Who should write the stories of African women? Why is there an absence of African women in nonfiction writing? Why is there a perception of so-called “feminine” subjects as less important than the “masculine”? Writer Valérie Bah explored the questions this week at a workshop in Uganda. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the few African women writing nonfiction that most people can name, along with Noo Saro-Wiwa, Dambisa Moyo and…um… Photo: Shiho Fukada/AP photo Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the few African women writing nonfiction that most people can name, along with Noo Saro-Wiwa, Dambisa Moyo and…um… Photo: Shiho Fukada/AP photo In a recent opinion piece for Al Jazeera, Minna Salami, of Ms. Afropolitan fame, wrote about the absence of African women in the pantheon of creative nonfiction written about Africa. She blamed systematic deterrents, such as limited publishing opportunities in African countries, the persecution of women who speak out within patriarchal cultures, and the perception of so-called “feminine” subjects as less important than the “masculine,” the purview of politics and history. She is correct on all counts, but I wanted to explore the question in greater depth. It’s a bit weird for me, a white non-African man, to stand here addressing you at a workshop And I did, this week, at a creative nonfiction workshop that sought to promote female writers from Africa and the diaspora. It was jointly organized by the African Women Development Fund (AWDF), a pan-African grant-making organization and Femrite, a Ugandan women writers’ association, financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (more on this later). Held in Entebbe, Uganda in a garish chic hotel, the workshop ran alongside multiple conferences in a mishmash of meet-ups; public HEALTH meetings, safari tourists decked out in enough khaki to survive a Henry Morton Stanley-esque expedition, evangelical Christian revivals, and bikini-clad tourists sunning themselves en masse on the lawns. The workshop gathered journalists, academics, international development workers, novelists, queer women, feminists, and activists. No topic was off limits; we commiserated over our invisibility in western male-dominant spaces, shared essays, poetry, and short stories, and exchanged practical criticism, encouraging each other with applause and ululations. Monkeys crashed the sessions, creeping through the WINDOWS to steal refreshments with humanoid deliberation. Yet still, we carried on and fawned over the poetry of Maya Angelou, speculated on the patronizing nature of Nicholas Kristof’s “Half the Sky movement,” shared the requisite thoughts on Beyoncé, and discussed the problems with “An African City,” a web series about glamorous women in Accra. The latter provoked a caustic response from its producer Nicole Amarteifio on Twitter. “She’s oversensitive,” someone joked. thisisafrica.me/write-stories-african-women/
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 23:43:17 +0000
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