Why
is the standard pop music track around three minutes? Because, on the old
wind-up gramophone that was as long as the steel spring could keep the disc
revolving at 78rpm.
Why
do films have musical ‘soundtracks’ and theatrical plays don’t? Because silent
films (i.e. those before 1925) had either little orchestras, or pianists. It’s
another ‘cultural inertia’ which just, somehow, hung about long after its time
had gone.
Why
do people dress up, and behave more ‘correctly’ at the theatre than the cinema?
Because, for 200 years, theatres operated under ‘royal’ licence.
My
point---one I believe in fervently---is that material circumstances condition
art.
Which
leads to the question I’d pose here. Why are African writers so damned good at
short stories? Short, where narrative is concerned, is not easy: it requires
more art.
Having
just read 100 entries (the bulk of them short stories) for this year’s Caine
Prize I’ve been struck by this almost universal mastery (is there a word
‘mistressy’---there should be) of the short form.
Two
things particularly constitute that mastery. One is the ability to grab the
reader from the first sentence. I’ll give one example, from Elnathan John’s Bayan Layi:
The boys who sleep under the Kuka tree in Bayan Layi like
to boast about the people they have killed.
There’s
no room here to go into the intricate techniques of short narrative. But the
other thing which strikes me (and, to put my cards on the table, I come from a
different literary tradition) is the control of ‘voice’. One hears, rather than
reads. It’s a powerful---at times overwhelming---effect. The ears ring.
Returning
to my little riff on ‘material circumstances create art’ there seem to me to be
two factors at work here. African writing (it’s a strength) still has roots
firmly in oral traditions. If you tell a story orally, you can’t go on too
long---it’s cut to the chase from those first 25 words. The other factor is
that Africa, until recently, has never had the publishing infrastructure that
Europe has built up over 500 years. No HarperCollins, no Viking-Penguin . There
is, I think, something uneasy-making that every major work of Chinua Achebe was
given the world by courtesy of a British or American publishing house.
Colonialism of the imprint. Short stories can slip past that barrier.
Having
thought about this year’s Caine entries (would, incidentally, there were ten
‘first prizes’) two things give me pause for thought. Large African states do
now have their own publishing industries. And a surprising number of entries
for this year’s Caine are from graduates (in some cases instructors) in the
thriving ‘creative writing’ classes in the US / UK.
These
two factors will, I think, bring new creative pressures onto African fiction. How that works out is for the judges in the
2023 Caine Prize to report on.
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