Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat

Joann Sfar's graphic novel, The Rabbi's Cat, is a complex picture of people negotiating tradition and modernity. As Sfar has the character comment, "Playing a north African Jew just doesn't work, people aren't interested in it, it's too complicated. The public (the audience), Uncle, doesn't like things that are complicated" (122). Nevertheless, he contradicts this in this wonderful graphic novel, soon to be on the screen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPtZOUr0Ctc). Sfar presents the complicated relationships of living in 1930s Algeria with the colonial mirage of Paris in the background.

In some perspectives on post-colonial literature, such as Achebe or Ngugi, there is the assertion that one cannot truly express the experience of a people who have endured colonization in the language of the colonizer. The writer is inherently compromised by the expression of the language of power. However, in a graphic novel, he draws in his own language and his own perceptions of the complicated life the Rabbi and his cat live in Algeria, as Jews, with Paris in the cultural background. The Rabbi shows the reader how tradition and modernity, colonized and colonizer, negotiate a livable peace. One poignant example is taking the "dictation" to stay the official Rabbi of the community. In order to keep a position he has occupied for thirty years, he has to study La Fontaine et cetera, and pass the test in French. The Cat knows his cannot do it, and sacrifices his ability to speak so that the Rabbi can experience and miracle and pass the test. The Cat, despite his cynicism, his curiosity, and his pragmatism, believes so firmly that justice should be done to his beloved master, that he will give up his most precious gift for that justice.

Equally poignant, and utterly believably, Sfar gives us gentle examples of people just getting along in everyday life. Certainly Muslims and Jews have had a great deal of strife in North Africa, but Sfar has the unhappy Rabbi Abraham meet up with and old Arab on the road to visit a saint holy to both Jews and Muslims. The Rabbi and his traveling companion have a great time talking, singing, and dancing. The Cat and the Donkey get into an argument that merely underscores how really people are people and should just get along because they have more in common than in opposition.

But what I love most about this graphic novel is the Cat. He is irreverent, pragmatic, and sometimes gauche, but his is also loyal, affectionate, and downright cute. The clever dialog that Sfar gives to the animal occupants of this graphic novel is some of the best dialog in the text. He draws The Cat in multiple styles, and each time The Cat appears, his artistic morphing expresses his emotions. Pages 92-93 show The Cat in several levels of anxiety because his mistress is getting married, and Sfar puts him through realism, expressionism, and surrealism in expressing the feline's anxiety.

The text is complicated, the pictures are detailed, and the themes are critical yet delicately dealt with. Every human being in this novel suffers a certain amount of identity crisis, except The Cat. The Cat knows who his is.

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga is now a staple of African literature courses with her novel Nervous Conditiosn. This novel was written in 1988 and won its big prize in 1989. Since then, Dangarembga has played on the local stage in Zimbabwe, recently winning prizes for her films in at the Pan African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou. She emphasizes local issues and the struggle for identity in her books and films.

Nervous Conditions is often hailed as autobiographical, but the reader needs to decide whether Tambudzai or Nyasha are carrying the weight of her experience. In my understanding of the story and Dangarembga's personal story, it seems like she is mixed into both characters, which makes Nyasha a more interesting character. I am interested that she chose Tambudzai to be her central character through which we experience Nyasha. Does that make Nyasha more pathetic or more heroic, or, of course, both? This was her first novel, and since then she has gained more narrative experience. There is uncomfortable pacing that can be accommodated by an experienced reader, I think, but even after reading it several times, I find the ending unsatisfactory, abrupt, rushed. This time around I can try to read it more slowly and see if I can appreciate it more.

Despite all her fame, awards, and international attention, Dangarembga seems to have retained her self-possession, perhaps hard won, if her first novel is any indication. Here she is tearing up the dance floor at a film festival in Durban where she got some more prizes. I know a lot of academics, and none of them can do this! Or when they do, it is best to just look away.

Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer wrote, "The facts are always less than what really happened," and she admirably shows this in her writing. She is able to so fully capture the world view of a particular narrator, that the reader is offered an empathy with a person who, rationally, he or she would reject. Of course, we admire the heroine in "Amnesty" because she maintains her integrity and never gets bitter, even in the local injustices of her life. She keeps a greater goal in mind, but the reader has to shake his or her head and wonder as the personal sacrifices she is making for her country, which are unsung, not admired, and passed off as "woman's work." It is easy to hate the narrator of "Six Feet of the Country" and pity, in a kind of repulsed way, the narrator of "Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants." Gordimer is able to put us into the lives of these people who we can claim not to understand, and perhaps, come to a small understanding of the deluded lives they live.

With that insight, can we learn to see our own lives, our own city, that clearly? I look at P&G selling disposable diapers and sanitary napkins in Nigeria. Sure, these things are "liberating", in a way, but what about the cost? What about the way things were working before? What about the fact that Nigeria does not have a waste control system to handle all these new disposable diapers and sanitary napkins? This seems like weird imperialism all over again where the nurse is saying to the mothers, "These disposable diapers will help you child sleep through the night, so he will be healthier." But a wet diaper is not what is causing the high infant mortality rate in Nigeria: it is the lack of access to clean water. Helping these people have access to clean water is not on P&G's list of things to do. They will do what profits them, not the people who they see as a huge market now that US consumers are failing them. On the other hand, P&G is not responsible for waste management in its consumers' countries. Nigeria is responsible for this problem. A company's primary responsibility is its shareholders. While this is true, perhaps there is more profit in sustaining one's population of consumers. There is research to show that ethical behavior can, indeed, be support long term profits.

Gordimer uses the power of literature to create empathy with the bad guys and thus expose their thoughtlessness. She shows how complicated the emotional experience of the facts can be. Gordimer observes, "Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area." She makes a lot of sense about how people survive, and this is an important contribution to all of who are still trying to make sense of it all.

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe is the great man of letters from Nigeria. He is at the top of all American university reading lists of African literature. However, he has spent much of his career at American universities since Nigeria was not a healthy place to stay and be a writer. His mastery of essay, novels, and short stories in English made him accessible to European readers, and so his name and work got out of African and onto American and European bookshelves. This paved the way for so many other African writers to gain legitimacy outside their countries to a global audience, but it all had to be done in the colonial languages. Africa has begun to value its writers, but totalitarian governments, perhaps, recognize their power all too well. Thus, many African writers have suffered much for their art. Writing is as much an act of creativity as it is of courage for these writers.

Achebe has never won the Nobel Prize for literature. Wole Soylinka and Nadine Gordimer have both won it, and both have cited Achebe as one of their great colleagues. Achebe is quite philosophical about the Nobel Prize. In an interview he says, "My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize. It's not an African prize.... Literature is not a heavyweight championship. Nigerians may think, you know, this man has been knocked out. It's nothing to do with that." One cannot disagree, and this view is consistent with the sentiments he so cuttingly expresses in "Image of Africa."

The essay and short stories we read for this session of our class are excellent examples of how racism is not limited to one people: everyone can suffer from it. In addition, the damaging world views that come from it re-create all parties into people they are not. Achebe champions seeing people as individuals first, and he urges us to be compassionate and just in our dealings with everyone. This is as true for Africa as it is for people of all cultures. It seems to me that even when Achebe is writing locally, he still has global themes that can inspire readers from any culture.

Strangle Hold of English Lit

Felix Mnthali just retired from the University of Botswana where he held the title "Professor of English" (!) for almost 30 years. Ironically, as a "Professor of English", which just means he worked in the English department because that is where one teaches literature in the Botswana university system, he taught African literature. Oh, how he must have felt the crazy strictures of English literature that he writes about in his poem "Stranglehold of English Lit" as he held the title Professor of English and taught African literature during the literary renaissance of the second half of the 20th century. I do not know if he speaks or writes in Tswana (the local language of Botswana) but certainly he must speak Chewa, the major language of Malawai, his home country. But Malawai has 16 language represented in the country, so he could know a few.

In "Stranglehold of English Lit" he seems to rail against the problem of Africans literary efforts being colonized by British literature. Indeed, the official language of Botswana is English and English is also an official language of Malawi. You can't get an education there except in English, but now there is so much from Africa to read in English, so things are different now. In fact, English has morphed into something different in these countries, so that I would like to find out what Ngugi and Mnthali would say about the appropriation of the colonial languages where they have been sort of reversed colonized by the people who use it on a daily basis making it "bear the weight of their African experience" as Achebe would have it.

So yes, the problem with the literature of the colonizer in the colonized country is that it doesn't answer any questions for the colonized. However, it seems to me that in these changing days, English doesn't belong to England any more, nor does it belong to the two northern countries of North America. Nigeria, Botswana, and Malawi, to only name a few, have taken English and claimed it as their own, colonial baggage an all. In fact, since independence, they have unpacked a lot of that baggage and filled it with their own stuff. Nugugi advocates that we embrace it all instead of having a Jane Austen book burning, as it were. This seems most useful. Let's read everything, and let's all write in all the languages we have available. Yes, yes, it is a little more work, and though literacy is costly, it is worth the expense.

Welcome to Africa

African literature has a long, rich history, but it has not always been written down in ways accessible to us, that is, people who prefer to read in English who live in Ohio. What we get to read and hear is filtered though English, but that is okay because many African authors choose to write in English. Nevertheless, they are writing in an English that we need to learn to read in a new way. There are lots of African words, names, and customs that you need to know when you read this literature. There are expectations and attitudes that you need to be familiar with. I hope that in this course, you can have a change to read these stories, novels, and films, and get to see huge variety of experiences you can learn from. Africa is an amazing place that often only appears on the horizon of the American mid-west when people starve, are bombed, or are bombing and starving each other. Literature has a way of presenting the human experience that the newspaper or the Unicef advertisements cannot. I hope that through working with this literature both logically and emotionally, you can begin to perceive the flavor of Africa in all its joy and beauty and sadness and anger.

Borges' and Frosts' Gardens of Forking Paths

Just as so many people, so many bloggers, misinterpret Frost's "Two Roads", so I think Borge's "Garden of Forking Paths" can be difficult to read. Both require the modern reader to consider the actual choices of words and to read closely rather than let the story unfold like a graphic novel. Some writing can be a pretty-picture-generating text, but others require one to really focus on the words and what they mean, may mean, and could mean in some other context. As a linguist, I love this game, and I find Borges at once exhausting to read and exhilarating to read. Frost is often just depressing. He didn't get a Nobel either. :-(

In the "Garden of Forking Paths," the pathos of the narrator is contrasted with the elegance of the scholar. The tone of writing changes, the words that describe their ideas contrast, and their relative perspectives on the world are different. The narrator feels trapped in the timeline he has created for himself, while the scholar dies with the conviction that in another timeline events unfolded differently. One of them is tortured, the other is at peace, but not in the way that the reader might have preferred. I think Borges requires a lot of a reader because we have to just let go of the narrative and let Borges do what he will with it. Then we have to think about that, and not what we might want to. I don't want the brilliant scholar to die, but I have to look at the philosophical manner of his death to appreciate this type of serenity and conviction that this life is only one of many. I don't want that miserable, scheming, little sneak to live and write this lovely memoir for me, but he writes the complex confession that allows the brilliant scholar to live on in the story, so, yay, I guess.

It reminds me of Shakespeare's sonnets where he goes on forever about how his beloved will be immortal and remain beautiful because he wrote these poems. And he/she does! And he/she is also, at the same time long dead, but is revived every time we read the sonnets and conjure that person up in our powerful reader imaginations.