Panel: Life Writing and the Colonial and Postcolonial “Native
Intellectual”
Copanelists: Dan Chima Amadi and Udamu Kalu
This paper concerns itself with the relations between writing, the individual subjectivity of the writer, authenticity, language, and representations of home and the colonial order. All writing involves some degree of transculturation, and thus of contestation and collaboration. However, as texts written by what Frantz Fanon called Africa’s erstwhile “native intellectuals,” whose historical “mission” coincided with Africa’s movements and processes of decolonization, the two texts under discussion peculiarly show a realm of textual strategies that suggest the many complex ways in which, as Mary Louise Pratt theorized, “asymmetrical relations of power” are negotiated between and within the physical and imagined spaces of the colonizer and the colonized, in an overly obvious context of what she also called the “contact zone” (see “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 9 [1991]: 33–40).
The two pieces of writing which I have brought together under the present title were published in differing times and phases of Italian colonialism in Eritrea and Ethiopia. Written by Fesseha Giyorgis, generally considered the trailblazer of modern Ethiopian and Eritrean literature, “The Author’s Journey from Ethiopia to Italy” (1895) is a sixteen-page-long essay of the author’s travel account from Africa to Italy. The Story of the Conscript, by Ghebreyesus Hailu, originally written in 1929 and published in 1950, is the first novel written in the Tigrinya language. Based on the author’s travel recollections, the novel deals with Italian colonization and war campaigns in Libya and Eritrea. Besides the thematic resemblances of travel and colonial encounter, both works share such formal qualities as the location of their center of narrative consciousness, the syncretization of oral and written traditions, and the mixing of various indigenous poetic genres. Yet, across similarities, the texts also differ significantly in the concrete ways they render accounts of colonialism.
Ghirmai Negash is Assistant Professor of English and African Literature at Ohio University, and the associate director of the Center for African Studies. He formerly worked at Leiden University and the University of Asmara, where he founded and chaired the department of Eritrean languages and literature (2001–2005). His research interests include African literature, postcolonial theory, oral traditions, and translation. His publications include A History of Tigrinya Literature in Eritrea (Leiden University-CNWS, 1999), and Who Needs a Story (Hidri-Michigan State, 2006), co-edited and translated with Charles Cantalupo. Currently he is working on a manuscript on the South African novelist Zakes Mda.