| Chapter : | Introduction |
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On the back cover of the 2005 Nigerian paperback edition of Everything Good Will Come written by Nigerian writer Sefi Atta, Odia Ofeimun speaks accurately, city and country specifics notwithstanding, for the greater part of new African writing. She notes the “…novel has the nerve to redefine existing traditions of African story telling. It confronts the familiar passions of a city and a country with unusual insights and a lyrical power pointing our literature to truly greater heights.” Similarly, regarding Chris Abani's GraceLand, a text discussed later in this book, America Magazine notes that the 2004 novel is part of “The next wave...of Nigerian literature” (Hawley). Likewise, a critic for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune finds that “In depicting how deeply external politics can affect internal thinking, GraceLand announces itself as a worthy heir to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Like that classic of Nigerian literature, it gives a multifaceted, human face to a culture struggling to find its own identity while living with somebody else's” (Athitakis). Both Atta and Abani are illustrative of these emerging African writers who are using their unique voices—fresh, contemporary, and bold—to update African literary classics. These two authors both live and write in the West; however, the challenges of establishing a writing career and seeing works to publication in Africa have a long history. Charles R. Lawson and Bernth Lindfors, among others, have written extensively about the tribulations of seeing a manuscript to press in Africa. When I asked Ms. Atta about the process of publishing her works in the United States compared to publishing them in Nigeria she shared an unambiguous, and somewhat surprising, response: