Teaching Yaa Gyasi's "Homegoing"

On June 4, here at St. Olaf College, I started teaching a summer course on African Literature, which I have taught several times before. Following my introduction to the course, we started reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, a young Ghanaian writer raised in the USA. I met her on March 2 at the Hemingway Festival in Moscow, Idaho, where she was the guest of honour as winner of the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award for 2017. She gave a magnificent reading and signed copies of her book.

Homegoing takes us several centuries back to the country known today as Ghana and portrays the life of the people then. Apart from themes such as marriage, the family, and the customs associated with them, as well as racial and ethnic relations and consciousness, the novel delves into the issue of slavery and the slave trade. The characters--African and European--who ran the slave trade describe it as a business.

The novel depicts life in the Cape Coast Castle, with Europeans and their families living quite comfortably while beneath them, in the dungeons, the enslaved Africans endure abominable conditions. Seamlessly, the novel transports us to the United States, where we witness the lives of the African slaves and the slave owners on the plantations. From the Castle to the plantations, we witness a continuation of the monstrous tale of human suffering wrought by human beings.

My students and I are still reading the novel, but I think it would be a great idea to read it alongside Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost, first performed in 1964 and published in 1965. A comparative study of the two works would be rewarding. Apart from their common preoccupation with the African and African American experience, and the theme of slavery, both draw inspiration from African folklore in significant ways.

I Am Teaching Leila Aboulela's "Minaret" Again

This week, in my African Literature summer course, I am teaching Leila Aboulela's Minaret. We started the course with Ama Ata Aidoo's Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa, went on to Athol Fugard's Valley Song, then Mia Couto's The Tuner of Silences, then Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

I am teaching Minaret for the second time, having first taught it in the spring. As I did then, I have started with an introduction to Islam, because Minaret deals with the lives of Muslims. I also feel privileged to talk about Islam in view of the widespread ignorance of it in American society. Having been born and raised in Tanzania, about half of whose people are Muslim and about half Christian, living in relative harmony, I enjoy sharing with students my experience of Islam and Muslims.

This time around, having talked about the origins and the five pillars of Islam, and about the Qur'an and the hadiths, I have started focusing on the novel, intending to go through it at a measured pace, in order to explore it as well as possible.

With its opening words, "Bism Allahi, Ar-rahman, Ar-raheem," Minaret inducts the reader into the world of Islam. In class today, I dwelt on this phrase, which means "In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful," and explained its significance in Islam and in the daily lives of Muslims. I went on to explain other references to Islam featured in the first several pages of the novel. I have no doubt that my students will both enjoy and learn much from this novel.

On my part, especially today, I have been thinking about other works of fiction I have taught, written by African Muslim women. These are Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter, Alifa Rifaat's Distant View of a Minaret, Nawal el Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero and The Fall of the Imam. I am dreaming of someday creating a course on writings by Muslim women. As Muslims say, Insha Allah, God willing.

My Postcolonial Literature course, Spring 2015

Today, I completed drawing up the list of books I plan to use for my Postcolonial Literature course this Spring. The idea of Postcolonial Literature has always been contentious, and teaching a course with that name requires, in my view, incorporating the conflicting perspectives. It is never easy to justify any list or configuration of texts for this course. Nevertheless, one must prepare such a list.

I have taught Postcolonial Literature from my first year here at St. Olaf College. The English Department I was hired to initiate this course, at a time when English Departments across the USA were awakening to the need to embrace literatures in English from around the world. In view of the large and growing number of authors and texts that fall under the "post-colonial" rubric, one must select only a handful.

For the Spring, I plan to teach the following works:

Aboulela, L. Minaret
Adichie, C.Americanah.
Desai, A. Village by the Sea
Fugard, A. Sorrows and Rejoicings.
Gunesekera, R. Monkfish Moon
Roy, A. The God of Small Things.

One can see that all the authors are contemporary in the truest sense of the word, some very young. I wish to say a word about each.

I had heard about Leila Aboulela for a few years, but did not get the opportunity to acquire and read any of her works. Recently, I bought her Minaret, and read a little about her and her work. Born in Khartoum, she reminds me of Tayeb Salih, the Sudanese writer, whose Season of Migration to the North is well known. I remember having taught his short stories at the University of Dar es Salaam. Leila also reminds me of Meena Alexander, a notable Indian writer who was born and raised in Sudan.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the young Nigerian writer who has been quickly gaining international acclaim with her writing, such as Purple Hibiscus and Half of Yellow Sun, both of which I have taught. I badly wanted to read and teach her Americanah, which readers and critics are raving about.

I have taught some of Anita Desai's works before, such as Fire on the Mountain and Baumgartner's Bombay and am touched by her views on writing. With this background, I want to teach more of her work, hence my choice of Village by the Sea.

Athol Fugard is a playwright I first knew about when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Dar es Salaam. Fellow students Martin Mhando and Jesse Mollel (now known as Tololwa M. Mollel) staged an unforgettable performance of Fugard's The Island. In graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we studied Athol Fugard's A Lesson From Aloes with Professor Edris Makward.

Here at St. Olaf College, the first Fugard work I taught was Master Harold and the Boys. I went on to teach Sorrows and Rejoicings, several times. My experience with Sorrows and Rejoicings, slowly discovering its deep implications and nuances, parallels my experience of reading and teaching Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Ama Ata Aidoo's Dilemma of a Ghost.

Only recently have I discovered Romesh Gunesekera, when I designed a course on South Asian Literature. I chose his novel, Reef, and ended up teaching it each time I have taught the South Asian Literature course. This time, however, I have decided to try Monkfish Moon, one of Gunesekera's collections of short stories.

Finally, there is Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. There was a time when everybody around me seemed to be raving about The God of Small Things , and, not having read it, I felt like an outsider or a traitor. Then I included it in one of my courses, but my selection of texts was, it turned out, rather ambitious. We did not manage to read The God of Small Things . If I remember correctly, we just started it, before the semester was over. I hope things will work out better this time.