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Gambit: Newer African Writing
Librarian Note: Alternate Cover Edition for ISBN-10: 1938022882 / ISBN-13: 9781938022883.
GAMBIT: NEWER AFRICAN WRITING is a unique collection of nine interviews and original short stories by emerging writers from across Africa. The stories in this anthology reflect the nuances that arise from living in a post-postcolonial Africa, where stereotypes are crumbling and writers are willing to tackle themes that are more social than political. Unlike other anthologies of African writing, GAMBIT's contributors are mostly based in their home countries, putting them closer to the themes they lyrically confront. The interviews provide insight into the writers' inspirations, fears, hopes, and craft. The short stories reveal a range of experiences that are alive with grace, resilience, and humor. GAMBIT is one way to rediscover today's writing from the African continent.
Contributors include: Abdul Adan (Somalia), Ayobami Adebayo (Nigeria), Dami Ajayi (Nigeria), Richard Ali (Nigeria), Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria), Dango Mkandawire (Malawi), Donald Molosi (Botswana), Novuyo Rosa Tshuma (Zimbabwe), Suzanne Ushie (Nigeria).
GAMBIT: NEWER AFRICAN WRITING is a unique collection of nine interviews and original short stories by emerging writers from across Africa. The stories in this anthology reflect the nuances that arise from living in a post-postcolonial Africa, where stereotypes are crumbling and writers are willing to tackle themes that are more social than political. Unlike other anthologies of African writing, GAMBIT's contributors are mostly based in their home countries, putting them closer to the themes they lyrically confront. The interviews provide insight into the writers' inspirations, fears, hopes, and craft. The short stories reveal a range of experiences that are alive with grace, resilience, and humor. GAMBIT is one way to rediscover today's writing from the African continent.
Contributors include: Abdul Adan (Somalia), Ayobami Adebayo (Nigeria), Dami Ajayi (Nigeria), Richard Ali (Nigeria), Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria), Dango Mkandawire (Malawi), Donald Molosi (Botswana), Novuyo Rosa Tshuma (Zimbabwe), Suzanne Ushie (Nigeria).
282 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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53 people want to read
About the author
Emmanuel Iduma
22 books62 followersEmmanuel Iduma, born and raised in Nigeria, is a writer and art critic. He is the author of the novel The Sound of Things to Come and co-editor of Gambit: Newer African Writing. He has contributed essays on art and photography to a number of journals, magazines, and exhibition catalogues, including Guernica, ARTNews, ESOPUS, and The Trans-African, for which he works as managing editor. His interviews with photographers and writers have appeared in the Aperture blog, Wasafiri, and Africa is a Country. He co-founded and directs Saraba magazine.
Since 2011, he has worked with Invisible Borders, a trans-African organization based in Nigeria, and currently the director of publications. He played a major curatorial role in the group’s installation A Trans-African Worldspace at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
He was longlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript Prize in 2013. In 2015, he was writer-in-residence at the Danspace Project’s Platform in New York, L’appartement 22 in Rabat, and the Thread Residency in Sinthian, Senegal. In 2016, he was invited to contribute a travelogue for Carnegie International, 2018. A lawyer by training, he holds an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts, New York, where he is also a faculty member.
Since 2011, he has worked with Invisible Borders, a trans-African organization based in Nigeria, and currently the director of publications. He played a major curatorial role in the group’s installation A Trans-African Worldspace at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
He was longlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript Prize in 2013. In 2015, he was writer-in-residence at the Danspace Project’s Platform in New York, L’appartement 22 in Rabat, and the Thread Residency in Sinthian, Senegal. In 2016, he was invited to contribute a travelogue for Carnegie International, 2018. A lawyer by training, he holds an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts, New York, where he is also a faculty member.
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September 17, 2016
After reading “Gambit: Newer African Writing Second Edition 2016”, you know you are one of two people; one that has read widely or one that has not (or one that eavesdrops a lot). I cannot begin to explain or relay the intellectual pleasure and eventual intellectual pressure it puts upon the reader.
I feel like it is written primarily for upcoming writers because it imbues you with not just passion, but method, for telling your own story. Nonetheless, any book loving person will immensely enjoy it. Let me explain.
As Emmanuel Iduma sits down with 9 “emerging African writers”, you travel into the minds of writers whose experiences, writing diligence, exertion, knowledge proves to be a séance into a world of multilayered aspects like religion, metaphysics, relativity, anthropology, society so delicately laid out in conversation.
I never miss forewords and introductions when I start books and the speeches of Shaun Randol and Emmanuel get one’s reading appetite nicely whetted!
Shaun states
“Gambit aims to open up the conversation about what is (or is not) African writing, who or what African writers are and represent, and how this conversation can broaden the reader’s understanding of places and people so foreign to their own experiences.”
This seems to be a conversation that is a river that never stops, and when you read the interviews of the writers, you come to understand it should be had because there is no one definite answer to this African writing thing.
From Emmanuel Iduma’s perspective, he prods deeper to ask “what could be “newer” about African writing.”? Of course the conversation about Western Literary prizes and publishing power comes up and for the two editors, they seem to be trying to put together a collection of finer African works that may not be praised by the “West.”
After getting through with the editors’ deliberations, is when the fun starts. The minds of 10 writers, all African, seven male, three female from Botswana, Malawi, Nigeria, Somalia and Zimbabwe are open to you and Emmanuel Iduma who doubles as the interviewer.
You will listen to Somalian Abdul Adan whose endearment to his father and his father’s culture seeps through at the seams. He speaks so dearly of his father you’d wonder what was so different about him. You get to listen to his thoughts on what identity is. And this was most engaging because the question Emmanuel asked was something of philosophical poetry –
“Do we say that there is a hyphen between the words “home” and “identity”? And that writers such as yourself walk within that hyphen trying to understand what is home, how home shifts, how home never remains the same, perhaps how no place is home?”
See, this questions finds itself in different formats and words as all the ten writers share perspectives.
Adan’s “The Somalification of James Karangi” is somewhat an odd tale. It can be called funny, tragic and entertaining at the same time. However with the background of the writer in the interview, you ask questions about identity especially about Somali.
However, let’s not stop.
It’s actually odd that some of the writers in the collection are called emerging and perhaps that’s the conversation the book engages a lot in. Ayobami Adebayo is a fiction editor at Saraba Magazine, which is a literary magazine of note. The conversation rides on different topics that range from the genres she focuses on, the part of technology in this new writing era, the writer’s responsibility and more.
Her short story “Spent Lives” interests me quite a bit. The characters are not too far from people I have met and generally begets questions like what is living? What is having lived? So often we are thrown into the lives of characters in their youth, that the old are mere afterthoughts. I love what she does with this.
By the time we are done with all ten writers my friends, you will have wanted to order this book already. For now, refill your coffee and let me keep telling you about it.
There were two interviews that were particularly mentally outstanding to me. The first one was Dami Ajayi’s. After the fact that he never has short answers for anything, you can immediately know he is not only involved in the literature of his home but also that of the world. I was not dismayed at the fact that I had to open my Dictionary app a number of times to look up a word he had used! It filters through in conversation, that the language of her work – Medicine- cuts through. I don’t mean he uses medical words, I mean the words he uses to explain some things are for those who know what they’re talking about. Like only the lab person can read what the doctor wants tested. My diction improved a bit
I feel like it is written primarily for upcoming writers because it imbues you with not just passion, but method, for telling your own story. Nonetheless, any book loving person will immensely enjoy it. Let me explain.
As Emmanuel Iduma sits down with 9 “emerging African writers”, you travel into the minds of writers whose experiences, writing diligence, exertion, knowledge proves to be a séance into a world of multilayered aspects like religion, metaphysics, relativity, anthropology, society so delicately laid out in conversation.
I never miss forewords and introductions when I start books and the speeches of Shaun Randol and Emmanuel get one’s reading appetite nicely whetted!
Shaun states
“Gambit aims to open up the conversation about what is (or is not) African writing, who or what African writers are and represent, and how this conversation can broaden the reader’s understanding of places and people so foreign to their own experiences.”
This seems to be a conversation that is a river that never stops, and when you read the interviews of the writers, you come to understand it should be had because there is no one definite answer to this African writing thing.
From Emmanuel Iduma’s perspective, he prods deeper to ask “what could be “newer” about African writing.”? Of course the conversation about Western Literary prizes and publishing power comes up and for the two editors, they seem to be trying to put together a collection of finer African works that may not be praised by the “West.”
After getting through with the editors’ deliberations, is when the fun starts. The minds of 10 writers, all African, seven male, three female from Botswana, Malawi, Nigeria, Somalia and Zimbabwe are open to you and Emmanuel Iduma who doubles as the interviewer.
You will listen to Somalian Abdul Adan whose endearment to his father and his father’s culture seeps through at the seams. He speaks so dearly of his father you’d wonder what was so different about him. You get to listen to his thoughts on what identity is. And this was most engaging because the question Emmanuel asked was something of philosophical poetry –
“Do we say that there is a hyphen between the words “home” and “identity”? And that writers such as yourself walk within that hyphen trying to understand what is home, how home shifts, how home never remains the same, perhaps how no place is home?”
See, this questions finds itself in different formats and words as all the ten writers share perspectives.
Adan’s “The Somalification of James Karangi” is somewhat an odd tale. It can be called funny, tragic and entertaining at the same time. However with the background of the writer in the interview, you ask questions about identity especially about Somali.
However, let’s not stop.
It’s actually odd that some of the writers in the collection are called emerging and perhaps that’s the conversation the book engages a lot in. Ayobami Adebayo is a fiction editor at Saraba Magazine, which is a literary magazine of note. The conversation rides on different topics that range from the genres she focuses on, the part of technology in this new writing era, the writer’s responsibility and more.
Her short story “Spent Lives” interests me quite a bit. The characters are not too far from people I have met and generally begets questions like what is living? What is having lived? So often we are thrown into the lives of characters in their youth, that the old are mere afterthoughts. I love what she does with this.
By the time we are done with all ten writers my friends, you will have wanted to order this book already. For now, refill your coffee and let me keep telling you about it.
There were two interviews that were particularly mentally outstanding to me. The first one was Dami Ajayi’s. After the fact that he never has short answers for anything, you can immediately know he is not only involved in the literature of his home but also that of the world. I was not dismayed at the fact that I had to open my Dictionary app a number of times to look up a word he had used! It filters through in conversation, that the language of her work – Medicine- cuts through. I don’t mean he uses medical words, I mean the words he uses to explain some things are for those who know what they’re talking about. Like only the lab person can read what the doctor wants tested. My diction improved a bit
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 of 1 review