J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

'Why, I imagine you asking yourselves, is this African fellow on board our ship? Why isn't he back at his desk in the land of his birth following his vocation, if he really is a writer, writing books? Why is he going on about the African novel, a subject that can be of only the most peripheral concern to us?

'The short answer, ladies and gentlemen, is that the African fellow is earning a living. In his own country, as I have tried to explain, he cannot earn a living. In his own country (I will not labour the point, I mention it only because it holds true for so many fellow African writers) he is in fact less than welcome. In his own country he is what is called a dissident intellectual, and dissident intellectuals must tread carefully, even in the new Nigeria.

'So here he is, abroad in the wide world, earning his living. Part of his living he earns by writing books that are published and read and reviewed and talked about and judged, for the most part, by foreigners. The rest of his living he earns from spin-offs of his writing. He reviews books by other writers, for example, in the press of Europe and America. He teaches in colleges in America, telling the youth of the New World about the exotic subject on which he is an expert in the same way that an elephant is an expert on elephants: the African novel. He addresses conferences; he sails on cruise ships. While so occupied, he lives in what are called temporary accommodations. All his addresses are temporary; he has no fixed abode.

'How easy do you think it is, ladies and gentlemen, for this fellow to be true to his essence as writer when there are all these strangers to please, month after month – publishers, readers, critics, students, all of them armed not only with their own ideas about what writing is or should be, what the novel is or should be, what Africa is or should be, but also about what being pleased is or should be? Do you think it is possible for this fellow to remain unaffected by all the pressure on him to please others, to be for them what they think he should be, to produce for them what they think he should produce?

'It may have escaped your attention, but I slipped in, a moment ago, a word that should have made you prick up your ears. I spoke about my essence and being true to my essence. There is much I could say about essence and its ramifications; but this is not the right occasion. Nevertheless, you must be asking yourselves, how in these anti-essential days, these days of fleeting identities that we pick up and wear and discard like clothing, can I justify speaking of my essence as an African writer?

'Around essence and essentialism, I should remind you, there is a long history of turmoil in African thought. You may have heard of the négritude movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Négritude, according to the originators of the movement, is the essential substratum that binds all Africans together and makes them uniquely African – not only the Africans of Africa but Africans of the great African diaspora in the New World and now in Europe.

'I want to quote some words to you from the Senegalese writer and thinker Cheikh Hamidou Kane. Cheikh Hamidou was being questioned by an interviewer, a European. I am puzzled, said the interviewer, by your praise for certain writers for being truly African. In view of the fact that the writers in question write in a foreign language (specifically French) and are published and, for the most part, read in a foreign country (specifically France), can they truly be called African writers? Are they not more properly called French writers of African origin? Is language not a more important matrix than birth?

'The following is Cheikh Hamidou's reply: "The writers I speak of are truly African because they are born in Africa, they live in Africa, their sensibility is African… What distinguishes them lies in life experience, in sensitivities, in rhythm, in style." He goes on: "A French or English writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him… We on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition."

'There is nothing mystical in Cheikh Hamidou's response, nothing metaphysical, nothing racist. He merely gives proper weight to those intangibles of culture which, because they are not easily pinned down in words, are often passed over. The way that people live in their bodies. The way they move their hands. The way they walk. The way they smile or frown. The lilt of their speech. The way they sing. The timbre of their voices. The way they dance. The way they touch each other; how the hand lingers; the feel of the fingers. The way they make love. The way they lie after they have made love. The way they think. The way they sleep.

'We African novelists can embody these qualities in our writings (and let me remind you at this point that the word novel, when it entered the languages of Europe, had the vaguest of meanings: it meant the form of writing that was formless, that had no rules, that made up its own rules as it went along) – we African novelists can embody these qualities as no one else can because we have not lost touch with the body. The African novel, the true African novel, is an oral novel. On the page it is inert, only half alive; it wakes up when the voice, from deep in the body, breathes life into the words, speaks them aloud.

'The African novel is thus, I would claim, in its very being, and before the first word is written, a critique of the Western novel, which has gone so far down the road of disembodiment – think of Henry James, think of Marcel Proust – that the appropriate way and indeed the only way in which to absorb it is in silence and in solitude. And I will close these remarks, ladies and gentlemen – I see my time is running out – by quoting, in support of my position and Cheikh Hamidou's, not from an African, but from a man from the snowy wastes of Canada, the great scholar of orality Paul Zumthor.

'"Since the seventeenth century," writes Zumthor, "Europe has spread across the world like a cancer, at first stealthily, but for a while now at gathering pace, until today it ravages life forms, animals, plants, habitats, languages. With each day that passes several languages of the world disappear, repudiated, stifled… One of the symptoms of the disease has without doubt, from the beginning, been what we call literature; and literature has consolidated itself, prospered, and become what it is – one of the hugest dimensions of mankind – by denying the voice…The time has come to stop privileging writing… Perhaps great, unfortunate Africa, beggared by our political-industrial imperialism, will, because less gravely affected by writing, find itself closer to the goal than will the other continents." '

The applause when Egudu ends his talk is loud and spirited. He has spoken with force, perhaps even with passion; he has stood up for himself, for his calling, for his people; why should he not have his reward, even if what he says can have little relevance to the lives of his audience?

Nevertheless, there is something about the talk she does not like, something to do with orality and the mystique of orality. Always, she thinks, the body that is insisted on, pushed forward, and the voice, dark essence of the body, welling up from within it. Négritude: she had thought Emmanuel would grow out of that pseudo-philosophy. Evidently he has not. Evidently he has decided to keep it as part of his professional pitch. Well, good luck to him. There is still time, ten minutes at least, for questions. She hopes the questions will be searching, will search him out.

The first questioner is, if she is to judge by accent, from the Midwest of the United States. The first novel she ever read by an African, decades ago, says the woman, was by Amos Tutuola, she forgets the title. ('The Palm Wine Drinkard', suggests Egudu. 'Yes, that's it,' she replies.) She was captivated by it. She thought it was the harbinger of great things to come. So she was disappointed, terribly disappointed, to hear that Tutuola was not respected in his own country, that educated Nigerians disparaged him and considered his reputation in the West unmerited. Was this true? Was Tutuola the kind of oral novelist our lecturer had in mind? What has happened to Tutuola? Had more of his books been translated?