Imraan Coovadia: “There’s No Such Thing As an African Novel”
Imraan Coovadia recently added his voice to the Kwani? Manuscript Project’s conversation series on the African novel, its foundations and possibilities.
He posits that indeed the “African” novel is a thing which doesn’t exist, not only because of the borderless age of the internet that we are living in, but also because “these non-existent novels have too little in them of the peculiar sensations belonging to the streets and neighbourhoods and informal settlements running from Cape Town to Cairo”.
The first thing to remember about the African novel is not that it is African but that it is a novel. Novels are produced one by one, sentence by sentence, feeling by feeling, and one scene after the other like certain marriages. The novel is tested out in a writer’s laboratory, on the apparatus of heart and tongue and sometimes, in the matter of sound and rhythm, on the writer’s ear and foot. Like any novel the African novel is made out of materials which a writer finds lying around the place entirely neglected by human beings—soon to be forgotten feelings and fantasies and desires, incidents which nobody thinks to think twice about, alongside pieces of string and sealing wax and the ant nests of pedestrians and taxis which dominate our cities. Yet in twenty years of being a writer I have answered far more questions about politics than about the sentences and sensations that I try out each and every day. At least my views about good sentences and great subjects for novels have a certain sincerity to them. Yet the world is far more curious about the economic and political views concerning the future of Africa that a writer carries, rather than his or her views on the curvy sides of a marvellous sentence.
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