The Journal of Commonwealth Literature recent issues

Editorial

Thieme, J. — 2008-08-26

"What's Love" in an Interconnected World? Ghanaian Market Literature for Youth Responds1

de Bruijn, E. — 2008-08-26

This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Mining the Archive: Historical Fiction, Counter-modernities, and Suchen Christine Lim's A Bit of Earth

Poon, A. — 2008-08-26

Historical fiction often serves to provide us with an opportunity to question the past as well as the identities that have crystallized around the archive. As an example of historical fiction, Suchen Christine Lim's A Bit of Earth depicts the emergence of anti-imperialist feeling, self-realization, and national consciousness in nineteenth-century Malaya, celebrating nationalist feeling as a commendable gesture beyond the self towards a larger sociality. The text invokes these sentiments to look for alternatives within a cultural and political space that continues to be strongly influenced by postcolonial state-sanctioned histories and masculinist versions of the past. Its attempt to loosen our received ways of knowing about history, modernity, Chineseness, and inter-racial relations is not an unqualified success, however. For in foregrounding gender and race as crucial components of modern subjectivity, A Bit of Earth ultimately shows itself to be more certain of its stand on women and its vision of modern Chinese identity than of its position vis-à-vis multiracial possibilities.

Alternatives to the Novel Form: Oral Storytelling and Internet Patterns in Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Draga Alexandru, M.-S. — 2008-08-26

Contemporary Indian fiction in English revives the novel genre through alternative writing techniques inspired from the Indian oral storytelling tradition. In Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain digressive storytelling that reflects oral patterns merges with structural strategies derived from the logic of the Internet, hypertext and computer games. The author's creation of an online storytelling community that gives him email feedback on his writing mimics the tradition of oral storytelling in a way that responds to both Bakhtinian expectations of the novel form and the demands of hypertextual interactivity. The implied audience is drawn into the process of storytelling, so that the novel's polyphony emerges from the work of a whole community rather than of an individual author/narrator. Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a modern version of the Arabian Nights, with a frame-narrative filled in by well-told tales meant to earn the protagonist's survival. Throughout the novel the classical concerns of the novel genre, which focuses on individual development and makes statements about society at specific historical moments, based on objective factual observation, are challenged by the presence of elements of myth-based traditional storytelling, digressions and ponderings on the meanings of events, in a discourse in which what matters is the endless storytelling process that must keep growing "like a lotus vine".

Indian Pulp Fiction in English: A Preliminary Overview from Dutt to De

Khair, T. — 2008-08-26

This article provides an overview of the long history of Indian pulp fiction in English, offering a tentative definition of the genre by identifying both qualitative and quantitative markers. Beginning with nineteenth-century romances, such as Toru Dutt's Bianca, K. K. Lahiri's Roshinara and K. Chakravarti's Sarata and Hingana, it moves forward to a consideration of twentieth-century pulp forms, including detective fiction, science fiction and fantasy fiction. It includes a more detailed account of the rise of Shoba Dé, discussing her work in relation to the phenomenon of Indian film and gossip magazines like Stardust, and of the fiction of Sujata Massey, "the creator of the Rei Shimura mysteries". It argues that while Dé's work expresses the half-realized social and cultural issues of urban and metropolitan India, Massey's fiction is self-consciously topical within a cosmopolitan scenario.

A Tale of Two Novels: Developing a Devolved Approach to Black British Writing

Fowler, C. — 2008-08-26

In October 2000, Penguin launched Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth. In the same month, Headline Review released a novel by Joe Pemberton. It was called Forever and Ever Amen. This article traces the differing fortunes of these two British novels and seeks to understand why Forever and Ever Amen, which was also a critical success, came nowhere near the sales or popular acclaim of White Teeth. It examines the commercial and (multi)cultural logic by which novels are coded as worthy of national and international readerships by corporate publishers and high street retail outlets. Emphasizing the significance of many black British novels that emerge from non-metropolitan glocalities, the author calls for a sustained focus by literary scholarship on the discomforting links between the political and literary economy. Most particularly, novels such as Pemberton's invite popular and critical engagement with what James Procter has described as "devolved" diasporic cultures throughout Britain.

Daljit Nagra, Faber Poet: Burdens of Representation and Anxieties of Influence

Gunning, D. — 2008-08-26

This article examines Daljit Nagra's recent poetry collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! in relation to the idea of the burden of representation placed upon minority writers. While Nagra has been lionized as "the voice of British Asian poetry", his verse actually serves to question the homogenization of diverse individuals and communities implied within such labelling. The collection consists of a mix of confessional poetry and dramatic monologues, and is marked by repeated quotation from and parody of the English poetic tradition as well as a linguistic inventiveness in portraying the voices of British Punjabis: the article suggests that each of these aspects can be seen as part of Nagra's attempt to engage with his anxieties of influence. Crucially, these anxieties must be understood not only in the Bloomian sense of the writer's relation to tradition, but also as formed by the discursive expectations of a society structured by racialization.

The Multicultural Bildungsroman: Stereotypes in Monica Ali's Brick Lane

Perfect, M. — 2008-08-26

Monica Ali's phenomenally popular debut novel Brick Lane has often been accused of reinforcing rather than challenging stereotypes of cultural otherness. Interestingly, literary critics who have championed the novel have not sought to deny that it employs stereotypes, but rather to emphasize its sense of knowing irony in doing so. Critically analysing debates which have attempted to assert that Brick Lane either propagates or ironically subverts cultural stereotypes, this article scrutinizes the valency of the kinds of "postmodern" readings of the novel which have thus far prevailed. I argue that the major concern of the novel is not the destabilization of stereotypes but the celebration of the potential for adaptation in both individuals and societies. I argue that Ali employs stereotypes as counterpoints in order to further emphasize her protagonist's final integration into contemporary British society, and that the novel might usefully be understood as a "multicultural Bildungsroman".

Terms of Hospitality: Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea

Farrier, D. — 2008-08-26

This article seeks to relate asylum issues to postcolonial studies. In the current immigration climate hospitality is an increasingly conditional provision; refugees are reclassified as asylum seekers, conditional presences dependent on the discretion of the host. Following Derrida's investigation of hospitable relationships, I examine how the reception of the asylum seeker is made conditional, through a reading of the relationship between an asylum seeker, Saleh Omar, and his various hosts in Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel By the Sea (2001). I argue that the increasingly fractured legal terminology of asylum represents a deliberate strategy of exclusion, and read the encounter between host and guest as a contest to define hospitality as either conditional or unconditional. I also consider Derrida's assertion that this contest is always interrupted by the urgent need to make a decision and how this interruption can represent a postcolonial inversion of the neo-colonial relationship of host and guest.

Making up with Painful History. The Partition of India in Bapsi Sidhwa's Work: Bapsi Sidhwa interviewed by Isabella Bruschi: Isabella Bruschi interviewed Bapsi Sidhwa in Turin on 14 May 2007

2008-08-26

The interview engages Bapsi Sidhwa in a discussion on Partition, a central issue in her novel Ice-Candy-Man , which also recurs in her other works. The author's interest in the historical event, beside having auto-biographical origins, demonstrates the tremendous impact it had on ordinary people's lives, the way it shaped their identities and the trauma it caused, which is not yet healed in contemporary India and Pakistan. According to Sidhwa, literature can dig into painful memory and try to make sense of it more successfully than history can. Her adoption (unprecedented in the context of Partition literature) of a marginal point of view — that of a Parsi girl who looks at reality with the immediacy and absence of prejudice typical of childhood — has enabled Sidhwa to tell her story with greater impartiality and to treat the problematic question of women's rape and abduction from a gendered perspective. The interview also explores the relationship between Sidhwa and film director Deepa Mehta, and between novel writing and filmmaking in connection with both Ice-Candy-Man/Earth and Water.

Books Received

2008-08-26

Editorial

Watkins, S., Chambers, C. — 2008-05-13

"Dishonourably Postnational"? The Politics of Migrancy and Cosmopolitanism in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance

Herbert, C. — 2008-05-13

This article explores Rohinton Mistry's novel A Fine Balance (1996), alongside his short story "Lend Me Your Light" (1987), focussing on the tensions between the politically-distanced cosmopolitan migrant and the socially-committed local activist. My readings draw on Radhakrishnan's notion of diasporic "double duty" — of accountability to, rather than irresponsible detachment from, the homeland. Mistry's representations of migrants, I contend, are centrally concerned not only with the necessity, but also the difficulty, of performing such "double duty" through a sustained engagement with India's history and politics. In this light, I argue that Mistry offers representations of migrants whose attempts to distance themselves from local and national politics are revealed as impossible and irresponsible. Moreover, I suggest that Mistry's representations reveal an anxiety over his position as a migrant writer, and his work seems to mobilize writing as a means of avoiding a problematically apolitical detachment from India. Thus, Mistry establishes a tension between his representation of the migrant within his fiction and his negotiation of his own migrant position through his fiction.

Traversing Diacritical Space: Negotiating and Narrating Parsi Nationness

Singh, R. B. — 2008-05-13

The Parsis have been typecast as India's most Anglicized community and as colonial collaborators. Anglicization was, however, a perfomative identity that manifested itself differently in public and in private space. Viewed through the lens of Homi Bhabha's theories of hybridity, and read through fiction by Parsi authors, the Anglicization of the Parsis can be seen not as uncomplicated mimicry, but as negotiation of national and cultural identity and space in terms of historical and geographical contingency. To see Parsi ambivalences as an unequivocal Anglicization is to presuppose a univalent and totalizing national identity from which one group or another strays, rather than to recognize the negotiated and contingent nature of what Bhabha terms "nationness". It is to posit a departure from an originary culture rather than to recognize the temporal and transitional nature of culture itself.

The Mother Tongue and Bilingual Hysteria: Translation Metaphors in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions

Thompson, K. D. — 2008-05-13

Approaching Tsitsi Dangarembga's 1988 novel Nervous Conditions as an extended metaphor of translation, the article analyses the complementary relationship between the two female cousins, Nyasha and Tambu, by examining the complex ways in which they situate themselves in relation to language and culture. The comparison between Nyasha and Tambu is anchored in translation theory and psychoanalysis, while highlighting the Shona linguistic undercurrent present in the text of the novel. In examining Tambu, it pursues the question of translation (both literal and figurative) and the parallels between the female subject's relation to language, on the one hand, and to the maternal, on the other. Nyasha's relationship to language, on the other hand, is read through psychoanalytic theories of polylingualism: her inability to locate her own identity with regards to language and culture eventually leads to anorexic hysteria.

The Nation's Monstrous Women: Wives, Widows and Witches in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Weickgenannt, N. — 2008-05-13

This article explores the function of misogyny in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), an aspect of the novel which is often too easily interpreted as a shortcoming on Rushdie's part rather than as a conscious and multi-layered strategy. It focuses on the question of woman and her national role, and the striking traits of monstrosity displayed by the female characters. In order to explore the crucial link between their apparent monstrosity and their significance for the nation in the novel, the portrayal of the novel's monstrous wives, widows and witches is analysed in relation to the representation of Indian womanhood in Indian historiographical and political discourses. The article identifies two main trajectories of the theme of female monstrosity, one aimed at criticizing the nation's unwillingness to grant women an equal status and the other designed to demonize Indira Gandhi.

Claire Harris's "Where the Sky Is a Pitiful Tent": How Two Women Respond after Witnessing Political Torture

Blumenthal, A. S. — 2008-05-13

In her long poem "Where the Sky Is a Pitiful Tent", Claire Harris juxtaposes quoted prose passages from I, Rigoberta Menchu to an imagined account, in poetry, of a woman's loss by murder of her rebel husband. Although Harris's topic in "Sky" is a dominant group's use of torture to control a resistant victimized group, the poet is primarily interested in the effects of such brutality on the rhetorical choices made by the two victimized women speakers, each of whom is recovering her voice in the aftermath of traumatic experience. In her two speakers Harris dramatizes the contrasting ways of knowing and speaking that Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule in Women's Ways of Knowing identify as "separate knowing" and "connected knowing". They define the first of these approaches as "detached," "public" and "disinterested", the second as personal, "empathic", "imaginative" and emotionally aware; both perceptual methods correspond to contrasting rhetorical purposes and methods. Harris shows that though each speaker recovers an authoritative voice, each voice reveals both surprising strengths and rhetorical effectiveness as well as a tendency for omissions and distortions resulting from self-protective instincts and from the limitations intrinsic to particular genres. Irony and paradox abound, as Harris dramatizes her two speakers' isolation as well as their mutual dependence: full awareness requires rhetorical and generic inclusiveness.

"Alone in a Landscape": Lessing's African Stories Remembered

Walder, D. — 2008-05-13

In many colonial and post-colonial writers there is a dialectic between different forms of nostalgia that avoids the bad faith assumed by those (like Fredric Jameson) who denounce nostalgia as a de-historicizing trend. Doris Lessing, through her "African" work both fictional and non-fictional, offers a suitable example. From her first African Stories onwards, she suggests that her mythic Africa, the remembered Rhodesia of her childhood, is at once a place of pain and suffering, and yet also the source of something that transcends, as it helps put into perspective, the human condition. As Mara and Dann shows, a nostalgia for the future appears in her later work, as part of her sometimes fruitless search for ever new perspectives upon her past, evident in The Grass is Singing and the Martha Quest series, as it is in The Golden Notebook and, most effectively and poignantly, "The Old Chief Mshlanga".

Commodifying the Past: Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook as Nostalgic Narrative

Bazin, V. — 2008-05-13

This article focuses on the realist fragment embedded within Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook concerning Anna Wulf's life in Rhodesia as a member of the Communist Party and, more specifically, the events that take place at the Mashopi Hotel. In this fragment Lessing critically interrogates the nostalgic glance backwards, thereby offering a dialectical understanding of the past as an image of the present. Responding to the post-war impulse to "look back", a gesture embodied by Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger , Lessing's realist fragment reveals the extent to which the past is always already commodified by the present. The Mashopi Hotel embodies an idea of Englishness that is at once comforting but ultimately destructive. Lessing's analysis of the nostalgia for a lost Englishness is, I argue, a response to post-war anxieties concerning English identity, anxieties attributable to the collapse of the British Empire and the influx of new immigrants from Commonwealth countries.

In Pursuit of the English: Hybridity and the Local in Doris Lessing's First Urban Text

Sizemore, C. W. — 2008-05-13

The narrator of In Pursuit of the English brings a postcolonial, hybrid and feminist standpoint to her "ethnography" of the Notting Hill district of London in this semi-autobiographical account of Lessing's arrival in London from Rhodesia in 1949. "Doris", as the narrator is known, says she is pursuing two "grails": "England" and "the Working-Class", but she has to give up both universalist concepts of England as an "imagined community" and the socialist cosmopolitanism of an undifferentiated working class. She instead discovers the local cosmopolitanism of the neighbourhood of Notting Hill and learns from her female friends how to centre herself in one district and navigate paths through the city. As she travels through the district of Notting Hill, she brings her experience of Africa into her observations of her new space and uses that hybrid and feminist vision to map the neighbourhood and create a snapshot of a culture of London in the 1940s and 1950s.

Rhodesian Children and the Lessons of White Supremacy: Doris Lessing's "The Antheap"

Cairnie, J. — 2008-05-13

This paper builds on Anne Stoler's study of "race and the intimate" and responds to bell hooks' provocative invitation, "One change in direction that would be real cool would be the production of a discourse on race that interrogates whiteness". In Doris Lessing's short story "The Antheap" (1953), Tommy, the son of a white mine manager, has a tumultuous relationship with Dirk, the "half-caste" son of the mine owner. It is understood that Tommy needs to break off this relationship and thus learn the codes which sustain white supremacy in Rhodesia. Rather than accept the central lesson — the prohibition against intimacy between whites and blacks — Tommy recognizes that it is repeatedly violated, even by its adult proponents. Tommy "imperfectly" learns lessons about four kinds of intimacy: heterosexual, maternal, paternal and fraternal. These lessons are important for white boys to digest: otherwise, the white community lacks the appearance of homogeneity. Ultimately, Tommy rejects these lessons and the text points to a future that is uncertain: Tommy may wholly reject or simply defer his white masculine privilege.

"Then Spoke the Thunder": The Grass is Singing as a Zimbabwean Novel

Visel, R. — 2008-05-13

Doris Lessing's first novel was greeted by the international press as important news from a region that seemed poised for change in 1950, but in subsequent decades, it was read, especially by Southern African critics, as an increasingly irrelevant echo of colonial discourse. I argue here that The Grass is Singing (1950) should be read anew in the twenty-first century as a prescient anti-colonial text which prefigures contemporary postcolonial themes and issues. Specifically, I situate Lessing's novel in dialogue with two novels by Zimbabwean author Alexander Kanengoni: When the Rainbird Cries (1987) and Echoing Silences (1997). I suggest that aspects of The Grass is Singing which literary critics found objectionable, such as its mythopoeic natural symbolism, and the unrealistic, thus implicitly racist depiction of Moses, can be read differently in the context of Kanengoni's novels and related works by his contemporaries. I read Lessing's novel within the genre of the Zimbabwean literature of Chimurenga, or resistance, in which violence is interpreted through ritual and the personification of natural forces.

Books Received

2008-05-13

Engaging Modernities: Cultural and Intellectual Trajectories from East and Southern Africa

Ogude, J. — 2008-02-25

Spectrality in Indigenous Women's Cinema: Tracey Moffatt and Beck Cole

Turcotte, G. — 2008-02-25

This paper addresses two recent Aboriginal ghost stories produced by Aboriginal film-makers Tracey Moffatt (beDevil) and Beck Cole (Plains Empty), in order to examine the relationship of these films to a type of spectral rewriting of the Australian nation state. This paper examines the role of spectrality as a revisionist process that exorcizes, but also celebrates, the ghosts that underpin and/or undermine narratives of belonging and place and investigates the dynamic potential of Indigenous film, not so much as a device that eradicates colonial encounters and their postcolonial legacy, but as texts that unsettle and contest, that empower and initiate debate by way of dismantling, or at least diminishing, dominant representations of Indigenous identities.

The Home, the World and the United States: Young India's Tagore

Ahmad, D. — 2008-02-25

This essay examines how the New York-based nationalist periodical Young India selectively reprinted the works of Rabindranath Tagore that accorded with its message of pluralist nationalism. Though Tagore used his poetry, fiction and lectures to express his vehement opposition to Western-style (and Japanese-style) nationalism, the exile periodical carefully culled his work in order to capitalize on his high status in the West while deflecting his criticism of its nationalist project. Under the leadership of Lala Lajpat Rai, Young India in effect manufactured its own Tagore for export to its American audience. Young India's Tagore offers a view into the development of anti-colonial thought outside India.

Constructing the Imaginary: Creativity and Otherness in the Films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan

Ganguly, S. — 2008-02-25

The essay primarily deals with three of Adoor Gopalakrishnan's major films from the 80s: Mukhamukham/Face to Face (1984); Anantaram/ Monologue (1987); and Mathilukal/The Walls (1989). It also includes a discussion of his most recent film, Nizalkutthu/Shadow Kill (2002). The author first provides an overview of Gopalakrishnan's life and career and then focuses on the subject of the outsider and the related issue of otherness, both of which he claims are common to all the films. He shows how Gopalakrishnan's protagonists are men and women who have been physically and psychically displaced from mainstream society. Victims of choice and circumstance, they grapple with forces that are self-generated but more often than not unleashed by larger historical and social processes. He particularly focuses on the work of the eighties because it is here that Gopalakrishnan attempts to locate otherness within the interior workings of self, within a psychological space that is often associated with the creative process. The male protagonists in these films function in very different contexts and yet their status as outsiders is defined by their engagement with the imaginary which they achieve through their creativity.

The Melancholic Structure of Memory in Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon

Moynagh, M. — 2008-02-25

In this paper I argue that the melancholic approach to the losses of slavery and colonialism in Dionne Brand's novel At the Full and Change of the Moon offers a critique of the exclusions and disavowals of modernity. Both in her novel and in her memoir A Map to the Door of No Return Brand represents the black diaspora in the Americas as an allegory about the incorporation of loss and links worldly losses to their psychic remains. She does not thereby pathologize the black diaspora so much as she enables a critical apprehension of the ways modernity's intimate relation to colonialism and slavery may be understood as pathological. As readers of these texts, moreover, we engage in a psychoanalytic and politic hermeneutics that potentially takes us in the direction of protest and political engagement.

Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa: Melancholy Narratives, Petitioning Selves and the Ethics of Suffering

Peterson, B. — 2008-02-25

Using Sol Plaatje as a representative figure and his Native Life in South Africa as its primary text, this article explores the political and ethical imperatives that informed the act of writing amongst the first generation of African writers in South Africa. Native Life in South Africa was written as an appeal to the British government and public to denounce the passing of the Land Act of 1913 and the book is a fascinating manifestation of the layered aims, ambiguities and paradoxes that inhere in petitioning. The article examines the petition as a genre that allows Plaatje to inscribe his imagined multiple readers of the text and their mutual obligations to each other. The act of petitioning also allows Plaatje to engage in modes of self-definition that include a critique of colonial modernity and laying claim to his status as a modern African.

Citashe's Apostrophe -- "Zimkile! Mfo wohlanga": The Unfinished "Preface" to an African Modernity

Mkhize, K. — 2008-02-25

The poem "Zimkile! Mfo wohlanga" has had a sustained salutary presence in South African literary and cultural criticism of the past three decades, especially when it has been concerned with the experiences of Christianized, modern Africans. The criticism of the poem provides an entry-point into how "Zimkile!" itself has been reproduced and used. I contend that, although this scholarship has done much to illuminate some of the complexities of the modern African's responses to European modernity, it has ignored dealing with the moment of its production and circulation in the late nineteenth century."Zimkile! Mfo wohlanga" formed part of a larger text in which its author, in this instance signing himself as I.W.W. Citashe, was concerned with formulating strategies for dealing with the incarceration of Xhosa regents who were seen as figureheads of the Xhosa nation. The modes of address undertaken in the poem, as the clinching resolution of the issues presented in the larger text, meant that in addressing an African readership, its author mobilized complex narrative strategies that interpellated the African intellectual's traditional heritage into his modern sensibilities at a time when modern Africans had to contend with the antinomies of a colonial existence.

Between the Wildebeest, Noble Savages and Moi's Kenya: Deceit and Cultural Illiteracies in the Search for Julie Ward's Killer(s)

Musila, G. — 2008-02-25

This paper examines the 1988 murder of British tourist Julie Ward in Kenya's Maasai Mara Game Reserve. It explores the search for Julie Ward's killers and how it is narrated in the three books on the case: John Ward's The Animals Are Innocent: The Search for Julie's Killers (1991), Michael Hiltzik's A Death in Kenya: The Murder of Julie Ward (1991) and Jeremy Gavron's Darkness in Eden: The Murder of Julie Ward (1994). Both the search for Julie Ward's killers and the narration of the case in the three books are framed within a distinctly British colonial archive, which reads Kenya(ns) through the twin tropes of exoticism and the political jungle of the postcolonial state. The paper argues that their embedding in this colonial archive resulted in an epistemological disarticulation between the British and Kenyan players in the search for Julie Ward's killers, as certain Kenyan textualities remained illegible to the British.

"Dictatorships Are Transient": Chenjerai Hove interviewed by Ranka Primorac: Chenjerai Hove talked to Ranka Primorac in London on 25 and 26 June 2007

2008-02-25

Novelist and poet Chenjerai Hove gained international fame in 1988 with his novel Bones. In recent years, his work (which revolves around the theme of the spiritual importance of land in African cultures) has gained a new significance in the light of the social crisis unfolding in his native Zimbabwe. In 2001, Hove left his country of birth amid the escalating violence triggered by the government of Robert Mugabe. He now leads a migrant's life in the West and is an outspoken critic of the Mugabe regime. Interviewed in London by Ranka Primorac, Hove speaks about the circumstances of his leaving, the Zimbabwean land reform, traditional attitudes to land and how the corruption of language can become the basis of other corruptions. He also discusses his relationship to literature, his friendship with fellow-writer Yvonne Vera and his hopes for the future.

Bernard Hickey (1931--2007)

Thieme, J. — 2008-02-25

Books Received

2008-02-25

Editors Note

Raja, I. — 2007-12-11

Australia

Ikin, V., McKenzie, K. — 2007-12-11

Canada

Chlebek, D. — 2007-12-11

The Caribbean

Harrison, S.-M. — 2007-12-11

East and Central Africa

Musila, G. — 2007-12-11

India

Narayan, S. A. — 2007-12-11

Malaysia and Singapore

Talib, I. S. — 2007-12-11

New Zealand

Hamilton, S. — 2007-12-11

Pakistan

Shamsie, M. — 2007-12-11

South Africa

National English Literary Museum, , Warren, C. — 2007-12-11

Sri Lanka

Perera, S.W. — 2007-12-11