Thaindian News

Jaipur, Jan 20 (IANS) London meets Lagos meets Durban meets Dakar meets New York. And now Jaipur. “American accent, European affect, African ethos.” A new breed of hybrid inklings called Afropolitans has descended here to chant and enchant the word-besotted at the world’s biggest literary jamboree.

Taiye Selasi, a London-born writer and photographer of Nigerian and Ghanaian origin and progenitor of the expression Afropolitans, is here at the Jaipur Literary Festival, which began Friday, to share the stage with New York-based Nigerian-American Teju Cole.

Selasi, better known for her Granta debut story “The Sex Lives of African Girls”, and Cole will talk about the African literary landscape and the Afropolitan sensibility in a session moderated by Ben Okri, the celebrated Nigerian novelist who won the Booker Prize for “The Famished Road” way back in 1991.

Cole, whose debut novel “Open City” has put the literary world in a fever of excitement, is one of the star attractions at the four-day literary show that cuts across geographies, cultures and national boundaries.

Cole is expected to read out excerpts from his much-acclaimed novel that revolves around the solitary walks of the half-Nigerian, half-German narrator in multi-racial New York, where he meets an eclectic set of migrants who launch him into erudite soliloquies, interspersed with learned quotes from Roland Barthes and Yoruba mythology.

Much like his narrator, Cole, who grew up in Lagos and came to America in 1992, juggles multiple cultural identities, making him a quintessential Afropolitan, a “chutnified” solitary, in Salman Rushdie’s words, who has multiple homes but belongs to none. He is now a graduate student in art history at Columbia University.

Selasi coined Afropolitans in an essay entitled “Bye-Bye Babar” in LIP magazine in 2005 to describe what she called “Africans of the world”. Since then, it has become a chic buzzword in the incestuous literary and cultural world to describe those multilingual Africans who are simultaneously at home and not at home in Western metropolises, but who tie their sense of self to Africa.

Who exactly are Afropolitans? “You’ll know us by our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes. Some of us are ethnic mixes, e.g. Ghanaian and Canadian, Nigerian and Swiss; others merely cultural mutts: American accent, European affect, African ethos,” she writes.

“There is at least one place on The African Continent to which we tie our sense of self: be it a nation-state (Ethiopia), a city (Ibadan), or an auntie’s kitchen. Then there’s the G8 city or two (or three) that we know like the backs of our hands, and the various institutions that know us for our famed focus. We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world.”

Besides the Afropolitans, there is a fair sprinkling of personalities and writers who trace their origin to what was once dismissed as the dark continent but has now emerged as the “continent of hope”.

Dressed in a sari, Oprah Winfrey, the original progenitor of talk shows and the US’ richest black woman, is already hogging the limelight, but there are others who are sure to bring untold stories from the heart of Africa.

(Manish Chand can be contacted at manish.c@ians.in)