Historical Fiction Is “Having a Moment”

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‎Listing Yaa Gyasi, Yvonne Owuor, Colson Whitehead, Chimamanda Adichie, and Peter Kimani as examples, historian Dan Magaziner notes in an article on Africa Is a Country that historical fiction “has been having a bit of a moment recently, especially among authors from the African continent and its diaspora” (2017: para. 1). Confirming this, Lizzy Attree asks in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Are we on the cusp of a new age of African literature? If so, the key to new novels from African writers seems to be the fresh use of historical fiction to articulate a new future” (2018: para. 1-2).
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‎Homegoing indeed seems to be part of a distinct literary trend, and not only in Afro-diasporic literatures. The Guardian, for example, points to the success of Hilary Mantel as proof that the historical novel has finally lost its genre stigma, noting that both escapism and contemporary crises may account for its huge appeal (2017: para. 1-4). But, of course, historical fiction has never really gone out of fashion. What these cultural commentators are observing is rather the rise – and simultaneous decline of different forms of historical fiction. Academically, there seems to be a consensus about the fact that certain forms of historical fiction have lost their purchase, while other styles have taken over. Linda Hutcheon, who in the late 1980s famously developed the notion of ‘historiographic metafiction’ in order to classify a distinct postmodernist way of writing, has since labeled postmodernism, and with it the self-reflexive historical novel, “a thing of the past” (2002: 2). After the heydays of historiographic metafiction, as Amy Elias observes, came “a distinctive move toward […] what is now a realist historiographical perspective” (2005: 163).
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‎The editors of The Return of the Historical Novel? Thinking about Fiction and History after Historiographic Metafiction likewise propose a departure from Georg Lukács’s and Linda Hutcheon’s theoretical paradigms, asserting that we have entered “a new phase” in discussing historical fiction (2017: 14). This new phase, the editors proclaim, is “becoming more inclusive, more tolerant and, above all, more diverse” (ibid.). On the cover, the editors affirm their conviction that a certain “desire for a literary experience of historical otherness has recently increased in urgency.” That said, the volume manages to include only a single discussion of a postcolonial or non-white author (M.J. Vassanji).
‎The “urgency” that the editors of The Return of the Historical Novel? make out in the current moment is certainly germane to postcolonial and Afro-diasporic historical fictions, which have long since expressed the importance of understanding “temporal difference as a fundamental category of cultural experience” (ibid. 14). If one follows the established genealogy of the African novel, already the most canonical instance illustrates this. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is fundamentally invested in exposing the epistemic violence of the historical archive by imagining what appears to have been erased by a work like The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger – the fictional historiographic account that concludes the novel, written by the figure of the District Commissioner and threatening to reduce Okonkwo’s tragic suicide to “a reasonable paragraph, at any rate,” if not a mere footnote in history (Things Fall Apart 183). The historicist tropes adopted by Achebe are those of unearthing and countering, his fictional alternative to the colonial archive conveying what Richard Begam terms “adversarial history” (1997: 397).76 It expresses the kind of metahistorical stance that is embodied in a proverb used by Achebe in a 1994 interview with the Paris Review and also taken up by Zimbabwean author J. Nozipo Maraire in her epistolary novel Zenzele (1996): “Until the lion learns to write, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter'” (78). Zenzele, written as a fictionalized letter from a Zimbabwean mother to her daughter who is studying at Harvard, also employs the metahistorical frame of intergenerational exchange, striking a tone that is at once affectionate and advisory:
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‎So it is with us, too. History is simply the events as seen by a particular group, usually the ones with the mightiest pens and the most indelible ink. […] Do not be fooled by the whitewashed apparent objectivity of the ivory tower. Until the ivory turns to a rainbow with all countries represented, you would do well to be suspicious of the so-called “facts.” (78)
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‎This adversarial view of history, suspicious as it is of ‘official’ historical records and dedicated to unearthing alternative histories, is still a powerfully productive metahistoricist position that hugely impacts on African or postcolonial literatures. In the Afropolitan moment of the 21st century, this backward glance appears to chafe at the simultaneous emphasis on contemporaneity and futurity. Pushing against post-independence Afropessimism and the politicization of African literature, some commentators in the African literary community have urged writers to abandon “Black and African history, with its tragedies, injustices and wars,” in favor of lighter, less monothematic and supposedly more “literary” topics (Okri 2014: para. 6).77
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‎In the US, a very similar discourse answered the alleged post-racial turn and its demands on all forms of Black cultural expression, including literature. A particularly pertinent example of this is Charles Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative” from 2008. Bluntly subtitled with the assertion that “a new century calls for new stories grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its consequences,” the article wields Obama-infused optimism and the demographic diversity amongst Black Americans not only as proof of progress but as an obligation to abandon the “traditional black narrative of victimization” (2008: 36).
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‎Johnson advocates that 21st-century Black narratives should be “based not on the past but on the dangerous, exciting, and unexplored present” (ibid. 42).
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‎As evidenced by the unbroken currency of historical fiction in post-colonial, African and Black American literature, and notably also in the writing of newly Black Americans like Gyasi, the 21st century certainly rejects Johnson’s counsel. If anything, and in the US-American context especially, metahistorical positionalities have become an even more crucial touchstone for Black cultural production. Most of these debates have also revealed themselves as being only superficially about abandoning the past in favor of the contemporary, but actually about the ways that past and present relate -particularly regarding the significance of past atrocities. Following Kenneth Warren’s polemic that the “retrospective” view of contemporary Black American fiction bespeaks its uselessness as literary category, as well as Stephen Best’s critique of melancholic historicism, the question is often not only whether but more importantly what kind of historicism adequately captures ‘the Black experience.’
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‎In the context of African literature, the current moment is perhaps best characterized by what Lizzy Attree describes as a “fresh use” of historical fiction. This new approach does not entirely abandon Achebe’s subject matter but nevertheless differs from this ur-moment of African or postcolonial fiction. Like Gyasi’s Homegoing, contemporary novels like Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu, Novuyo Tshuma’s House of Stone, or Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift do not shy away from depicting a pre-colonial past or detailing the contact zone between colonizer and colonized. Yet these novels trace these historical trajectories into the (near) present, strongly indicating the presence of the past in the present. Most importantly, however, they are foregrounding historical continuities and counter suppressive historiographies and also reflect on the discursive impact and effects of adversarial, postcolonial, or melancholic historicisms. Both Kintu and Homegoing employ the manifest destiny of a curse that continues to traumatize and wreak havoc on the members of a family line. In The Old Drift, a protean swarm of mosquitos grants a long historical view on the Zambesi basin. One of its human characters thinks of history as “the annals of the
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‎bully on the playground” (98), while the narrator of House of Stone distinguishes between history and a more personal, “murky hi-story” (7). House of Stone’s author Tshuma also advocates a creative and emotional engagement with colonial history rather than a self-legitimizing or purely falsifying approach. Problematizing the project of excavation itself, the Zimbabwean author warns that you cannot excavate a true history -“because every history has an agenda” (Tshuma 2019). Self-knowing and ethically engaged, these novels open up a space to explore different historicist epistemologies beyond the binary of authentic truthfulness or contingent play. In Homegoing, the question of how the past bears on the present often extends from the way it makes itself known – through archival traces, notions of spectrality, looping, or echoing to the very condition of it being written.
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