The crew of the
The leader of the orchestra, and occasional singer, is a blonde in her early thirties. She has a smattering of English, enough to make the announcements. 'We play piece that is called in Russian
She is there with a couple from her table, having a drink. They are from Manchester, they inform her. They are looking forward to her course on the novel, in which they have both enrolled. The man is long-bodied, sleek, silvery: she thinks of him as a gannet. How he has made his money he does not say and she does not enquire. The woman is petite, sensual. Not at all her idea of Manchester. Steve and Shirley. She guesses they are not married.
To her relief, the conversation soon turns from her and the books she has written to the subject of ocean currents, about which Steve appears to know all there is to know, and to the tiny beings, tons of them to the square mile, whose life consists in being swept in serene fashion through these icy waters, eating and being eaten, multiplying and dying, ignored by history. Ecological tourists, that is what Steve and Shirley call themselves. Last year the Amazon, this year the Southern Ocean.
Egudu is standing at the entranceway looking around. She gives a wave and he comes over. 'Join us,' she says. 'Emmanuel. Shirley. Steve.'
They compliment Emmanuel on his lecture. 'Very interesting,' says Steve. 'A completely new perspective you gave me.'
'I was thinking, as you spoke,' says Shirley more reflectively, 'I don't know your books, I'm sorry to say, but for you as a writer, as the kind of oral writer you described, maybe the printed book is not the right medium. Have you ever thought about composing straight on to tape? Why make the detour through print? Why even make a detour through writing? Speak your story direct to your listener.'
'What a clever idea!' says Emmanuel. 'It won't solve all the problems of the African writer, but it's worth thinking about.'
'Why won't it solve your problems?'
'Because, I regret to say, Africans will want more than just to sit in silence listening to a disc spinning in a little machine. That would be too much like idolatry. Africans need the living presence, the living voice.'
The living voice. There is silence as the three of them contemplate the living voice.
'Are you sure about that?' she says, interposing for the first time. 'Africans don't object to listening to the radio. A radio is a voice but not a living voice, a living presence. What you are demanding, I think, Emmanuel, is not just a voice but a performance: a living actor performing the text for you. If that is so, if that is what the African demands, then I agree, a recording cannot take its place. But the novel was never intended to be the script of a performance. From the beginning the novel has made a virtue of not depending on being performed. You can't have both live performance and cheap, handy distribution. It's the one or the other. If that is indeed what you want the novel to be – a pocket-sized block of paper that is at the same time a living being – then I agree, the novel has no future in Africa.'
'No future,' says Egudu reflectively. 'That sounds very bleak, Elizabeth. Do you have a way out to offer us?'
'A way out? It's not for me to offer you a way out. What I do have to offer is a question. Why are there so many African novelists around and yet no African novel worth speaking of? That seems to me the real question. And you yourself gave a clue to the answer in your talk. Exoticism. Exoticism and its seductions.'
'Exoticism and its seductions? You intrigue us, Elizabeth. Tell us what you mean.'
If it were only a matter of Emmanuel and herself she would, at this point, walk out. She is tired of his jeering undertone, exasperated. But before strangers, before customers, they have a front to maintain, she and he both.
