Juliana Horatio Ewing - "Jackanapes"

Frederick Orin Bartlett - "The Triflers"

Edward Elmer Smith - "Spacehounds of IPC"

Maurice Hewlett - "The Forest Lovers"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
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.

Marie Claire

M >> Marguerite Audoux >> Marie Claire




She wrote her book when and how she could, on scraps of cheap paper,
and she does not know herself, now, whether she hoped to have it
published when she wrote it. She did hope for publication when she had
finished it, but that was because she was hungry.

I met a friend just outside Marguerite Audoux's house after my first
visit to her. "Tiens," he said, "tu viens de la mansarde de Genie
l'ouvriere." And the clever little pun was true. Marguerite Audoux is
a genius, and she does not understand what people mean when they ask
her "how" she "writes." She opens her weak eyes very wide at the
question, laughs as a child laughs when it doesn't understand, and
says, "But I don't know. The thoughts come, and I write them down. I
only wish that I could spell them better."

When the committee of the Vie Heureuse was voting on her book before
awarding her the 200 pound prize for the best book of the year,
somebody suggested the possibility that she had had help with it.
Madame Severine was sent to fetch the manuscript. It was passed round,
examined, and no more doubt was possible.

I hope you will find the pleasure in reading Marie Claire that I found
in translating it. I should like to say quite earnestly--and perhaps a
little shamefacedly, because we hate saying these things out loud--that
when I had read it I felt awed. The book had worked upon me. Do you
remember the impression made on you by moonlight upon the snow in the
country? You must be quite alone to feel it. The purity of it all
makes you wish that you were a cleaner man or woman, and, till you rub
shoulders with people again, you mean to try hard to be cleaner and
better. Marie Claire made me feel just exactly like that.

JOHN N. RAPHAEL.

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