[mimie]

Who's seen it?
its been carefully kept in the family...
Andia Kisia has been given lots of space to write,
Both Judy Kibinge (the film person) and her small bro have articles
Binyavanga
gosh
do you think they had time for people like us?
no.

and secondly, the exciting thing they did with kwani01, about using language and forms rather spontenously is missing in two. who the heck do they believe is gonna read that dull thing?

and of course, the maasai mara, karen horse racing, blah blah touristic stories are now more than ever!

speaking of the kenyan midro crass

[Dee Dee]

I agree it will be am major flop just going thro' the thing and i am mad even at the layout it is so uninspiring... before i get my response which i will do once i am thro with reading this PR thing coz i find nothing artistic to make me treasure it ...we only write to cause hell nothing more....if it does not raise a response it is not a story.

[mimie]

its dull dull dull

i tried reading Kisia's 1982...beyond the clthes and the drinks on page one, i found dullness

not to say kisia's not a good writer. in fact when i read the story as an independent piece, i thought, well (on the Kwani site) but knowing her story is part of this large rather uncut book makes me sick.

have you seen the cartoon work at the end of the book?
wooi! what is that thing about rampant sex with teenagers?
it reminds me of that article you posted Dee Dee, remember?

whooooooooooosh!

[Jibril Cessay]

Kwani magazine has a problem seeking new talent. They need to get strict on their qualifications for good publications. Another thing I have noted; elitist poetry. Poetry has always been associated with underground movements. This is evident in the works of Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Octavia Paz, Amiri Baraka, Dennis Brutus, Augustinho Neto to mentin but a few. Kwani magazine promotes tasteless verse every last Tuesday and prides itself with a new literary Kenyan revolution. Kwani's weight in gold will come from the masses-the school children who write their simple revolutions in class, the mama wa mbogo who tills her roadside mealieland, the jobless man who was once a bank manager.

[Thinker]

How the heck does one get into Kwani anyway? Ama it's the typical Kenyan story of having to know someone?

:-)
"Due to complaints from KSCPCA and other animal fanatics, I shall henceforth only eat meat from animals that have commited suicide"

Thank God I'm An Atheist :: http://geocities.com/roomthinker

[pix9]

Its rather sad that the kenyan Intellectual old guard ( akina chris Wanjala and Ilieva) have been proven right - remember that long-drawn argument in the newspapers sometime back?. Point is, however much you try to tap into 'local' talent, you need to have some sorts of standards and the ability to commission solid stuff from people out there. I think kwani was a brilliant idea, gone wrong. Obviously, they used that vybe for 'the non-elitist' writing, to get Ford found. funding, but clearly, its one thing to circulate the funds among a handful of 'pseudo-nouveau-artistes' in kenya, but you have 2 have s'thing 2 show for the funds, in terms of quality!

well, well,well... typical kenyanness. Has anyone noticed the way artistic production is becoming a clique thing in kenya now? you have specific cliques of pple in the music industry, film industry, creative writing and even print media. With this kind of patronage system, i guess its ambitious for us to expect much....













Insist on your right to go off on a tangent ( Dambudzo Marechera 1978)

[Jibril Cessay]

Pix....the cliques will drive kenyan creativity underground. Many eloquent Kenyans are known abroad but not in Kenya. That is one reason, people find the idea of spoken word poetry (oral poetry) for instance, very strange.

[pix9]

Jib, I'm not so sure these fella's give much of a damn about creativity or art as a whole. True, i really appreciate what they've done to revive the kenyan artscene, but i think this funding business is really killing it nice and good, and the worst thing about it is that nobody seems to notice this. But perhaps it has to do with the current economic situation in the country- folks have got to earn their daily bread, hey? But old-fahsioned as it may sound, I still believe artsists should have some sort of intellectual integrity,which puts artistic quality before everything else, and that's why this whole scenario of artists acting like politicians sounds scandalous to me. Well, I suppose I need to wake up and smell the coffee, hey??



Insist on your right to go off on a tangent ( Dambudzo Marechera 1978)

[Jibril Cessay]

There is an old generation of Kenyan Creativity. I know people like Francis Imbuga, David Mulwa, Austin Bukenya and Ezekiel Alembi personally.

The older generation were successful partly due to their revolutionary work. When people stopped taking these folk seriously and others such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Al amin Mazrui and Micere Mugo went on self-exile, so did the standards of Kenyan literature.

My only beef with the nouveau generation is the lack of overt innovation and the elitist cliques formed. In many places in the US and RSA for instance, poetry is an underground movement that is not confined to elitist aficionado.

If we say poetry for instance is for the elite, then we are killing our indigenous creativity for ethnopoetry (oral-poetry/oral history) and story-telling. It is through story telling that many prominent African writers have an vehicle to convey their minds. It is through story-telling that we have many ocular-messengers ready to write.

Otherwise, Kwani magazine has another year to make up for its follies. We learn through our mistakes.

[pix9]

@Jib. BY the way, poetry is dying out in kenya, hey? haven't heard of any new anthology, worth the name, after the Poems from e.africa( by David Cook and David Rubadiri, and Jonathan Kariara's Introduction to East African Poetry( remember them?) After these there were two editions by Arthur Luvai and s'one else, that's Boundless Voices, and Voices Across the Valley. These had the occassional gem, but on the whole...so..so...

So you're right, poetry is not quite getting the attn it deserves,and part of the problem here is that ka attitude that poetry must be hard- y'know, the T'S Elliot and Chris Okigbo kind of things? and of course this's a myth! I mean, I think Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen are great poets, yet their poetry is very accessible,and this doesn't compromise the quality.

About oral tales by the way, there's a childrens's series published by sasa sema, on bigraphies of key figures in kenyan history and these are structured along the oral narrative formula. Have you sampled them? What's your take on them? ( by the way Alembi has written a couple of them, and he's quite good with oral literature and storytelling).





Insist on your right to go off on a tangent ( Dambudzo Marechera 1978)