Bufflehead Cabin

“The grand dialectic it sets forth pits the grounded stability of Wad Hamid against the frenzied rootlessness of the West, experienced by Sa’eed first as libertine intoxication but ultimately as a “poison … injected into the veins of history.” Sa’eed’s tormented, ecstatic war, fought mostly in the bedroom (his public career is much more complicit with those who taught him “how to say ‘Yes’ in their language”), rises to the pitch of a mythic clash of civilizations. This now seems untenable. Such a vision depends on there being a genuine alternative to Western ideology and influence, a secure sense of the organic “life warmth of the tribe” as embodied in the narrator’s grandfather, who represents “something immutable in a dynamic world.” But the dynamic world has triumphed, and its triumph is total. The world bequeathed to the ascendant generation of African writers has never been anything other than rapidly shifting, absurd, fitfully Americanized, too often convulsive, and, yes, contaminated by history’s poisons. African reality may possess intensities that the rest of the world is grateful not to endure, but globalization has ensured that it is less alien and exotic than it has ever been.”