Some Passages From The History Of The Chomley Family Book

In Corner B - Es'kia Mphahlele

Penguin Classics cobbles together the essential short stories and essays of Es'kia Mphahlele, a revered icon in African emergent literature. This edition comes with a critical introduction by a literary scholar who happened to be the author's student.

While the stories mostly take place in Africa in the 1960s, the characters portray emotions, thoughts and lives that are accessible even to a modern day reader. Perhaps that is the power of good writing by a generational writer. Words, when properly deployed by a thoughtful writer, can generate unique patchworks of realities of such cultural and sociopolitical diversity yet remain within the comprehension of a layperson. This feat, I suspect, is achieved with the selection of words and idioms, the arrangements and weights of which are tied to strands of traits, habits and foibles common to all human beings across all times and all strata. Distance, time and space as narrative contexts no longer become barriers to understanding a story as the reader immediately recognizes familiar elements as easily as gazing one's reflection in the mirror. With exceptional writing, the characters may live out their stories in the other side of the world at a time several decades removed from the present but remain relatable to the reader of whatever circumstance, leanings, age and stripe.

I came away from the experience of reading the collection of stories with a firmer grasp of the notion that writing is partially a performance art. Realities, fictional or otherwise, are gestured into existence much in the same way a jar is produced into existence with the synchronised movements of hands and clay. A 30-minute Youtube video on Es'kia Mphahlele confirmed my suspicion that the author considered writing as performance much in the same way as one would when it comes to musical instruments.

As a final note, Es'kia Mphahlele's skilled use of idioms in delivering a complicated thought made it obvious to me that words are not the end to writing as they are only tools and media to ferret ideas. That is to say that clay and kneading techniques are acts of pottery and not the actual pot itself; just as words and idioms are part of writing but not the written work itself. The final product should not be mistaken for the parts which it took to produce it. I say this since I have noticed that most Filipino writers I have come across over the years have been heavily fixated on developing diction, grammar and style under the erroneous belief that mastery in these aspects will produce literature. I find that is never the case. A writer has to come upon insight through lived experiences first before the words necessary to express them become available. While competent writing is ideal, a person possessed and haunted by a powerful story would do well to imbibe it in full than waste time flipping the dictionary and thesaurus searching words to communicate the experience.