Culture July 22, 2011

In 2005, Binyavanga Wainaina published a piece in Granta mocking the West’s need for African literature to present a uniform, tribal, black, desolate, and desperate homeland called Africa. He strives in his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, to present life as it is and was, not in any fixed notion of “Africa,” but in the places he lived and traveled through: Kenya, South Africa, Lagos, Uganda, the Sudan. He does not present one mythical continent, but rather a fractured, complex, and ever-shifting collection of experiences. Sentence to sentence he jams ideas together, mimicking the way Michael