“Most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues,” Virginia Quarterly Review Editor Ted Genoways wrote in the February issue of Mother Jones. “As if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.” Genoways’ concerns are as artistic as they are practical: Not giving two shits, as it were, has put literary journals on the chopping block at scalpel-happy universities nationwide.
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The most recent edition of VQR, a special issue on North Africa, approaches the region with a gravity and patience that might be well-applied to its governance. Much of North Africa escaped colonial rule as recently as 1960. America’s first 75 years were no cakewalk. But nowadays, a bad government’s void can become a breeding ground for a host of ills.
The first of which is terrorism. Troubles in Somalia birthed Shabaab, the Islamist insurgent group most famous for shooting down an American helicopter in 1993, in Mogadishu. Now Shabaab’s recruiting apparatus stretches as far as Minnesota. Nicholas Schmidle tells the strange story of a Somalia-born teenager who, in a “perversion of the immigrant story,” returned there to offer himself as a martyr.
Tyler Stiem explores the legacy of Americo-Liberians, freed slaves who founded Liberia in the image of the America that subjugated them, with one notable exception: the African-Americans were the masters. The country spiraled into violence as the 20th century came to a close, and citizens chose Charles Taylor for president in the hope that electing the worst of the warlords would end the fighting. In modern day Port of Buchanan, Stiem’s picture of a rotting antebellum-style estate resounds as an African echo of Southern Gothic.
Climate change and overexploitation of resources threaten to undermine political progress. Anthony Ham searches for the continent’s northernmost elephants as the southward sprawling Sahara pits people against them, as well as each other. In Senegal, Jori Lewis writes that the country opened its waters to international fishing boats in the late 1970s; by 2000, exploitation became overexploitation, and now jobs are drying up in an industry that employs 15 percent of the population—in a country with 50 percent unemployment.
Cautious hope comes in the form of Somaliland, a breakaway state north of Somalia, a bastion of stability in the region. Tristan McConnell writes that Somaliland shunned Western models to create “clan-based authority with the beginnings of a limited modern democracy.” But the state remains unrecognized—no one nearby wants to fuel separatist attitudes in their countries; outside the region, no one wants to be called neocolonialists.
Nonetheless, this “invisible country” is the best example of what Genoways calls for in his introduction: nations that arise from “listening to the problems that each individual region and nation faces—in all their frustrating specificity and intricacy.” For this struggling region it may be a matter of survival that voices there are heard. And that may be just the kind of thing that keeps VQR in the budget.
