{"id":268656,"date":"2009-02-13T20:08:25","date_gmt":"2009-02-13T20:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/02\/13\/mabanckou-review\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:24:21","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:24:21","slug":"mabanckou-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/02\/13\/mabanckou-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Mabanckou review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Laila Lalami <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenational.ae\/article\/20090206\/REVIEW\/91184843\/1008\">reviews<\/a> Alain Mabanckou&#8217;s <em>Broken Glass<\/em> in <em>The National<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cIn Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>When the Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Hamp\u00e2t\u00e9 B\u00e2 uttered these words at a Unesco assembly in 1960, he was attempting to draw attention to Africa\u2019s tradition of oral storytelling. Little did he know that his aphorism would turn into one of the most persistent clich\u00e9s about the continent, one that unfortunately reinforced the erroneous idea that there was no tradition of written literature in Africa prior to European colonialism. Early on in Alain Mabanckou\u2019s new novel Broken Glass (to be published this month in translation from French to English), the proprietor of a seedy bar in Brazzaville, who is referred to only as Stubborn Snail, hears the slogan and derisively responds that it \u201cdepends which old person, don\u2019t talk crap, I only trust what\u2019s written down.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Laila Lalami reviews Alain Mabanckou&#8217;s Broken Glass in The National \u201cIn Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns.\u201d When the Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Hamp\u00e2t\u00e9 B\u00e2 uttered these words at a Unesco assembly in 1960, he was attempting to draw attention to Africa\u2019s tradition of oral storytelling. Little did he know that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[19986,2136,9586,1646],"class_list":["post-268656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-alain-mabanckou","tag-ejvl","tag-laila-lalami","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268656"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313676,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268656\/revisions\/313676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}