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- Granqvist, Raoul J.
(author)
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Eliot Elisofon's Famous Portrait of a Young Chinua Achebe
- 2013
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This is a reading of Eliot Elisofon's portrait of Chinua Achebe taken in Enugu on November 16, 1959. Achebe's Things Fall Apart has recently been published. My reading of the portrait is placed in the larger context of the mission of Elisofon's travel to produce two seemingly antagonistic articles or viewpoints for LIFE magazine, one old, the second modern. The first about the Western myths of Africa, I claim, submerged the second about the independence process of Nigeria. The portrait of a young assertive Achebe is filtered by such a complexity.
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- Granqvist, Raoul J.
(author)
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Elisofons möte med Jean Sibelius : nationalism och jazz
- 2012
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In: Nya Argus. - 0027-7126. ; 105:4, s. 89-92
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Artikeln diskuterar mötet mellan Jean Sibelius och den amerikanske fotografen Eliot Elisofon den 9 oktober 1944 på Ainola och mera i detalj omständigheterna kring hur två av Elisofons fotografier kom till. De två bilderna av Sibelius på en bänk vid en stenmur är delar i en berättelse om det stora lilla landet med sin skörhet och sårbarhet.
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- Granqvist, Raoul J.
(author)
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Förord
- 2015
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In: Elechi Amadi, De stora dammarna. - Stockholm : Modernista. - 9789174995534 ; , s. v-x
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Elechi Amadi’s (b. 1934) novel The Great Ponds is a stylized, only seemingly simple, story about a conflict between two Ikwerre villages (Niger Delta, today Rivers State, Nigeria). The conflict concerns to begin with an internal local wrestling match, a male skirmish, about fishing rights between ‘strong men’ and the leaders’ manipulative handling of the god systems, to escalate into an apocalyptic pandemonium of death with wonjo (1918), the Spanish Flu (La Grippe) as the catalyst. References to wonjo occur only at the very end of The Great Ponds, as if Amadi had resolved to position his story in a de-contextualized exclusive African enclave on the Atlantic coast, outside the history of the white man’s two century-long colonization of Ikwerre land and neighboring Igboland. This may have been his decision, only that a writer’s decision can be jammed by his book, which is the case here. Amadi wrote his story in 1969 while the Nigerian civil war, the Biafran War (1967-1970), was on going; the writer staunchly loyal with the Federal side throughout. The absence in The Great Ponds of ‘white men,’ ‘white religions,’ and the ’white decease’ (as the Spanish Flue has been identified as, only that it was global; 40,000 thousand died in Sweden and even more in Finland), it needs to be pointed out, only has a formal significance. The cruelties that embodied the breaking down of the two villages in the novel were underpinned by a series of ‘events’: one, the wonjo; second, the colonial wars that had been waged in the Niger Delta between the British and the Igbo ever since the first missionaries arrived in the 1850s; third, the Biafran War that positioned, sadly, Amadi– in theory – against Chinua Achebe, his colleague and friend. They were born and bred 150 km from each other; Achebe four years his older; they had been to the same prestigious colonial school, Government College, Umuahio; and were alumni at University College, Ibadan. An Ikwerre against an Igbo. No!Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) engages the ‘white men’ and their religion; Achebe wrote a history about the colonial encounter. Amadi erased the Europeans. Amadi wrote an ethnographic allegory from within local belief systems. But more importantly, the two share the vision of what constitutes the foundation for not ‘falling apart,’ whether it is a group or an individual and a village like Chiolu (Amadi) or Umuofia (Achebe): the ability to talk, to negotiate, to compromise, and when rule systems violate the dynamism of change (impacted by neighbors, foreigners, or women), disobey the ‘rules,’ replace them! No god can breathe for long within the pages of a single volume! The once commensurate patriarchal system in The Great Ponds, based on concord and solidarity, disintegrated into religious fundamentalism, brutal violence, greed, and mercilessness, with the gods and their adjuncts in recalcitrant partnership. It was not wonjo’s fault!
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- Granqvist, Raoul J., 1940-
(author)
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Förord
- 2015
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In: Hemligheter. - Stockholm : Modernista. - 9789176455845 ; , s. v-x
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Nuruddin Farah's Secret, the third in a suite of three novels called 'Blood in the Sun', was written in Berlin in 1990. It was originally dubbed 'Awake, When Asleep', an evangelical plea for social and political redemption whose idealism Farah did not walk out on but camouflaged under an uncompromising exploration. Somalia had become a nightmare and has stayed a life-long trauma for Farah himself. With the Wall collapsing outside the windows at Potsdamer Platz and the jubilant demonstrators' catch phrase "We are the people" metamorphosing into "We are ONE people", the novel’s title and language changed. Farah's documentation of the collective horror of Somalia in decay, the converse of German unity (as it seemed), could only be searched through a radical literary diagnosis that shattered 'normalcies' that bound together family-clan, man-woman, right-wrong, sanity-insanity, God-gods-fathoms. Farah deconstructs, unveils, ruthlessly the mechanisms of patrilineal genetics, patronymics, rape, blood binds, foster children, down to their minutest, most mazelike particulars; even the interlinguas of animals. All is made transcendent. This is what the 'secrets' connote. Cultural taboos and religious codes of loyalty, normalcies, kill.In monologues, all the five narrators, Kaaman, Sholoongo, Yaqut, Damac and Nonno, tell stories about themselves, about each other. They do it through fables, innuendos, whispers, wrong-sayings, rumors, lies, voyeurism. As readers we have to endure Farah's fragmented world, simply for it to make sense for us. To achieve this, his fable tells us, we have to understand that there is no secret if life is here to be lived. That the collective mystery of Somalia is a lie: no one understands why someone shoots another human being; why you eat locusts; that no one knows that God does not exist.Now, a quarter of a century later, dysfunctional Somalia is still there, unchanged, but so also, increasingly, the out of Somalia world, from Damascus in the east to Berlin and Stockholm in the north. Farah's Secrets concerns us all.
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- Granqvist, Raoul J.
(author)
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Introduction
- 2006
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In: Michael's Eyes. - Umeå : The Department of Modern Languages, Umeå University. - 9173059897 ; , s. 9-15
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)
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