To Go Far, You Go Together

And if you are alone, you wait for reinforcements

This is how it goes: you get shortlisted for the most prestigious literary prize for African short story writing – the Caine Prize. Immediately, you are thrust into the global spotlight. Suddenly you are a somebody in the global literary scene: the first Rwandan-Namibian writer to ever be nominated for this prize. Your work is amplified beyond your country’s borders. You are interviewed by some of the most illustrious magazines around. Famous writers read your work and send their congratulations. Your Twitter feed is a mess of notifications, mentions, and retweets – the Gen-Z dream.

You do not even have to win the award. The shortlisting feels like a victory in and of itself. Everything else, really, is a bonus – gifts of fate for which you have had no hand in creating. All you can do is receive.

A month or so later your debut novel, the one that has been doing the rounds in southern Africa, is picked up by Simon & Schuster, one of the world’s largest publishers. The current is stronger and pulls you from the shore. You are sucked into the undertow of success. Where the flow will take you remains unknown.

The cycle repeats itself: recognition and relative fame.

You are the so-called “it kid” of regional and international literature. Glorious.

Then comes the hard part: you have to be the torch-bearer for a whole country’s literature. A demanding and impossible task. The publishing hardships make consistent literary output difficult, and the pursuit of the creative life is so brutal that many talented artists quit their craft to pursue more stable and lucrative career opportunities. But the torch is there and it has to be carried by someone.

You have two choices: you can push on forward, further, higher, faster – but then you will be alone. This is what it is like for pioneers. Being first is lonely.

The second choice is to follow continental wisdom passed on through my proverbs across generations of migration: to go quickly you go alone, but to go far you go together.

It is why, in this strange moment when everything seems to be happening, when the urge to carpe diem is so strong, that you choose to stand still. You seek refuge in the local – you resist the urge to get caught in the hype because what goes up must come down. You stay still, you look around, and wait to see where the second, third, fourth, and hundredth writer will come from.

Why?

It is why, in this strange moment when everything seems to be happening, when the urge to carpe diem is so strong, that you choose to stand still.

Because you want to go far, further than you have come. And if you want to go far you go together. The ancestors said and have shown that this is so.

So you wait. You look through Namibian poetry anthologies published by the University of Namibia and scroll through the contributor list of the small literary magazine you cofounded: Doek! The Namibian section of the Windhoek Book Den, the bookshop you patron and haunt for long periods of time, is raided often and periodically. Because you know there are otherwriters around, you are merely separated by geography and chance encounters between the pages. But they are there, this much you know. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. This is another proverbial wisdom you have taken to heart.

You wait. And wait some more.And, then...There! On the shimmering horizon.Another writer. And another. And another.

Reinforcements – if you wait long enough help always arrives. Again, more conventional wisdom saves the day and wins the night. The ancestors were really onto something.

And when everyone else has pulled abreast of you, then you turn to the future. Because you are not alone anymore. And if you are not alone then you can go far.

Rémy Ngamije is a Rwandan-born Namibian novelist, columnist, essayist, short-story writer, and photographer. His debut novel The Eternal Audience Of One is available from Blackbird Books and Amazon. His short stories have appeared in Litro Magazine, AFREADA, The Johannesburg Review of Books, The Amistad, The Kalahari Review, American Chordata, Doek!, and Azure. More of his writing can be read on his website: remythequill.com