benin

autobiography of the lower east side

by rashidah ismaili

My original choice for Benin was Olympe Bhêly- Quenum’s AS SHE WAS DISCOVERING TIGONY. Written by a man, and published in 2000, the choice did not represent my goal of reading contemporary African women writers, but I had struggled to find a women writer from Benin, whose work had been translated into English.

After doing a bit more research, I decided to read a collection of short stories, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE by Rashidah Ismaili Abubakr, a Beninois writer who was born in 1941 in Cotonou, Benin. Ismaili is often represented as a Nigerian writer—her mother was from Benin but her father was from Kano in Northern Nigeria and Ismaili was married to a Nigerian—but in french academic circles, she is considered Beninois. She married at only 15 (a fact that is, amazingly, just glossed over in much of what I read about her,) to a Nigerian man who was studying in New York, which gave Ismaili the opportunity to get a bursary to study in New York too, and is where she has lived ever since. 

When I discovered this title, I was especially intrigued at the idea of a place being presented as a character and in Ismaili’s apparent intention to reveal the Lower East Side to us from the perspective of an African immigrant woman. Unfortunately, the book reads more like documentary than autobiography, as Ismaili tells the interrelated stories of Blacks from Africa, the Caribbean and the USA who arrive in the LES in the 1960s to form an artistic community, rather than immersing us into their experience. An experience she must be intimate with as it is her personal experience too. The effect of this removed style of telling is the reader is established as an observer. The scenes Ismaili depicts are interesting and filled with a cast of creative players, but her style of writing does not put the reader inside their lives, rather it keeps them at a distance, which denies any real connection to the stories or the lives of the immigrants she describes.

Despite this sense of remove in her fiction, I was happy to have the experience of seeing the world Ismaili occupies, mostly because Ismaili herself is such a fascinating person. From her roots in Benin, Ismaili hoped to become Africa’s first opera singer. She studied for a BA in Music at The New York College of Music as a Voice major, with a minor in literature. She also studied musical theatre at Mannes School of Music, but later changed direction and went on to obtain a PhD in Psychology from the State University of New York (SUNY). She has had a successful career in academia, both as a lecturer and administrator, recognized for her expertise in the literary movement of the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude, and worked as the Associate Director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for 15 years. 

Ismaili is better known as a poet, although she is also described as a playwright, essayist and short story writer, Ismaili has published multiple poetry collections including Cantata for Jimmy (2004), Missing in Action and Presumed Dead: Poems (1992), and coedited anthologies, as well as appearing in The Heinemann Book of African Women’s Poetry (1995). Elegies for the Fallen, is an opera based on Ismaili’s poetry and her play, Rice Keepers, was staged at the American Museum. In 2014, she published Autobiography of the Lower East Side: A Novel in Stories, her first book of fiction.