by Taiye Selasi
How would you, 10 years after you wrote the essay, respond to its main ideas and to such criticism? How would you evaluate your essay – both in terms of the positive and negative reception and in respect to how you may feel that your ideas about Afropolitanism have changed or matured since then? Do you feel that the need to complicate Africa is different today than it was in 2005?
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In 2005, I wrote an essay describing a particular experience. No less and no more. No less in that I believed then and believe now that much of the power of writing—fiction or non—resides in the transformative power of description. To hear one’s experience described in words can fundamentally change the way one sees oneself: where one once felt entirely alone she now feels utterly human. As F Scott Fitzgerald has it: “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” In a very basic sense “Bye-Bye, Babar” said to a great many people (myself foremost), “You are not isolated.” To those for whom the description rings true the essay says, “You belong.”
It says no less than this—and no more.
