Acting Like a White Woman: Cynthia Jele’s Black South African Chick Lit Novel Happiness Is a Four-Letter Word (2010) as New Weltliteratur

Acting Like a White Woman: Cynthia Jele’s Black South African Chick Lit Novel Happiness Is a Four-Letter Word (2010) as New Weltliteratur Sandra Folie Chick lit purportedly originated in the mid-1990s with works such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (both 1996). Initially defined as a new subgenre of romance, chick lit also departed from some well-established conventions of the romance genre, such as the single-minded focus on the search for true love and the one-man-per-woman ratio. Instead, the often ironic and humorous novels typically focus on more emancipated, metropolitan heroines—heterosexual, affluent, and (notably) white—who face the everyday challenges of their careers and the search for Mr. Right along with their friends. Early reactions to chick lit were often extreme, either attracting “the unquestioning adoration of fans” or “the unmitigated disdain of critics” (Ferriss and Young 1). The rejection or omission of the genre by critics and literary scholars ensured that chick lit and world literature are hardly ever associated with one another to this day—except, perhaps, with some degree of irony, as in Rachel Donadio’s article in the New York Times, “The Chick-Lit Pandemic” (2006). In the context of both increasing indictments of a sexist book industry and the COVID-19 pandemic, Donadio’s disease metaphor has not aged particularly well. Pointing to the genre’s ‘minor’ reputation and ‘major’ circulation, the metaphor is also unfortunate because it suggests that chick lit has been transferred from the white Western ‘centres,’ mainly the US and the UK, to the ‘peripheries,’ where “an international commuter train of women has been gathering speed close behind. From [End Page 34] Mumbai to Milan, Gdansk to Jakarta […].” This notion of chick lit as a successful export product is reminiscent of Franco Moretti’s infamous “law of literary evolution.” The pattern he describes in relation to the modern novel—that “in cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system,” it “first arises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials” (58)—has also dominated chick lit research until recently.1 When Donadio concludes her article with a quote from Helen Fielding that “the really interesting thing […] would be to see chick lit coming out of Africa,” she is effectively marking the African continent, along with the Arab world mentioned shortly thereafter, as the tail end of chick lit evolution. Headlines such as “Where’s the African Chick-Lit?” (Abrams) or “Is there a chick-lit gap in African literature?” (Owino) seemed to reinforce that notion almost ten years later. Rather than simply confirming an existing ‘deficit,’ however, these articles put it in perspective by pointing out that chick lit novels are offered in large numbers on the streets of African metropolises and that the genre is also explored “in monthly magazines and weekly newspaper pullouts” (Owino). Considering that only a fraction of the literary production from Africa reaches the Global North, ignorance of African chick lit is not surprising. ‘Western’ readers and critics often have very specific expectations of African literature, which is assumed to be explicitly political and to revolve around slavery, colonialism, poverty, and war— usually in the form of novels or memoirs. This points to “a dominant white reader’s gaze that desires to consume black suffering” and that results in Black African writers “being unfairly pressured toward a single story” (Samatar). Moreover, chick lit had a bad reputation in Africa for supposedly being “superficial or materialistic” and for focusing on “stories of white women with western white woman problems” (Rouse). The fact that only a few months after the publication of Donadio’s article on the chick lit pandemic, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “The Thing Around Your Neck” appeared in a volume titled This Is Not Chick Lit suggests that African authors may deliberately distance themselves from the genre. The NGO Femrite–Uganda Women Writers’ Association, for example, also refrained from promoting their ‘romantic’ women’s fiction as chick lit. Other publishers, however, did embrace the label. Some of them, such...

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