Go Gently into that Good Night, Harry
Graham Huggan
Harry was just 61 when he passed away, which is my current age, and like all those lucky enough to have known him I acutely feel his loss. Over the past year there have been so many lives lost, every single one of them precious, but it’s often those we wish we’d known better that we miss the most. Harry first got in touch with me in 2014, a year when I nearly lost my own life after a sudden lung embolism, and he was one of the first to comfort me even though he and I hadn’t yet had the chance to meet face to face. Once I’d recovered, he continued to ask after my health even though his own was far from perfect, and I was struck by the humanity of a man who, despite his conspicuous achievements, was quick to support others and modest to a fault.
We talked about putting together a transnational project on World Literature, ‘Africa on the World Stage’, and although it never got funded, a virtual friendship, sustained by that often least friendly of means, university email, was formed. I eventually got to meet him face to face when he and some UCT colleagues came to Leeds for a workshop, again on the idea of an African-centred World Literature, and he was delightful, as I already knew would be the case.
It’s fashionable these days to pour scorn on humanist ideals and to confront the very idea of the human, but there aren’t too many human beings out there like Harry, and he embodied the very best that humanity has to offer in a deeply divided world. Like another of my intellectual heroes, Edward Said, he practised the same ‘worldliness’ that he preached, and while he quite rightly took the view that the African continent could and should be at the centre of World Literature, he doubtless would have agreed with Said’s description of human culture as a ‘many-windowed house’.
I’ve heard from others that Harry described me as a friend, although in truth I barely knew him, and it’s the least I can do to return the compliment, which is deeply heartfelt. Still others have spoken of Harry as an excellent scholar and accomplished poet, and I’m sure both are true, but the memory I treasure is of Harry as, above all else, a genuinely good man. Rest in peace, Harry, and please know just how very much you’re missed.
Brendon Nicholls
As an African literature enthusiast, I regarded Harry with great admiration and respect. What I liked so much about his work was his ability to fuse African texts, and the particularity of their cultural or social detail, with much wider, global debates. For me, his work was always able to advocate the power, potential and reach of the books that give me joy. Whenever I read his work, or heard him speak, I wished that more literary critics, especially those who do not regularly read African literary texts, possessed Harry’s intellectual fluency, his generous acts of inclusion, and his conceptual elegance.
I remember with great fondness Harry’s paper at a UCT-Leeds World Literature workshop, in which he spoke wonderfully about Teju Cole’s publication history and reception, both in Nigeria and in global terms. It was an erudite tour-de-force, a journey of ideas, and the paper showed an academic at the height of his intellectual powers. What I took from that discussion was a new understanding of how institutional and national spaces affect valuations of literary texts. Harry prompted us to remember that readerly communities are important to consider, no matter where they are to be found. In this way, Harry made the case against the erasure of Africa in World Literature’s conceptualization – a timely caution against an oft-repeated move.
Harry, of course, was so intellectually versatile and so possessed of personal charm that he was at ease in any community. He was a friend of Ken Saro-Wiwa, and it was always my hope that I might one day discuss the great man with him. Although that day will sadly not arrive, Harry lives on in conversation, not least when my African literature students are seeking informed and dazzling secondary sources. Harry’s Public Culture article on animist materialism is now a standard toward which I direct my undergraduate students when I want them to understand the versatility and flexibility of African theorization – “Look at where Sango came from and at what he does now,” I advise them! In fact, as I write, Harry’s work on animism is prominently cited in a chapter on indigenous ecologies quietly being readied for print somewhere in the United States.
Although we will miss him, Harry remains in our thoughts and in our estimation. He has left us the gift of his thought and his fine professional example, and we continue to share both with our students and in our research.
Sam Durrant
I first met Harry fifteen or so years ago, when I was a visiting fellow in the African Studies Centre at the University of Cape Town. He was a very welcoming and inspiring presence but it was only later that I read his famous 2003 essay ‘Explorations in Animist Materialism’, just as he was moving in a different direction. Harry’s essay has set the agenda for more recent discussion of animism in and beyond African culture and he was invited to return to the debate in the 2012 issue of E-flux, just as the question of animism was beginning to acquire a wider interest. He good-humouredly turned down my request to engage with these debates for a forthcoming special issue of New Formations and it is only now, reading his obituary, that I realise that he was still working on animism in his own poetry. His long awaited second collection, Animist Chants and Memorials, was published in 2017, meaning that this moment of loss is also, for me, a moment of gain. Go well, Harry, and may your words travel with you even as they remain with us.
I long only for things prosaic
things without poetry or fire
Like bread and flesh and earth
Like soil and seed and water (‘Monkey Love’).
