A friend alerted me to this article by Ben Okri in The Guardian:

“The black and African writer is expected to write about certain things, and if they don’t they are seen as irrelevant. This gives their literature weight, but dooms it with monotony. Who wants to constantly read a literature of suffering, of heaviness? Those living through it certainly don’t; the success of much lighter fare among the reading public in Africa proves this point. Maybe it is those in the west, whose lives are untouched by such suffering, who find occasional spice and flirtation with such a literature. But this tyranny of subject may well lead to distortion and limitation.
It is a curious fact that the greatest short stories do not have, on the whole, the greatest or the heaviest of subjects. By this I mean that the subject is not what is most important about them. Rather, it is the way they are written, the oblique way in which they illuminate something significant. Their overt subject might seem slight but leads, through the indirect mirror of art, to profound and unforgettable places. The overwhelming subject makes for too much directness. This leaves no place for the imagination, for the interpretative matrix of the mind. Great literature is almost always indirect.”

Read the article here.

I can understand why some writers and readers are offended by this article and it’s not difficult to see the weak spots in it. Badly written literature can also be indirect for example, and what do we mean exactly by “indirect”?

And yes, style matters, but as the Dutch essayist Bas Heijne once remarked it’s not only the style that sets Primo Levi apart from let’s say E.L. James. Sometimes the subject does matter more than we may be willing to acknowledge. The subject can overwhelm the literary qualities of a text. Think of Cythia Ozick’s attempt (very rightly so) to remind us that the diary of Anne Frank has important literary qualities.

It's easy to dismiss Okri’s article, but that would do injustice to it, there certainly is a more sympathetic way of reading and understanding Okri's essay.

Okri is saying that it is limiting for an African writer to be reduced to the clichés of an African writer, or for that matter, for a black writer to write for just a black audience.
In the same way for example that I don’t want to be a Jewish writer, writing for a Jewish audience, or a Dutch writer writing for just a Dutch audience. And no, being Dutch or even Jewish for that matter is not the same as being black. Especially nowadays in the Western world it’s not that difficult anymore for a Jew to become a Gentile, or to be accepted as if he were a Gentile.

Okri is promoting assimilation. Certain people will object to the concept of assimilation. To some assimilation is just another word for collaboration.
But I’m still a believer in assimilation. Whatever minority you belong to it’s worth trying to get out of the “ghetto”. Even when others, for various reasons, want you very much to stay in that ghetto. (I’m aware that the word “ghetto” can cause confusion, I mean by “ghetto” a certain part of the periphery, also a symbolic part of that periphery, where the majority forces a minority to live and to die.)
And if you are a writer, you should be free to choose your own subject, (you should be free to entertain the illusion that you can choose your own subject) whatever your background is. Isn’t that what Okri is saying? He certainly has a point.