‘Such talk is senseless, amusing, redundant’ –Prof Chimalum Nwankwo Our Reporter June 8, 2013 4 Comments » By ANDREW BULA In a recent interview granted the online media, Sahara Reporters, the Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, dismissed those describing Africa’s mostly widely read and most translated writer, Professor Chinua Achebe, as “the father of African Literature” as suffering from literary ignorance, just as he expressed regret over some of the contents in Achebe’s There was a Country. In this interview, the fiery literary critic and award-winning poet, Professor Chimalum Nwankwo, also the former Chair, Department of English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and a scholar currently with Turkish-Nile University, Abuja, lampoons Soyinka’s reaction on Achebe being “the father of African Literature”, which re-echoed across the world with his passing, as absurd from a writer of his calibre, adding that he, Soyinka, committed more heinous crime by arrogating to himself the title of “pioneer quartet”, in exclusion of other significant contemporary writers of his. With the colossal impact Achebe has made on millions of readers on the African continent, especially Things Fall Apart which has sold over 12 million copies, the sheer immensity of it being translated into more than 50 languages of the world, and the near 100 awards or more that he won among which are over 40 honouree doctorate degrees from so many universities across the globe, do you think there is any other African writer with the same stature as Achebe, given especially that Emenyonu, while paying tribute to him, said “legendary writers like Chinua Achebe come perhaps once in a Century”? And do you foresee that in the nearest future someone else can achieve the same feat… or even more? What is the future of African writing? African writing has a very bright future. The energy is there, and the field is full of talents still inchoate but growing ever so steadily. A phenomenon like Chinua Achebe is a great boost, and one of his great prophecies is already flowering and manifesting…Morning yet on Creation day… Emenyonu is right. It is very difficult but you never know with humanity and the periodic geniuses which tenant this planet. Cosmo-historic figures are always a rare breed, but Achebe will remain forever an inspiration and a deathless phenomenon. Never mind that I have already stated the number of languages in which Things Fall Apart has been translated. It is as one reads. But I’m not sure really, since there are variations of the figures. Some people put it at 60 languages or below. In his tribute essay to Achebe, Emenyonu says there are 65 languages into which the novel has been translated. Yet, recently, a journalist, Victor Ogene, has put it at 150 languages. In future, the numbers thing will become unimportant and irrelevant as in the case of the ancient Greeks. Classics proliferate with the rising awareness of various peoples about issues that are squarely within the precincts of the unavoidable crises of self- determination and oppression all over the world. As the Guest Editor of African Literature Today, No. 30 (the issue before Achebe’s death), you asked: “Why has the Nobel Prize in Literature eluded Chinua Achebe?” And Elechi Amadi seems to have responded indirectly elsewhere that the Nigeria Civil War affected Achebe very deeply and probably robbed him of the Nobel Prize, that between “A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Achebe’s creativity had a lull of 20 years which dealt a fatal blow to any Nobel Prize ambition”… First of all, check out the Nobel Prize qualifications. They claim in summary that they are looking for impact. The manner the whole world reacted to Achebe’s death affirms an impact which the Nobel laureate committee obviously missed. The Prize has never been directed or determined by a number game. How many books did Toni Morrison write? I want you to note that in the past, I predicted a number of times that Achebe would never get the Nobel Prize. See at least my interview in The Muse, No. 40, the journal of the English Association of the University of Nigeria –not after the really deadly onslaught at the citadels of white superiority racially and intellectually. Please, go back again and read the end of Chapter 8 of Things Fall Apart where the white skin is compared with leprosy. Go back and re-visit Achebe’s attack of Albert Schweitzer, and, then, of course, re-read Achebe’s destruction of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and tell me whether if you were white you would recommend Achebe for the Nobel Prize. Heart of Darkness, by the way, is one of the top 100 great books in the Western Tradition. Those who thought they were the “custodians” of that tradition fought Achebe’s essay for many years. It was only a few years ago that a man as eminent as Professor Graff came to the conclusion that “Achebe was right” about Conrad’s book. Graff, indeed, encouraged his colleagues in the American academy to accept that fact! In Ngugi’s tribute to Chinua Achebe, the latter came off as “the father of African Literature”, a view shared by many in Africa and beyond. However, in his interview with Sahara Reporters, Prof. Wole Soyinka, referred to that appellation as one of “literary ignorance” or “momentary exuberance”, adding that “education is lacking in most of those who pontificate”, an “embarrassment” and “it is all rather depressing” to him. Now, how would you react to that? Is Ngugi correct? Was Achebe’s refusal of the appellation himself out of modesty? Do readers of literature and literature scholars alike have absolute right in saying who their hero is? Do you perceive “jealousy,” “rivalry” and “ill-will” in Soyinka towards the late Achebe as being alluded here and there? Could this be why he didn’t even attend Achebe’s burial? In his tribute, famous Kenyan author, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, noted humbly and graciously that, at one point in his life, people who did not know him asked him if he was the author of Things Fall Apart, even in his country. In the same tribute, he also pointed out that Soyinka acknowledged that he met a similar fate elsewhere –whether he was the author of Things Fall Apart? These encounters are very significant in terms of their implications in relation to the stature of the writers with Achebe. Whatever anybody says about that appellation, “father of African Literature”, now or tomorrow, I find or would find rather inane, amusing, and redundant. Soyinka himself said that Achebe was uncomfortable with that “father of African Literature” ascribed to him. Christians can, I am sure, appreciate the Christian story about the response by Jesus to a similar question. “Art thou the son of God?” The modest non-committal response was “Thou sayest.” It is unfortunate, sad, and also rather depressing that Soyinka should go so far as to charge the millions of readers and critics… young and old people… all over the world with “ignorance” for calling Achebe “father of African Literature”. You see… just as Soyinka ascribed to himself and his favourite contemporaries “pioneer quartet”, I think that if claims were heinous crimes, it is a more heinous crime that Soyinka’s was more direct, with quotation marks or without. He claimed “pioneer quartet”. Achebe never claimed that he was “father of African Literature”. Also, the four of them were not the only serious writers at that point in time in the history of Literature in Nigeria. Forget the eminence which greeted their names down the road. Note that the Nobel Prize Committee gave Soyinka the Nobel Prize. Not all readers thought he deserved the prize, but it is the right of that group to dispense that honour according to their choices or preferences. That an eminent highly respected Nigerian thinker and writer referred to the Nobel Committee as “a gaggle of Swedes” in disgust over preferring Soyinka to Achebe is irrelevant just as it should be irrelevant to some of us that anybody thinks that Achebe is the “father of African Literature”. Mark also that of all the names Soyinka mentioned of those who could also be called father of African Literature, whether it is Mazisi Kunene or Kofi Awonoor or any other name that we could all think up, no one has a global text such as Things Fall Apart in his or her resume. Not even Soyinka himself! Please, let everyone try a shot at some honesty about this point…The last point about this really sad subject is that, I do not think Soyinka raised this subject at the right time. The whole thing is really so untimely and unfortunate –and this is about a man that supposedly was his friend: they wined and dined together and all that. I truly really wished that he had waited till after Chinua Achebe’s burial for such utterances or debate. I wish he had never opened his mouth so early about this subject, because I find it so untimely…but who am I any way? A man like Professor Afejuku has wondered, with shocking naivete and zany insensitivity, whether Achebe thought about his Itshekiri and Yoruba in-laws while writing There was a Country. Now…that is how horrible and how low Nigerian primordiality could descend. And do we wonder about how Chinua Achebe’s family would be feeling about the kind of strange sentiments swirling crazily out there at the heels of the transition of a man who suffered so much and sacrificed quite a bit of his time for oppressed people all over this world? Besides, asked how, in that interview, he saw Achebe’s role in the popularization of African literature as editor of the Heinemann’s African Writers Series, Soyinka replied: “As a literary practitioner, my instinct tends towards a suspicion of “ghetto” classifications –which I did feel this was bound to be….I refused to permit my works to appear in the series… Permission to publish The Interpreters was granted in my absence…All in all, the odds come down in favour of the series—which by the way, did go through the primary phase of sloppy inclusiveness, then became more discriminating.” What’s your take? There is so much that is so dreadfully infra dig about that interview, so abysmally beneath what many of us had before now thought of Wole Soyinka. To associate AWS with ghettoization is not something which anyone who claims commitment or engagement with the problems of the black world would say…you know. I am appalled at the troubling Caucasian condescension in the sub-text or sub-tone of that remark, though in terms of Soyinka’s consciousness the pedigree is still clearly from his old thing about the tiger not having to proclaim his tigritude which the late high priest of Negritude, Leopold Sedar Senghor, dismissed with a telling “the Negro talks”… Can you see why so many Africans are so suspicious of his Nobel Prize? Can’t you see how such rather unkind suspicions and misgivings find fuel in Soyinka’s politics of culture…? Can you imagine the number of very serious African writers that one would probably never have heard about without AWS…whether the series started sloppily or not…? Think about the story Achebe told about the near loss of the TFA manuscript, and the rejections it encountered before Heinemann gave that gift to the world…And as for this other thing about Adewale Maja-Pearce, that’s their business… If I were Maja-Pearce, I would be celebrating, because when a big guy anywhere is beating up on a little guy, sympathy always stays with the little guy. The dignity of publications and their sources is all bourgeoisie nonsense. My volume, Toward the Aerial Zone, won the ANA Prize in 1988, even though it was self- published. The greatest of American poets, Walt Whitman, printed his famous Leaves of Grass. So, I really do not know what all that means to Soyinka…but as I said, that conflict is not my business. Only the great prof knows what drove that unfortunate interview. Your classic poem, “Rodin in Biafra” paints a pathetic picture of disillusionment and hopelessness of the Igbo situation during the civil war as does Achebe’s memoir, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. Given the harrowing experience of the war, do you think that war memories haunted Achebe so much so that aspects of his memoir are fraught with different cracks as Soyinka and others accuse? It is surprising that Soyinka who we thought understood the agony of the Igbo and the really unavoidable insurgency called Biafra would say some of the things he said, unless his earlier sentiments were fake and spurious. As for war memories haunting Achebe and producing cracks is nonsense. Achebe had a rider which is self-explanatory for every fool out there: “A Personal History of Biafra”. Does he or anyone not have the right of subjectivity in an experience which everybody including you, my young friend, accept as harrowing? Look… all Igbo who experienced the war cannot forget the war…the global conspiracy to crush and silence the Igbo, the callous indifference and complicity of so many in our country, Nigeria… Most Igbo do not want to think of or remember that ugly chapter in Nigeria’s history. We should all, indeed, be grateful to Achebe for his courage and candour. His book will remain a national call for a re-think. All some folks see is that he was attacking Awolowo. What a shameful take on the history of this nation, and this especially when the seed of that tragic civil war was really sewn in the catastrophic ethnic anarchy and infighting in Yoruba land in 1965.Where is that sane Nigerian who can tell us all that all the questions which caused the Nigerian civil war have been successfully answered? Achebe was attacking Awolowo is this song of vengeance in lieu of a rational re- appraisal of our sad history…, but those who hold on to that inane primordial gun have forgotten the pre-war Igbo driven project called the United Progressive Grand Alliance to save Awolowo from dying in prison for treason. I recommend the plan for people like Professor Afejuku to read…Certainly people like Odia Ofeimum whose take on Achebe’s There Was a Country, a text that one would say is a certain kind of Cry, the Beloved Country, should know that too: the book is a lamentation of what this country could be in terms of all our foundational hopes and promises… So, I read, indeed, with great sadness and disappointment what Odia said with anachronism and absurdism rolled into adhominem irrationality.(My friend Odia had to leap far back to The Trouble With Nigeria to deliver his winning blow on Achebe today)…And Wole Soyinka should know all that, too… Was Soyinka’s carrying a gun into the Broadcasting House of Western Nigeria to defend the true voice of Yorubaland (Western Nigeria) a comic scene from Brother Jero or Kongi’s Harvest or Madmen and Specialists…? Look, my friend, I get really tired when, in both Literature and Politics, all acute visions or criticisms in our country become misconstrued for either destruction or the protection of our primordial instincts… Thank all the Great Spirits for giving Chinua Achebe the energy to leave with us a disturbing testament like There was a Country for national soul-searching and reconstruction and onward construction, just as we know the whole world is thanking him for giving us all Things Fall Apart. Andrew Bula is a scholar-writer based in Abuja
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 06:59:47 +0000
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