Discourse | Issues In The Evaluation Of Contemporary African Literature (Part I) By Prof. Saleh Abdu | The Arts-Muse Fair
Issues
In The Evaluation Of Contemporary African Literature
By
Prof. Saleh
Abdu.
INTRODUCTION
Like the stated theme of this year's ANA International
Convention, although shorter, my chosen topic is broad and is designed to
proffer a wide, instead of deep and argumentative, posture. This relieves me of
engaging in hard and tortuous textual exegesis in the usually bent and twisted
critical parlance to uphold a line of argument. Not pursuing any of today's
sub-themes, I set out to explore and by so doing remind you, by highlighting,
of some historical epochs and extant signposts in preceding critical evaluation
of African literature. All these are presented as a prelude to assessing
African literature (with)in (the comity of) World Literature(s).
I hope my paper will serve sufficiently to bring to the
fore of today's discourse the healthy inevitability of heterogeny in matters of
global cultural discourse and the likely misplaced fallacy of homogeny or
equality against which Aristotle cautioned when he said,
The
greatest act of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal
So, my paper strives to reveal the uniqueness of African
literature from its inception; to suggest the difficulty of judging it like any
other in the world, and to solicit for it a more appropriate, sympathetic
assessment paradigm.
The paper will be punctuated by questions and posers
instead of any conclusions about the issues raised.
For this purpose, the paper x-rays the key concepts of the
Convention's stated theme including Canon, Prizes, Borders, but, most
especially, African literatures
(with its plural 's') and World Literature (in its single
grandeur).
ON
CANONS, PRIZES AND BORDERS
Seen from the perspective of literature as a cultural
practice, each of the three terms which feature in the Convention theme
(Canons, Prizes, Borders) constitutes a limit and so indicates a set of
limitations. For, each is a subjective construct meant to simultaneously
include and exclude. This is so even though the term Canon in its use today
still bears the semi-sacred, semi-spirituality of its Biblical origin. For, in
literary discourse today, we know that the Canon is established and jealously
guarded by a clique of secular, even irreverent self-serving members of the
literati, without any written objectives or criteria as a guide. Often, the
decision to include or exclude a text in the Canon vary and vacilitate across
epochs and geography. For example, P W Shelly, the Romantic British poet, and
John Donne, the Metaphysical poet, were for sometime not in the Canon of
English literature.
I was not taught Amos Tutuola as a Undergraduate in the
English degree program. But, by the time I started teaching African literature
to University students in the early 80s, The
Palmwine Drinkard was on the syllabus and many students were thrilled by
its 'Yoruba English'. With the recent changes in the University curricula
today, especially the inclusion of Popular culture as a respectable genre, soon
other texts hitherto not patronized, such as James Hardley Chase and similar
other crime and sensational thrillers will be unquestioned subjects of dissection and analysis in the English
undergrad class. For, the selection and establishment of the secular canon does
not seem to have a set of written or immutable criteria. Not so with Prizes.
Most literary prizes on offer today tend to be awarded on
the basis of some(-times written) set of culture-specific criteria. Some, however,
operate with undisclosed, even suspect criteria and motive. It is reported, for
example that William Wordsworth only conditionally accepted the British Poet
Laureate in his time. Jean Paul Sarte was said to value more his individuality
and freedom from institutional establishment when he rejected the prestigious
Nobel Prize for Literature. So, often, Prizes tend to have strings attached,
perhaps the more prestigious the longer and tighter the string.
THE
LITERARY HORIZON
CANONS, PRIZES AND BOUNDARIES: AFRICAN WRITERS AND
WRITINGS IN WORLD LITERATURE, the theme of this year's ANA International
conference, throws an equal challenge to writers, critics and sponsors of
African literature and the literary arts in general. It simultaneously seems to
ask questions such as, Is African Literature parochial/provincial? Is it
appropriately valued/assessed/rewarded? What is the current/actual status of
African literature in (the comity of) World Literature(s)? While these
important questions are being asked and their answers contemplated, it is my
belief that we are all aware of how Literature, as the product of human imagination and encoder, generator
and perpetuator of culture, is fast losing grounds to 21st Century predilection
and preoccupation with the social media and the digital culture. For, while
Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilee and Albert Einstein are continuously succeeded by
many Alfred Nobels, Steven Hawkins with their strings of distant illuminations,
constructions-destructions, comfort, bred by constant inventions, comparatively
less and less are seen, heard and felt of Plato, Aristotle, Donne, Shakespeare
and Wordsworth - well known erstwhile vanguards of humanity.
In this age, perhaps more than in any preceding epoch,
elders, whose traditional task it is to educate, instruct and groom the young
ones into a future built on the past and present traditions, upon which they
(the youth) are expected to build and improve, are finding themselves and their
knowledge and expertise of minimal, if not doubtful, relevance to contemporary
dispensation. Admittedly, the passage across the digital-divide has been
wrought with waves of shock across many other spaces and spheres of human life
to the extent that some of its groundbreaking achievements may not appear to be
properly acknowledged.
The latter are many and countless. But, collectively they
seem oriented toward making human beings more efficient, more comfortable, to
work faster, be more accurate and exact. But, taking only comfortability for
analysis, can it be said that 21st Century man is any way more comfortable
than, say, the man of the 19th Century? Yes, the new man of today maybe faster,
more accurate in calculating the target to attack in a thousand kilometer
range. But, things like comfort, confidence, and many other core human
attributes, thrive best in a cultured, not fast or speedy, society.
For its status as the agent for encoding, expressing and
representing man's affections, spirituality and identity, the cultural sphere
is, above all, the victim of this wave of visceral changes. Important as the
former are in our lives, the 21st Century ethos has tended to privilege other, contesting
attributes and pursuits of man such as
the glamorous, the comfortable and material benefits to the extent that,
to be successful and productive, man must be like a machine - fast, accurate,
efficient, exact. 21st Century man has lost confidence in himself and all his
effort and achievement are measured - marked scored and graded - by machine and
mechanistic principles and devices. Many scholars have rightly posed the
question as to what this trend portends: man has unwittingly reduced himself to
servicing of and serving his inventions. In one of his memorable poems on the
effect of the rise of industrialization and urbanization on central London in
18th Century, Wordsworth laments of "what man has done to fellow
man".
What does this spell in/for the future of literature? What
can writers/Writers Association do? The publishers, distributors, literary
agents, readers and critics may join hands with the writers to re-position
African literature in World literature; but, is the increasingly digitalized
world according literature a fair or equitable space?
LITERATURE
MISUNDERSTOOD
In its general and specialized conception, literature can
be said to be and understood as the story or narrative in man's life. In this
regard, by its function and what man should know and expect of it, literature,
as story, is fully represented by Prof Kerr(2007) as,
"It is the story
that conveys all our gains, all our failures, all we hold dear and all we
condemn. To convey this to the next generation is the only way we can keep
going and keep alive as people. Therefore, story is like the genes that are transferred
to create the new being. It is far more important than anything else"
Is it because literature is misunderstood that it has
become a pariah of the vocations in our world today? Yet, literature issues
from man's basic impulse to make sense of the environment he finds himself; to secure
sanity and security, to develop composure and self-confidence, which will
enable him to dream and realize his dreams. This impulse is as basic as it is
protean, and so it manifests itself in a variety of metaphoric representations
in human preoccupations. Perhaps the most ubiquitous and overlooked
manifestation of the literary impulse in man is in all instances of the use
of language whose metaphoric essence is
often eclipsed by its daily use and ubiquity in our life.
We need to know, as Clabourgh (2014) explains, that
"even the most faithful account of an event is made up in the sense that it is filtered through the eyes,
feelings, beliefs and memories of one person". So, inevitable elements of
a make up (fiction, untruth -
metaphor) are always, actually there in every instance of language use, whether
verbal or semiotic (communication in/by signs). This assertion automatically
includes the scientific world with its seemingly irrefutable claim to 'the
truth'. Like the arts, the scientific world also uses signs to represent ideas.
The numbers, figures and diagrams all represent things other than themselves.
Thus, science and art have the same character of modus operendi. That is why,
in his investigation of the mathematical dimension of life, Ossaman (in Obafemi
op cit) avers that,
Though
the light of science and the light of art are inseparable and the same, their
bearers speak different languages and only the best among them understand that
they are engaged in the enterprise Robert Ossaman, Mathematical Exploration of the Universe
Cited in Obafemi op cit
Of course, in a more academic sense, literature is further
distinguished as "writings that come from the imagination or writing that
isn't factual. It's the very fine art of making things up in the most
attractive, apt and convincing way possible. It is the telling of lies in order
to reveal illuminating and dark truths about the world and our place in it
" Clabourgh 2014: Pix
Except in the schools and academia, for the purpose of
studies, dissection and examination, literature conceived and produced as
fiction has suffered and is suffering globally, consequent to man's
predilection for science and technology. Even in the schools, and especially in
the academia, the introduction and subsequent preponderance of theories in
literary studies in the 20th Century have tended to erode the affective and
pleasurable attributes in fiction. Indeed, Mikhail Bakhtin, one of the gurus of
literary theory, is known to have insisted that literary studies requires
"area other than literature" and that, of the literary critic and his
subject,
"his specialty
is not to be a specialist; conversely, an interest in literature is perhaps a
requirement for specialization in the human sciences Cited in Obafemi, op cit
For man, the 20th Century experience in all spheres has
revealed evermore a yawning lacuna, which the failing prevalence of literature
has brought to the fore. Democracy may have gained grounds in many communities.
The paradox of modern man's pursuit of democracy amid his simultaneous
suppression of the Humanities subjects in the school has been sufficiently
highlighted by Nussbaum (2010). But, this gain is threatened by the resurgence
of negative, 'uncultured', proclivity.
In this regard, the need for literature's cruciality in an age at the
brink of losing its humanity is highlighted by Prof Olu Obafemi in these words:
"Literature should keep abreast of the
space-scientific age, the computer and telescopic revolution, and from it
unearth the essence of man and purge him
of racist centric canons and impositions" Prof Olu Obafemi.
The trend of neglect of literature is such that in almost
all schools across the world, among the elite and the masses, the story of
readers negative attitude is the constant. Dana Gioia, Poet Laureate of
California, and a lecturer has this to say
"I worry about
my students, so many of whom are so preoccupied with social media and digital
entertainment that they lack the contemplative space to develop their inner lives" 4th October, 2017 The Catholic World Report.
African
Literature(s) and Writing(s)
The appellation 'African Literature' in the Conference
theme, especially its plural 's', side by side with 'World Literature' (not
World Literatures), inevitably recalls the reluctance, if not outright
rejection by the Western world, which forerunners of the concept, such as Wole
Soyinka, encountered in the UK back in the middle of the 20th Century. Although
the concept 'African Literature' has come to stay and to be widely accepted and
used, one wonders if there is something left out or not included in its
referential scope each time the plural 's' is added to the name. For example,
the very good American-based journal Research
in African Literatures has the tendency, each time I think about its title,
to make me ponder on its implication side by side with the journal titled World Englishes. While in the case of
the latter, it is assumed, in fact it is well known, that the concept is
predicated against the existence of an English English; the former has no such
background underpinning it. Or, so it seems. And, despite the prevalence of its
use to designate degree courses and programs in Universities across the world,
the appellation 'African Literature' (without the plural 's') seems to clumsily
compromise Africa's different languages-literature - including European
colonial and ethnic indigenous linguistic medium texts. So, are there many
literatures today - as many as there are languages in use - in/of Africa, or is
there one complex African literature? With what prize or losses do we accept
either of the two options? Or, can we have our cake and eat it.
CONTROVERSIAL
LABELS
Despite their importance and helpful use by scholars,
labels, especially for cultural constructs, continue to feature inaccuracies of
representation, which inevitably inhere in them. How much sense is there in
continental or national literatures? For example, despite the sub-continent's
geographical uniqueness, one can still ask, how Australian is Australian
Literature? And, European, American, Literatures? Because literature is a free
and freeing enterprise, truly creative writers have tended to abhor
designations that limit and align them to finite contractions in form of
continents, nation-states and regions. When in 1966, just a year to his sad
demise, Christopher Okigbo was awarded the prize for The Best African Poet in
Dakar, he was reported to have declined with the remark that he was simply 'a
Poet'. Yet, it can be asserted, with little contradiction whatsoever that Christopher
Okigbo was of full African descent. For, the stand-alone existence of the
continents can be said to be incontestable by virtue of boundaries of the great
waters - Pacific and Atlantic.
Yet, creative citizens of the different continents can and do rightly regard themselves and their works as super or supra continental. Was or wasn't Okigbo making a lot of sense when he said he was not (merely) an African poet? More recently in 2013, Starvans, in a submission on American literature had a course to asseverate the point that "the only true country a writer can claim is the language in which he writes" Starvans, 2013. ANA, the association is conceived in form of a Nigerian literature. What is inalienably unique about ANA-generated or ANA-sponsored texts? Beyond the setting and the personae of ANA literature, both of which can be replicated with ease in Niger, Benin of Ghana, what is Nigerian about the books produced by ANA writers?
Yet, creative citizens of the different continents can and do rightly regard themselves and their works as super or supra continental. Was or wasn't Okigbo making a lot of sense when he said he was not (merely) an African poet? More recently in 2013, Starvans, in a submission on American literature had a course to asseverate the point that "the only true country a writer can claim is the language in which he writes" Starvans, 2013. ANA, the association is conceived in form of a Nigerian literature. What is inalienably unique about ANA-generated or ANA-sponsored texts? Beyond the setting and the personae of ANA literature, both of which can be replicated with ease in Niger, Benin of Ghana, what is Nigerian about the books produced by ANA writers?
THE
GLOBAL ROOTS AND CHARACTER OF AFRICAN LITERATURE
The concept 'African Literature' in the academics has been
traditionally seen and explored as a complex, multi-lingual, multi-cultural
phenomenon historically spread across the continents. Ancient writings in
Amharic and the Egyptian Hieroglyphics which may have preceded all subsequent
genres and which seemed to have been confined to the African continent, do not
feature prominently on University syllabi except perhaps as passing topics in
the class. The accessible roots of African literature for scholars in the field
has always been texts written in Arabic and some in modern European languages.
In this regard, the poetry of Antar bn Shaddad al-Absy in Arabic, those of
Alfonso Alvares in Portuguese, those of Juan Latino in Latin and Phylis Wheatly
in English have been sufficiently documented and do serve as pointers to the
cosmopolitan, as against any provincial assumptions of African literature.
Both bn Shaddad (who proudly paraded his surname 'al-Absy'
or from Abyssinia - the Arabic name for Ethiopia) and Wheatley, (the proud
'Ethiope'of her poems) exhibit with pride their African origin. As for their
impact on, and early status in, the so called 'World literature' we only need
to know that despite systematic suppression and refusal to acknowledge them,
literary historians and scholars have written to point out that Cervante, of
Don Quixote fame and other Romance writers of the time, were indebted to the
Antar Romance which dominated literature writing in the 5th - 7th AD and was
passed on to Europe through Andalusia or Spain by Muslim-Arab scholars. It is
also in scholarly records how, for example, Shakespeare's play, Orthello, was heavily informed by
Muhammad al-Hassan al-Wazez or Leo Africanus' life and writings, which had so
much African ethos. Before his fated journey to Europe and subsequent capture
by pirates and life in the Vatican where he wrote several pieces some of which
the young Shakespeare must have read, Leo Africanus was in Bornu, the Chad
Basin and in Kano where he wrote a treatise on leadership for the then Kano
Emir. Early African writers, if not African literature must have been the most
cosmopolitan in their vision and literary production/practice.
This being
text of Keynote Address at the 36th ANA International Convention by Professor Saleh Abdu of Federal University,
Kashere, Nigeria. Currently on Sabbatical as Dean, School of Postgraduate
Studies, Gombe State University, Nigeria.
The second
and concluding part will be published soon.
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