By Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
The other day I came upon an English poem that seemed to summarise the feelings of many people under the coalition government in Kenya. The form and vocabulary are dated, but this reminds us that similar situations and responses occur throughout history: literature is not the work of the super-sensitive bestowing enlightenment upon the masses. It is the words and images that those gifted in expression make available to those who share the same griefs, passions and bewilderment but may not have found a way to ventilate and come to terms with them.
Vikram Seth reminded us at the Storymoja Hay Festival in August 2009 that the political responsibility of writers is precisely the same as that of other citizens. Putting pen to paper does not make us wiser than anyone else. Concerned writers, concerned plumbers and concerned farmers all have a role to play. We would all wish from time to time that we had learnt to apply a tourniquet, to defuse a bomb or to detect a forgery. This is the poem which I don’t remember seeing until it was included in Michael Schmidt’s The Great Modern Poets (Quercus UK n/d):
They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own
dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?
They shall not return to us, the strong me, coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and, hid them in their
pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?
Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night
divide-
Never while the bars of summer hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
Shall they thrust for high employment of old?
Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly and how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?
Even while they soothe us, while they promise large
amends,
Even while they make a show of fear,
Do they call upon their debtors and take counsel with their
friends
To confirm and re-establish each career?
Their lives can not repay us – their death could not undo-
The shame that they have laid upon our race.
But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew,
Shall we leave it unabated in its place?
The poem is called “Mesopotamia 1917”, that is, it refers to a war in Iraq. The author - hold on to your seatbelt - is Rudyard Kipling. I was surprised too, though that extraneous heavy syllable at the start of each line should have given me a clue. So is Kipling commonly stereotyped as an imperialist and racist, and related through his mother to the conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin subject to the same hurts and angers as ourselves?
Evidently yes. This is what I want to examine.
Technically it is not a good poem, though not nearly as bad as “If”. Wilfred Owen’s poem about Abraham sacrificing Isaac (“The parable of the old man and the young”) indicts the old men more memorably. But Owen was killed in 1918. He did not have to live with the aftermath. Kipling, who lost his only son in battle, did. He was indeed an imperialist and a martinet, not easy to get on with. But he never held public office of any kind, was never a soldier, though much of his work relates to soldiers, Indian or English, often of the lower ranks. He never accepted any of the national honours offered to him, even the Order of the Merit and the Poet Laureateship.
He is often characterised by a partial quotation from The Ballad of East and West.
* “Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet”,
rather than the lines that follow:
“But there is neither East or West, border nor breed nor birth,
When two brave men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.”
James Fenton has drawn on his rhythms and idioms to familiarise readers with the conflicts and issues of the later twentieth century.
(“Tiananmen is broad and clean
And you can’t tell/where the dead have been
And you can’t tell/when they’ll come again.
They’ll come again/to Tiananmen.”)
Having a common enemy does not necessarily – or optimally - lead to total consensus. “Many there be that desire peace, but few that desire the things that make for peace.” We should like to heal the nation but retain our professional jealousies and generation gaps, our dubious title deeds and high pollution rates. Not everyone would welcome a society where having a baby or having a car was permitted only to those showing prudence, foresight and responsibility in everyday life.
Protagonists on both sides in any war commonly pray for victory, write poems and produce moving graphic images on similar themes. Popular tunes echo on both sides of the lines with different words. So, Plaatje punctuates his account his visit to London during WWI to protest against discriminatory changes in South African land law with snatches of soldiers’ songs like It’s a long way to Tipperary in Zulu, Xhosa and Ndebele. It was one way of linking two sets of readers. We cannot afford to ignore those who from another point of view genuinely seek for justice.
The classic example of this understanding is Yeats’s Easter 1916 about the gallant but unsuccessful Dublin rising of that year.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart.
But I number him in the song
He, too, has been changed in turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
We do not face disaster cold as concerned citizens the day riots break out. There are plenty of poems about Burnt Forest and Ennosupukia, about Mboya and J.M. and Ouko. We used to read them out on Torture Day or Heroes Day, weep a bit and feel better but we failed to put two and two together. Disaster management does not start after the worst has happened but before- like when glass-fronted buildings, for instance, are built in an earthquake zone. The American Embassy bombings would have caused fewer casualties if we had been taught at school,to shield eyes in nay explosion.Good sense provided voluntary ferry service to hospitals and an information desk at Uhuru Park. By the time the tsunami occurred, we had one of the best early warning systems around the Indian Ocean. Disaster does not have a sudden ending either. You get used to restrictions during a real war.
When the shooting stops there are new constraints – to behave normally towards the airman whose burnt face is disfigured with skin grafts, the released prisoner of war who does not feel safe without a snack hidden in his pocket “just in case”, the refugee who cannot bear to return to town where no one known to her survives. And, like Kipling, to contemplate a regime change which he could not have imagined ten years earlier.
When I represented publishers , I remember showing a new book to a scientist in Makerere just after peace had returned to Uganda in 1981. He stared at me wild-eyed.
“But this ought to have been my book. It duplicates all the research I have been doing while we were cut off from the outside world.”
We shall never know how many lifetimes of work are destroyed or set aside in violent times. We now have the techniques to preserve them – at that time the Makerere Institute of Computer Science was operating without a computer – but have instead used these to intimidate and misinform.
Like the unknown to the hungry
We were once the hope of the generation
Promise of the bumper harvest
As Jared Angira puts it in Hope of Tomorrow (Lament of the silent, Nairobi: EAEP 2004) 127f.)
We were the icebox
To dissolve violence
And melt hatred
Into concord….
I once met Michael Schmidt at a London book fair and requested him to consider some of my poems for his Carcanet Press. He demurred, since he said, African poetry was only politics. At my insistence he did read them and admitted there was poetry but it would not be of interest to his readers. The readers were, I believe, Mexican as well as British. But many years have passed and Schmidt refers to poetry as “the language of accrual” (op.cit.p.5) – each re-reading adds something to our understanding. His new anthology inevitably includes some politics.
But when so many died, so many and at such speed
There were no cities waiting for the victims.
They unscrewed to name plates from the shattered doorways.
And carried them away with the coffins.
(‘James Fenton, “A German Requiem” p.221)
The pen may conceivably be mightier than the sword but it is also frequently two edged. The drum, the bugle and the bagpipe may call to battle but they only do good if the strategy and the target are rationally laid out. All of us have lived with anger and I am sure I am not the only one who has held back poems that might do more harm than good until some equilibrium has been reached. The object is not to relieve our feelings but to restore order to society…. “The dead shall not return to us”. “But shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?”
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Theme As King - The Misreading of African Literature
By David Kaiza
In The Interpreters, Wole Soyinka’s hard drinking journalist character, Sagoe, summons the office messenger, Mathias, and begins to read to him his essay on the “philosophy of voidance”, a knotted thesis that we encounter more than once in the novel.
Mathias, whose English (pidgin) is no where as grasping as Sagoe’s, let alone Soyinka’s, sits through a reading in which “voidance” morphs from void to voidate, voidante, voidancy, voidatory and climbs up to variations such as “arborial voidatory” and “Voidante pseudo-negritudinists”.
Doubtless Mathias sat through the lecture for the wicked bottle of beer Sagoe bribed him with for his attention (drinking at work), lost, as it were, in this linguistic void, managing a down-to-earth “Na so life be oga” in reply.
One time literature professor at the University of Sierra Leone , Eldred Jones, in an introduction to the novel, said this philosophy of voidance was a good joke. Funny, yes, but creative excursions of this kind did little to endear readers – tragically even in Africa – to Soyinka’s prose.
The joke becomes cruel if we think of Mathias as representing the general reader and Sagoe’s essay as embodying Soyinka’s complexity-wrought oeuvre. Complex, difficult and no friend of readers, Soyinka has been a tough question to African literature in the brief period of its life.
It is not difficult to figure out why. In what we immediately think of as constituting African literature – that body of work mass produced in the 1960s - the possibility of what an African narrative ought to be makes an about-turn if having read God’s Bits of Wood, Things Fall Apart or Mission to Kala, you stray into The Interpreters. It makes an about-turn and comes adorned in a kaftan cut in a manner not in keeping with the fashion:
Gesturing extra-thematically, a little forceful in its daring use of language, rather than ask us to consider the European-African impermeability or esteem the plenteous prodigy of the African woman, The Interpreters draws our attention to the possibility of creek mangroves (gnarled tears), a sunken canon (rotting hulks) being viable vehicles yielding poetic insight into loss and grief without saying it nakedly artlessly.
The barreling advance from sheer suspense as when Bakayoko strides messianic to a rapturous denouement in Dakar, or when Okonkwo’s suicide becomes unavoidable, were in The Interpreters replaced by a tetchy, life-loathing, post-adolescent nervousness; not very page turning stuff if suspense is all you require of a book.
Even the proverbs in The Interpreters are set at a suspect distance, given as a human tendency to think rather than as given Thought. The matter is after all debatable. In short, The Interpreters is not “African” literature as we have been bred to know it. It did not open with an “African” prescript. And so on the continent, what is doubtless a work of genius, has been punished with neglect. Another age may warm up to its expansiveness (when existentialist voidance hollows out the African middle class) but the central crisis writers from the continent face could not have been better illustrated by this novel’s reception:
Fast forward 44 years later: a rather brilliant collection of short stories and excerpts from novels is published in the Winter 2009 edition of The Literary Review; wonderful prose from the likes of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor - but not so fast. As an African writer, you must first perform a welcome ceremony to your work. So the authors featured in this collection are asked to identify themselves:
“An African writer is not just someone who has black skin and mixes alphabets to create words on paper,” writes Tracy Nneka Nnawubar. “As an African writer, I am someone who belongs to a civilization of people with peculiar experiences that have challenged our environment and continent, Africa .”
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley makes the rejoinder that “I am an African writer first before anything, and have always known myself to be. I see the world through my Africaness (sic), the sensibility of our being, and I am guided by that in all that I write”.
This suspects’ identification parade unfolds with diminishing enthusiasm, and with much diminished politeness, Yvonne Owuor brings the lid crashing on it with “I ignore the term African writer. I write. Among other things. Full stop. Place myself as far away as an Indian Ocean speck of sand is from disgraced Pluto’s fifth moon”.
It is a bit like being asked to sing for your supper, for this kind of demand is never made of European or American writers. African writing, the demand implies, is not really there yet, a shameful ambition orbiting non-canonically beyond Pluto.
While it would be both unfair and untruthful to say that African literature is necessarily contradicted without this also being a general statement on all literatures, there is a specific, unignorable, historical problem: five decades since it became a fact, we still have not made a serious effort to read it; a fault of the reader who does not expect enough and of the writer unsure if he should do more.
Almost without exception, we read our books for themes, and not just any themes: history forms the central plank; colonialism too, which is itself presented as an inescapable African-European encounter (for centuries, African empires colonized other African societies and not without brutality), so that an Ezeulu has to be measured against a Winterbottom; a Lawino cast alongside a Westernised Clementine. The result is that Africa seems impossible without an opposite, this Other necessarily being Europe , the continent a shadowgraph of its northern neighbour.
Inescapable too is our expectation that our books be plot-based, so that literature classes are endlessly descriptive of action, cause and effect.
That it is possible for African literature to muse poetically, even if just for the heck of it, is rarely contemplated. Its not that such books are not produced. How many discussions about African literature consider Sweet and Sour Milk a canonical text, despite it exploring newer, moist terrain?
It is a tragic counterpoint that this literature looking at “peculiar experiences” never dives inwards, to consider the African mind, to feature an African thinking, musing on the abstract and the proffered. It is as if once Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary reacted to the European shock of seeing a human being with a body blackly contradicted to white skin, that the African writer saw it as his job to offer explanation.
It was a strategic error for the foundational generation of our writers to answer back Cary ’s insult. Had those insults been made by a Tolstoy or a Shakespeare – high achievers of the Western canon – then it might have meant something. But Cary is third rate, and by humoring him, Chinua Achebe ensured that third rate became our starting point.
It became the standard, so that a text like The Interpreters, which “pounced” rather than self-declared its negritude, seemed un-African. While Negritude's reactionary but tragically simple-minded thrusts never made it across the writer-generation, its conflation of one’s race with one’s subject continued. Jean Paul Sartre’s ironic statement that it was negation, anti-racist racism pointed out in an important way its devaluation of Africa as innately incapable of empirical thought.
By their very nature, literary creations (incorporeal word-realities) cannot be racialised. Realised by agency of symbol, possible through a conscious cooperation of readers willing to believe, they are creatures of the mind. But more than this, as creatures of words, they too reflect the creative process.
To not pay attention to the technique by which they are realised, is an insult to civilization, which being a contemplation of what it is, also traces how it becomes. To read Things Fall Apart for the titillation of suspense alone, and not pay attention to the manner in which Achebe writes, is to read only half of him.
It is essential to suspend for a while, the time-worn reading of African literature and concentrate on the manner in which these books were written – suspend as if colonialism never happened, as if we are not our colour, nor that Church and Shakespeare ever invaded our sacred spaces.
It is important to ask if Achebe’s famous “simple” language was sufficient to convey a complete Igbo world or whether his proverbs constructed fully their worldview or if those proverbs merely served to confirm Cary ’s stereotypes. Perhaps they did more than that, but we haven’t asked the questions yet. Every culture has proverbs and at the last count, I found as many English proverbs as Igbo ones.
Was Okot P’Bitek’s Song of Lawino an enabler rather than inhibitor of poetic possibilities? Perhaps it enabled much more than we think. But how can we tell if we are unwilling to empirically “disown” these books by looking at them as no more important to Africans as say Murder in the Cathedral?
Is it not self-inflicted imperialism that we continue to see Europe as our nemesis or self-defeating that Francophone African writers write to repudiate French literature and Anglophone, the English?
There is a world above and beyond history as source for text, but the reactions to Conrad and Cary, whose unintended historical mission ended reducing the African to his body parts (“the lower the brain – the beast blood”) – as colonial economy intentionally reduced us to labour (African thought labeled witchcraft), means that any book in which Africans are considering free-floating notions of human existence is received with suspicion.
Sagoe’s laboured essay on voidance seems to me a more fitting rebuttal to Conrad than the frontal, misleading comments Achebe made of the Anglo-Polish writer for it does a number of things:
One, an African is thinking; two, this thought interrogates Thinking itself; three, it is a self-critical examination of the idea of writing and four, acknowledges that what we call Literature is no more than a pastiche of linguistic registers. Fifthly, it is an uplifting satire about the very idea of blackness being prime locus for African literature – and no literature goes very far without a little self-mockery.
In The Interpreters, Wole Soyinka’s hard drinking journalist character, Sagoe, summons the office messenger, Mathias, and begins to read to him his essay on the “philosophy of voidance”, a knotted thesis that we encounter more than once in the novel.
Mathias, whose English (pidgin) is no where as grasping as Sagoe’s, let alone Soyinka’s, sits through a reading in which “voidance” morphs from void to voidate, voidante, voidancy, voidatory and climbs up to variations such as “arborial voidatory” and “Voidante pseudo-negritudinists”.
Doubtless Mathias sat through the lecture for the wicked bottle of beer Sagoe bribed him with for his attention (drinking at work), lost, as it were, in this linguistic void, managing a down-to-earth “Na so life be oga” in reply.
One time literature professor at the University of Sierra Leone , Eldred Jones, in an introduction to the novel, said this philosophy of voidance was a good joke. Funny, yes, but creative excursions of this kind did little to endear readers – tragically even in Africa – to Soyinka’s prose.
The joke becomes cruel if we think of Mathias as representing the general reader and Sagoe’s essay as embodying Soyinka’s complexity-wrought oeuvre. Complex, difficult and no friend of readers, Soyinka has been a tough question to African literature in the brief period of its life.
It is not difficult to figure out why. In what we immediately think of as constituting African literature – that body of work mass produced in the 1960s - the possibility of what an African narrative ought to be makes an about-turn if having read God’s Bits of Wood, Things Fall Apart or Mission to Kala, you stray into The Interpreters. It makes an about-turn and comes adorned in a kaftan cut in a manner not in keeping with the fashion:
Gesturing extra-thematically, a little forceful in its daring use of language, rather than ask us to consider the European-African impermeability or esteem the plenteous prodigy of the African woman, The Interpreters draws our attention to the possibility of creek mangroves (gnarled tears), a sunken canon (rotting hulks) being viable vehicles yielding poetic insight into loss and grief without saying it nakedly artlessly.
The barreling advance from sheer suspense as when Bakayoko strides messianic to a rapturous denouement in Dakar, or when Okonkwo’s suicide becomes unavoidable, were in The Interpreters replaced by a tetchy, life-loathing, post-adolescent nervousness; not very page turning stuff if suspense is all you require of a book.
Even the proverbs in The Interpreters are set at a suspect distance, given as a human tendency to think rather than as given Thought. The matter is after all debatable. In short, The Interpreters is not “African” literature as we have been bred to know it. It did not open with an “African” prescript. And so on the continent, what is doubtless a work of genius, has been punished with neglect. Another age may warm up to its expansiveness (when existentialist voidance hollows out the African middle class) but the central crisis writers from the continent face could not have been better illustrated by this novel’s reception:
Fast forward 44 years later: a rather brilliant collection of short stories and excerpts from novels is published in the Winter 2009 edition of The Literary Review; wonderful prose from the likes of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor - but not so fast. As an African writer, you must first perform a welcome ceremony to your work. So the authors featured in this collection are asked to identify themselves:
“An African writer is not just someone who has black skin and mixes alphabets to create words on paper,” writes Tracy Nneka Nnawubar. “As an African writer, I am someone who belongs to a civilization of people with peculiar experiences that have challenged our environment and continent, Africa .”
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley makes the rejoinder that “I am an African writer first before anything, and have always known myself to be. I see the world through my Africaness (sic), the sensibility of our being, and I am guided by that in all that I write”.
This suspects’ identification parade unfolds with diminishing enthusiasm, and with much diminished politeness, Yvonne Owuor brings the lid crashing on it with “I ignore the term African writer. I write. Among other things. Full stop. Place myself as far away as an Indian Ocean speck of sand is from disgraced Pluto’s fifth moon”.
It is a bit like being asked to sing for your supper, for this kind of demand is never made of European or American writers. African writing, the demand implies, is not really there yet, a shameful ambition orbiting non-canonically beyond Pluto.
While it would be both unfair and untruthful to say that African literature is necessarily contradicted without this also being a general statement on all literatures, there is a specific, unignorable, historical problem: five decades since it became a fact, we still have not made a serious effort to read it; a fault of the reader who does not expect enough and of the writer unsure if he should do more.
Almost without exception, we read our books for themes, and not just any themes: history forms the central plank; colonialism too, which is itself presented as an inescapable African-European encounter (for centuries, African empires colonized other African societies and not without brutality), so that an Ezeulu has to be measured against a Winterbottom; a Lawino cast alongside a Westernised Clementine. The result is that Africa seems impossible without an opposite, this Other necessarily being Europe , the continent a shadowgraph of its northern neighbour.
Inescapable too is our expectation that our books be plot-based, so that literature classes are endlessly descriptive of action, cause and effect.
That it is possible for African literature to muse poetically, even if just for the heck of it, is rarely contemplated. Its not that such books are not produced. How many discussions about African literature consider Sweet and Sour Milk a canonical text, despite it exploring newer, moist terrain?
It is a tragic counterpoint that this literature looking at “peculiar experiences” never dives inwards, to consider the African mind, to feature an African thinking, musing on the abstract and the proffered. It is as if once Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary reacted to the European shock of seeing a human being with a body blackly contradicted to white skin, that the African writer saw it as his job to offer explanation.
It was a strategic error for the foundational generation of our writers to answer back Cary ’s insult. Had those insults been made by a Tolstoy or a Shakespeare – high achievers of the Western canon – then it might have meant something. But Cary is third rate, and by humoring him, Chinua Achebe ensured that third rate became our starting point.
It became the standard, so that a text like The Interpreters, which “pounced” rather than self-declared its negritude, seemed un-African. While Negritude's reactionary but tragically simple-minded thrusts never made it across the writer-generation, its conflation of one’s race with one’s subject continued. Jean Paul Sartre’s ironic statement that it was negation, anti-racist racism pointed out in an important way its devaluation of Africa as innately incapable of empirical thought.
By their very nature, literary creations (incorporeal word-realities) cannot be racialised. Realised by agency of symbol, possible through a conscious cooperation of readers willing to believe, they are creatures of the mind. But more than this, as creatures of words, they too reflect the creative process.
To not pay attention to the technique by which they are realised, is an insult to civilization, which being a contemplation of what it is, also traces how it becomes. To read Things Fall Apart for the titillation of suspense alone, and not pay attention to the manner in which Achebe writes, is to read only half of him.
It is essential to suspend for a while, the time-worn reading of African literature and concentrate on the manner in which these books were written – suspend as if colonialism never happened, as if we are not our colour, nor that Church and Shakespeare ever invaded our sacred spaces.
It is important to ask if Achebe’s famous “simple” language was sufficient to convey a complete Igbo world or whether his proverbs constructed fully their worldview or if those proverbs merely served to confirm Cary ’s stereotypes. Perhaps they did more than that, but we haven’t asked the questions yet. Every culture has proverbs and at the last count, I found as many English proverbs as Igbo ones.
Was Okot P’Bitek’s Song of Lawino an enabler rather than inhibitor of poetic possibilities? Perhaps it enabled much more than we think. But how can we tell if we are unwilling to empirically “disown” these books by looking at them as no more important to Africans as say Murder in the Cathedral?
Is it not self-inflicted imperialism that we continue to see Europe as our nemesis or self-defeating that Francophone African writers write to repudiate French literature and Anglophone, the English?
There is a world above and beyond history as source for text, but the reactions to Conrad and Cary, whose unintended historical mission ended reducing the African to his body parts (“the lower the brain – the beast blood”) – as colonial economy intentionally reduced us to labour (African thought labeled witchcraft), means that any book in which Africans are considering free-floating notions of human existence is received with suspicion.
Sagoe’s laboured essay on voidance seems to me a more fitting rebuttal to Conrad than the frontal, misleading comments Achebe made of the Anglo-Polish writer for it does a number of things:
One, an African is thinking; two, this thought interrogates Thinking itself; three, it is a self-critical examination of the idea of writing and four, acknowledges that what we call Literature is no more than a pastiche of linguistic registers. Fifthly, it is an uplifting satire about the very idea of blackness being prime locus for African literature – and no literature goes very far without a little self-mockery.
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