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Chinua Achebe

Literature today with Stanly Mushava
A DEBATE is underway in literary circles, with authors and critics exchanging fire on multiple fronts. The object of controversy is what should constitute African literature. Is there a set template to which candidates must comply to qualify as African writers? If so, who defines it and what horizons does it encompass?

Or, contrariwise, is African literature, like any other literature, the art of uninhibited creativity. Is it the language of emotion over which noexternal authority can preside?

It is tempting to forestall discussion and separate everything to black and white but the complexities of the matter require more than retailing predetermined positions.

Critics have provoked a backlash for peddling rule-books of what they presume to be African literature.
Gatekeepers have been rapped for trimming out experiment and fetishising tradition as the certified canon of literature for the continent.
Offended cries of “Who made you judge over me?” have been, accordingly, heard from varied sections of the literary fraternity.

Mukoma WaNgugi recently challenged the gatekeepers in his brilliant World Today article, “Don’t tell African authors what to write and what not to write”, where he argues that prescriptions are bound to stagnate the development of African literature.

My immediate misgiving is that Mukoma’s article confronts only half the problem. Granted, gatekeepers are a disservice to the literary fraternity because literature has always been a rather personal convergence of experience, imagination, observation, intuition and creativity.
All the same, critics are only a verbal, if any, part of the problem. Any writer, worth the vocation, must be able to man up and corroborate his work against critical adversity.

Negative criticism is actually fodder for the expansion, clarification and improvement of literature. As such critics are not that much of a force when it comes to what writers can or cannot write.

Even if critics erroneously malign or circumscribe a valid work of art, the durable qualities which inhere in it are bound to secure posterity, vindicate the author and invalidate bad criticism.

Arguments in literature, no matter how controversial, are a requisite crucible for discriminating the nuggets from the dross.
T. S. Eliot once said “Hamlet” is not a work of art and Dambudzo Marechera once said Charles Mungoshi is not an artiste.
Extreme as these positions may be, they have the useful potential of drawing closer attention to the works in question, thereby affirming their merits or debunking their indiscretions.

“The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgment that makes an impact that is, never to say anything,” F. R. Leavis writes in “The Great Tradition”.

This standpoint emboldened Leavis to call John Milton negligible, dismiss the Romantic Movement, trash all poets since John Donne except T. S. Eliot and G. M. Hopkins and canonise Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad as the only novelists worth reading.
Of course, Leavis is smugly propagating personal taste as universal reality but his views are still useful in that they are a brave challenge to debate.

If things come together on a dualistic scale, as Mukoma suggests, then all this is good for literature.
Critics themselves have often found themselves at the receiving end of scathing satire by daring authors who equate being defined to being confined.

W. B. Yeats caricatures critics as old, learned and respectable bald heads who edit and annotate the lines that young men rhymed out in love’s despair.

Yeats’ short poem, “The Scholars”, hides behind humour and simplicity to heap cold scorn on superfluous authorities who claim a stake in other people’s emotions and make an ascetic trade out of it.

Leo Tolstoy bemoans a monopoly in the valuation of art, not by ordinary people but by perverted and self-confident individuals, deriding critics as stupid men who discuss wise men.

“What do they explain? The artist, if a real artist, has by his work transmitted to others the feeling he experienced. What is there, then, to explain?” queries Tolstoy in “What is Art?”

Chinua Achebe said, “If you don’t like somebody else’s story write your own”, and showed the way by following up on his critique of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” with “Things Fall Apart”.

G.B. Shaw, who was notoriously resentful of critics, resorted to writing prefatory reviews of his own books to spite critics. The worst imaginable criticism can also be wrested into a springboard for self-improvement.

A Blackwood review of “Endymion” in 1818 advised a 23-year-old John Keats to go back to plasters, pills and ointment boxes and leave poetry for learned and established authorities.

Keats refused to be force-marched back to the apothecary, shoved his critics’ words down their own throats and wrote some of the most elegant odes and epics in the English language, earning him a place in the presidium of English poetry along with Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton and William Wordsworth.

Of course, the malice-charged Blackwood critic J. K. Lockhart’s name is now only relevant in reference to the litany of false prophets in literature.
University snob Robert Greene’s critique of Shakespeare as “an upstart crow beautified with our feathers” now cuts him out for a villain in juxtaposition to Shakespeare’s genius.

The moral of these anecdotes is to demonstrate that critics cannot wear off the value of an authentic artist.
It is my position that the threat against literature is not the multiplicity of opposing opinions, even the most ignorant and arrogant opinions. Nay, the threat to literature is the political economy.

Rather than expending their eloquence on critics, African writers are better off teaming up to bury the hatchet right into the head of the common enemy who is indirectly but effectively setting rule-books for them.

Clearly, the powerful global media outlets and cultural institutions, naturally based in the West, which is globalisation’s region of higher concentration, are the real power behind the slanted agenda on what literature deserves acclaim and what literature deserves indifference.
Are these not the ultimate gatekeepers telling authors what to and what not to write? Is this not the grand conspiracy which poses a death-knell to the authenticity of African literature?

The problem runs the tapestry of Africa’s book sector of which Zimbabwe is a case in point. There are basically three options for an aspiring writer in Zimbabwe.

With all the major publishers now majoring with academic texts, save for a few literary exceptions in form of anthologies where individual niche is crowded out by multiple voices, going the scholarly route is the first option.

For writers of exclusively literary inclinations, self-publishing or trusting one’s work with obscure publishers becomes the second option at the risk of ending up stuck with piles of one’s own books due to marketing constraints.

The third and most attractive recourse becomes writing donor-themed political satire for the few well-financed publishers. Of course, writers with  varying degrees of eloquence can easily adapt their skills to earn their bread.

Thus intertextuality upstages creativity and solicited political flyers usurp genuine literature, that is, literature generated by conscience not convenience.

Niyi Osundare’s “Questions for a Pandering Poet” taunts writers entangled in the corridors of power whose art is generated by mammon not man and diadem not duty. The poem demonstrates the political economy adage that he who pays the piper dictates the tune.
This is the fundamental problem assailing African literature. The gatekeepers are not critics but a system of misrepresentation and under-representation running on the oiled juggernauts of globalisation and cultural imperialism.

Critics, notably Helon Habila and Chika Oduah, have suggested that panellists of the most prestigious awards, home and abroad, are fine-tuning the accent of African writing by rewarding works that ratify Western stereotypes about the continent.

Habila unfortunately oversteps his mandate by giving alternative prescriptions as to what African writers should concentrate on based on his insipid personal preferences rather than plausible arguments.

All the same, his accurate diagnosis must not be thrown out of the window along with the messy prescription.
The critiques, written with particular attention on Zimbabwean novelist NoViolet Bulawayo, whose novel “We Need New Names” was recently short-listed for the Man-Booker Prize and Nigerian author Tope Folarin, whose short story “Miracle” won this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing, have earned the critics a good spanking from sceptics.

I also drew a fair share of censure from writers and readers for my article questioning whether “We Need New Names” secured exclusive eminence because it concurs with Western stereotypes on Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular, while local not-ables like Charles Mungoshi have gone practically unnoticed.

Responses suggested that it was a culture of an entitlement to assume that the West must pay attention to African literature and that the Western media echo chambers and cultural institutions which I faulted in my article were to be lauded for what little, undeserved coverage they give Africa.
Clearly, such views are an epitome of the self-hate that many readers gullibly imbibe from global media outlets. A story half told leaves a void open to manipulation. To omit, says Chenjerai Hove, is to lie.

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says.

So the debate is flaring up and the question is whether African writers are disowning identity and shirking responsibility to pacify offshore market forces.

Habila apprehends a danger whereby, in a bid to woo panellists, authors are pandering to the West’s stereotypical portrayal of Africa by resorting to images, symbols and allusions that evoke pity and fear for Africa after the tenor of global media institutions.

“We are talking child soldiers, genocide, child prostitution, female genital mutilation, political violence, police brutality, dictatorships, predatory preachers, dead bodies on the roadside,” writes Habila.

“The result, for the reader, isn’t always catharsis, as Aristotle suggested, but its direct opposite: a sort of creeping horror that leads to a desensitisation to the reality being represented.”

Habila, however, overreaches himself when he suggests that Bulawayo specialise more on passages like falling snowflakes and teenagers watching porn which he believes epitomise Bulawayo’s genius in “We Need New Names.” This too is futility. Habila is, clearly, better suited for the laboratory than the theatre.

Udoa suggests in This Is Africa that the issue of supply and demand is taking, with writers majoring the sort of work that has come to be expected from Africa.

More than the critiques drawing frontiers for African writers, as Mukoma suggests, they also expose the fact that African writers are already operating within imposed frontiers.

Creativity is not only threatened by critical prescriptions but chiefly by covert forces of the political economy impelling the writer “to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread,” as John Swinton said.

“We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes,” Swinton told fellow writers in 1953.
New African columnist Cameron Duodu laments that the modern age is dominated by news retailed by Western conglomerates which he slams for perpetuating varied forms of slavery in Africa. Make out a people to be one thing, says Adichie, and that is what they become.

Writing has been used to demobilise Africans for too long. There is a void in respect to work adapted to empower the continent. This is not to agitate for another single story.

As Patrice Lumumba we can “borrow from Western civilisation what is good and beautiful and reject what is not suitable for us. This amalgam of African and European civilisation will give Africa a civilisation of a new type, an authentic civilisation corresponding to African realities.”