By Anote Ajeluorou
Chuma Nwokolo is a lawyer, but a consummate
writer, whose short stories have a huge appeal, especially with a natural humour
built into them that beguiles. He has written many works, but his two most recent,
Diaries of a Dead African and The Ghost of Sanni Abacha explore
the many contradictions that character Nigeria’s modern-day society. In this
online conversation, he gives an insight into the short fiction and how he has
deplored it to analyse what he termed Post-Autocratic Stress Syndrome (PASS)
among Nigeria’s political elite.
IT is simple really: I looked for a rational
explanation for our contradictions. We have an open, democratic society but
autocratic election heists like 'June 12' are still rampant. We have a society
governed by the Rule of Law, but well-connected plutocrats routinely get away
with murder. We have a society where constitutionally guaranteed human rights
are aborted every time 'Might' collides with 'Right' — or a soldier pulls out
another citizen from a car for a public flogging.
The Post Autocratic Stress Syndrome
explains it to my mind. I am obviously paralleling the well-known Post
Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSDs), which are anxiety disorders that often
cause behavioural problems. So soldiers, for instance, could suffer PTSD after
leaving a war zone, making them unable to fit properly into normal society.
In a similar way, I am suggesting that as
a society, we have emerged from three decades of dictatorship with serious
problems. Our society's Post Autocratic Stress Syndrome affects
different people in different ways. A politician with a bad case of PASS will
play the dictator lording it over his subjects. He will think that ordinary
laws do not apply to him, that he is above the constitution.
As a governor, he might go a bit mental —
try to steal more than the dictators themselves. He will forget he is a servant
who is accountable to his employers. Individuals suffering from PASS
will meekly accept all manner of humiliations from 'public servants'. They have
a 'head knowledge' of their constitutional rights, but they are so
psychologically damaged by their lives under the dictators that they have a
permanent inferiority complex. They have no heart knowledge of their own authority.
It is a whole spectrum of dysfunction and
it is possible to locate sufferers on the scale, based on their behaviour. Yet,
by focusing on appropriate behaviour, we can also begin to turn things around.
So in my book, The Ghost of Sani Abacha,
I present a collection of 26 stories set in the aftermath of dictatorship.
They are today's stories; so they are not dominated by politics and oppression
and dictatorships… Politics is there in the background alright, but our
characters live and love in a free society, with varying shades of that
emasculation that is the legacy of the Post Autocratic Stress Syndrome.
The short story magic
I do love the short story format. I think it is
closest to the folktale, the bedtime story, the barbershop anecdote. I love the
small canvass, and the discipline required to elaborate a competent tale within
its petite frame. I have a natural instinct for concision. I don't always
achieve it, but a great story emerges from the tension between the few words
you do use and the mood evoked in the worlds between your words.
Picking up a short story is no guarantee
that you will read a 'short' story, or that the story you are about to
read will be told in the most succinct, attractive and striking manner. That, I
think, is the challenge of a short story writer: to take a single idea and
polish it to perfection; to practice almost poetic economy with language, such
that the story cannot be boiled down further without damage to the fabric of
the tale, or the felicity of the telling.
Frankly, it is the challenge of every
literary writer.
I have also benefited from, well, writing
the short story. The actual process of writing is the writer's best training
school. So you gain your equivalent of a degree in the Short Story by creating
a library of decent enough stories, which you will never publish, in much the
same way that a Marathoner chalks up practice Marathons before his actual
competitions.
The short story is a vast territory on its
own: from flash fiction to novella, it can be read in a minute or a couple of
hours. It can be written in a day or a couple of months of furious rewrites. It
also has a diverse audience — from children to egg-heads, from house-wives,
through literary types, to the business executive — the short story seems best
adapted to our modern lifestyle.
However fast-paced your day is, you can
restore your cultural balance with a good story consumed over dinner or just
before bed. Not a chapter of a book... but the complete universe of a tale
fully told at a sitting.
(Okay, now I'm sounding like a bad short story
commercial!) That is the short story for you.
There is also another facet to the short
story and that is its relationship to the oral tale. We have a powerful story
telling tradition in Nigeria which is often misused when we put traditional
inspiration into the strictures of 'literature' that are alien to that
tradition. So, our oratorical forms: the songs, the narrative poems, the oral
tales and the legends… they are often discomfited by the written page whereas
they are re-energized as you rise to address a waiting audience.
The short story bridges that, and not just
in its brevity. So you have on one hand, the story teller and on the
other hand, the story writer. The true story teller does not read
his story to his audience. He 'performs' it. Neither does he memorize a story,
which he recites to his listeners. He 'tells' it, with his notebooks,
Ipads and notepads packed away, so that each telling is different from the
last… each rendition, performance has a life of its own...
Such a tale has its roots in
orature. Such a tale is different from the short story, which has its roots in
literature. Some stories are more visual than others… designed to be read,
others are optimised by a hearing. But the short story writer, I think,
stands there at the cusp of both forms, doesn't he? While catering to a hopeful
audience of hundreds of thousands, his stories are often consumed at a session,
like the storyteller's fare. Striving for the spontaneity of oral delivery, the
stories are also frozen in text — and now, in e-books and audio-books as well.
And the versatile practitioner of the short story can aspire, to be both writer,
and teller!
Political engagement in Nigeria’s literature
THE story, Accidental Man, features
politicians who delegate violence to their followers and push the community
into a bloodbath, while keeping their own families safe and their lace babarigas
white. But it does end on a hopeful note, with a one-time political thug bringing
peace to his community by breaking with his erstwhile boss. This is the story
that ends the collection.
At the other end of the collection is the
political story, Bullfight, where the uncommon courage of a young lad
brings a previously 'PASSified' community out to the picket lines. These
species of stories engage the reader from an inspirational angle. They show
their protagonists not merely as victims, but as change agents engaging their
political crises head on, and making a realistic sort of headway.
Other stories, such as The Ghost of
Sani Abacha, and The Provocation of Jay Galamba are political
satires. We will have a laugh at the circumstances of our hapless protagonists,
and leave it at that. So there is this 'realistic' depiction of political anomy
on the one hand in The Ghost of Sani Abacha and The Provocation of
Jay Galamba and the feel-good tales that empower the little man at the
expense of the entrenched big man - tales like Accidental Man and Bullfight.
I suspect that we have enough 'literary
engagement' of the first variety, not quite enough of the latter. You might ask
what difference it makes - these are all political stories after all? I'd say
that a generation that grows up on a relentless diet of 'realistic' political
tales that reiterate the miserable, relentless status quo will bring that
resignation to their interface with their body politics.
Translation: no change agents. Whereas a
generation weaned on a staple of up-beat literature will wear their can-do
optimism everywhere. That is an outcome worth writing about!
I’d say it depends on the ambitions of
those who write the literature. Literature is part of our cultural furniture,
and so it is exceptionally powerful in shaping both our sense of self as a
people, and our perception of others. But like most cultural changes, it often
takes time. Literature (unless it is of the statutory variety of a Decree No. 1
that sacks a parliament!) is rarely the axe that brings down the tree. It is
more usually the water that wears a river down into a waterfall.
Often, the change is imperceptible, and
happens over decades, even generations.
But having said that, where our literary
producers match their abilities to towering ambition, change - transformative
change - can certainly be midwifed within a revolutionary season. For
literature to midwife change in Nigeria on a revolutionary scale, a few things
have to fall into place. A transformational book that arrives in Nigerian
literature today will be rather like a 'Crocodile Warning' sign written in
Chinese and nailed up by a river full of English speakers.
For signal literature to transform people,
it has to be read and consumed in the first place. So this brings
us to that old chestnut - the broken book-chain. We have to finesse every step
of our book chain:
writer-editor-publisher-distributor-library-bookseller-bookclub-reader...'
In the absence of a revamped system,
Literature must align itself with the personal charisma of its creators or
change agents. Under such circumstances, it can have transformational impact.
On Prof. Kole Omotoso charge that Nigerian
writers are not doing enough of taking on political issues in their writing, I
plead guilty as charged. - But I would be pleading guilty to a far wider
charge than the one framed by Prof. Omotoso. We are not creatively engaging the
political, social, economic, cultural issues at the appropriate depth. Besides,
it is one thing to bore the hapless reader to tears with political screed after
screeds, with tomes that will not be read, and which will gather dust after de
rigueur launch events. What is required is for us to widen the literary
space by writing our themes so engagingly, so creatively that we capture the
imagination of our publics.
Humour as vehicle
THERE is, of course, only so much deliberation
one can put into the development of a personal style.
I think that the reader I had in mind when
I started to write was... myself. There were many years in which I did not send
out any work to publishers, but through them all, I continued to write
compulsively. Throughout those periods, my only consumer was myself. As every
writer knows, the hardest audience for a joke is... yourself. That makes sense:
since you know the joke already it is harder to make yourself laugh just by
reading it.
So, in order for my writing to remain
funny on the twentieth reread or revision, the humour had to be that more
savage, the timing that more ruthless. That much was a deliberate goal.
As to the purpose of the humour, well, I
think that entertainment is a principal purpose for writing, and not just genre
or literary writing for that matter. You only need to read the Psalms, for
instance, to appreciate the poetry of the lines, and to see that though the
plainness of a verse cannot detract from its holiness, the writers of the Bible
seemed to feel that the Holy Book should also be read for its beauty.
Which brings me to the deliberation of my
humour. I think that the level of sedation that a surgeon uses during surgery
will determine just how deeply he can dig into a patient's body. With local
anaesthesia perhaps he can take out a mole or two. To open up a stomach and
bring out an appendix he had better use a general anaesthesia. Beyond sheer
pleasure, humour, I think, plays a similar ‘sedative’ role in literature.
Humour becomes 'black' when the subject veers into the grim.
A writer with grim subjects on his mind
can utilise the anaesthesia of humour to probe deeper into a reader's psyche,
or conscience, or emotions without unduly distressing him. Like the surgery
patient, a properly humorous book will keep the reader in the writer's
'surgery' until the book is done. Of course, the anaesthesia eventually wears
off - the book is closed, the patient is roused - and we can find out if the surgeon,
or writer, was any good at all.
Beyond the grimness
OF course; I am a Naijoptimist. If you
look at the basic themes of the three diarists in Diaries of a Dead African,
you will see that their issues are easily solved. Meme wanted a more caring
society; a society in which people looked out for each other. A society in
which a broken man will be healed, nurtured, mentored, by his fellows. Our
society is getting richer everyday.
For all the anomy, as a country, we are
richer now than we have ever been before. You only need to count the cars, the
houses, the roads - even the satellite dishes sticking out of our shanty towns
- and extrapolate. Yet, I doubt that we are, for all our greater wealth, as
caring as the generations before us. It would seem instead that the richer we
get as a people, the more self-centred, self-indulgent and narcissistic we are.
And I think that this cultural change, from self-centredness to selflessness is
something that we can easily begin to address. We don't need to wait for
a billion naira government contract award. This is primarily the province of
civil society.
Meme's sons, our second and third
diarists, were living a lie. The first son graduated from prison, but was
living the lie of a first class university graduate. Naturally, his job
prospects are permanently in conflict with his actual qualifications. The
second son passed off his sexual incompetence as a blanket disdain of women.
The day of exposure shook him to his roots.
Most of our social vices in Nigeria can be
eliminated in one fell swoop if we began to level, one with another, to strip
off artifice and the false, unsustainable lifestyles. Most of our middle-class
criminality, and the endemic corruption appurtenant to the public services can
be linked to the servicing of the various lies that we live as a people.
So to avoid the grim realities of the
protagonists of Diaries of a Dead African, I think that we have a
cultural work that is by no means impossible. On the contrary, I am excited by
the transformational potential of that work, bearing in mind the youthful
component of our population.
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