By Anote Ajeluorou
Last week, Uyo, the capital
of Akwa Ibom State played host to writers under the auspices of the Association
of Nigerian Authors (ANA). It was the yearly convention, the 31st edition. It
had as theme Nigerian Literature, Social Media and Security with Canada-based Nigerian scholar, Prof. Pius
Adesanmi as keynote presenter.
The yearly gathering of Nigerian authors has come to
symbolise the indomitable spirit of the country’s literati in its march forward
in spite of the many odds confronting writers and writing in a country that has
gradually become anti-intellectual, where books are no longer the staple diet
of a vast majority.
Yet these writers gather yearly to reflect on the question
of nationhood and how to make the country work better for its citizens.
Chairman of the opening ceremony and notable poet, Odia
Ofeimun captured this indomitable spirit of the Nigerian writer when he averred
that the oneness usually expressed by writers in the country in their yearly
gathering was a source of hope that all was not lost.
Ofeimun noted that writers’ commitment to their cause and to
each other was something the Nigerian polity would need to emulate to move
forward, saying that no mater the challenges facing writers, something good
still managed to come out of them for the benefit of all Nigerians.
He reasoned, “We are opinion leaders, future leaders who
have made Nigeria look like a country; without writers, Nigeria will not be a
country.”
However, in his postulations, Adesanmi submitted that
literature may not necessarily provide security in the physical sense of the
word but noted that literature does secure memory, a vital aspect of nationhood
that must be kept intact for future generations. His submission becomes more
relevant especially in a society like Nigeria where history as subject has been
removed from school syllabuses. Indeed, even history is sometimes seen as a
poor repository of memory, which only literature aptly chronicles amidst the
dins of the present and memory retrieval from the fog of the past.
In fact, Adesanmi noted that literature may not even secure
the individual writer from state persecution like it happened to such eminent
writers as Wole Soyinka, who was imprisoned in 1968 for calling for cessation
of hostility between Nigeria and Biafra, or Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was murdered on
November 10, 1995 for championing the rights of Ogoni people.
Indeed, Adesanmi rephrased his subject to read, “What Does
(Nigeria) Secure?” in order for him to properly situate the problem. For
Adesanmi, therefore, “Every society tells and records the story of their march in history,
of triumphs and travails, of failures and successes, of reversals and progress,
of ups and downs, of heroism and betrayal, of war and peace, of love and hate.
“Fictional truth
secures these memories and acquires an authority superior to other modes of
recording. This trans-temporal authority of fictional truth is the only reason
why we view Ancient Greece today largely through her arts, mostly her
literature and architecture. Think of the trials and tribulations of that
society during the years of the Peloponnesian War. Think of The History of
the Peloponnesian War, a magisterial account of that war written by the great
historian, Thucydides, and ask yourselves why our civilization, looking back at
Ancient Greece today, prefers memories of that war and era secured by the
fictional truths of the Greek tragedians, especially Sophocles and Euripides.
Why does our current civilization prefer to gaze at Ancient Rome through the
fictional truths of a Virgil than the documentary accounts of an historian like
Tacitus?
“I am saying that
a thousand, two thousand years from now, a future civilization will look beyond
the archives constituted by disciplinary history and privilege the truths
secured by Nigerian fiction today as a window into how we negotiated our march
towards the mountaintop, the roads taken and the road not taken (apologies to
Robert Frost), how we lived, laughed, loved, and hated. How we kidnapped. How
we bombed. How we killed. How we pogromed. If, as it is tempting to predict,
given our talent for self-inflicted national injuries, we somehow never make it
to the mountaintop, we need not worry. Our literature will secure that failure
against forgetting.
“Why do people privilege the security offered against forgetting
by literature and the arts? Does it have something to do with the aphorism that
when the chips fall wherever they may, literature and the arts are the only
evidence, the only trace that a civilization truly leaves behind? Civilizations
whose skeletal remains defy even radio carbon dating have left us the marvel of
rock paintings. When the artist, Victor Ekpuk, looks for what remains of his
forbears, the only window he has left to reconnect with them is the scribal art
that has defied time, Nsibidi (art).
“Does the
privileging of the security offered by literature and the arts have something
to do with man’s fundamental instinct of self-preservation? Does a civilization
disappear, confident that evidence of its passage through time has been secured
by the scribal talents of her writers and artists?”
ON the role of literature as memory bank for the future,
Adesanmi further argued, “Writers are the world’s window into a culture. In
essence, those looking back at today’s Nigeria a thousand years from now will
detect evidence of our literature’s attempts to offer the security of a
predicted future. They will read Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests, Chinua
Achebe’s A Man of the People, and the Menippean satires of T.M.
Aluko, especially Chief The Honourable Minister, and glean
evidence of the errors of the rendering.
“They will gain
insights into how fictional truth imperils the artist ironically through its
own vatic function. Let’s not forget the reaction to A Dance of the Forest by a
political establishment, which, like the dog, failed to hear the hunter’s
whistle and perished in the forest of postcolonial anomie.
“If it is clear
from the foregoing that Nigerian literature offers the security of memory and
the armour with which to shatter the carapace of forgetting, it is equally pertinent
to add that the vatic essence of fictional truth is an attribute which makes it
a very dangerous truth indeed. This truth places a double-edged sword in the
hands of the writer. Tell the truth and be damned; don’t tell the truth and be
damned.
“In the attempt to
secure memory and social history with this double-edged sword, the writer often
discovers that the security, which his work guarantees for the social body, is
hardly ever coterminous with the security of the writer. There is often a terrible
opportunity cost: secure memory and forego your own security. This is true
because society hardly accords the writer the privilege of value-free, personal
remembering.
“If you
examine the social memory inscribed in the poetics of my generation from the
perspective of what it sought to secure it from – or against as the case may be
– you will discover that the idea of which nation’s memory is being secured
becomes quite fuzzy, quite uncertain, shorn of a unifying centre, such as
ritual or mythopoeia, which had tied the works of earlier generations to
project nationhood. No matter how expansive and how ambitiously itinerant the
imagination is, it is always possible to detect a silhouette of either the
national or the ethno-national centre in the poetics of Achebe, Soyinka, and
Clark; in the restless social realism of Osundare, Osofisan, Obafemi, Okediran
(what a succession of Os!) and Iyayi, whose novel, Violence, typifies
this trend. To the question – was there a country? – the work and praxis of the
generations before mine had an answer: yes, Nigeria”.
Nigerian literature
and social media (Best novel on 419
by a Canadian)
ON literature and social media, Adesanmi’s said, “being a very
active member of literary cyberia (my neologistic contraction of Cyber and
Nigeria), I could understand and relate to the social media part of the theme”,
saying, “the rise of Cyberia poses the question of border security in a very
real, literal sense. The phase of Nigerian writing which houses writers I don’t
even ever have to meet face to face to feel like I’ve known them my whole life,
largely because they have social media personas, is an interesting phase
indeed. It is an age where literature has been nervous about losing the book
form, as we know…, and now to the efflorescence of forms of literature
associated with blogs, Facebook, and Twitter”.
He listed young
Nigerian writers, who have seized on the magic of social media platform to ply
their literary trade to include “Richard Ali, Tolu Ogunlesi, A. Igoni Barrett, Ifedigbo
Nze Sylva, Jumoke Verissimo, Chinyere Obi-Obasi, Egbosa Imasuen, Uche Peter
Umez, Ukamaka Olisakwe, Paul T. Liam, Su’eddie Vershima Agema,Onyekachi Peter
Onuoha, Rosemary Ede, Saddiq M. Dzukogi, and so many brilliant writer-citizens
of Cyberia face border security problems beyond the simple threat to the book”.
Adesanmi expressed
the democratic license Cyberia offers its users such as writers, noting that
with the advent of social media, defining a writer within a particular
geographical locale becomes an increasingly difficult task. He noted thus,
“There is a democracy that comes with social media and it has radically
transformed the idea of the writer. Everybody with a blackberry and a blog is
now a potential writer. We may wax puritanical here, declaring that we know who
a writer is; the problem is with cultural shifts in the West that seem to
validate the idea of a nomenclatural borderlessness when it comes to who is a
writer in the age of social media.
“It is in this
expanded context, where literature is increasingly determined by very loose
understandings and definitions, that our emergent crop of writers must try to
secure not just the social memory of their own generation. This new cultural
context challenges their very ability to own stories devolving from our
national experiences, good and bad, in the global marketplace of creativity.
“What does it
mean, for instance, that one of the most powerful accounts of South Africa’s
attempt to exorcise the ghosts of Apartheid through the truth and
reconciliation framework has been written by an American? I am sure you have
heard of the blockbuster novel, Absolution, by Patrick Flanery? What
does it mean that the novel that will probably settle the argument over the
national origin of 419 is not Tricia Adaobi Nwaubani’s I do Not Come to You
by Chance but a novel recently published by a Canadian writer, Will
Ferguson’s 419, which has just been awarded Canada’s biggest literary Prize,
the Giller Prize worth $50,000? The ownership of stories South African and
Nigerian by an American and a Canadian writer has been facilitated largely by
social media. We live in days and times when a Tibetan Monk can write an
authentic Nigerian story, in an authentic Nigerian voice, after spending a year
on Twitter and Facebook”.
WHILE summing up,
Ofeimun restated the function of memory in the make-up of nationhood, noting
that memory was like a limb, which, if lost, would imperil forward movement. He
said, “If you loose your memory, you loose your country. If we want to remake
your country, we must start by remaking our literature.”
Writers remember
Saro-Wiwa, as Mimiko bids to host in 2013
A moment of silence
was observed in honour of slain former president of ANA, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was
killed on November 10, 1995 in Port Harcourt by Gen. Sanni Abacha’s brutal
regime for agitating for the rights of Ogoni people, whose land was and is
still being polluted by the activities of oil companies.
Also, governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo
State, who recently won a re-election, through the state chapter of ANA, bided
for the hosting of ANA 2013 convention. Ondo State last hosted in 2010 and
ordinarily should not be eager to host again considering the financial costs
involved. But as patron and in order for governor Mimiko to launch the
near-completed new arts centre, he intends to host Nigerian writers again to
showcase both the new arts centre and to share his new vision for cultural
production.
While some congress members cheered the
bid, others were skeptical and wondered what the motive was. Kaduna State also
bided to host the yearly gathering next year. But with new ANA rules, hosting
rights would have to be vetted through visits from the national executive to be
sure of preparedness of such states; thereafter, congress would vote online
before the final right is awarded.
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