Nigerian Literature afflicted by famine – Chinweizu
By James Eze (jameseze1@yahoo.com)
Sunday, February 19, 2006

•Chinweizu Photo: Sun News Publishing

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It took all of 365 days. But it was well worth it. Chinweizu! Well, 365 days? It was all expected though: the skepticism, the curiosity, even the disdain.

"What did you study in school? What is the interview about? Call me back this time next year" the indifferent voice on the other end had dismissed you rather clinically. "Next year?" you had exclaimed, stupefied. "Yes, next year", the voice had insisted with a note of finality. Your little power of suasion had met with a laconic "you are supposed to be a professional. Respect my wish in this matter" and the line went dead instantly.

Disappointed? Certainly not! On the contrary, the turn of events has just sent your adrenaline roaring. The game had just opened up. And after repeated attempts and several interventions, here you are ‘in his presence’, 365 days after.

Chinweizu! The West and the Rest of Us, Towards a Decolonization of African Literature, The Anatomy of Female Power, Decolonizing the African Mind, Energy Crisis and Other Poems. Chinweizu! Mathematician, philosopher, poet, polemicist, scholar, critic, cultural nationalist, African thinker. Chinweizu! Maverick, enigmatic, eccentric, repository of receding mores, last of a dying breed. Chinweizu…!

It’s a modest living room, all right. And there are books (what did you expect?), good books, voluminous books, tomes of books. You lower yourself onto straight-backed chair. He sits a good distance from you on a soft couch, regarding you with the tail of his right eye, his head tilted sideways to the left. Since you had not come across his photograph anywhere before, you had no idea what to expect. But since most intellectuals keep beards, you half expected a heavily bearded, grand old man with grey hair and a raspy breath.

But here he is, clean-shaven, youthful and strikingly alert in shorts and shirt. His skin is so light that its youthfulness shone like polished leather. "Well, if you want me to comment on the Nigerian literary scene, you have to wait. I will have to find a paper I wrote in 1989", he says in reply to your request for his assessment of the domestic literary scene. Before you came to this point, he had cast a flood of intellectual gamma rays on a range of niggling questions.

The rays had more specifically illuminated issues like the silent imperialist war on Africa and Africans, black African origins of Greek civilization, true origins of Queen Nerfetiti of Egypt, artistic representations of ancient Egypt, extermination of black populations of ancient Egypt and the infiltration of Nigerian economy by home-bred imperialist agents. His views had been acerbic and frontal, as has been his wont. But when the dialogue tapered off to literature, the famous maverick became a little more introspective and withdrawn.

Perhaps he had said enough already on African literature. His famous literary disputations with Soyinka and Charles Nnolim are clear reminders. Returning from his study where he had gone to look for the paper, he asks for more time to enable him retrieve it among numerous other papers.

"I can’t say I have been following developments in Nigerian literature. But snippets I have stumbled upon don’t give me any sense that there is a literary scene going on," he resumes in a voice that is completely drained of all hints of his training in some of the best schools in the US. "My paper in 1989 is entitled The Future of African Literature: Feast or Famine. I predicted that we were going into a period of famine and the reasons were quite clear in that piece. If I could find it, it would answer that question, unless you can show me that there has not been a famine.

But my view dates back to the end of the 80s and I would imagine that if there was a feast, I would have heard about it. Since I haven’t heard anything to make me realize that there’s a feast, I may have been quite right in my prediction that we were going to have a famine because what would have created a literary feast, a flowering of literature has been lacking." Now, Chinweizu speaks in measured tones. His words are carefully chosen and deliberately delivered with the right amount of stress exerted on specific areas he wishes to draw attention to.

But his obvious lack of enthusiasm in discussing literature seems a little discouraging. So is his submission that there has been a famine on the nation’s literary landscape. It sounds rather incredulous in view of the glut of works that the incident of self-publishing has thrown up.

Well, may be he actually means to say that there has not been a rupture of sorts on the literary scene, some kind of literary Tsunami that would force global attention on our literary tradition, you observe. "I imagine that I would have heard of it if there was", he says unenthusiastically, almost drawing the curtains on the discussion. Once again, he leaves you struggling to scrounge up literary issues that might ignite his interest.

The NLNG’s Nigerian Prize for Literature beeps on the radar of your mind. Has he heard of it? You wonder. "I’ve heard of that, but I don’t know the works that won the prize. Prizes are neither here nor there. It’s the works that make the prize. If the prize is awarded to rubbish, then the prize is rubbish. So, one has to see the works first. I am sure Okara’s works will be okay because we know where he is coming from, his generation.

I don’t know Ezenwa’s works to be able to make any pronouncement on their worth. So, as I said, I cannot comment because I don’t know the works that got the prize. But awarding a prize is not the kind of thing I mean when I am talking about a flowering of literature. The flowering of literature I mean is what are the titles of the book we are talking about and what do they mean? What is their impact on our society, our way of seeing the world and things like that?

If a book comes out and captivates the imagination or shocks the society, I am sure it would have been a matter of constant discussion and debate and I would have heard of it. But I haven’t heard of any such thing", he reasons lucidly, giving you the little cracking hope that this dialogue can be sustained.
But, is he right really? Has no work of fiction gripped national imagination in the past one and a half decades? Well, what in his estimation, are those things which absence in a book turns him off? You could see light sparkle in his powerful eyes. He turns slightly to face you. "It’s like someone asking me what is it that turns me on in a woman and I say if she does she does, if she doesn’t she doesn’t".

A hearty laughter rings out between the two of you and you sense that you might end up scratching up something reasonable from this dialogue after all. "The same with a book", he continues, a hint of enthusiasm surfacing in his voice. "If I start reading it and I can’t keep turning the pages and reading on, then it has failed to capture me. It hasn’t done what it should, which is to keep my interest going. So, to me, any book that doesn’t do that is kept aside.

If it is a technical book that has information that I want, that’s a different matter. But a storyteller that doesn’t keep the attention of the audience has failed. If you stand in front of a podium and start telling people a story in a hall and they are all yawning and falling asleep, no matter what you think of your oratory, you have failed at the crucial test. At an individual level if I pick up a story and I can’t keep my eyes open; it hasn’t worked for me.

I developed that thirst when a friend of mine introduced me to Gabriel Garca Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Before that, I found most novels very boring. It didn’t matter where they came from. But Marquez was one of the few people that got me back into reading novels because when I opened One Hundred Years of Solitude, that experience of keep reading and turning the pages happened. And I began using it to decide on any book that comes my way.

That is the minimum test I set for any story and any one that doesn’t meet it is gone. People may elaborate theories as to why or why not but for me, that’s irrelevant. If you say you are a good cook, let me taste your food. If I taste it and want some more, then you have done well", he posits.
Great! The dialogue is fully underway no doubt.

He is more at ease now and more willing to share his rare views that are sometimes disquieting and brutally frank some other times. But his interest must be sustained in this exchange or it would be proper to compare your interview skills with those of the storyteller who fails to keep Chinweizu’s fingers flipping the pages of his book.

So, could he remember any Nigerian writer whose book has made him flip the pages in the past…say, fifteen years? "No", comes the candid reply. "That’s why I believe there is a famine. And now newspapers don’t publish stories as far as I know. You are a literary editor.

How many stories have you published on your stable in the last one month?" he asks, raising his eyes to meet yours cooly. Well, the game is on the swing. You just never know with Chinweizu. With him, the pendulum swings in a dizzying speed. At the moment, you have just traded places with him. He is now the inquirer. O! You mean short stories? you return, buying time. "Yes. Why not", he snarls, "you think literary pages are for academics to come and quarrel over theories?" He queries. Well, not necessarily, but we have had to contend with space constraints, you explain. He lowers his gaze with a little smirk on his mouth that says ‘what a pity’.

"Well, what you people forget is that you don’t build a literary culture by publishing critics. Critics are parasites to literature. If you want to build a literary culture, you have to publish works that people would read and want to read more", he observes prescriptively but quite interestingly too because he is also supposed to be a critic himself. "Stories are what people want to read in a newspaper.

To give you an example, (he walks into his study, fishes out a collection of 19th Century Russian short stories and hands it to you) most of these stories with their great writers were first printed in newspapers. If newspapers are not performing that function, then they are failing in their literary mission. You have to publish stories so that people can create time and read good stories. If you are not doing that, then what’s the literary page all about?" he queries again.

It’s difficult not to see the merit in his argument. "A literary page is not for arguments about theories," he resumes. "When writers complain about not being published, how will they get published if they have not been tried out on the public?

If somebody were to publish five or six good stories in the newspapers in two or three years, when a publisher wants to take it up, you know that those stories have been discussed extensively in the public and there may be some people who may want to keep the story. You cannot develop a literary culture without giving writers outlets. Achebe and co tried to go the way of little magazines but magazines are hard to sustain," he reckons.

As you hit the stop button of your mini-recorder, you ponder his last observation. In truth, there isn’t much publishing of short stories in the newspapers and the import of this on the country’s literary tradition cannot, in all honesty, be gainsaid. Of course, you may love or hate Chinweizu, but you cannot ignore his views. Truth be told, they are well worth every single minute of the 365 days it took to get them.