Irele tackles Ngugi...
‘It’s not just about language, but local realities’
By Henry Akubuiro (ifeanyi_mcdaniels@yahoo.com)
Sunday, June 11, 2006
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•Ngugi
Photo: Sun News Publishing
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Professor Abiola Irele has had a storied career in scholarship
that places him inside the mainstream of African scholarship.
For some people, their hearts leap when praises trail their
achievements. But the professor of Africa/African American
Studies and Romance Languages, Harvard University, USA, is
a fainthearted when it comes to taking accolades.
At the recent ALA convergence in Accra, Ghana, where a session
was dedicated to him in honour of his seventieth birthday
(May 18, 2006), as speaker after speaker lionized his genius
in literary criticism at the La Palm Beach Royal Hotel, he
escaped to a nearby bar with a fast clip, relieved to be from
the buzz. “When you stay in a place where people sing
your praises like that, you feel uncomfortable,” he
says primly, a little later, dispelling any emotional camouflage,
his appearance cloaked in simplicity.
He was the former editor, Research in African Literatures
(1992 – 2003). His selected works include: The Cambridge
History of African and Caribbean Literature (2004), co-edited
with Simon Gikandi; The African Imagination: Literature in
Africa and the Black Diaspora (2001), Aimé Césaire:
Cahier d'un Retour Au Pays Natal (1994), The African Experience
in Literature and Ideology (1981), Selected Poems of Léopold
Sédar Senghor (1977), among others.
Looking back at his seventy years on earth, the septuagenarian
feels a level of accomplishment, though he admits he has not
achieved all he would have loved to. “But there is a
point when you let go,” he intones, casting a vacant
stare in the air, which turns out to be an intermittent perfunctory
gesture while the chat lasts. However, there is a certain
sense to which he is grateful, considering that he is living
in a generation, which, he says, people live longer than their
predecessors. “At seventy, I am still strong, and I
‘ll continue to produce and react,” he enthuses.
When Professor Irele travelled to Ohio State University, USA,
in 1987 for a one-year visiting professorship, little did
he know that he would stay back. “It was never planned,”
he says. At the end of that year, the university dangled him
a professorship in African literature, which it had just created
then. “So, I stayed on. It wasn’t my intention
really to stay on,” he recalls. Earlier in 1972, he
had received two offers to travel to America to teach, but
he was not keen on that, because, as he tells Sunday Sun,
he was happy at Ibadan. “The point is that from mid
1980s, we had a downturn, and my leaving for America coincided
with it,” he explains, not wishing to be linked with
the brain drain syndrome.
When Irele talks, you are left in no doubt as to why he is
a man of considerable intellect. His gentle tone is magnified
by the semi silent chinwag nearby. “My problem is that
our literature and our cultural expression in terms of language
and the terms we use in our intellectual background is, of
course, derived, I mean, Western, essentially. I feel that
there is going to be a certain difficulty in creating a literary
tradition using that intellectual baggage of the West. It
is a problem for us, and, to tell the truth, I don’t
see a solution,” he utters in a mild bluessy voice.
“Others think we should abandon or, maybe, create our
own modern intellectual traditions, but I don’t think
it’s going to be easy. For example, in Wole Soyinka’s
The Man Died, he made reference to Kant [a great philosopher],
a very important one in terms of ethical philosophy. But ask
yourself: if you are addressing a Nigerian or African audience,
how appropriate is it to cite Kant? That illustrates the problem
for me. All the time we are writing, our references tend to
be Western. I wonder how long we can sustain this. Some of
us have been educated essentially within the Western tradition,
and we are trying to reach out now to the African background.
That’s a problem for me,” he harps in a rueful
tone.
Irele doesn’t want to be stereotyped as an expert on
a particular scholar, say, Soyinka. “Soyinka is one
of the writers I have written on, but he is not the only one.
I have also written on Chinua Achebe. In fact, my first critical
essay was on Achebe. (“The Tragic Conflict in the Novels
of Chinua Achebe”), and I have been fascinated by Achebe
ever since. My works are across the board.”
There has been a debate on the definition of African literature.
While one school, including Ngugi wa Thiong’o, insists
that African literature should be the one written in African
languages, the second school says it should encompass both
the one written in foreign languages used by Africans for
communication. Professor Irele belongs to the latter school,
and he doesn’t stretch a point when you ask him to state
his position. “Ngugi has been pursuing that line. I
agree we must have literature written in African languages,
but that is not the point. Most African states are multinational,
multicultural, multireligious, etc., and English, French and
Portuguese have a strong position among us. My argument is
that you write in the language you are most competent.
“For me, the definition of African literature has to
do, therefore, with the internal reference of the literature.
If you write about, say, African realities at the pre-colonial,
colonial and postcolonial, and you have an intimate understanding
as a writer, then you are producing African literature. There
must be some kind of sensibility that comes through and some
kind of world vision. If they come through, then you are writing
African literature,” he explains, barely withdrawing
from his fixated gaze.
The professor’s ambition at Ibadan was to produce a
new generation of critics and scholars. Sadly, the conditions
in most Nigerian universities have forced them to the West,
prompting the observation from some writers based in Nigeria
that ours is a generation in search of critics. Irele agrees
with that only to an extent, because he believes “there
are still lots of scholars writing, even widening the area
of discourse. It’s not that bad. I really admire the
younger scholars, because despite the enormous problems they
encounter, they are still producing.”
He, however, admits that in the 1970s and early 1980s, there
used to be a tremendous intellectual atmosphere at Ibadan,
Calabar, Ife, and so on, with conferences taking place, which
hardly take place now. He responds with a subsonic suddenness,
expressing an expressive gesture of ecstasy when you ask his
opinion on new writing from Africa: “We have some very
good writers now, Chimamanda Adichie and Sefi Atta, for example.
The women have come up quite a lot. To tell the truth, there
is much more new writing coming from francophone Africa. Really
incredible. I have a difficulty keeping up with all of them.
I am beginning to learn Portuguese to read literature from
Portuguese speaking Africa.”
Irele does not strain at the leash when it comes to discarding
the application of the theories of structuralism and deconstruction
in African literary criticism. “I did my work without
them, but they are useful. I am not so sure about deconstruction.
I think Derida is important in certain ways. They are very
technical, but the whole point is to break into discourse,
the way discourse itself becomes autonomous, despite the subject.
“One theorist I definitely admire is Foucult with the
power of his language. I have read him in French, and he is
wonderful. Also, you have Edward Said. If you a scholar, especially
a university scholar in America, you have to read those people,
because they are references you use in teaching. But, as an
African, you then decide whether it is something that is useful
for you or not,” he says cautiously.
Asking him whether post-colonialist theory is the way forward
for the criticism of African literature is like asking him
to open the Pandora’s box. “The term itself is
ambiguous,” he begins. “I have never liked it
because of the way Aschroft and others defined it. I don’t
agree that anything that has been written since colonialism
is post-colonial.
That’s too broad. Post-colonialism, for me, is what
came after independence. But I think we are trying to avoid
the term ‘colonial literature’, which was the
literature of the Europeans. I think the term itself (post-colonialism)
has to be theorized a little bit more. I don’t use that
term, and I don’t consider myself to be a post-colonial
critic. I began to write long before the term was invented,
and I have never felt concerned about it,” he says,
maintaining a dignified aloofness.
It is equally difficult to get him to set a new direction
for African writers in the 21st century. “You can’t
prophesy,” he intones. “If you read Chimamanda
Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus or Sefi Atta’s Everything
Good Will Come, you realize that these writers are doing what
we did not anticipate in the 1960s and 1970s. The same thing
with Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. There would be a
certain continuity. The new writers must have read the older
ones and carried forward. It is very difficult to predict
the direction the writers should go. So, it’s impossible
for the critic to say the writer should write like this or
like that. Writers themselves would decide.”
While he cannot prescribe for the writer, he would like the
borders of literary criticism to diversify to include the
broad critical enterprise – looking at our society,
the problems of modernity, which will include politics, governance,
economics, and so on. “I think a critic must be aligned
and acquire a certain conceptual background to be able to
attend to a work like Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will
Come, a work bristling with social problems.”
Reminded of the complaints by new Nigerian writers based at
home of the dearth of critical essays on their works by Nigerian
scholar-critics, who “over-celebrate the classics”,
he blames lack of journals for the imbalance. “In America,
Britain, France, etc., new works are fed into circulation
through journals. I agree we must attend to the younger writers
and give them exposure,” he says, “but you can’t
write a long essay on writers who have only written one work,
like Chimamanda Adichie and Uzodinma Iweala. You have to wait
and see how they develop before you write a long critical
work on them. Instead, you can write a long review,”
he posits.
A section of the Nigerian literary community has condemned
Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation for its unusual pidgin
English usage. But Professor Irele, who read the manuscript
before it came out, contends that there is nothing like standard
pidgin. “Iweala didn’t think that pidgin English
[Nigeria’s] was an expressive capacity to capture the
reality on ground. The curious things about that book are
the brutality, the fatality, the realism, the poetic rendering,
and so on. Iweala [in writing Beasts of No Nation] had to
find some kind of language that could do that and also express
the character’s fragmented consciousness. I think it
is a solution. What these critics are looking for is something
that is authentic, but you can write pidgin in all kinds of
ways. I don’t think there is a standard pidgin now,”
he says with finality. |
