My war with JP Clark
By HENRY AKUBUIRO (akuhen@sunnewsonline.com)
Sunday,
February 24, 2008
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•Chris
Anyokwu
Photo: Sun News Publishing
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With four offerings in two years, Dr. Chris Anyokwu of the
University of Lagos is following the tradition of the Ezeigbos,
Kareen-Aribisalas and Eghaghas, scholar-writers from the university’s
department of English who are turning the citadel of learning
into a hive of creative writers reminiscent of the popular
Nsukka and Ibadan schools.
In his oeuvre include three plays, Stolen Future, Ufuoma and
A Parade of Madmen, and a prose offering, Ol’ Soja and
Other Stories. Spare your judgment until you hear his defence,
if you think he is guilty of prolificity: all the works published
so far were written years back but were not published because
he was honing his craft and undergoing a process of intellectual
maturation as a student studying for his BA, MA and PhD. With
the acquisition of all the academic accomplishments he desired
comes a sufficient measure of self-confidence, which has made
him to explode in creative writing.
Dr. Anyokwu wears medicated lens, and he radiates a bookish
aura as he sits at a table in his office on campus this morning.
Considering that his published works are mainly plays for
a lecturer who teaches mainly poetry, you begin to wonder
why they are not in his preferred genre. “Fundamentally,
I am a poet,” his voice echoes in the hush as if to
assert his latitude. There is modicum of bliss as he announces
his forthcoming poetry collection, “Currently, I am
collating my poems.”
Never mind that his oeuvre is not teeming with poetry volumes.
“Don’t forget that late Chris Okigbo only had
a published work, Labyrinths, while we have some poets who
have more than ten collections and nobody knows them. The
important thing for a poet is to write his poems and go over
them several times. For me, poetry is the most difficult form
to write. People think because you can string together words,
you can go away with doggerels and versified prose and call
it poetry,” he tells me. On the other hand, writing
plays comes to him naturally because it is much easier for
him to write than writing poems and prose.
As a scholar-writer who makes the best of both worlds, does
he share the view by Elechi Amadi that scholarship is a distraction
from creative writing? He differs that they complement each
other. “I don’t believe him, because what we call
scholarship is normal pursuit of intellectual research, and
when you indulge in a rigorous pursuit of knowledge, it accrues
to you ultimately as a writer in the sense that it becomes
a cornucopia of material which you will now convert into creative
work. So, if you want to go into creative writing without
extensive and intensive research, your work will not endure.”
Steering a middle course is his position on the exchange between
Professor Tony Afejuku of the University of Benin and the
veteran writer, Elechi Amadi, over the superiority of the
scholar-writer or the writer. “I guess what is important
is the innate talent,” he hints. “Soyinka says
in Death and the King’s Horseman and Kongi’s Harvest
that ‘a man is born to his art or he is not’.
So, writing, for me, is inborn; it is a gift; it really doesn’t
matter whether or not you read English or Literature to be
a writer. If you have the predilection for writing, you will
be a better writer, but it pays better if you are able to
hone your art through normal university training in a university
reading English or whatever. But that doesn’t mean that
it will make you a better writer than the person who didn’t
read it.”
He doesn’t support the view that new Nigerian writing
is rudderless for failing to adhere to literary schools, “The
idea of schools or labels is distracting and ultimately diversionary.
You don’t go all the way to put pen to paper having
a set of artistic tenets or convention by which a particular
school is known guiding you when you write. The so-called
Metaphysical poets wrote the way the spirit guided them. The
English Romanticists –Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley,
Keats, Blake and Byron (the big 6) wrote the way they felt
like writing. That’s why we have great variety and individuality
among them.
“It was the generation after them that had the perspective
and distance to look at their works with totality and said,
‘Let’s give them the name, the Romanticist school.
For the Metaphysical poets, it was Samuel Johnson that derogatorily
dismissed them as Metaphysical writers. So, you realize that,
when you look at literary history, writers didn’t write
in the past trying to follow a particular school; they wrote
what engaged their creative imagination. Therefore, the idea
of trying to pigeonhole writers into schools, for me, is wrong-headed
and sheer love for controversy,” he thunders.
It is doubtful if Anyokwu is in the good books of the playwright,
JP Clark. The veteran writer, Sunday Sun learnt, did not take
kindly to the remarks by Anyokwu that his dramaturgy is classicized
in an interview with the paper in 2006. “When I granted
that interview, I didn’t go all the way to denigrate
any of our predecessors in the business of penmanship, least
of all Prof, JP Clark Bekederemo. JP Clark is somebody I had
much respect for.
I wrote on Osundare’s poetry for my PhD, and I realized
that JP Clark rubbed on Osundare a great deal. In fact, Osundare
considered him, and I agree with him, the most lyrical poet
in Nigeria. I also believe that his work on oral literature,
Ozidi, for instance, is also unparalleled and incomparable,
but coming to the area of poetry, Prof. Femi Osofisan reviewed
all his artistic oeuvre and came up with an argument that
there seems to be all kinds of ambivalence, ambiguity, silences
and contradictions, and what have you.
“In that interview, I only considered some of his plays
as tending towards what I call classicization, that is, trying
to sound very classicist. When you poetize for the sake of
it, the stage will become a little stylized and people might
consider you as hankering after the Greek model unnecessarily
without sufficiently domesticating it within the intellectual
ambience of the Ijaw-Nigeria environment.
“I wasn’t dismissing his drama, but comparing
him to Soyinka and Rotimi, I believe that Soyinka and Rotimi
have had greater influence on my intellectual and creative
formation than he. So, I wasn’t writing him off completely,”
he clarifies urgently.
Elechi Amadi wants us to believe that ethnic factor determines
the extent of critical attention a writer gets in Nigeria.
Anyokwu is not in tandem with his logic, “There is no
truth in that. As far as I am concerned, university scholars
like to write papers on established authors to gain academic
promotion and preferment. It is only natural. So, if Chinua
Achebe happens to be an Igbo man and people are writing their
papers on him, it is purely an accident of history. If Chris
Anyokwu writes a number of works which people consider good
enough to merit extensive, intensive and sustained scholarly
attention, it has nothing to do with ethnicity or provincialism
at all.
“I don’t believe in what he says. That is just
trying to be mischievous for the sake of it. Amadi’s
works are good, and if they are not getting the same attention
as Soyinka and Achebe, he should bid his time; he will get
his dues in due course.”
War cannot be considered a novel theme in literature, but
it cannot be said to be overflogged, as far as Anyokwu is
concerned, for it forms the basis of one of his plays, A Parade
of Madmen. “How can it be said to be overflogged when
war is what engages the attention of the international community,
especially with regard to Africa? I feel that so long as man
is fighting his fellow man, we should continue to interrogate
this menace until we are able to wrestle it to the ground,
maybe resolve it and have a better world.”
Responding to what fascinates him about the campus setting,
which recurs in most of his works, he says, “I guess
that a writer should write about what he knows best. It tasks
less on the imagination when you write from experience.”
He has lived in the university environment for close to twenty
years. “I know that if you consider the dialectics between
the gown and town, in a normal society, the gown is supposed
to tell the town what direction it is supposed to take. We
believe that the gown should continue to provide leadership,
moral direction and ultimately shape the collective destiny
of the nation. So, if we get it right in the gown, the town
can sleep with its eyes closed.”
Fifty years after Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, can we
say we have told the African story well? “I guess the
African tale is a continuum,” he remarks. “People
have been telling the African story the best way they know
how. Don’t forget that the African story is like the
proverbial great mask dancing. So, we have to look at the
form from different perspectives. In telling the story, we
might cancel out one another; we might blur one another’s
perspectives, points of views, etcetera. It is the more the
merrier. But the important thing is that I believe the African
story is being told. The emphasis is the process. Achebe,
Soyinka, Chimamanda, Ezeigbo, Anyokwu and others are telling
the African story,” his voive trails of with a whiff
of confidence. |
