Prof. Chimalum Nwankwo’s track in African literary intellection is oft cited globally. A former Chair, Department of English, North Carolina State University at Greensboro, USA, Nwankwo now shares his time between America and Nigeria following his retirement. The scholar-poet recently flew back to Nigeria to present a seninal paper entitled “Playing Heirophant for Gabriel Okara: Deathless Poet of Essences” at the University of Port Harcourt, in honour of the deceased, first generation, Nigerian writer, Gabriel Okara. HENRY AKUBUIRO chatted with him on a myriad of issues raised in the paper pertaining to African literary evolution.
What’s your idea of a hierophant?
A hierophant is like a mass servant in Roman Catholic terms, a role more commonly associated with the shrines in ancient civilisations. I loved Gabriel Okara and his work to the extent that, as our great pioneer poet and now ancestor, he lives in my heart like a great priest. There is no reason why I would easily accept to fly in from the USA to give that keynote at his memorial conference.
To what extent was Okara a mystical, esoteric poet?
It was actually Theo Vincent who first described Okara as esoteric, though he did not pursue that term deeply enough for young scholars and readers of Okara to appreciate that fact better. I admire the Delta people as much as I admire the Yoruba for tenaciously hanging on to their deep cultural foundations and mystical inclinations. My strange Igbo people say much of our Igbo foundations are “ihe Ekwensu”. How in the world can you, as an African, make deep statements about your world and your people without those foundations of primordial and autochthonous powers? How can you write poems, like “The Call of the River Nun”, unless you really are in sync with your roots and the deep pulsing of ancestral forces? Okara’s most powerful poems are nothing short of mystical. They probe and affect you with those probes like Ben Okiri, another deeply rooted Spirit, also does in The Famished Road…Scholars familiar with works like The Hermetica and The Kybalion will understand what I am talking about.
Brenda Osbey chronicles Gabriel Okara as the first modern African poet. What defines his modernity, compared to the writings of Dennis Osadebey and Nnamdi Azikiwe?
A respectable and intelligent modernity is a harvest of the forces of the past in the quest for weapons with which to stabilise our troubled present. Western modernity returned to the Golden Age of Rome and Greece for the neo-classical impregnation of the present. An unintelligent modernity, the sort which you find all over Africa, even by older African scholars, shamelessly imagine that we dropped from the sky, or, indeed, we were discovered in actual fact by the white man. We were not human beings managing our existence quite effectively before the West arrived. I do not really blame the ineffective pioneers like Osadebey or Azikiwe when it comes to their trying to be poets. They tried to replicate what they gathered from hymn books and …twinkle, twinkle little star. The people I really slash mercilessly are people who have seen and know better than all that and still think that such creative tendencies define poetry. They never read or heard of Olaudah Equiano, the famous freed Igbo slave, who proudly wrote in his autobiography that his Igbo nation was full of poets and musicians. I don’t think he meant they were producing rhymes and jingles and hymnals and such antiquated stuff.
You hinted that no African writer can escape “the cosmo-historical character” of the agon with the West. Why is it inevitable?
I can only forgive those born blind and deaf and dumb who do not know that most of the problems in Africa are results of the nature of the unfortunate contact with the Western world and the trauma of colonialism and imperialism. The West simply rolled over our ancestors with their fantastic stories of their here and hereafter. Our ancestors were not ready or as equipped as the Asians. The Asians guarded what they have or had very aggressively because they had matching or superior answers for what the white man came to sell to them to deceive and confuse them and soften them up for the cunning and ruthless exploitation which followed. They took the technology of the West and dumped all else.
That is why, in most Asian countries and their massive populations, traditional indigenous Religions remain rock solid. So the tenets are respected and help the stabilisation of consciousness and the necessary cosmic identification. The secret human fear that there may be something you do not know watching your missteps…Do you know that black Africans are the only race in the world that worship alien deities …? And see, my friend, how that alone has dangerously affected even the polity of a country so richly endowed like Nigeria. In Nigeria, we neither fear God nor the laws! Those are forces upon which other cultures and peoples build or cultivate the honesty and sincerity and dedicated spirits which inculcate what you may call the sense of nation. We respect nothing except the idiotic readings of God and tribe. No serious writer can tell you that he or she is unaware of this fact.
You drew analogies between Okara and his foreign counterparts, like Mo Yan, Alfred Tennyson, Federco Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Yasunari Kawabata. What do you think accounts for the fascination of these writers with mysticism?
These are all writers who know or knew how to use the past. China’s Mo Yan does not just critique modern China; he goes back into the deep lessons from all facets of ancient Chinese culture, be it magic or witchcraft or the ancient sense of family order and organisation and gerontocracy, and so forth. Lord Tennyson takes you back into the ancient will of the English and the nature of love and order and loyalty in mythical realms like King Arthur’s Camelot. Lorca finds glory and honour in the rugged machismo of Spanish matadors and bullfighting. Neruda returns to Machu Picchu and the wisdom and valour and mysticism of the Inca. Kawabata informs of the beauty and mysticism of The House of Tea with their artifacts and extraordinary rituals. What do we return to? Okara digs into the Delta soul with their beautiful love of water spirits and so forth. My own people return to Gilgamesh and Sumeria and hymnals and twinkle twinkle little star and even win prizes for such idiotic adventures and doodles and scribbles…
Another revelatory thing you did in this paper is the appraisal of Okara with his African contemporaries. What are the distinctions that mark him out from other continental bards?
In the great balances which define human compassion and accommodation and temperance, the things which demand a negotiation of our differences while asserting that, even when we do not agree, let us live and let live, the closest to Okara are Soyinka, Brutus, and Senghor. The great champion who stands apart in my estimation is Tchicaya U’Tamsi. You may defer to Okigbo in musical charm and verbal glitz, but, as a trouble making critic, my interest in lyricism is marginal when ever I am dealing with the human condition. And that is what attracts me to Okara’s work.
You have also expressed a preference for Soyinka’s drama partly because of the “parochial Yoruba cosmology”. Can you elaborate on how this thread is positive vis-à-vis the “Ogunism” of his poetry?
Soyinka’s drama is assertive. The mystical underpinnings do not genuflect to any culture. The white man who gave him the Nobel Prize is aware of that fact. Ogun is as good as Jehovah ,if not better. The secret behind that posture is that, “Looki here!” as Fela would say, so are the Yoruba! Africans need to be thinking like that when they collide with foreign ways. Most of us are petrified by alien ways and things…!
Again, you slammed Leopord Senghor’s Negritudist humanism as one-dimensional. How did you arrive at that conclusion?
Please, note that that is not totally. A large part of Senghor’s aesthete is ideologically or philosophically static. I do not like fixation. I like the dynamic, the discursive, and the expansive. I enjoy things which grow in whorls or in resilient concentricity. Like Okara, I like when the front is aware of the back. We are all simultaneously good and bad!
Some critics, like Adrian Roscoe, consider Okara’s The Voice as a major artistic failure. Do you share the same sentiment?
Roscoe was one of the careless or reckless early critics of African writing that sounded crazy in their ignorance and condescension and insolent paternalism. Forgive and ignore that kind of shock from novelty!
In what sense does Okara qualify as an angry poet, as you suggested in that paper?
When he innocuously associates Western affectation with “laughter with ice block cold teeth…”, you cannot miss that point about anger. There are numerous other such references in his poetry. I mentioned that in more openly bitter black poets like African-American/Jamaican Claude MacKay, such reactions emerge more explosively. Okara was clearly a very controlled irate poet.
Surprisingly, you describe the trailblazing Makerere Conference as controversial. In what sense was it controversial?
No quag or quandary offers an easy escape route. Some of the participants suggested that, in order to produce authentic African literature, writers must write in indigenous African languages. It is controversial because you are saying that Nigerians should write in at least three hundred different languages. You are just opening an ugly bag of political, economic and epistemological crises.
What is your stand on the age long English-indigenous language divide in African literature?
For now, the debate is unnecessary. Let Africa survive first. That kind of issue can come later, much later. Language, to me, is like a car. Understand how to use it first for your immediate pressing tasks. If you decide later to make a car which you can drive inside your house or over water, that is another issue altogether.
I have heard young Nigerian writers lament that older critics hardly pay attention to new writers, except award winners celebrated in the West. Is your generation of critics overwhelmed by the works of older generation of writers?
Books market themselves. Those award winners have generated curiosity as a result of their fame. You do not become famous for nothing. There is no such thing like being overwhelmed. There are reasons why the older generation of writers still compel attention. Quality remains the issue from any perspective you bring to bear on that situation.
How important is it for a writer to master the literary tradition before his? There seems to be a disconnect in the writings of the new generation, especialy the internet generation…
I have observed elsewhere that most young Nigerian writers do not know that most writers around the world begin the business of writing by imitation of those you call the masters. Watch first what other writers have done before you. Learn from their errors or learn from their successes. Try and figure out how to fit into what we call the generational call, and then take it from there. That relationship with the past is as vital to the new writer’s relationship with history.
Is Chimalum Nwankwo a controversial scholar as insinuated in certain quarters?
I don’t know what they mean by “controversial”. In private or public, my friends and family know me as always outspoken. What I say always is as important to me as how I say it. Besides my late mother teaching me always to speak without fear, I am also aware that I am defining myself, my character, my vision of life and the world. I, therefore, do not like being misunderstood. I am also aware that some of the most important spirits who have visited this planet did not write much. They spoke much more than they wrote, very clearly and honestly; Socrates, Confucius, ahhh… Jesus Christ. And they were all controversial!!! Writing, especially as a scholar, doubles the opportunity to be clearer about life and the world.