Ernest Nnamdi Onuoha, a novelist, poet and public analyst, is a former legislator. A rotarian and member of the Association of Nigerian Authors, he is the author of Challenges of Existence (1999), Biafra the Victims (2012), Tomorrow in Our Hands (2013), Beauty in the Rubbles (2018). He is also published in several journals and anthologies.
Onuoha is currently an assistant General Manager, Sales and Marketing, Southeast, Dana Pharmaceuticals Ltd, and spoke with Henry Akubuiro at the recent ANA Convention in Abuja on the burden of Nigerian writers.
You are one of the third generation Nigerian writers who felt unease with Professor Charles Nnolim’s essay on the emerging Fleshly School of Nigerian literature years ago, have we now moved away from fleshly concerns in our writings?
At the Wole Soyinka colloquium after that Nnolim outburst at ANA Imo conference in 2006, this issue came up, and many third generation Nigerian writers were uncomfortable with that appellation and definition of their generation. We were of the opinion that Prof Nnolim’s view wasn’t balanced; he must have read one or two novels tilted towards that. Their thinking was that old generation writers, even when their own works were fleshly, gave themselves a pass mark. Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine is a romantic novel, but critics didn’t say anything fleshly about it. If you look at Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, there are a lot of romantic scenes there, but, because they were written by that calibre of writers and they were the earlier generation of writers and the literary critics were of their generation, they looked the other way.
For those of us in the third generation, we are suffering from unfortunate parents or what Wole Soyinka described as a wasted generation. We are the unfortunate children of unfortunate parents, according to Professor Biodun Jeyifo, and these issues haven’t allowed us a breathing space. So we are much more interested in turning around the society we met, to even go back to what it was when the old generation was writing, because, at that particular time, they ate three square meals at the university and had more than thee jobs waiting for them on graduation, which are not so today.
That’s why, in most of today’s poetry works, you see many lamentations. What is happening is that, the older you become, the more you get a sedative view of works of the younger writers, because you are now on post retirement. What doesn’t capture your imagination is seen as abnormal.
At the 41st ANA Convention recently, Prof Ernest Emenyonu made a case for students, from the primary to the university level, to be compulsorily exposed to literature in indigenous languages. What’s your take?
He was saying that the federal government should create it as a policy to encourage literature in Indigenous languages, that it should be in the curriculum. What’s happening now is that children are not even encouraged to speak their indigenous tongues, because their parents want them to speak in English. Hence, if a child speaks fluent native language, he is seen as having gone to school for nothing, which is a wrong notion, and that’s creating a problem and eventually a cultural crisis that Achebe cited when the colonial masters came to Africa. He said that they had put a knife to what unites us. The dominance of the English language has actually created a cultural crisis, and it requires a painstaking policy of the government to reverse it. Indigenous language doesn’t stop you from knowing mathematics, physics and chemistry, but allows you to have the vibrancy of wisdom that comes from your culture, and it creates a progressive culture where tradition is transmitted from one generation to another.
If you look at the major literary prizes in Nigeria, there is none given to writers writing in indigenous languages. We need to impress on the parents that their Indigenous language is a part of their children’s studies.
Let’s revisit the theme of this year’s ANA Convention, “Literature and National Consciousness: The Story as a Catalyst”. How well has literature, past and present, interrogated activism towards social economical and political emancipation of Nigerian society?
What comes to my mind is the writers’ burden, because the writers are part of the society, and a progressive society where there is economic freedom, liberty, cultural progressivism and all that follows a normal developing society is all that everybody wants. So writers, through various works, have tried to interrogate and reproach the slide of Nigeria’s social, cultural and political society, and it has affected most of their works. Even the first generation of our writers showed this revulsion in the slide taking place then before and immediately after the independence.
Chinua Achebe titled his first novel, Things Fall Apart, and he was looking at the collapse of our culture, because of the inversion of colonialism on every facet of our life. After independence, politics and politicians turned things upside down, and there was massive corruption, which led to military coups and a civil war. By then, writers had taken this burden and became prophetic and wrote books on that. Professor Achebe wrote The Trouble with Nigeria. Professor Chukwuemeka Ike wrote Toads for Supper. Then you begin to wonder why these titles instead of beautiful titles.
Going back to the English medieval period where Thomas Hardy wrote Far from the Madding Crowd and T. S. Eliot wrote a play, Murder in the Cathedral, on his aversion for the interplay of politics between the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Political dominance was trying to take over from religion at that time, leading to the murder of Thomas Becket.
Coming to Nigeria, probably that must have caught the imagination of Prof Ola Rotimi when he wrote The God’s Are Not to Blame. You begin to wonder what’s the source of our problem? Is it from the gods or from ourselves? When you go through the play and the fall of the king, you discover that it was not the gods that caused his downfall but himself. The problem of Nigeria today is not caused by the colonial masters, because we have passed that period and taken over the reigns of power. Now, there are no gods to blame. This country is richly endowed with mineral resources. Writers are, therefore, finding it difficult that we are not able to put our acts together. They come in various ways through teachings and entertainment by bringing the attention of Nigerians that we are not on the part of recovery. Rather, we are on the road to disappearing.
So our writers use drama, poetry and prose to express these things to the Nigerian public; we are no longer at ease, as Chinua Achebe said. Unfortunately, the society we live in has degraded downward to the point that even the development of the minds derived from literature is no more common, for the public has a revulsion for reading. You will go to a beautiful house and you will find a wine bar but hardly a bookshelf. The society is drifting to alcoholism, ready to put money into liquor rather than buy a book that costs only N2000 or N3000. I have encountered friends at book presentations who said even the books they had, they were yet to open any of the chapters. So you find a situation where the writers have a big burden. In every nation, writers have championed the cause of progressivism. That’s why we don’t actually aim at making money. We are much more interested in a progressive society, a society that’s there for all and all is there for the society.
In this period, writers have continued to show their reprobation for and interrogation of the society they have seen in their various works. It was Ben Okri who wrote a book entitled The Famished Road. If you look at the title of Henry Akubuiro novel, Prodigals in Paradise, then look at the biblical concept of the prodigals who squandered his father’s wealth unjustly and became impoverished. That’s exactly what Nigeria has done since the discovery of oil in the country. Since the 1960s, we have made so much money but have squandered it. So you find writers trying to chronicle these issues through various themes, trying to be the ifa oracle to bring back the society from total collapse, as we have seen it today. The country is in near collapse. That’s why there is no serious writer who can close his mind when writing any work and become unaffected. It’s not possible.