ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Opinion category.

Class: Week Two

Language use and language attitudes is a very interesting subject for me. More than any other classes I’ve ever attended in school, I found the sociolinguistics classes to be the most fun. Everything in it relates to something out of the class into the real world. From discussing language attitudes and language variations to examining language use and the ever expanding argument about what is a language and what is a dialect, I’ve always found things to relate to. The downside of this renewed delight in the sociolinguistics class is the realization that I’ve been here before. It’s new only because it’s a new, graduate class. It is old because I encountered it in my undergraduate days as well. It is fulfilling however because the examples are fresh, and so are the perspectives of classmates. And there is always something to discuss.

It also helps that the teacher is originally from Turkey and was brought up speaking British English. Words like “pavement”, “veranda”, “parlor” and “groundnut” are slowly returning into my vocabulary in the presence of someone who might actually understand them. I’m also learning new ones like “griddle cakes”, “goobers”, “scallions”, among many others. One of the most positive features of (my) American classes has to be the presence of people who speak a different kind of English, and come with a different kind of linguistic outlook. Nothing beats that.

The Enemy, Homogeneity

Occasionally, we make the mistake of assuming that we have successfully quelled the silly arguments in favour of language (and attendant cultural) homogeneity as a substitute for the current plurality of worldview on the African continent. Last week, I read another one of those articles, this time continuing the Nwaubani line of thought that seeks to keep local languages like Hausa, Igbo or Yoruba away from literature because they are regional. Nwaubani the writer, had written in a disturbing New York Times opinion piece that “I should say that Ngugi remains one of my literary sweethearts, and he’s hardly a conformist. Many fans have extolled his brave decision to write in his mother tongue, Kikuyu, instead of English. If he truly desires a Nobel, I can’t help but wish him one. But I shudder to imagine how many African writers would be inspired by the prize to copy him. Instead of acclaimed Nigerian writers, we would have acclaimed Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa writers. We suffer enough from tribal differences already. This is not the kind of variety we need.” Many people have responded to that slight. Mine is here.

Now this other new article stretches the argument to even more ridiculous lengths arguing that homogeneity (my own word to describe what he prescribes: putting English language first because of its role as a language of governance and communication) is far more preferable alternative in literature because we do not have a culture sufficient to bear the burden of expressing our own thoughts. Nothing could be more preposterous. I’m surprised that the New York Times hasn’t published the article yet. Listen to him:

“One very important point we all tend to overlook is that what constitutes a strong culture and language are the conglomerate strength and power of their civilisation. By civilisation, I mean the economy, technology, politics, religion, and commerce. Our civilisation is either borrowed or enforced. No language can strongly support a culture that lacks the commensurate strength to sustain it.”

What he was trying to say, of course, is that since much of Africa has been colonized and given a new language, the old languages have failed in their duties to defend the worldview, and should therefore be trashed. I’ve never heard a sillier argument in self flagellation. He continues:

“The English language dominates modern technology, market, economy, and even religion. Africa does not have any strong indigenous religion; no indigenous technology to compete with Western ones, no strong economies and markets. So, how do we expect to build a strong literary heritage that will identify with our weak indigenous languages without recourse to the cultural realities of our present existence?”

And more:

“What Ngugi and his supporters have failed to understand is that language is arbitrary. A stone is a stone in whatever language one calls it. The picture is the substance of language. So, whether one calls it stone in English or in another language, the same substance is conveyed. There’s a universality of substance in every language and that is what the writer should strive to communicate.”

A stone is definitely not always a stone. It’s either a pebble or a rock and few languages are capable of expressing it in the same way. What’s more, the literary history of much of Africa’s past is oral, is rich, is old and has as much value for humanity as any other. To insist that they don’t deserve expression just because of a colonial conquest must be what Fela called the second slavery. This article, like Nwaubani’s original piece, missed the mark. It’s crux, which argues that English language should be used because of its superiority of a backing culture, is absurd. “Anyone trying to write and reach a national Nigerian audience would be quite unserious writing in any of the native languages.” This makes no sense. Neither does this: “Rather than begin to romance with the cold smoke of the past, African writers should immerse themselves into the spirit of the times and begin to use the available tools in their disposal to call humankind back to our common humanity.”

Don’t get me wrong. Writing in English has come to stay. What we should object to is this thoughtless insistence that writing in any other language amounts to romancing with “the cold smoke of the past.” What? This is the exact argument that has turned more than half of the current generation of Nigerians into partial monolingual morons who who speak only English language, AND DON’T SPEAK IT WELL! What exactly is wrong with writing in a non-national language? Has writing in the native language removed anything from the depth and reach of the literatures of D.O. Fagunwa, or J.F. Odunjo, or has writing in Hausa removed from the influences of the many Hausa literatures said to be popular in Northern Nigeria? What of Onitsha market literatures that are written in mostly market language accessible to even the most uneducated readers? The argument that Nwaubani makes about having everyone write in English in order to foster national unity rather than tribal identities fails because literature is an expression of self first before it becomes a commercial product meant to reach a wide audience. A trubadour will sing in the language of his audience first before he thinks of others. This is not tribalism. It is self expression.

For, no matter how much we apply ourselves to English, we may never be able to speak it like a native speaker. Language carries with it not just the tools of expression, but a worldview that you cannot share even if you share the tools of expression. I speak English, but it’s not mine. If I speak and write Yoruba, or Igbo, better to express my worldview, it is the best medium in which I should write. As much as English is a uniting language, our inability to use our own languages in literature today will one day come back to limit even our use of English to express the basic realities of our everyday life. The fact is that the world- view from which we derive our identities are couched in the language with which we express them. We need as much literature in English published in Nigeria as literature published in local languages, or else, when the local languages eventually die off, we will find out that English is not sufficient to rescue our thought and identity, and we’d have lost it all. The problem is that then, it would be too late to do anything about it. Or maybe it already is.

Growing up to ’11: A Nigerian Story

My first memories of elections in Nigeria takes me to June 1993 when the biggest political event of my generation took place. Before then, the most memorable memory I had was the death of someone called “The best president Nigeria never had.” That was Chief Obafemi Awolowo who, as the premier of the Western Region (another name for an area that covers all of Yorubaland), brought the first television station in Africa to Ibadan, my hometown, in 1959.

When Awolowo died in 1987, I was only six years old. Not technically though, since the man died around July – I think. My sixth birthday was to be in September. The most memorable thing I remembered from that day was lazing around my father’s living room and watching on television the lying-in-state of the man that came to define Nigeria’s postcolonial political history. The corpse laid in a glass casket. He had his wig on, and a pair of glasses. I also remember someone asking how they intended to inter someone with his spectacles on. I was too young to make sense of it all – the man’s political dominance and influence – but I heard his name a lot. It would take me years of research (reading his memoirs which my father gave me, among many other publications) to know all I needed to know. Father also made a record album in honour of Awolowo a few months later.

Now in 1993, I was much older. I was twelve and in secondary school. Much of my political consciousness came from rhetorics of elder brothers and their friends, and the media. MKO Abiola had promised to abolish poverty – sort of like promising to make it snow in Nigeria. When his election was annulled by the military dictator, and riots broke out, school was closed, and students spilled to the streets in protest. University students led protests and came to get us out of our schools. We all spilled in the street and fought with police and military men. It was exhilarating for me. I didn’t have much political consciousness to have been able to take sides, but the crises charged me up. We were tear gassed, and shot at. We walked great with friends and fellow rebels from school back home to the embrace of worried parents. It was the best of times for a curious almost teenager. It was also the worst of times for the country. A year later, there was a change of government, from one military dictatorship to another, and darkness descended on the country.

In 1998, I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Sani Abacha was dead, and I didn’t believe it. He had after all survived many rumours of death. A day before, Pope John Paul II had just left Abuja after a state visit (and also to plead for clemency for the lives of a bunch of military men sentenced to death for plotting a coup d’etaat.) The Pope wore white. Abacha wore black. They were both was on the NTA network news and Abacha looked as sick as Tell Magazine of a few weeks earlier said he was, but he looked strong and resolute as well, and mean. But he died. A few hours later, all the suya sellers were nowhere to be found. Their stalls and sheds had been destroyed by happy citizens giddy to be finally free from military dictatorship. Exactly one month later, MKO Abiola, the presumed winner of the election had died of poisoning after meeting with Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations and some other “American” visitors. Conspiracy theories abound, but by the end of the year, it was clear that the campaign message “Hope” from 1993 had gone forever.

And 1999 came, time for the new gentle looking military man to go. He had set machineries in place for democracy to return. I was out of secondary school. I was teaching in a primary school in Ibadan earning the lowest payable wage for that position and qualification while I waited for news of my admission into the University. The candidates were Olusegun Obasanjo (a former military ruler and a UN/Africa statesman), and Olu Falae, an economist: both Yorubas chosen to appease the region after the 1993 annulment and subsequent miscarriage of justice. The South-West voted for Falae. I wasn’t eighteen yet, so I didn’t vote, but I hoped that Falae would win. He didn’t. Obasanjo won from votes from all the other parts of the country. Again in 2003, Obasanjo won again for the second term. In 2007, he handed over to Yar’adua whose deputy was Goodluck Jonathan. Yaradua died last year in Saudi Arabia after a protracted illness. Goodluck Jonathan took over and has since consolidated his hold on power. I am here in the United States as a graduate student.

Last night, as I listened to the result of the votes in the primaries of the country’s largest political party, I was reminded of the memories of my participation in the politics of Nigeria: the sweat, the riots, the rhetorics, the fiery but always independent media, and the national obsession with the figures and players. It isn’t “Hope ’93” all over again, because now I can discern and see through songs and slogans of “MKO: Action! Abiola: Progress!! Na im be the hope for better tomorrow!!!” or Abiola=good and Tofa=bad etc. The coming election that will likely find me in an American class discussing language and society will be between candidates that we hope to get a chance to question, and examine. They will get to power again through our votes, but for the first time, I hope to get a chance to take them to task on what they would do: about Jos, about electricity, about health and higher education, and about a better environment for the people of the Niger Delta and other ethnic minorities. I have come of age, and so has my vote, and I am not giving it away for free, if I’m giving it away at all. I hope that there’d be televised and online debates as well as town hall meetings to question the candidates and ask them how they plan to move the country forward.

I’m proud of the progress taking place in Nigeria today and I hope that there would be public televised and online debates to listen to the candidates as well as town hall meetings to question them as to how they plan to solve problems. If I could go back in time, what a pleasure it would be to relive those experiences again, rebelling, challenging authorities and paying my dues of youth on the streets of a country that I love.

Scheduling a Semester

One of the more challenging parts of the beginning of a semester is figuring out a right schedule so as to prevent a case when each day is spent trying to catch up with the previous one. A graduate student who is also a graduate assistant faces the challenge of being able to balance his time in order to satisfy both his employers and his academic sponsors. It makes no sense to be a stellar employee and then become a poor student. I’ve always wondered how people who do more than one job (and have families, children etc) cope with being graduate students at the same time. Imagine having two young children, two or three jobs, and three classes a semester. But it’s America. Being resilient might just be the most important trait to possess.

I taught the first Foreign Language Yoruba class yesterday. It was mainly introductory, and it lasted an hour. In my experience, the first class is always the most crucial, especially for students hoping to see if the class is worth taking at all or not. The pattern is also always the same: the strange man walks in to a full class of staring students. They’re all silent and wait for him to break the ice. He stands there for a moment, thinks of the first words to say, and then walks back to the blackboard to write out a list of key words that they would need to remember – Yoruba, Nigeria, West Africa, 30 million speakers, Wole Soyinka, Hakeem Olajuwon, Sade Adu, Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje… – and then returns, by which time the words would come by themselves. “Hi. I’m Nigerian. Last year was my first time in the United States…”. From experience I know that it always helps to be seen first as the outsider.

I also attended my first class for the semester yesterday. It’s called “Discourse Analysis”, and I’m looking forward to all I can learn about how to analyse conversations and classify them on the basis of content, use, participants, context and many other variables. In the absence of a new commitment to the International Institute, I’m hoping that my class and work schedules will give me enough time to gain as much as possible knowledge from class interactions in a new course whose content looks promising so far.

Of Books and Used Books

I like books, but only to the extent that they don’t become a physical burden. When I was younger, I used to like the idea of a stacked bookshelf filled with books of different kinds – even when I didn’t get to read them all. My room when I was between fourteen and eighteen was filled with over two hundred books that I’d gathered from all around the house. I studied library archiving methods from books and made a list of all of them, delighting in the ability to monitor their movement whenever anyone borrowed them.

Much of those book were pass-me-downs from father and elder siblings. Father gave me tonnes of Readers’ Digest issues from the 60s and 70s along with series of novels from a writer called Dennis Robins. Sisters read James Hardley Chase and Harold Robins and a few Mills and Boons series. There were also books from the African Pacesetter series that provided an opening into a world of new adventures. The real heavyweight literature texts however were from Shakespeare (father gave me his copy of The Complete Works), Wole Soyinka (we had a copy of The Lion and the Jewel as well as The Jero Plays. I never did figure out who owned them. They could have strayed in somehow from borrowings. I remember vividly when father handed me his copy of Ake, saying, “This is one of his most accessible prose works. Even I can understand it. It turned out to be one of the writer’s most delightful reads.), Chukwuemeka Ike (The Bottled Leopard, The Naked Gods), D. Olu Olagoke’s The Incorruptible Judge, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child, Nkem Nwankwo (Danda and some other one I can’t remember now), Efua T. Sutherland’s Edufa, Chinua Achebe’s trilogies, and his outstanding Chike and the River which I read in primary school. I also remember Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge which I never read because at that time for a silly reason that it was too big a book to be read without accompanying pictures. Along with all of those were the Yoruba texts: all of D.O. Fagunwa’s books including the famous Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale, Bamiji Ojo’s Menumo, Adebayo Faleti’s Ogun Awitele, Akinwunmi Isola’s Efunsetan Aniwura (which we read in the Yoruba class in secondary school), father’s own poetry and prose collections, among so many others.

The house was a wonderland of sorts with such very many ideas locked in the pages of creative texts that I delighted not only in reading, but in making mine. I called the home library The Virgo Library and made a catalogue of all borrower. I also made a rubber stamp out of flip-flops and branded all of them with coded numbers all starting with VL. Much of the said library became depleted between 2000 and 2005 of undergraduate studies through lending and book exchanges with friends. In turn, I exchanged them for an introduction into a world of new texts and so called “adult” literature of Rushdie, Joyce, Marquez and the rest of them.

Then there was the other realization that half of the books we should even be reading didn’t even get to Nigeria on time, except occasionally through professors (like Niyi Osundare and Remi Raji) who brought them in truckloads after every return trip. We read voraciously from the many book exchanges with such trusting professors. It was a good thing that books – like the sea – renewed their buoyancy after each use, and the knowledge in them went around. Sometime when I think about it now that I’m in the US with Amazon.com at my fingertips, I wonder how much we missed out of back then because we didn’t have anywhere to buy books, or sometimes even the means to do so. Great books were encountered only in random places either in the shelf of a travelling professor, or in the corner of a used bookstore by the side of the road.

Most of the books on Amazon.com today have used equivalents that cost between $0.01 and $1, excluding shipping. What a delight, especially to find out when they arrive that they actually look as good as new. But what if they didn’t? Who cares? A book is a book is a book. The content will remain the same through pawings, markings, note taking, and dogearings. I’ll read it, leave a few notes in some of the margins, and hand them over to the next reader. These days I don’t keep books with me anymore. I find the concept of a stationary shelf of books to be tiring and not just because of the cost to move them around through airport baggage weight scanners. It might be why the Kindle or the iPad have become the next best companion of the itinerant reader. As clichéd as it might sound, there’s still an allure to the feel of real books, and I won’t tire to buying and reading them. And this, my friends, is why those who take a look at my new Amazon wishlist will find a list of books I’ve wanted to read, along with a few gadgets that have stolen my interest, including the iPad. (Hint: Mr. Jobs, here’s your chance to win me completely over).

What is the value of books, or knowledge, or even Christmas gifts? A delight, I tell you. Or ask a fifteen year old boy discovering the world, discovering himself through the words of others in the dead of night.

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Picture source: http://www.binarydollar.com/category/frugal/, http://stkarnick.com/culture/category/culture101/

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