ktravula – a travelogue!

“Emerging Aesthetics in Nigerian Literature”

As a symposium participant in an event at the Draper’s Hall, University of Ibadan, at the weekend to celebrate the work of Rotimi Babatunde, winner of the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing, I made a few points regarding the distinguishing features of Rotimi’s work, and the opportunity it offers for emerging writing. More importantly, the way it conforms to the already established trends in great storytelling.

In craft, Bombay’s Republic distinguishes itself by being able to re-tell a story already told in a longer form in Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy in a different form, and from a different angle. This is not an easy feat. As a contribution to history, the work also moves between fiction and real life in a way that is not only authentic, but also affecting. Like Eleshin Oba in Wole Soyinka’s famous Death and the King’s Horsemen, and Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the main character in Bombay’s Republic lived at a crossroads of a certain time in history and automatically assumed the perils and rewards of such serendipitous existence.

As a contribution to language, I made note of my most fascinating discovery, made close to the end of the story, that the author had not used quotation marks at all throughout the text of the short story. That I discovered this towards the end of the piece only added to the interesting point that unlike what prescriptive grammarians would have us believe, our brains usually process text in chunks rather than as individual pieces of written information. Quote marks, as good as they are, and as aesthetically pleasing their presence on the page might me, fade in significance if a story can still be told, brilliantly as was in this case, without any use for their now rather annoying presence.

The event was hosted by a Committee of Friends, including Yomi Ogunsanya, Ropo Ewenla, Benson Eluma, Iwalewa Olorunyomi, et al. Other participants included Sola Olorunyomi (Author of Fela: Afrobeat and the Imagined Continent), Benson Eluma, Tade Ipadeola, Niran Okewole, Jumoke Verissimo (Author of I Am Memory), Biyi Olasope, Remi Raji (President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, and poet), Ayodele Olofintuade, and Olisakwe Ukamaka Evelyn.

Here Comes Trouble

Michael Moore’s new autobiography follows the sometimes ordinary, sometimes extraordinary, life of one of America’s most controversial commentators. His movie Fahrenheit 9/11 is the highest grossing documentary of all time. Aptly titled Here Comes Trouble because of the perception of the author and movie maker during the first few years of the George W. Bush administration and his war in Iraq. He describes in great detail and with sufficient personal reflection what it felt like to criticize the administration on live television during his first Oscar win acceptance speech, and the turbulence of his life after he became public enemy number one.

The memoir-writing style of American writers (mostly public figures) has often amazed me in their ordinariness. No attempt at lyricism or any special verbal sophistication. Just facts, told sometimes with a flourish, and with humour. Not much with any real attempt at literary brilliance. This commentary of mine is ironic, of course, because the straight-forwardness of the narrative makes it a fun and light-hearted read. But it ends there. I’ll remember the facts in the book more than the beauty of how the facts were told. In short, it doesn’t challenge me even though the recollection surely delights. I’m sure this makes some sense.

Michael Moore is a controversial figure, and holding his book with me around campus has already got me a few stares. We no longer live in a George Bush America but it is still fascinating the kind of response his name elicits. A few minutes ago, a student saw it on my desk and asks what I thought could be a tricky question: “So you like Michael Moore, eh?” “I like his work,” I replied. It seems like the safest answer to give given the circumstance. As the book shows, he is however a man bold enough to take risks, and who because of those risks – and some other coincidences in life – has lived a truly remarkable life.

Orwell on The English People

I am reading “As I Please”, a collection of essays written by George Orwell between 1943 and 1945 and edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. In the first essay titled The English People, the author explains some benefits and demerits of being an Englishman speaking English:

“But there are also great disadvantages, or at least great dangers, in speaking English as one’s native tongue. To begin with, as was pointed out earlier in this essay, the English are very poor linguists. Their own language is grammatically so simple that unless they have gone through the discipline of learning a foreign language in childhood, they are often quite unable to grasp what is meant by gender, person, and case. A completely illiterate Indian will pick up English far faster than a British soldier will pick up Hindustani. Nearly five million Indians are literate in English and millions more speak it in a debased form. There are some tens of thousands of Indians who speak English as nearly as possible perfectly; yet the number of Englishmen speaking any Indian language perfectly would not amount to more than a few scores. But the great weakness of English is its capacity for debasement. Just because it is so easy to use, it is easy to use badly.”

In the essay with parts that read like an epilogue to his earlier essay Politics and the English Language, Orwell complains about English being influenced by “American” pop culture words. Although written about six decades ago, it is fascinating how Orwell’s perception of the English life, language, and culture seems to remain as applicable now as it was then, even seeming applicable to other new post-colonial societies elsewhere.

Here is another quote:

“The temporary decadence of the English language is due, like so much else, to our anachronistic class system. “educated” English has grown anaemic because for long past it has not been reinvigorated from below. The people likeliest to use simple concrete language, and to think of metaphors that really call up a visual image, are those who are in contact with physical reality. a useful word like bottleneck, for instance, would e most likely to occur to someone used to dealing with conveyor belts: or again, the expressive military phrase to winkle out implies acquaintance both with winkles and with machine-gun nests. and the vitality of English depends on a steady supply of images of this kind. It follows that language, at any rate the english language, suffers when the educated classes lose touch with the manual workers. As things are at present, nearly every englishman, wheatever his origins, feels the working-class manner of speech, and even working-class idioms, to be inferior…”

An engaging read.

Holidays and Readings

This period of the season just after final exams means only one thing: a long space of time left open to do anything under the sun – or on top of the snow, depending on what part of the world you occupy. Holiday means days without school, without classes or volunteer work at the Institute, without work at the Foreign Language Lab, without driving (much) and without Blackboard postings. I need that. I looked into my book drawer yesterday and found almost two dozen books I’d bought without reading more than a few pages.

Just yesterday, two more arrived: Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and Wole Soyinka’s Art, Dialogue and Outrage. The latter was a text that had dominated much of the many conversations and debates with mates and scholar as an undergraduate in Ibadan. Obviously important to understanding the thoughts of Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, the book has always been a reference point. Spending a few minutes on the preface has however convinced me that I should read it only when I’m well fed, and in a most patient mood for deliberately difficult writing. Feynman’s collection of essays is a delight, like many of his earlier publications. Much of the book are transcribed from his BBC interviews as well as from many of his published essays and speeches. Another one of his books What Do You Care What Other People Think now lay somewhere in my bag. I can’t wait to devour them.

The other crazy idea in my head, encouraged – no less – by Mohamed is that we get in the car and drive to California during the winter break. If I wasn’t considering it myself, I would have said that he had gone nuts. Now I’ve given my (almost) word and may have to do it after all. The only obstacle is a stretch of road 2000 miles long which may most likely include black ice and heaps of snow many miles long. What do you think? Is it worth it or would a good old flying do? Oh, there’s still the TSA scanners and grope-downs to worry about.

On “Stickfighting Days”

I read the 2010 Caine Prize-winning short story yesterday. “Gore” is the first word that came to my mind afterwards.

Olufemi Terry’s Stickfighting Days is a moving story that one never forgets in a hurry for its description of raw violence among (pubescent) boys in an imaginary dump site. I’ve read a few stories of raw violence that moved me. One of them was Fola by my friend Olumide Abimbola. It is a short family story with enormous prospects that I believe should be expanded to a standard short story length. It definitely comes to mind right now, but Terry’s offering takes us deep into an isolated world free of societal interference. There is no redemption at the end, just violence, and perhaps some jungle justice that must serve as the only catharsis afforded the reader.

Benson Eluma has written a review aimed at the insularity of the lives of the characters of the story. My friend’s observations in his review take the dialogue on literary craft and responsibility of the writer to a different direction and force us to ask a different kind of question. For me however, it is the stark violence without a chance for a real redemption that puts me off the story. It is not a deficiency as far as craft is concerned. The story is very well written and I don’t think I’ll be reading it again. Read the review on Nigerianstalk. You can read the story itself here.

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