Category: Uncategorized

First published in Next Newspapers, February 13, 2011. Reproduced for archival purposes only.

The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie hits the nail on the head when she calls the West on their obsession with the single story of gore that is their Africa. Adichie is absolutely right: In the West, the power of the single story races through cash registers and rifles through white liberal pockets and rich racist valleys. However, there is the implication that the single story is mostly the product of the other (aka white person). Lately the single story has been bred, watered and nurtured for profit by some African hustler-writers. I am talking of people writing to the test of Western hunger for the stereotypical.

Whites are not the only ones that climax to the beat of stereotypical African stories. With all due respects, the bulk of contemporary African writing is all about the single story that the white world loves. Indeed, several African writers have over the years focused on the single story for profit.  These writers will probably ask you, what else is there to talk about? And I agree, for different reasons. Take Nigeria for instance; there is only one single story. What our thieving leaders are doing to Nigeria, is quite simply black on black crime. To tell any other story would be criminal. In that respect, our writers are right to turn their rage inwards and shame our leaders with a single story – the fate of the fabled tortoise that borrowed feathers from birds, flew with them to a feast in the skies and tricked them out of every morsel of the feast. In that fable, the enraged birds sent the tortoise crashing down to earth sans borrowed feathers. Let us send our leaders the way of the greedy tortoise. The good people of Tunisia just sent their thieving tortoise packing.

Achebe’s essay, Today the Balance of Stories speaks to the racism inherent in stories about Africa as told by Western writers and the occasional accomplice of color like VS Naipaul. Adichie’s Single Story speech is essentially Achebe’s seminal essay set to (YouTube) video. The new medium is not The Book. It is called YouTube. Ideas rock and books are finding their way into garden mulch. Think about it. Achebe is a prophet rendered mute by advances in technology. In Adichie’s video testimony gone viral on the Internet, Achebe’s great words are re-born. YouTube says we ought to take a break from writing books and return to the oral tradition of our ancestors.

Adichie represents how things used to be and what to hope for in the Nigeria of our dreams. Sadly, she is a painful stand-out from the forest of mediocrity that now insists on respect. And hers is a thoughtful and inspiring speech. But then, why are we running around assuring people that we really are human beings? Why are we so defensive about our humanity and why do we proclaim our humanity by denying in installments, all about us that is authentically African? Why must we quote mostly Western authors to prove that we are indeed learned? What is wrong with our food? The French eat snails; it is not more appetizing because they call it escargot. Why must we hide the fact that some of us relish sautéed termites and loudly proclaim our love of caviar er fish eggs? Many of us, especially our leaders have a complex about our African heritage. Let us think deeply about these things. Our psychosis is more than skin deep.

Heads ought to bloody roll for what has become of Nigeria under civilian leadership. How can things be this bad in a land just bursting at the seams with some of the best resources the world has? How can people ignore the fact that there are no roads, there is no light, no water, no safety and security, no health care facilities worth using and the educational system has virtually collapsed? Our educational system is so bad many of our Nigerian “professors” refuse to allow their children in their own classrooms. What other stories are there to tell of Nigeria?

I am really beginning to believe that our people deserve what they are getting. Take Abuja; basically thieving intellectuals, civil servants and politicians have carved up all the choice land for themselves and shoved everyone else to the far outskirts to live like sub-humans. And the people seem happy about it, happily going about their daily business of begging thieves for crumbs. If we really believe we are human beings like the white man, we should be fighting this black on black crime. As a people, we should take a deep breath, stop the navel gazing and reflect on why five decades after Achebe’s Things Fall Apart we are still lecturing the white man on the need for respect. It is hard to respect what the eye sees. There is not much to respect in the shame that has become Nigeria. If we urinate in our living room, how can we demand that visitors respect said living room? Anyway, my point is this; we are our own worst enemies.

#OccupyNigeria: For all the beautiful children murdered in January for standing up to the myrmidons of our darkness

I fully expect Nigeria’s Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to be the next president of the World Bank. Her rejection as the first African to run the World Bank would be wrong on many levels. There is no one else better primed to execute the obnoxious policies of the World Bank against African and brown nations than Okonjo-Iweala. Her current tour of duty, although disastrous to Nigeria and her poor, has given her an impeccable resume to spread the World Bank’s gospel of uncritical capitalism and indifference to the world’s poor and dispossessed. Okonjo-Iweala has the playbook down pat, for those of us who still remember #OccupyNigeria, that uprising of Nigerian youths against the Okonjo-Iweala-led World-Bank endorsed policies against the poor, that uprising that was quashed with ruthless efficiency and that  left several young people dead for exercising their rights of association and protest.

No shrinking violet, Okonjo-Iweala has mounted an aggressive and fairly effective campaign for the presidency of the World Bank.  South Africa has endorsed her and The African Union has a beautifully penned hagiography in support of the candidacy here that should make even Okonjo-Iweala blush with excitement. There is a sense of entitlement here, but hey, regardless, she is going to be a vast improvement over the sad sack of odium that was the IMF’s Dominique Strauss Kahn.

As an institution, the World Bank is an ancient bureaucratic relic whose time has come and gone. Now it is mostly a mean cudgel for meeting the West’s imperial needs in developing countries, aided by many of Africa’s intellectual and political elite. The fawning over Okonjo-Iweala by Westerners has been comic. Early in March, the Economist started out of the gate by braying Okonjo-Iweala’s term of endearment, Iron Lady.  Well, She definitely is no Margaret Thatcher, let’s not be patronizing. David Smith of the Observer leads the pack of hagiographies but unwittingly makes Okonjo-Iweala look like some sort of Don Quixote tilting at windmills, rather than a serious economist. You would think he just sighted a simian using twigs as an instrument to fish termites out of a log. There is more crowing here by Lant Pritchett of the Guardian. Annie Lowry of The New York Times has a more nuanced piece here on the three top candidates: Dr. Jim Young Kim, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Jose Antonio Ocampo. The New York Times does have a more dignified editorial in which it appears to lean towards Okonjo-Iweala but it is loud in what it does not say about her candidacy.

What the West will not say in public is in the intelligence briefings that made President Barack Hussein Obama avoid her like the plague and go for Kim. Again, anyone in doubt should remember #OccupyNigeria. Okonjo-Iweala and her colleagues in Aso Rock, and NASS, that pretend-legislature, callously rammed through one of the most obnoxious taxes on the poor in the history of Black Africa. Again, many Nigerian youths died protesting this outrage on the majority by a privileged few screwing Nigeria for their own benefit. Under normal circumstances, were Okonjo-Iweala a Westerner or white, she and her bumbling team would have been fired for gross incompetence. The show of double standards is galling and maddening. Kim’s works have been given intense scrutiny and rigorous analysis while Okonjo-Iweala has been described in patronizing terms, with absolutely no mention of her views or documented works and her deadly role in the subsidy removal fiasco of this past January. But she is African and the world recoils when it comes to holding Africa’s political and intellectual elite accountable. That would mean, finally, Africa is on an upward trajectory, perish that thought.

It would be interesting to know what intelligence America’s White House had on all the candidates that made Obama choose Kim, someone whose views are actually full of compassion and common sense and seem to go against the grain of what the World Bank now stands for. In any case, Obama in my view has become an apostle of orthodoxy in thought and governance and it takes one to know and avoid one. Besides Obama has no history of respect for Africa and Africans. If he does he has a strange way of showing it; his tenure so far has lacked any coherent foreign policy when it comes to Africa. President Bush was a better friend of Africa, by far.

But I digress. When Okonjo-Iweala departs for the World Bank, she will be leaving Nigeria much worse than she found it. That is the most compelling reason why she deserves the World Bank presidency. Nigerians need a break. Okonjo-Iweala’s appointment would be the most eloquent marker of how seriously the world takes Africans as human beings. As a parent, I personally hold Okonjo-Iweala and the Nigerian leadership responsible for the numerous youths who were murdered and maimed early this year by the state for exercising their rights. Again, no Western leader could have survived that mess, not one. The world shrugs its shoulders routinely and rewards African incompetence, corruption and brutality. That is why certified wife-beaters, petty crooks and murderers are paraded on the world stage as “African statesmen.” This is how to keep Africa in perpetual bondage. The World Bank is good at that.

The presidency of the World Bank would be a wonderful homecoming for Okonjo-Iweala one of their own. It is interesting to me that the same African intellectuals and activists who constipated the Internet with anti-subsidy rants have been quiet. Indeed the few vocal ones are actively lobbying for her appointment. That is how we roll in Africa. I was one of several that protested the policies of the World Bank in January, how soon we forget. For the children that were murdered in the struggle for Nigeria, may their sacrifice not end up being for nothing. For my mother in the hellhole that serves as her village in Nigeria, the beating goes on. And the beat goes on. From the White House to the World Bank, Africa is screwed by her own. Farewell, I hope, and pray, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

Related posts:

The Economist, March 31, 2012: Hats off to Ngozi

BloombergBusinessWeek, April 4, 2012: Former World Bank Managers Endorse Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Sonala Olumhense, April 2, 2012: Go, Ngo, Go: This Battle Is Not Yours

First published in various media, September 2009. Reproduced here for archival purposes only.

Zimbabwe’s writers have lately been taking me by the literary hand and lovingly showing me wondrous places in the heart of their country – using beautiful prose. I cannot get enough of their works, starting with the late great and greatly troubled Dambudzo Marechera, then Brian Chikwava and now Petina Gappah. Ah! I have just finished reading Petina Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly published by Faber and Faber, Inc. and now I am in love with Zimbabwe. The streets of Zimbabwe keep patrolling my mind creating gentle vistas and memories of a beautiful place that refuses to go away despite the horrific efforts of President Robert Gabriel Mugabe. And Oh, what a book. You should see this book. It is drop-dead gorgeous, an attractive spirit that stirs things in my heart and loins each time I spy it showing itself off on my coffee table. Quite simply, An Elegy for Easterly is a pretty book of gorgeous short stories and Gappah will probably end up being one of the smartest new writers to come out of Africa in a long time. I must say that her publisher, Faber and Faber knows how to put together a beautiful book. The workmanship shows professionalism and pride in an output. I looked and looked and looked and I could not find a single editorial fault with the book. The result is, well, drop-dead gorgeous. This is an attractive book, Africa as life, breathing deeply and richly out of its pretty cover, a book so pretty I was too intimidated to write notes on its pages.

In Gappah’s book, freshly-baked story-loaves fill my reading world with the complex smells of Zimbabwe. And Africa, that persistent lover, comes calling again. These are all tender stories told by a master story-teller. The brilliance of this book is its universality – short stories about Zimbabwe morph into a grand tour of our humanity. Sadness and joy envelop issues that are common to all of us – disease, injustice, corruption, patriarchy, sexuality, etc. The prose in these stories is pretty and gently muscular, just throaty enough to still keep you hanging on to the edge of your seat. At the Sound of the Last Post is a well aimed catapult salvo of insults fired gleefully at the house of Robert Mugabe. Gappah’s words are pretty little daggers gently drawn, plunging lustily into the manhood of oppressive beasts. The sweet bitterness of her words extracts sweet victory from felled dictators. Tart prose cuts everything in its path to bite-sized sniveling pieces as she expertly documents the circus that has hijacked authentic leadership in Zimbabwe, and by extension, much of Africa. Zimbabwe’s government is exposed as populated by buffoon-leaders goose-stepping to the pretty drum-beats of pretend rituals pilfered from more purposeful and serious societies.

In Gappah’s stories, we go to places of despair now owning only pretty names and precious little else. But comedy steals past filthy skirts of despair and it is really funny. The chaos is uniform and universal. It is too early to compare her to Jhumpa Lahiri but her debut book is on par with Lahiri’s latest, Unaccustomed Earth.  Indeed, where Lahiri is proprietary and almost insular (albeit in a disciplined way), Gappah expertly reaches out beyond the boundaries of Zimbabwe to speak to all of us.

The title story An Elegy for Easterly is an elegant, intimate story of a man hyper-dancing to the rhythm of Zimbabwe’s fading fortunes. It is quite simply beautiful, this story and it showcases Gappah’s intimate, loving mastery of the Zimbabwe landscape. The story At the Sound of the Last Post explodes with guns gently blazing at Zimbabwe’s handlers: “It is three months since inflation reached 3,000,325 percent per annum, making billionaires of everyone, even maids and gardeners.” (p9). Keep reading, gentle reader; the prose gets even more scrumptious, if that is possible.

Our Man in Geneva Wins a Million Euros is easily one of the funniest stories of greed fueled by need that I have ever read in my lifetime. It is delectable and masterfully done. The main character is caught in a 419 money scam; told he has won a million Euros, he dreams of riches that he will use to quell the raging financial demands of his nuclear and extended family. The story races breathlessly to a predictable end, but still leaves the reader sighing with an overwhelming sense of sadness and empathy for the victim, and us. Gappah is that good. It is easy to forget that like Zimbabwe, the characters in these stories mostly go nowhere fast. The banality of impoverished existence haunts and poetry rises to sweetly ambush the reader already wary of sad Africa stories. And sad and haunting is the prose-poetry. Just when you think Africa has exhausted her store of sad stories, a fresh batch unearths itself. Is there an end to this?

The Maid from Lalapanzi is a heartbreaking love story, beautiful in its simplicity and in its complexity. The story spoke, in joyous prose, of a time when there were tight physical boundaries and it was easier to fight for freedom than to flee from terror. In this story Gappah warmly travels through the remains of Zimbabwe, planting seed-stories of life. The heartbreak is of the good kind multiplied many times over and it in turn mass produced multiple sighs from my rugged heart. This writer is good. The Maid from Lalapanzi will stay with me for a very long time for it unleashed in me a warm gush of childhood and adolescent memories. I grinned as I read the love letters. Love blooms happily and lustily, even in the terror-infested weeds of Zimbabwe. The love letters were penned Onitsha Market literature style: “My sweetheart Blandina… Time, fortune and opportunity have forced me to take up my hand to pen this missive to ask how you are pulling the wagons of existence and to tell you how much I love you. My heart longs for you like tea longs for sugar. I wish for you like meat wishes for salt, and I miss you like a postman would miss his bicycle…” (p139) Hilarious. And sweet.

Meticulously researched details are important to Gappah. Not even the most private of details escapes her eyes. She notes everything including the invasiveness of the new commercialism: “The women from Johnson and Johnson had come to the school, and separated us from the boys so that they could tell us secrets about our bodies. They said the ovum would be released from the ovary and travel down the fallopian tube and, if it was not fertilized, it would be expelled every twenty-two to twenty-eight days in the act of menstruation. It was an unsanitary time, they said, Our most effective weapon against this effluence was the arsenal of the sanitary products that Johnson and Johnson made with young ladies like us in mind, they said, because Johnson cared.” (p137) In this story, we witness crass commercialism promoting self-loathing to sell the excess of capitalism. Lovely.

It is fortunate and refreshing that Gappah’s stories do not follow the formulaic patterns favored by the story minting machines of MFA programs. However, there is probably enough to quibble about in the stories. Every now and then, Gappah tries too hard to end a story and it becomes an unwieldy elephant that has been wrestled down and lashed together with weak cords of incredulity. An Elegy for Easterly gathers her wrappers too tightly and clatters too quickly to an ungainly full stop. They say most writers begin with autobiographical stories. One or two of Gappah’s stories come across as fairly autobiographical.  Also there are all these lovely stories that trick the reader into forgetting that sometimes, their key ingredient is their improbability. But so what? Life can be improbable, life is an untidy mess. Like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gappah could be accused fairly or unfairly of spreading contempt for African men. There is this persistent hint of misandry – the stories are populated by weak waves of weak men fashioning absurd rules to fit their anxieties. That, plus her thinly veiled contempt for Mugabe exposes her to the charge a number of her stories are political statements masquerading as short stories.  My verdict: I don’t care, I love this book.

First published in Next Newspapers, February 6, 2011. Reproduced for archival purposes only.

Every now and then, the white man, cursed with too much money in his pockets, rounds up all the African writers he can find and sends them off to a conference somewhere exotic and romantic (rarely ever in black Africa) and instructs them to engage in discourse on the African situation. These writers are usually resident abroad, away from Africa’s unnecessary roughness. I call these gatherings pity parties because after a few glasses of cheap red wine, the writers become weepy and whiny and start making pathetic statements about, the burden of being an African writer or a writer of color, the limitations such labels clamp on them and their long suffering muses, whine, whine, whine. I wish they would invite me to these affairs. I love cheap red wine.

It is true that the West for whatever reason is more comfortable seeing people of color, especially Africans, as the other. Nothing we do makes us escape the label of the other. Professor Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart, one of the world’s greatest books of all times. The other day, a major newspaper in the West described it as an African novel about a simple yam farmer. But then, many African writers or writers of African extraction living abroad are truly divorced from Africa and her myriad issues; forget the lush writing about Africa. Having being raised “white and civilized” through no fault of theirs they chafe violently when referred to as anything other than what identifies them as remotely removed from Africa. They wave their wine glasses at the world, shake their ice cream spoons indignantly and exclaim, how dare you call me African? It is not their fault. They were raised to eat their cake and have it. They are really no different from the rest of the African intellectual and political class misruling African nations today, raised to be smug, conceited and lacking in principles and compassion. These misrulers ignore the squalor around them that Africa has become, they loot funds, they build islands of heaven for themselves and they jet to the West to check that rash on their knee and proclaim their humanity to the West in their fake accents.

When you examine African writing or writing from the writers of African extraction, one thing is clear; it is blessed with an abundant narrowness of range and vision. There is the understandable obsession with everything African. In their writings, huts, moons, stars, fearsome masquerades, wars and malevolent spirits come tumbling out, chased by constipated army generals. The most unprincipled of them hawk these exotica to the delight of bored suburbanites in the West. Distance and time don’t seem to matter to these folks. If you have been in America for three decades, rarely going home to visit, what about contemporary Africa would inspire you to write an African story worth reading?

Do not get me wrong: I truly believe that many of our writers write with a genuine social conscience and indeed are too busy thinking about real social issues to worry about whatever name they are called. Indeed, the sad truth is that the story of modern Africa is a single story of deprivation, pillage, abuse and mayhem in the hands of her black misrulers. The white man did not invent today’s single story, we did. He may have come over to our ancestral land to upend the mango cart, but today we are the ones raping, and pillaging Africa and generally making life miserable for our people. That is the single story. It is virtually impossible to write about anything else. The political elite aided by our unprincipled intellectual elite have lain to ruins all institutions and structures that sustain robust states elsewhere. It is profitable to blame the white man for our ineptitude because suffused with guilt he rewards our irresponsibility with even more grants and awards. The white man loves to play uncle to us.

As African writers, we must get off our high horses and help the people who denied themselves everything to save us from that which we now abhor. Memo to the African writer who proclaims his or her whiteness er humanity at every turn: If you want to be known as just another writer, simply write whatever truly rocks your boat. If you feel no obligation to be an African writer, by all means, stop being one. Be a plain vanilla writer, living in the West. Why not write about America? Look out your window in America and write about deer gamboling on your manicured lawn.  Look out your windows and write about the majesty of the land that adopted you and freed you from the harshness of Africa. Sing the praises of those that clothe and nurture you daily. And when you are done, chronicle and clothe their neuroses and anxieties with the awesome power of your words. If you are a writer and all your five books have been about suffering in Soweto, the white man should be forgiven for calling you an African writer. Get over it.

NOTE: First published January 24, 2010 in Next Newspapers. Reproduced for archival purposes only. Next has shut down its website and I am reproducing my old column pieces here.

 Much has been made about recent statements ascribed to Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah, in which she expressed unease at being called an African writer. She was particularly irritated that her own book blurb called her the voice of Zimbabwe. First of all, I think it is presumptuous for anyone to call Gappah the voice of Zimbabwe and she is absolutely right to reject such a burden. She also has a right to protest whatever label anyone stamps on her. I am not so sure however, what the problem is this time, except that the question that elicited her response was an incurious one. It was a silly question: What was the problem that the interviewer was trying to solve? Other than that, I regard Petina Gappah as an African writer and a fine one at that.

 I have absolutely no problem with the term, “African writer,” I am an African writer. Everything depends on context. And it is true that we are the sum of our experience and folks are right to protest any definition that in their view limits the range of their identity and their life’s work. But I do think Gappah protests too much this time. Prejudice is one thing, but the consumer, that is, the reader has a right to see Gappah the way she presents herself. If you don’t want to be called an African writer, well, don’t be one.  Case in point: In November 2009, Gappah was a willing participant in “African Literature Week” in Oslo. All the writers invited to the event were “Africans. “African Literature Week” was supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From all indications, these African writers had a great and memorable time, and I don’t recall that anyone ever protested the stereotyping or pigeon-holing that this event could possibly represent. I don’t know what people do at these events, how people are chosen to represent “African writing,” etc, but given the stridency of African writers like Adichie and Gappah in complaining about the West’s tendency to stereotype “Africans”, and focus on “single stories”, etc, it seems to me that they are quite simply guilty of eating their cake and demanding it back.

I detect this chic superciliousness, our writers coolly biting the Western fingers that feed them daily. I am not prescribing obsequiousness, I am simply saying, show some respect. The truth is that, largely due to the circumstances Africa finds itself, most of our (African) writing is very limited in range. Read our African writers, close your eyes and recall the themes in their books. They are for the most part predictable and focused on the single story. This is not necessarily a bad thing but the consumer is not to be blamed for identifying the writer with his or her own label. Our actions and words taunt our stated convictions. Word to the African writer: If you are unhappy about the label, “African writer,” stop applying for these grants that are targeted at “African writers,” stop writing to the test of all those Western prizes dedicated to the preservation of  “African writing.” Stop attending conferences on “African literature” facilitated by the kinds of patronizing, condescending white professors that live in Adichie’s stories. Stop publishing your works on websites that are dedicated solely to “African writing.” If you want to be known as a worldly renaissance writer, write about your real life in Europe or America, don’t worry about Africa.

Our rage is misplaced; all over Africa our political and intellectual leaders are hard at work trying to convince the world that we are sub-humans. Yet, when we are called sub-humans, we wail foul. It was not white folks that sent us packing into the cold fields of exile.  Put another way, it was white folks that fixed our broken bones, found us a roof and gave us back our (formerly) broken voices. We should be grateful. I know this is not the politically correct thing to say. Who cares?

I think that our writers are obsessing about the symptoms, instead of focusing on the central issue. Again, it is all about context. Is Professor Chinua Achebe an African writer? Yes. Is the book Things Fall Apart an African novel? It is more than merely an African novel. A Western professor once in my presence hailed Things Fall Apart as the great African novel. He probably meant it as a compliment, but I thought he chose his words carefully. Things Fall Apart is a great novel, no ifs, no buts about it. This is one instance in which those who see the exotic in us do not share in the expression of our humanity.

 Lastly, perhaps, as a people, we are the conquered and we know it but we are not taking it very well. It is humiliating I think to be the conquered, to be the one struggling to mimic alien accents, enjoy their wines, marry the other, etc. I take a more charitable view of our circumstances. There is no conquest per se: The world is browning. That pretty much sums it all. Chew on that.

Someone once asked me to respond to the interesting question: Is Nigerian English the same as Nigerian pidgin? My response: There is pidgin and many variants are spoken in Nigeria. And there is English and many variants are spoken in Nigeria. Debating the idea of one Nigerian English is as useful as saying that there is ONE recipe for cooking egusi soup (yes, soup, NOT sauce!). There are ways of speaking, and ways of expression that are distinct to various sections Nigeria. And it is often possible to tell where someone is from based on how they handle the English language. Some of the best masters of English are from Nigeria. And some of the worst are from Nigeria. What is mildly hilarious is that it is the latter that usually spends precious time correcting the former. There is something about some Nigerians and the attainment of knowledge or whatever; they like to wear it loudly like a Rolex watch, and when someone is around they tap it so that someone can tell they have it. Some would say it is an inferiority complex.

American academics and intellectuals tend to be quiet about their accomplishments. Do not make any assumptions about your neighbor working in her backyard, She may have three PhDs from Ivy league schools and may be secretly building the next generation nuclear reactor. Just call her Jane. And when you read her academic papers, they are highly accessible, while still retaining the requisite substance. American academics tend to be considerate of the target audience. In contrast, my people love bombast. I don’t know where that bad habit came from. Ironically, they are the ones that really need to break it down for the “masses.” Before you clamber on to any Internet forum that houses Nigerian intellectuals, please say your prayers, take some painkillers, drink a quart of cognac and then, only then, start reading. What some may regard as “Nigerian” English is merely the product of a dysfunction: Bad grammar posing as our national anthem. Go read President Goodluck Jonathan’s babble on his Facebook status. Once you recover from the shock of reading Presidential atrocious grammar, then you will understand my frustration.

Please do not die until you have read as many Onitsha Market literature pamphlets as you can. The experience will remind you of some of our Nigerian intellectual elite. In particular, please read Ogali A. Ogali’s hilarious play Veronica My Daughter, featuring the great master of bombast, Bomber Billy. Next, you must read Peter “Pan” Enahoro’s seminal How to be a Nigerian. That pamphlet is a hoot. Please, please, please, find a copy and enjoy. It was written almost fifty years ago; not much about the stereotypical Nigerian has changed other than the Internet is here and they are all now on Facebook entertaining the world. Some of the best masters of the English language reside in Nigeria. When they relocate to America, listening to them the first couple of months is sheer joy. Give them six months, in the zest to become the Americans they will never be, the tongue becomes tied up in knots, they acquire atrocious grammar habits from who knows where, and guess what, when they visit home, they are “hailed” or envied for losing their “Nigerian accent.”

It is actually the case that several of our writers were already wired to write nonsense at home. They come abroad and mangle their already atrocious literary style with additional bad habits. Then they call this new product scholarship. I disagree. What some of our writers call academic writing is simply bad writing. There is no need in my opinion to deploy bombast where a few or blessed silence would do. From the beginning of colonial history our people have been drawn to big words. Back to Bomber Billy in Ogali A. Ogali’s Veronica My Daughter. Bomber Billy was the caricature of the bombastic Nigerian. Here is what Bomber Billy has to say upon sustaining a bad fall:

“As I was descending from a declivity yesterday with such an excessive velocity, I suddenly lost the centre of my gravity and was precipitated on the macadised thoroughfare.” He goes on to assure concerned onlookers thusly: “Don’t put your mind under perturbation. But after my precipitation whereby my  incunabula got soaked, it was made incumbent on me to divest my habiliments which were saturated as a result of my immersion in the rivulet.” When asked if he had gone for treatment he responded thusly:  “I don’t care what the Medical Officer said but I assure you that this is nothing but a cocified agency, antipasimodicala producing nothing but voscandum, miscandum and tiscono. This medicine that I have in hand is called the GRAND ELECTRICAL PUNCHUTICAL DEMOSCANDUM which cures all diseases incident to humanity.”

Our writers are starting to be really innovative. In the blogs, websites, and on Facebook, they are showing us the true face of their creativity, using the new media to create a fusion of voice, text, and dance in the oral tradition of our ancestors. I salute them.

First published in Next Newspapers, October 24, 2010. Reproduced here for archival purposes only.

I usually approach Helon Habila’s books with dread. His novels are too long, even when they are just two pages. I just finished reading his new novel, ‘Oil on Water’, ostensibly about the hell that is the Niger Delta. Habila doesn’t disappoint. The novel is too long. He should have stopped right after the first page and directed us to YouTube to gawk at gas flares and military goons drawing, hanging and quartering hapless civilians. Oil on Water offers absolutely no new insights on the issue of crude oil and the Niger Delta. In any case, everything has been said; all that is left is purposeful rage directed at the myrmidons of Nigeria’s hell-delta.

In this novel, a white British lady has been allegedly kidnapped for ransom by the militants of the Niger Delta. Inexplicably, two journalists, Rufus (the main character) and Zaq (a has-been journalist and a raging alcoholic who has no business being anywhere but in a hospital) are commissioned to go establish contact with the militants and the woman. The awful plot does not allow any room for the thriller that the book loudly advertises. It does however start on a thrilling note borne on wings of well crafted prose-poetry. I adore the first line: “I am walking down a familiar path, with incidents neatly labelled and dated, but when I reach halfway memory lets go of my hand, and a fog rises and covers the faces and places, and I am left clawing about in the dark, lost, and I have to make up the obscured moments as I go along, make up the faces and places, even the emotions.” Right after these memorable lines, the book promptly dozes off and never awakens, despite Habila’s gallant attempts.

It is as if Penguin Books, Habila’s publisher, needed another African novel and the author complied with another sleepy-eyed, rheumy riposte on Africa’s problems. The misfortunes of the people of the Delta have been a boon to anyone with a laptop and a camera. My eyes have endured some pretty bad writing, atrocious cinematography and plain bad pictures in honour of the devastation. There are several books you must read if you are interested in Nigeria’s war on the beautiful people of the Niger Delta, for example, Michael Peel’s excellent book,  A Swamp Full of Dollars. The oppressed people of the delta should rise up in song and strangle all her oppressors.

Part of the problem, besides Habila’s challenges with the novel as a medium (he should stick to writing extremely short stories) is that blogs, Facebook and YouTube are making books struggle for relevance when it comes to contemporary issues. In a few lovely places, ‘Oil on Water’ promises to gather up the rage in the reader until it is an inferno billowing out dark acrid smoke from the conscience’s ears. In a few precious instances, Habila is priest-like, in a trance, churning out dark, brooding, gorgeous prose that offer delectable hints of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.  In the beginning, the book is engaging; it doesn’t sound contrived and there is abundant evidence that Habila did some research for this novel. There is enough detail to provide memorable scenes. His greatest strength is deployed to descriptions of the apocalypse that is the Niger Delta. Dreamy and haunting are the lush descriptions of the roiling waters and forests. Habila loves water and he finds a peaceful kinship with the seas and the rivers. When he is good, the scenes remind one of Vietnam, Napalm bombs, children on the streets fleeing fires roasting them, and My Lai.

But then it is hard to overcome the main characters’ self-serving, unctuous narcissistic self-absorption. Like many of Africa’s intellectual and political elite, it is always about them. In the end, where is the rage? Indeed, where is the beef? Habila is perhaps guilty of romanticising common thugs pretending to be “freedom fighters.” These are not freedom fighters in the mold of Isaac Adaka Boro and Che Guevara. As Peel shows in his lovely book, these are mostly greedy, self-serving thugs. It is the case that the people of the delta are victimized by their own leaders also. That point seems lost on Habila.

The author does not have the investigative instincts and skills of a journalist and it shows rather painfully. Oil on Water is a gentle disaster of a story lolling about wishing it was a very short story. As an aside, the Pidgin English here is a distraction, a tool struggling for meaning.  Inchoate, the Pidgin hangs in the air, squirming in mid-sentence, as if unsure of its legitimacy. The unintended consequence: The characters are thus diminished as half-humans. The drama and dialogue are forced, and insincere. The book features editorial issues, jerky disjointed dialogue, awkward attempts at humour and improbable twists and turns lifted right out of a third-rate MFA curriculum. Habila, like Rufus, the main character is in pursuit of the elusive “great story.” He should continue the hunt. This story is definitely not it.

Devotees of Jhumpa Lahiri know that she has written three books, her Pulitzer Prize winning The Interpreter of Maladies, Namesake, and  Unaccustomed Earth. She got a well-deserved Pulitzer for The Interpreter of Maladies, a book of exquisitely woven short stories about Bengali immigrants in the West (especially America). They are all focused, disciplined books on the immigrant experience in America (from a Bengali perspective). Exile hurts in real life and Lahiri’s books fairly throb with the pain of dislocation. And she pulls it off with miraculous ease. Anyone who thinks about these things, about immigrants of color and the dislocation of exile should read at least one of Lahiri’s books. I would recommend any of her two books of short stories. The Namesake is a good novel, but Lahiri is first and foremost the czar of the short story. Lahiri’s muse knits a haunting tapestry of life in America, a tapestry glued together by relentless heartaches of the gentle kind, but relentless nonetheless. It entertains.

The other day, I bit my stingy wallet in the lip and she shrieked and gave up a few dollars for a copy of Lahiri’s new book, Unaccustomed Earth (I had to buy it used, it is cheaper that way, America is very hard these days, sigh!). The book landed today looking as good as new. It is pretty; it is so pretty I did not want to open it for fear of defiling it with my peasant paws. But listen to this little quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the “The Custom House” from which Lahiri’s muse takes the book’s title:

“Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”

Wow. That is deep. Lahiri’s stories are suffused with a haunting beauty, of pretty people dislocated from the bread of their ancestral earth, stoically carrying on in exile, hoping for everything great but resigned to the cloying comfort of middle-class drudgery in America, bearing the badge of martyrdom with a quiet understated defiance. After reading Unaccustomed Earth, I think I am now happily overdosed on Lahiri’s sweet anxieties. I see saris flying everywhere, I see Bengali men, quietly, furtively willing their wives to show up from the kitchen of exile weighed down with the sweets of the past. I feel everywhere the hunger and the deprivation from missed spiritual connections; and arranged marriages mock my idealism at every bindi dot. Red bindi dots mark the foreheads of Lahiri’s fertile stories, never letting of India’s forehead. Lahiri is the Owner of Words, words that comfort, words that hurt, words that take the heart out of your soul. Lahiri examines the furtiveness of lives lived for purposes oblique to the living. Every paragraph has that something that holds you by the hand and leads you everywhere and plumbs the dark depths of your feelings.

I hope Lahiri doesn’t write another book anytime soon. I might just die of Lahiri overdose. And do you blame me? Her stories are so good, they are an addiction. One is forced to ponder the fate our children in this dispensation called exile. Lahiri paints a canvas that is ultra familiar to those of us who obsess non-stop about the condition called exile. It has to be a kind of death, to be mummified in the comforting embrace of the past, of a familiar earth. We know now that it is possible to mope around in exile with no historical recollection of the details of our sojourn. The decades fly by as we ignore our surroundings and loiter around ethnic stores buying up stale delicacies just to be connected to a desiccated umbilical cord that promises a return to a mirage. Life goes on. I find myself wondering: How do my children feel in all of this….? These long names, these meals that they never pack as school lunches, these strips of “culture” that they are force-fed by parents refusing to let go of receding memories of their ancestral lands? I hope my children treat my memories with the same tenderness that birthed Lahiri’s books. It is a tall order but one can only hope. Exile is enough punishment. I salute you, Lahiri.

 It instructs, it informs and it is quite simply, good literature. Attention to detail, exquisitely researched work, and tight, oh so tight flawless prose with not a single strand of prose astray. It is simply awe-inspiring. My two favorite short stories are the first two in the book: Unaccustomed Earth and Hell-Heaven. One or two of the stories may be formulaic, but it is easy to forgive Lahiri, her stories are so well built. If this was an evaluation, I would bleat the following: well defined, well designed, and yes, well developed!