Category: Uncategorized

The world has not rested since the 2016 Nobel Prize was awarded, not to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, but to Bob Dylan, that legendary poet who also sings. There have been impassioned essays for and against the award to Dylan. It all makes for fascinating reading.  Take this piece from Rajeev Balasubramanyam, writing in the Washington Post (October 22, 2016) who makes an interesting case for why Ngugi should have won the prize:

Ngugi’s decision to move away from English was a brave one for a writer hailing from Africa, a continent frequently treated as irrelevant by the rest of the world. It could, in fact, have led to his disappearance from the global stage, but instead it solidified his reputation as a writer of supreme political commitment, though few of his contemporaries or juniors took up the call to write in their native languages. Ngugi’s attitude toward this, however, is markedly self-aware and flexible.

 We of the elder generation,” he told the New African three years ago, “are so bound up by our anti-colonial nationalism, which is important for us but the younger generation ― they are free. You find they don’t confine their characters necessarily to Africa. They are quite happy to bring in characters from other races, and so on … that’s good because they are growing up in a multicultural world.

Okay, let me share a few thoughts:

1. Ngugi richly deserves the Nobel, no ifs, no buts about it. This warrior deserved the Nobel in celebration of a prodigious life marked by industry, hard work, innovation, a profound love for the word and its application in civil rights activism.

2. Ngugi’ innovation, in my view, is not in experimenting with writing in a Kenyan language. I didn’t find that particularly innovative, many writers (not well known of course) have always written in indigenous African languages. It was quixotic in the sense that there was not a market for it, a bold experiment perhaps, but not innovative.

3. Literary innovation was in how in their early works, Ngugi and Chinua Achebe took the English language and appropriated it as if it was an African language. I will go so far as to say they made it an African language. Achebe, said it all, as if with a wink and a smirk: “Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.” It is thanks to them and the young writers of the Internet and social media, and not to today’s contemporary African writer (of books), that words like “molue” and “egusi” are now words defined in English dictionaries (Yes, Google it!).

4. I would have danced myself crazy had Ngugi won. For many years, I agonized over Chinua Achebe not winning the Nobel Prize. I once said something about this in the once thriving literary list-serve krazitivity and I think it was the writer Obiwu, not sure anymore, who counseled me against looking outside for validation, Achebe was certainly not sitting around waiting for the Nobel to honor him. That spoke to me and in a sense has inspired me also to urge us to look inwards.

5. These are exciting times to be a reader if you love African literature. I have said this ad nauseam, advances in technology, especially the advent of the Internet and social media have exposed the world to the universe of the narratives of Africa. Our books are still incredibly important but you have to read the young men and women who are doing some pretty amazing and innovative work on the Internet and on social media to get a sense of the sum of our stories. They have pushed the frontiers of the work started by pioneers like Ngugi and Achebe. In their stories, we think, laugh, make love and cry like the human beings we are. Africans are not the pathetic disease-ridden stick figures we read of in African books of fiction. Like their Western counterparts they have learned to be “provincial” as the writer Chigozie Obioma wrongly (in my view) puts it in his recent piece in the Guardian, or in my words, insular. I applaud the new African writers of the Internet and social media. They don’t explain themselves, they just write. If you are curious enough, google “egusi” or “molue.”

6. These are exciting times to be a reader if you love African literature. Advances in technology, especially the advent of the Internet and social media have exposed the world to the universe of the narratives of Africa. Our books are still incredibly important but you have to read the young men and women who are doing some pretty amazing and innovative work on the Internet and on social media to get a sense of the sum of our stories. They have pushed the frontiers of the work started by gusi” just as you would “crumpets.” If you care enough about my world, you would be curious about my words. These young men and women do not write for the West, they just write. And guess what, the world is getting it. I say to young writers, keep doing more of what you are doing, may you profit from your demons.

7. And profit they should. Young African writers need a lot of support and affirmation. They are doing good work and they need all the help that they can get. I have serious issues with Nigeria’s NLNG $100,000 prize, I have been loud in decrying is as an embarrassment. It is a crying shame that the NLNG Prize committee spends the equivalent of the Nobel Prize (about $1 million) yearly to award a $100,000 lottery to one writer. I am happy for Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, he and Elnathan John (a runner-up along with the awesome writer, Chika Unigwe, a previous winner of the award) are exactly the kinds of exciting young writers I have in mind when I am talking about innovation in African writing. I have studied those two and think their entries are among the most important narrative to come out of Nigeria in the past decade or so, but we must push the conversation about how best to use $1 million every year. Right now, much of it is being wasted and the prize is seen more as an absurd give away than a real literary prize. There are so many innovative projects that the money could be used for. It is exciting to talk about the Nobel and who they should give their money to, but we have a great opportunity here in the NLNG Prize being wasted like a gas flare. By the way, I would have split the prize between Abubakar and Elnathan, they were both deserving of the award.

8. We need to support not just African writers of fiction and poetry and drama, we should also support the essayists in our midst. At the risk of generalizing, my observation is that African writers don’t do fiction well, many times what they call fiction is autobiography or long theses on social anxieties. Many of these works of fiction should be essays or works of creative nonfiction. Acknowledging these efforts might encourage many African writers to focus on their area of expertise. Even at that, writers should not wait for prizes or seminal events to hurriedly staple together thoughts. Many of the essays on Bob Dylan, for or against, that I have enjoyed were actually written months if not years ago. Western journalists and writers tend to anticipate events and write ahead. May Soyinka live long to torment us with his genius but he won’t live forever. Many Western newspapers have already written his obituary. Our writers are merely waiting. When he passes on to the next pantheon, there will be syrupy pieces on how we drank wine together. Get to work. Today.

9. Writers and thinkers should look at our world and ask hard questions about the way things are – and adjust to the changing of the seasons. I am happy that the award was given to Bob Dylan. Students and fans of Bob Dylan like me fully appreciate the Nobel for not only honoring him, but for in an unintended way, giving a loud nod to the fact that today’s literature is no longer your mama’s literature. Where it was once flat, it is now multi-dimensional, in song, on YouTube, in print and on the oral tradition of my ancestors.

10. So, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize and I am delirious and happy for him, who cares? African literature is undergoing a renaissance. We are making progress. I am happy.

Corruption kills;
absolute corruption kills absolutely;
so does silence,
aiding, being accessory to the realities
of corruption invested in all kinds of affiliations…

Trapped, double-trapped, triple-trapped…
Everybody is talking about cleansing,
but everyone is afraid of the cleansing lotion.

– Professor Remi Raji, Facebook, October 9, 2016

Silence is not always golden. Sometimes you just run out of things to say. Sometimes the ways of the world simply garrot your voice box. It is what it is. So, the soul visited the seaside all of last week to get away and to be mute witness to two ugly, mean hurricanes, raging demons foaming in the mouth. Hurricane Matthew. Hurricane Trump. Olokun, goddess of the sea cooks up these hurricanes, and the white man names them. And sitting at the feet of rage-waves, I thought of home. Yea, home was on my mind. I would like to go home. But where is home? Dunno. Sigh.

Hurricane Matthews has disgraced those who took Haiti’s billions and gave her nothing but pie charts and PowerPoint slides. Hurricane Trump is racing through America’s catacombs and wreaking major havoc on her anxieties and hypocrisy. This one is for the history books. The Lord is good, the (white) women of America may have finally stopped Hurricane Trump, yes, Trump the bully, Trump the bigot, and Trump the racist. Make no mistake, America reveres her (white) goddesses. Trump found out the following last week: You can make monkey noises at black men and women, you can body shame Mexicans and call their men rapists and America will look you in the eyes and make polite noises, you can call all Muslims terrorists and berate their women. Just don’t defile (white) women, for if you do, you will hear from (white) America. Yup. Trump found out last week.

It is a crying shame; those elected leaders and citizens of stature who were prepared to make a racist and misogynistic buffoon president of the greatest country on earth finally rose in rage and shut down his dream – and our nightmare. Trump should have asked Bill Cosby, his pal in crime (yes, sexual assault is a crime), about sexual assault. Trump has assured us that he is guilty of sexual assault, he should be in the big house, not in the White House. (White) America will make sure of that. Good for them. He scared them. In his new (white) victims, they saw their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. And justice may finally knock on Trump’s gilded doors. This is America, their America, says John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo.

Where were the calls for Trump to step down on account of his well documented bigotry? Where was the outrage? Certainly not at today’s decibel level. I am happy for Hillary Clinton, though. I am #TeamHillary to the very end. She has earned my vote and that of America. In any case, I will never vote for the Republican Party in a partisan race; the Republican party has no place in her heart and soul for people that look like me. But then, the Democratic party has grown to take my loyalty for granted. What has the party done for people of color lately? We must ask these questions. Was it not Bill Clinton that enacted anti-crime laws that prescribed triply harsher drug penalties for poor black youth compared to their richer white counterparts? Was it not Bill Clinton that refused to do anything about the Rwandan genocide because he did not see how it was America’s business? And what has Obama done for Black folks and Africa lately? We may not have anywhere to go, but that does not mean we are fools.

Oh Haiti. Who cares about Haiti? Many do. It is just not obvious. Billions of aid dollars have been sunk in Haiti and it is still so poor, it does not qualify to be a third world nation. Billions of dollars sunk into Haiti that have ended up in the deep greedy pockets of NGOs, an equal opportunity pantheon of the greedy feeding fat on the poor and the vulnerable. If all the billions stolen by NGOs and multinationals were simply dropped on Haitians from airplanes, each Haitian would be a millionaire today. Ditto the IDP camps of Nigeria.

There is a war on the poor and dispossessed everywhere. Come and see America; the poor are locked up in neighborhoods guarded by liquor stores, fast food joints, pawn shops and pay day loan sharks. And with the police, it is a turkey shoot of beautiful people whose only crime is to be black men. Where are intellectuals of color? They are writing pretty books and long essays on injustice from deep within lush summer homes in Martha’s Vineyard. This dispensation has exposed the intellectual rot and hypocrisy within the temples of intellectuals of color. There is a wide sea-gulf between the elite and the poor, fueled by arrogance and ignorance.

Nigeria. Home. There is no need to talk about home anymore. Home is Nigeria. Or is it? And the poet said, prepare for dark days ahead. Dark days are here. There is a picture of a door to a judge’s home torn down by a uniformed mob in the name of fighting corruption. This is a democracy they say. Why is the DSS arresting judges, why? Where is the outrage? Thosepretending to lead Nigeria who have properties worth hundreds of millions of dollars in Dubai and elsewhere, those who murdered and buried almost 400 Shiites, 400 human beings, 400 Nigerians, with absolutely no consequences, those who feted a Nobel Prize laureate to a $500,000 dinner, are the ones leading this assault on the judiciary and on the opposition in the name of fighting corruption. And we are all silent. Yes, Professor Wole Soyinka, the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny. The man has died in all of us. ALL of us.

Sometimes, you just have to be silent because talk is cheap. Sometimes this Diasporan thinks if you can’t do anything to help those trapped in the land you fled from, just shut up and walk away. I should walk away. In any case those who have voices have walked away. They are writing books about poverty disease and deprivation, they are fighting over “literary prizes”, crying louder than the bereaved and worrying about the oppressed of other nations, fighting over definitions of feminism even as they beat up their house help for chilling the red wine (“It should be at room temperature, STUPID WOMAN!”). And yes some learned ones, some writers are defending this outrage. Yes, some are defending this outrage. As in America, this has exposed the greed, intellectual rot and hypocrisy within the temples of Nigerian intellectuals. There is a wide sea-gulf between the elite and the poor, fueled by arrogance and ignorance. Trust me, this will not end well. Why are things the way they are? We don’t know. Or we know. But we are afraid of the answers. Let it not be said that we are children of a lesser god.

Do not ask me what I think. I have said enough. I have said that in Nigeria, thieves are fighting thieves, cheered on by their intellectual hirelings. There is no rule of law, none, nothing but hypocrisy and thuggery. Impunity is the word that fills me with rage and sadness. This is sad. I have said that there clearly is no difference in substance between the APC and the PDP, they are all boll weevils and termites with strong jaws eating up what’s left of our country. Where are those voices that gave Nigerians this hell? Where are they? They should speak up and stop this nightmare. No one is building structures and institutions, no one, Buhari’s regime is too inept, too clueless to care. My heart goes out to the young; to have to stand by helplessly and watch your present and future eaten up by the thug-elders, is worse than anything I can remember.

Someday perhaps, there will be a group of dreamers and doers who want to really help. Until then, talking and talking and talking about these things does not really make anyone feel better. Besides, I am no longer there. Those who really feel this hurt at home must lead the way and tell us how we can help. Where is home? I honestly don’t know. Hurricanes roam the earth and you might as well sit where you are until it all blows over. I have said my own.

And oh, here, click on this link below, here  is important work about South Africa. It is a photo essay about white privilege in South Africa. Political correctness makes the artist look sideways at the truth. There is white privilege in South Africa, yes, but this is now being subsumed by class privilege. The poor blacks of South Africa are going through hell in the hands of the black and white middle and upper middle class elite. Yep, it is beyond a black-white binary though. Mix it up with class and you get really fed up with South Africa. Where are Black Africa’s voices? They are cowering in the cafes of Europe and North America, navel gazing and self-medicating at book readings with free cheese and red wine. Nice pictures, though.

http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/photography-2/photographer-deconstructing-white-privilege-south-africa/

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

This is a response, for the most part, to a thought-provoking essay titled Dear Contemporary African Writer, We Read; We Don’t Just Read You, written by Chisom Nlebedum.

In his essay, Nlebedum bemoans the fact that many young African readers know little or nothing about many other contemporary African writers, and adds that this should not “be misconstrued ‘as another “Africans do not read episode’, for this is already a ludicrous cliché.” Africans may read, but fiction has no place on their list of priorities, especially African fiction.

We must first establish that there are different categories of young Africans—Nlebedum seems to refer to the under “under twenty” category, and seems to have a bias for fiction writers in his criticism. I am Nigerian, and I live and work in Nigeria. I class myself way above the “under twenty” category. Apart from being an aspiring writer myself, I have a daytime job which places me in an environment where I have for colleagues at least forty well-educated Africans of about the same demography as mine, some older, some younger. I can tell you without fear of contradiction that reading fiction has no place in their lives. “Are you preparing for yet another professional exam? You never tire to do exam?” colleagues say to me when I’m seen reading a novel before the beginning, or after the end of the business day—among many Nigerians, one is expected to read only when one is preparing for exams. When a few of them stumble on fiction novels on my person at any given time, all I get are unbelieving looks, mixed with the looks of pity one would give a drug addict well down on the path to perdition.

Nlebedum remarks in his essay that he teaches “kids in Lekki, some of whom have devoured all the series of The Diary of The Wimpy Kid, Harry Porter, The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson’s series but who are strangers to the names and works of Chimamanda Adichie, Seffi Attah, Chika Unigwe, Igoni Barret, Helon Habila, Tope Folarin. This may surprise many keen watchers of the African/Nigerian literary scene who consider these names to be the leading lights of contemporary African literature, but it does not surprise me. I was privileged to attend a secondary school with children whose parents dwelt in Lekki-type places; they shared in that widespread Nigerian mindset that all things local are inferior. As a youth in Nigeria in the late 1980s and 1990s, I clearly recall disparaging remarks made by classmates and friends about the African literature we were made to study in school at the time. “The works of Achebe and Soyinka,” one of my pals from a well-heeled home snorted one time. They wanted to read the exotic works of Sidney Sheldon, the thrillers of Fredrick Forsythe, the books by Enid Blyton and James Hadley Chase. The novels about African themes like Things Fall Apart, The Lion and The Jewel and A Grain of Wheat were a bore—we knew all they were talking about; they were too familiar, they were too local. They grudgingly accepted thrillers under the popular Pacesetters imprint, but they were quick to state that they were not as good as the Nick Carter thrillers from America. When I was in the university, I remember criticizing a classmate of mine about his always reading thick western “bestsellers.” His response stays clearly with me to this day: “You want me to go and be reading Things Fall Apart?” We wanted to read stuff written by white folks, the real owners of the English language—some parents gave that mindset the adequate boost by flooding their homes with only such foreign books; my colleagues do the same for their children now. I was spared of this fate, because I had a relatively healthy mix at home. Sometime in 2015, in the company of friends, I was in the sitting room of a Nigerian friend, who resides in Lekki, whose two-year old son found himself instinctively jigging to a television advert for some product or the other, and the theme song was filled with heavy African drum percussion. His embarrassed father turned to us, his visitors, and said jokingly, “I’ve failed as a parent.” Behind this humorous declaration is an undeniable truth—the young African of today has been taught to hate his own heritage and culture, or make it second place to western culture, either consciously, or on a subliminal level.

In the light of this, one is forced to draw the conclusion that the best fate that can befall a contemporary African writer before he or she may find favour with the young African audience, the Lekki-type demography, is to become white, like Furo Wariboko in Igoni Barrett’s Blackass. Only then, will the Lekki-type demography find you worthy of their respect, and their children’s reading time. The overwhelming role of pigmentocracy in our national lives does not just apply to Africa/Nigeria’s economic sphere where expatriates are accorded greater wages and regard than their local counterparts with even better qualifications, it also extends to our cultural makeup. This is why a young Nigerian will read with glee the Harry Porter books, with due encouragement from the Lekki-type parent, who will do all in their power to discourage their child from reading a book about Harry Porter’s African wizard counterpart, written by a contemporary African writer. Everyone knows that a white teenage wizard is much better than an African wizard, the type that the Lekki-type parent takes their children to see the evangelical pastor cast and bind every weekend. Harry Porter is white, like Jesus, and is guaranteed a place in Heaven. The African wizard, that black being, is Satan’s sure companion in Hell in the afterlife.

I do not attempt to discourage the African reader’s interaction with literature from outside the continent. I owe a lot of knowledge to such interaction. For instance, it was in my reading of African American literature I first came to the knowledge of the racist history of the use of the word “boy” to describe black adult males, and of course, its related use in colonial Africa by the European colonialists who regarded the African male, irrespective of age, as one who could never grow out of a child-like state of mind. The post-colonial education Nigerians receive does not eliminate such in-built, unwitting self-hatred. It’s not uncommon to find African intellectuals and civil servants refer to their colleagues and subordinates as “boy” or “my boy,” which is unexpected from folks who should know better. If foreign literature will redress this, we should encourage it, but not to the detriment of our local content.

Nlebedum raises the question: “Who really are the people reading you, dear contemporary African writer?” The question is thrown up by the unavailability of the print editions of the works of these young African writers in bookshops. I would posit that a few devotees, such as myself, and I am sure there are a good number around the continent and in the diaspora, go all out to hunt for these new works. I’m not fond of e-readers, so I do as much as I can to get a hold of the print edition of books. I can sympathise a bit with his dilemma—I recall roaming many bookshops in Abuja before I got a copy of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun in 2010. However, in due course, I identified a few “watering holes”—bookshops—where I spend a great deal of time selecting works by African writers and you can be sure to always discover a new exciting work—it’s not often a cheap hobby. Some of the books can be rather expensive.

The major reason why many of these books are not available in print is that publishing houses in Nigeria are just as practical as businesses anywhere in the world should be—why risk mass producing products that few will buy? It is a matter of simple economics—no demand, no supply, or little demand, little supply. Many readers won’t buy those books, not because they aren’t good, but because they dwell on themes that are too familiar, and they aren’t written by white people, about exotic places that the buyer may never visit, or intends to migrate to and leave, forever, this place called Africa. The Afropolitan writers and their works find better favour with African publishers and the Lekki-type demography for a good reason—they have left the godforsaken continent and gone on to live, study and work in those exotic white places. But, oh well, you can take the African out of Africa, but the African can never write anything as good as Harry Porter, or The Hunger Games.

These contemporary African writers’ works are available on every kind of e-reader you can mention, but they won’t be bought or read by the the Lekki-type parent, who can supply their children with e-readers of various forms, but will not contaminate their children with local African perspectives; it will not help the children prepare well for their insulated journeys to Harvard and Oxford.

Nlebedum states that a new direction of writing by African writers is necessary, works that show that “Africa has evolved, and is now an Africa where we seek equality between the man and the woman; an Africa where the minority and there rights should be protected; an Africa where electorates have discovered the pettiness of their politicians; an Africa that will stand and stands in judgment against those who take sides with the powerful against the powerless.” I must express surprise that as a teacher of literature, Nlebedum is not aware that African writers, the “old school” and the contemporary ones, have been writing about these themes for decades. Recent examples from contemporary African writers are Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday, Season of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Oil Cemetery by May Ifeoma Nwoye, Nairobi Heat by Mukoma Wa Ngugi, The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician by Tendai Huchu—the list goes on and on. These books ARE available in Lagos—the question is, how dedicated is a prospective reader to the task of finding them? There are tonnes of African novels which explore these themes. As a teacher himself, Nlebedum is not entirely blameless if his students are unaware of contemporary African writers, just as are many African literary scholars who think the only writers worthy of note are those of the 1960s and the contemporary ones canonized by the West, and they are made to sit in judgment every now and then at the NLNG literary prize. Contemporary African writers, he prescribes, should jettison “tales of witches and wizards, of evil powers in high places” but I am very sure that many of Nlebedum’s students, and maybe himself, would give stamps of approval to the works of Stephen King. After all, white horror, is better, more decent, than black/African horror.

Nlebedum complains “of books hurriedly written and printed by hungry writers who are grossly uninformed and are yet to come to terms with the rules of the English grammar.” The aspiring African writers who produce these books have to wage different battles on several fronts. The first front is the traditional publisher who will only publish writers and their works which have been blessed by the West. Not long ago, a popular Nigerian imprint asked for submissions from writers. Months later, the publisher complained that the submissions were filled with grammatical errors, and they all submissions were rejected. If Amos Tutola’s publisher had been so “grammatically-correct”, the magic of his stories would have been lost, forever. “Grammatical errors in a manuscript? No, can’t publish,” says the African publisher. The African writer must not have knowledge that is beyond his or her ken; the western writer knows it all and must be emulated. One would think that editors were invented for a particular reason, or perhaps editing is just too much work.

Writers have to make ends meet too. Having our manuscripts rejected by the continent’s traditional publishers means we have to seek funds to self-publish—anyone burdened with an unpublished manuscript for any length of time can probably identify with this. Waiting around for a gate keeper whose decisions are driven by the West won’t help to put food on the table. Yes, it is important to ensure quality is produced, but a writer doubling as the editor, the publisher and distributor of his or her work may not be a good idea. I often relate my own experience when, filled with excitement and zest, I took the manuscript of my first novel to the expansive, air-conditioned offices of a major Ibadan-based publisher. I was told, by the chief editor, without opening a page of the manuscript and with a sympathetic smile on his face that I would have to bear the entire cost of publication of the novel. However, if I would be willing to write a textbook on accounting—the source of my daily bread—for use by either secondary schools or universities, they would publish that one gratis, without delay. My excitement waned considerably immediately after that meeting.

I often watch with fascination, and inner pride, my younger relatives, become so enamoured of music produced by homegrown, home-based young Nigerian musicians. They pay attention to the gossip, the fashion trends among these music stars, word about which musician is sleeping with whom. The last time we had this level of explosion in that cultural scene was in the 1980s, when we wanted to know why Mike Okri was still hopping in and out of taxis despite having monster hits, when we bought and read Prime People and Vintage People, and wanted to know Charlie Boy’s latest scandal. Then the 1990s rolled in, and American style hip-hop took over. Folks who had no idea what Tupac and Biggie Smalls were talking about became fans of the genre because our music stars stopped producing major stuff, and when they did, the recordings were of poor quality. I believe African literature will experience the same phase in due course. In the 1980s, things that the Achebes, the Soyinkas, the J.P. Clarks did made the front pages of newspapers—they had rock star personas. The closest to that today is Chimamanda Adichie. The real or perceived present poor state of the country’s educational system may cause one to doubt that we’ll soon have fiction writers of such statures dominating pop culture headlines. You don’t need much education to get into the groove of contemporary Nigerian Afrobeats, but you need it to read through a novel. As a stakeholder though, one must be optimistic that the time of African literature to explode like the pop music scene will arrive soon.

Writing is vanity. Staring at those three words forces me to confront the detritus that the poor judgment that passes for my writing life has made of my existence. Why do we write? Dunno, I wake up and I write and write and write until I fall asleep. There is absolutely no reason why I should be writing, certainly not this beautiful dawn with the sun beginning to peek shyly out the sky’s curtains.

Why am I writing? I shouldn’t be writing. I should be taking a walk, mentally counting all my dollars (well, imaginary dollars since I currently have none) or engaging in wild luscious fulfilling sex (another impossibility since my lover since fled the house and will only return abused, used and physically broken from slaving in the salt mines of Babylon. I imagine any suggestion regarding amorous adventures would inspire her to call the police to come haul my black ass out of her existence. She still rues the day she fell in love with my words (her words, she did NOT fall in love with me, she says) instead of falling in love with the class dunce who is now a highly regarded hard working thieving multi-billionaire politician in Nigeria. My lover has a tee shirt she wears to bed every night that screeches in garish red, “ONLY A FOOL FALLS IN LOVE WITH A WRITER!! SMH” My lover is not a fool.

Writing is lunacy, the lunacy of vanity. Why do people write, why? Why do people even read these things? I write, but I mostly read. I have read a lot of stuff in my life, I mean serious headache inducing stuff and you go, this is madness. Take the great Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka. Now, that is how to be mad and vain. It is humanly impossible to shut him up, he is a mad man. All of his life, institutions, people, and now the Internet have conspired to try to gag him, you know stuff things in his mouth, tape it shut and hope he never utters a word again, ever. It never stops him, he keeps writing.

In 1969. General Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria’s dictator du jour got so tired of Soyinka’s nonsense, he jailed Soyinka and put him in solitary for several years just so the world would be freed from his cacophony. That Man took the toilet paper he was given in jail and wrote an entire book, The Man Died, on said toilet paper. Now, that is lunacy and vanity, your belief that the world is so enamored of your words of wisdom, it cannot wait for you to crawl out of prison to hear you.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Well, you all know that Soyinka is famously obtuse er incomprehensible. Need any proof? Well, have you read his novel, The Interpreters? Did you understand it? I didn’t and I have read it several times. Take this sentence: Metal on glass jars my drink lobes; what in the hell does that even begin to mean? The Interpreters was required text in my youth and I know many class dunces who simply walked out of school and took up armed robbery rather than be forced to deconstruct such “nonsense” (their sage words).

My strong belief is that it takes a deft combination of genius lunacy and vanity to foist Soyinka’s literary madness on the people. And so when the military put Soyinka away in a dungeon millions distressed Nigerian school children flooded the streets in jubilation, chanting, “Our Tormentor is gone, The Lord is Good! All the time!” Have you read Soyinka’s poems? They are incomprehensible to mere mortals. In literature class, I used to pray to the Lord for our mean teacher not to call upon me to explain any line in Soyinka’s Abiku. These perplexing lines terrorized and terrified me:

I am the squirrel teeth, cracked
The riddle of the palm; remember
This, and dig me deeper still into
The god’s swollen foot.

That poem gives me painful flashbacks of my school days, I should sue Soyinka for allowing his vanity ruin the joy of my childhood. The man even wrote a poem about his greying hair, who does that? He sure did, read this and please explain to me what he just said:

 Hirsute hell chimney-spouts, black thunderthroes
confluence of coarse cloudfleeces – my head sir! – scourbrush
in bitumen, past fossil beyond fingers of light – until …!

Sudden sprung as corn stalk after rain, watered milk weak;
as lightning shrunk to ant’s antenna, shrivelled
off the febrile sight of crickets in the sun –

SMH. And his narcissism has been fueled and funded by a gleeful West; for this and other literary subversions, Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986, a decision that so infuriated Chinweizu another bad belle vain writer, he denounced it as “the undesirable honouring the unreadable.” Hehehehehehe! SMH. Some argued that this was a case of a miffed kettle (Chinweizu) calling the pot (Soyinka) black.

 To be clear; I am joking, I am not picking on Soyinka, I love The Man. I love the man; he is a genius and a global treasure. Besides, the man is famously thin-skinned and I don’t want to incur his wrath lest I be the source and inspiration for his next tome, who wants to die? Besides, he has singlehandedly saved my marriage. Enh? How?, you ask. Well, my lover adores him, simply because of his cute little poem, Telephone Conversation, that adorable tub of superciliousness. Whenever I am in trouble, reciting that poem loudly always gets me out of the dog house. Also, my lover thinks Soyinka is cute. Guess who is not coming to dinner at my house? Soyinka! SMH.

I am not picking on Soyinka, but please, take any writer, take your favorite writer and you will soon find that what drives him or her is a punishing insecurity, a raging emptiness, a yearning for something that manifests itself in the dysfunctions of vanity. The writer is us, what you see are your anxieties and insecurities glowering at you. Ask any critic who has ever as much as written a negative word about a writer’s work. In fact, google the term “literary critic” and you will come face to face with the vitriol of writers punishing critics for as much as suggesting that perhaps their latest work is only good for mulching the garden, shredded, that is.

I once suggested to a writer that his work needed, well, more work. I was visited with the opprobrium reserved for armed robbers. The poor soul called me a conceited ignoramus and berated me for not declaring his work, Pulitzer Prize winning material. I am still in therapy from the abuse. You should have seen this piece, typos everywhere, clichés running riot all over the place. Read all about it here, my feathers are still burning. I do understand, it is hard to stand by and watch your baby criticized, I would know, I have children and I have reserved the hottest part of hell for anyone that dares criticize my adorable kids. I must say it hurt me immensely to be called a conceited ignoramus. I am not conceited.

I come from a land that has streets with no names. Our people did not name the streets of our village because they saw the coming of smartphones, Google, e-mail and Facebook and whatnot.

Well, the little path that goes from my father’s village to my mother’s village is called the little path. Was. The little path is no more. My father’s father was buried by the path half way to my mother’s people. He is no longer buried there. A government thief built an ugly mansion over his bones. In the land of my ancestors, people don’t venture far from the earth. There are no mortuaries, when they die they practically fall into their graves themselves. We are simple people; it is complicated.

I have ventured far, very far from home. When I left home, no Facebook messages charted my way out of Africa into America’s issues. My parents put me inside this capsule to somewhere and hoped that someday I would be back. I am still here in America. I am not going back soon.

Today, I stare at the remains of winter in America; earth, frosting on chocolate cake. After all these moons, alien images and clichés stick to me, white on rice. Nothing stays the same. Not in America. The changes make me dizzy and I obsess non-stop about the way things used to be.

Here in my part of America, our drugstore no longer has human cashiers. The owners remodeled the store, and replaced humans with machines that talk to you. You walk up to a machine, scan your goods, pay and leave. It is very disconcerting; I keep looking for humans to return, I actually miss them. I know now that I love people and I cannot shake this cold unfeeling nothingness I get from interacting with a machine that proves its indifference with faux warmth.

Don’t get me wrong, I am high on the possibilities and the opportunities riding on the strong backs of these new and emerging technologies, but I do wonder now if there are downsides to all of this. The world is becoming more and more shaped by a few and powerful; the cognitive elite. We struggle daily to deal with and adapt to the awesome force of new technologies and the new billionaire dictators that built them.

Life is war. We were all born into a war that we did not ask for. And people write about our world; sometimes it is mostly gory. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Achebe, they belonged to a certain era when one had no choice but to concentrate all of one’s creative passions on one medium of expression – the book.

I read a lot of books, mostly about the condition we find ourselves as people of color in a white man’s world. It is a shame that we are talking about books because in my clan we are steeped in the oral tradition. Some of the world’s greatest “books” have been “read” to us in song by our ancestors. My mother, Izuma is one of the world’s greatest living poets; she has not written a lick. She would be great on YouTube. She would at least help to preserve one of our dying languages.

On Facebook, walls are colorful wrappers wound tightly around a billion new municipalities of ME. Facebook is falling leaves, hearts fluttering, forlorn, drying on yesterday’s clothes lines. People are waving hasty goodbyes out the windows of indifferent relationships. It is complicated. Life goes on. There are no nations as we remember them.Facebook. The new frontier has edged into our consciousness. Africa. We fled her angry windows for Facebook Nation.

History matters. There are many ways to commemorate, to memorialize communal horror. All over the world, memorials and museums stand sentry to history, to various times when the darkness within seemed to overwhelm humanity and throw up the unmentionable like the holocaust, Biafra, Bosnia, and now Rwanda. Yes, over twenty years ago, in 1994, beginning in April, within a span of 100 horrible, blood-drenched days, the Hutu took machetes and other crude implements of savagery and hatred and hacked down approximately one million Tutsis (and moderate Hutus). Those who are strangely not familiar with this sordid aspect of world history should read this primer by the BBC on the genocide. The thinker Wandia Njoya (@wmnjoya on Twitter) also has an incisive piece that situates the genocide in its proper context and assigns appropriate responsibility to all the players in this horror of horrors.

 History matters. There are many ways to remember the past. In addition to physical artifacts of remembrance, writers, thinkers and artists have memorialized trauma in prose and theatre. Read Elie Wiesel’s Night and be numbed by his stark and searing narrative on the concentration camps of the holocaust. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is an epic ode to the horror that was Biafra and the Nigerian civil war. In Rwanda, as in previous crimes against humanity, the world chose to look away. America under the leadership of President Bill Clinton knew of an impending genocide and chose to do nothing. There is not a shortage of immortal words commemorating man’s inhumanity to man.

So the other day, this book came in the mail; Juliane Okot Bitek’s 100 Days, a book of poetry about Rwanda, genocide, pain, living, dying, loving, about connections and dislocations in a time of madness. One hundred days to be precise. It sat staring at me, willing me to read of a time when it seemed that the world went mad and looked away as Rwanda boiled in a cauldron of whirling machetes and hate. And the text came: ‘My dad’s health has declined since last night. They say he doesn’t have much longer if you would like to come see him.” And as I do when I am under stress I grabbed the book and took it with me to the hospice to go say goodbye to a part of me. And as I read Bitek’s poems to the living dying in that room, I was overcome by the power of her words and the comforting healing of the poems from someone so far away. The poems spoke to both of us in our grief. What are words if they cannot lift you and carry you past the valley of darkness?

Major kudos to the University of Alberta Press (@UAlbertaPress on Twitter), publishers of 100 Days; it is a gorgeous book, well edited, you should read it. It is poetry and it is not poetry, the fluidity of the verse defies definition, in a good way. The reader is forced to ask the question: What is poetry and does it matter if you don’t call it poetry? It is simply enough for one to say, 100 Days is a compilation that came straight out from deep within Bitek’s rich soul and made this reader’s cells dance in celebration of a life ebbing away into the next pantheon. Bitek’s ability to connect with the beauty and pain of human suffering seems supernatural, this ability to give voice to those who seem to have no voices. Bitek wrote this book with her blood and it shows.

 You should read 100 Days, there are connections, physical, emotional and spiritual in every page of this fascinating collection of connections. Each day is a poem. Each day reveals a new dawn, a new theme, or many themes. Bitek is a gifted seer, she sees tomorrow with a sweet but earthy, guttural voice, voice of the masquerade. And betrayal is a constant theme, the voice reminds the earth.

but it was the earth that betrayed us first
in those one hundred days that would never end

100 Days is a long lament in the tradition of the ancients, long running, punishing the conscience, no question marks, no commas, no periods, a long harrowing lament that grabs you by the head and forces you to listen to the victim, and be drenched in the sweaty rage of the not-so helpless.

 Words leapt into our eyes
& burned this new knowledge that was never new

but it was the earth that betrayed us first
in those one hundred days that would never end

what is it to come from a land that swallows its own people

how can we exist outside of betrayal
by time & land

100 Days is about Rwanda. But then it is not only about Rwanda. It is about everywhere really as Bitek reminds us in her note to the reader:

“How and where do the experiences of survivors of genocide in Rwanda match those of survivors from Bosnia and northern Uganda? All three places were steeped in war and violence at the same time. What is it to be from a place where bloodshed of your kin darkens the soil, makes the river run red and that that’s not newsworthy?”

In these powerful pages one is confronted with a starkness, with a painful loss of innocence, the poems are almost one song, it as if I am listening to the poets of the sixties, the poets of Vietnam, of Biafra, Simon and Garfunkel wailing the sad, beautiful song, The Boxer. This is what Bitek does; she takes the reader to places in the heart that the writer never intended or imagined. That is powerful, how she makes 100 Days a deeply personal journey for each reader.

We walked when our legs could carry us
childhood rhythms carried us along
songs from days of innocence
like holding hands
like soft embraces

 And so, a hundred days becomes a frightening character in a book of horrors, this vehicle that swallowed so many innocents whole in the blood of a mean land.

 What do crickets know about innocence
were they not there
did they not see more than we did
By staying closer to the ground than we ever were

 innocence is power without experience
innocence is a knowing untempered

  Imagine a world in which evil is a numbing cliché. It is our world.

a machete hangs like a mockery of time
like a semblance of that reality
in which another machete
& other machetes hanged
for what seemed like a long time
but eventually they come down
again & again & again & again & again

even time measured in machete strokes
can never be accurate

100 Days grabs you, not letting go, telling you of the truths you won’t look at it in the face. And you feel the heavy emptiness, the disempowering weight of grief as helplessness is measured in the relentless cycle of unending time.

After all this
time flashes
time drags
nothing as nothing  just as it was
a nothingness

Bitek reminds us with the force and clarity of her verses that poems can serve as cameras into the soul of a troubled world. The remembering is painful but necessary, this holocaust museum in the soul. This is horror neatly catalogued like the surviving finger with the ring, missing her nine companions. Words are powerful here, describing the powerlessness of being. And the whole notion of reconciliation as avoidance is birthed. And organized religion is an enabler.

The beauty of 100 Days is that it asks all the right questions about what did not happen in Rwanda. As an aside it is interesting that a mere twenty years after that genocide, the word reconciliation has been bandied about until it is chic for photographers like Pieter Hugo to take  staged portraits of victims and perpetrators in ways that they would not dare of the holocaust. As in South Africa and Rwanda, the powerless reach for the placebo of reconciliation, while with the holocaust, the talk to this day is of justice and punishment. That is how it should be.

100 Days is also a conversation about the power of the Internet and social media to make connections among artists and allow for productive collaboration. As Bitek explains it, these poems started out as a collaboration of sorts with the Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu (@Wangechimutu on Twitter) who in April 2014 started posting a series of photographs tagged #kwibuka20#100Days on social media. Indeed, on Bitek’s blog there is an online version of the book in which each day, Mutu’s photographs are juxtaposed side by side with Bitek’s poems for each day. I think the collaboration should have been extended to the book, the pictures would have helped the stories. It is not a huge loss, the poems are powerful portraits by themselves. By the way, the foreword by the Canadian poet Cecily Nicholson (@_c_n_ on Twitter) alone is worth the price of the book, it is a scintillating show of pretty prose-poetry housing profound thoughts about our humanity.

 There is another reason why I celebrate and adore Bitek. She is a powerful poet in her own right, which is no mean feat, because she has had to shake herself off the shadows of her father, Okot p’Bitek one of Africa’s most important poets, most famous for Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, epic works of fiction in long-running verse. It is interesting, over five decades after the publication of those volumes, the same themes of alienation, dislocation, and belonging continue to haunt Africa as seen in Bitek’s 100 Days. Her poetry only confirms that she comes from a land of people who revere the spoken word and make it say important truths in beautiful ways. In interview after interview, the questions never fail to come out about her father, but Bitek is ever so gracious in not letting it be about her father, while educating the world about a man’s legacy she is infinitely proud of:

“My dad was not an autocrat in the house and he was not sexist. All the housework was shared fairly between our brother and sisters. He taught us how to cook some dishes that I still make occasionally. He showed us, for example, how to cook rice and beef on a single charcoal stove by placing the charcoal stove on top of the rice pot and then cooking the beef on top. He made an excellent dish of fried matooke which he cooked with lots of ghee and pepper. He was a great lover of Acholi food which we all now appreciate. My dad woke up early every day – my mother tells me he was up between four and five every morning to write. I have memories of my dad waking me up to watch the sunrise from the back verandah of our house in Kololo.”

And of course, you would not be a Ugandan poet if you did not pay homage to matooke, that meal of the gods. Matooke? Google it. That’s what Google is for. And oh, Juliane Okot Bitek is on Twitter as @jobitek. Follow her. Thank me later.

The Nigerian fiction writing scene is no longer quiet; it is enjoying a raucous renaissance and we have the energy and creativity of young Nigerian writers to thank for it. For the past decade, we have just Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila and Chika Unigwe and a few others to brag about. The good news is that new voices like Chigozie Obioma and Chinelo Okparanta, Elnathan John, A. Igoni Barret, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, and several others have emerged to literally rock the literary house. Still, for a country of over 170 million people, this is not nearly enough. 

 Nigeria needs lots of resources and robust structures to encourage its creative writing industry. What do we have? How many MFAs? How many noteworthy publishing houses. How many noteworthy contests for upcoming writers? Apart from Farafina and Ebedi, what other consistent live-in workshops are there? My point is this: Nigeria needs more structures. We need a more enabling environment for our writing. We need to rid our culture of the poor-writers-who-scramble-for-every-20k-crumbs attitude. We need to give writing the dignity it deserves in this part of the world. We need The Flash7: Blackout. 

 Yes, we need the Flash7: Blackout. What is blackout, you ask? It is an exciting initiative of the writer Hymar David, one of many brilliant young writers that have turned Facebook and Twitter into an infinite literary canvas that is giving traditional writing serious competition. 

The Flash began as a series of Facebook-based writing duels of Flash Fiction between two writers with the reading public as judges: Samuel Okopi and Enobong Odohofreh. Hymar David, however, took the idea and turned it into a certain movement that has spread through Facebook like a virus. Literally. 
 

The Flash7: Blackout, featuring 24 writers in 6 groups, is the second of its kind after the Flash: Eclipse which had 16 writers in 4 groups going one on one for a N30,000 reward. However, with the support of Dufil Groups, the makers of Indomie noodles, and Lenovo, Nigeria’s foremost laptop and smartphone manufacturers, the Flash has grown in one giant leap. 

Blackout is offering a grand prize of N100,000 naira plus a Lenovo laptop to the eventual winner; N50,000 plus a Lenovo smartphone to the runner-up and N15,000 each to the last 2 semi-finalists. It is so far the biggest individually-run writing competition in Nigeria. And stands its own next to The Etisalat Prize and the NLNG prize. I am beyond thrilled.
 

The Flash7: Blackout is well organised. The contestants are picked via a process that involved stories sent in (after a call for submissions) sorted and sent anonymously (without the writers’ names appended) to four judges who filter through and pick the final 24 stories.

 The Facebook reading public is often fond of praise-singing, applauding poorly written efforts and giving writers a false sense of accomplishment. During the Blackout, each matchup will be judged not just by votes but by three judges whose votes carry more weight than the public votes. For instance, 10 public votes are worth 3 points while a single judge’s vote is worth 12 points. Soliciting for votes is prohibited. Contestants are fined 5 points for that. Just write (based on given themes with word limits attached) and let everyone assess your worth, the organizers seem to be saying. 

I cannot say it enough: Kudos to Hymar David and his crew who are taking Facebook writing, and social media writing in general to another awesome level. 

 Credit must also go to Lenovo and Dufil Groups for their involvement in this noble endeavor; helping grow a youthful literary sphere full of groping brilliant hands and minds. It is my hope that The Flash will keep expanding to become a major player in the Nigerian literary landscape. It is a new world and it is a good time to be alive if you are a reader.

As the flash starts on Saturday, 9th January 2016, like the Facebook page: The Flash: Challenge to follow up on this generation of new writers, writing their way out of Nigeria’s glorious literary past into a new dawn of fun and innovative writing. I salute Hymar David and his fellow warriors.

Accents. December 30, 2015 was not a good day for most Nigerians. President Buhari spoke at his inaugural “Presidential Media Chat” and that upset them. Poor Buhari. He can catch no break. If he doesn’t speak, everybody wails, ‘Baba, talk to us na, SMH!!!” If he speaks, everybody wails, “OMG! Baba shut up!” Yesterday all of Nigeria was in mourning. The best way to decribe it is if all the teams in the British Premier League played on the same day – and they all lost. Imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth on the streets of Nigeria. Pretty much everybody agrees now that President Buhari should not do media chats again, ever, never, ever, never. I happen to agree. I do think there should be media chats – featuring just Lai Muhammed and the interviewer Ngozi Anyaegbunam. Just kidding! Just kidding! Drop your stones, SMH.

I actually enjoyed the media chat, even  before I watched it. The Igbo have an ancient saying, that Facebook comments are always more interesting than the original post. This was especially true with Buhari’s media chat. I kept laughing and fainting and dying as APC die-hards, Buharists, breathlessly tweeted and Facebooked their alarm, despair and disgust as their man Buhari kept mangling any and everything remotely resembling rigorous thought. It was cute, how PDP enthusiasts kept consoling the Buharists [“Ndo! It is well, this too shall pass, it doesn’t worth it, Buhari is useless, that is the crust of the matter, see him passing the bulk, SMH! Hiss!! Nonsense!!! Don’t cry!!”]. The tweets and Facebook posts, I must say were hilarious. I don’t need to post any here, they are everywhere.

Nigerians are proud people, they like to look and sound good. You can do anything you like, but don’t disrespect Nigerians by not representing them well. Buhari did not represent them well at the media chat. I finally watched the videoclip of the media chat; it was bad, but not as bad as it could have been. The interviewers were not the best, save for Ibangy Isine, the Premium Times representative. He at least looked like he had done his homework. Ms. Ngozi Anyaegbunam should not be allowed near a microphone again, ever. To say she was awful would be to disrespect the word “awful.” In general, the interviewers missed a golden opportunity to ask systemic questions, rather than “who chop meat” kinds of questions. The other way to look at it is that Buhari is incapable of big picture questions. He stubbornly refused to rise to the occasion at each opportunity. He sat there like a Nigerian iceberg glowering at himself and the world. He clearly has no idea what it takes to run a modern state, it just seemed like he had not read anything of substance for 30 years, as if he had been locked away in solitary and the keys thrown away. Does he have advisers who brief him every day? Poor Buhari, he still longs for the days of decrees and house arrests, democracy is in his way. And he pretty much said that. It was bad.

I have to say I love Buhari’s accent *dodges slaps* I honestly do, it is the only thing presidential about him. He should speak Hausa and use an interpreter. Let the West use English subtitles, who cares? They will anyway, even if he speaks what we think is English. My sense however is that it was his accent and delivery that upset Nigerians the most. Nigerians love style over substance. This time there was neither style nor substance. They came for suya, they did not smell suya, did not smell the smoke, did not hear the sizzle, certainly did not even eat the onions. Nigerians are steamed, and they are not having it.

Since 1999, it appears that the chief objective of democracy has been to humiliate Nigerians with leaders that are quite honestly unpresentable. Whenever Obasanjo would speak on CNN, they would use subtitles, as if he was speaking a rare variant of Yoruba. He came across as opinionated, arrogant, but poorly read. I still wonder what he is going to put in his presidential library. I met Yar’Adua once, I liked his delivery, he came across as humble and well read. I could never bear to watch Goodluck Jonathan. He was poorly read and did not look anywhere near presidential. I loved Madam Patience though, just loved the poetry of her delivery. I never understood her, to be honest. I did not know she was speaking English until someone told me that she was. And this was long after she’d left office. Yes, she was president of Nigeria. Her husband was simply warming the seat. Now, that is how to be a feminist.

I do miss the days when our leaders made us proud when they spoke. Leaders like Tafawa Balewa, Yakubu Gowon, Odumegwu Ojukwu, etc. etc.. We were respected world wide. Go to the archives and see how prepared and dignified Yakubu Gowon and Victoria Gowon were when they were guests at Buckingham Palace. Ah! Victoria! *swoons* Compare those halcyon times to the buffoonery that was the visit to the White House by Buhari and the boys. I am still crying. Here, watch Tafawa Balewa’s visit to the U.S. Compare it to today. You wil cry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT5m9Fn9RBg

I shall be back in the new year.

– Signed, Your favorite rascal, Ikhide