War has provided creative artists over the ages with bumptious ecstatic inspirations in their creative enterprise. Many philosophies have sprung from the blood-nourished fields of war and thinkers have developed certain reasoning patterns from merely studying war. In war is the widening gyre of vibrations that play the chord of human sportiveness.
Added to this is the glaring verity that great men and women, great nations and empires all came to greatness in a chaotic war situation or outright from the threshold of war. Many arguments have been raised on the meaning, nature, and causes of war. Many have viewed it from deterministic and free will perspectives.
Many great writers have tackled the subject of war with depth and dexterity of mind. Homer used his Iliad and Odyssey to crack the kernel of war verbiage. English writers from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Pope to Shaw and Dickens deepened our understanding of war and human nature. Russian writers even brought great assiduity to the subject.
Their many experiences of revolutionary crisis and invasions perhaps animated their ragbag of perspectives; and from their pens, the world was further opened to the portentous and prodigious concussions of war. Human nature and history became focal points in understanding war, and war itself took a more dignified state in the works of these masters.
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, for instance, not only chronicles the Napoleonic Wars, it explores the interconnectivity of war, history, religion, and human nature. To him, war and history are deterministic phenomena. Dostoyevsky was more concerned with the motivations of humans to war.
In his masterpiece, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, he comments on man’s inherent barbarity thus: “It is just their [weak men’s] defencelessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal that sets his vile blood on fire.
In every man, of course, a beast lies hidden – the beast of rage, the beast of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the beast of lawlessness let off the chain, the beast of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on.”
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky made war a rosy-cheeked, wide-eyed damsel for us to woo, and for her sake engage ourselves in thorough cogitations as to her coquetry.
Hemingway and Crane
Ernest Hemingway and Steven Crane yet variously engaged the rosy-cheeked lady in ‘A Farewell to Arms’ and ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ respectively. They punctured some of her narcissistic and capricious mien, leaving her in a state of apostolic simplicity. Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and Auden all had something lofty, something sensuously seductive and poetic to relate with in her. They all proved to be bold and men enough to manipulate the lofty lady.
Then came African writers and, apologetic enough, our own Nigerian war pundits. These writers displayed base timidity and pusillanimous shyness to the point of utter lack of ideas on how to engage the lady. After reading some wonderful works on war, one would have expected that anyone who was serious in the hallowed business of writing, especially one trying to engage certain themes, should have read up the masters who had attempted similar subjects before ever diving head on to the subject.
To make up for their deficiency, our own very writers raped this rosy-cheeked lady, and even at that, no orgiastic fancy was still achieved. Their war fictions reeked of abhorrent, dismal apoplexy. In our war literature, the great and celebrated pachydermatous queen of high thoughts and philosophies was invidiously disembodied, and with scattered wits, her beauty and classy purdour was furrowed.
Sunset at Dawn
Chuwkuemeka Ike’s ‘Sunset at Dawn’ and S. Mezu’s ‘Behind the Rising Sun’ are earlier chronicles of the Nigerian Civil War. Far from having intellectual depth, the works were mere attempts to document the events of the war and no exploration of matters beyond the surface. Aniebo’s ‘The Anonymity of Sacrifice’, Okpewho’s ‘The Last Duty’ and Iyayi’s ‘The Heroes’ would have been engaging enough to a lofty mind had it not been for the borrowed and touted ideological treatments of the subject and situation of war.
They have not managed to achieve the depth given by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to the subject. In trying to be more Marxian than Marx, they created stereotypes instead of characters.
Measuring Time
One would think that the younger writers would cover the lapses, but alas. When one began reading Helon Habila’s ‘Measuring Time’, one would erroneously assume that a great war fiction was in the offing. The dismal fascination one had at the onset gradually evaporated at the dangled treatments of the many subjects that accompanied an epic: love, jealousy, violence, and so on.
The stupendous display of action scenes in the novel revealed that the writer was not unfamiliar with kiddies’ comic books and cartoons. The careless handling of the characters exposed the writer as an aborted poet’s attempts at leap-frogging. The work, of course, had its strengths in having an interesting story and good expressiveness. Beyond these, there’s no depth, no resonant idea that could engage the intellect in good verbiage.
And apart from the half-witted, mesmerised vapidity of ideas in the works of these writers, they still cannot be classified in the realm of war literature for their paucity of depth and good sophistry.
It is not enough to merely document a war and call it war literature, otherwise there won’t be any difference between literature and mere historical documentation.
Half of a Yellow Sun
Then came Chimamanda Adichie’s ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ and the celebration of emollient, flamboyant narrative that is lacking in living ideas. The novel festooned the grand subject of war, petted her, and never engaged her. The book is definitely not a war fiction; it is best a love and family tale told in a war situation.
Even the themes of love, sex, family ties, virtues and vices are ridiculously treated, albeit with fiery intrigues: interesting a story, impish and timorous in depth. In the novel, loftiness was ruffled and smeared with flamboyance.
In her appraisal of her work, Adichie said that she wrote the book to cover for the “uniformed and unimaginative ways” the Nigerian Civil War has been earlier treated. Add to this is the “emotional truth” that she believes the work contains. The twins, Olanna and Kainene, are simple female versions of Mamo and LeMamo in Habila’s ‘Measuring Time’. There’s no depth in her treatment of Olanna’s infidelity with Richard, with Olanna’s love for Baby, and worst of all, Kainene’s ambiguous character.
The novel would have been powerful for its great story; but the shallow treatment of character motivations and ideas renders it less engaging beyond an interesting read.
The evolution of Nigerian literature has progressed in regressive motion. There’s no lyrical excuse for our poor literature, except that writers have become lazy and hardly engage themselves in good research. Achebe, Soyinka, Okigbo, and Okri still remain the lofty, yet-to-be-surmounted, luminous images of our literary arts.
A word for young, perhaps aspiring, writers! To be a writer, one should immerse oneself in the living pools of history, of philosophy, of religion, politics, and sciences. Above all, one must be an astute reader and possess a nature for controversies and anger.
“Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers.” So says Naguib Mahfouz!
