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The literary event
of the last week has to be not so much the op-ed piece written by
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani for the New York Times, but the reactions to it,
of which there are many, the tones of which have been of the almost
universally aghast kind.

My own reading of
Nwaubani’s ‘In Africa, the Laureate’s Curse’ was predictably
complicated. I am a great admirer of Mario Vargas Llosa (a worthy 2010
laureate) and many other Latin American writers, people in whose works
I’ve found a world closest to that of the Yoruba, from among whom I’ve
sprung.

That said, I wanted
Ngugi to win the Nobel, it meant a lot to me. He has written great,
visionary works. He’s an ideological writer, and without ideological
grounding, a writer is just piffle, in my view. He has also
demonstrated great courage over many decades and suffered terribly for
his art and convictions. Ngugi’s ‘Decolonizing the Mind’ is one of the
great theoretical works of African literature, or any literature for
that matter. After reading it, you cannot be indifferent; you must take
a stand, either you are for or against. I have always had great
sympathy for Ngugi’s insistence that we should write in our mother
tongues, controversial though the larger body of African writers say it
is. And one cannot take from Ngugi the fact that he has put his writing
post-1986 where his mouth is: writing first in Gikuyu then translating
into English (he’s written his latest memoirs in English, but that is a
matter for another day).

Ngugi has produced
indestructible works in many genres: drama, novel, essay. ‘The Trial of
Dedan Kimathi’ was a memorable playtext in my secondary school days.
And what of ‘Weep Not Child’, which apart from introducing Njoroge and
co, made me want to discover Walt Whitman’s ‘On The Beach At Night’ for
myself? These are among the foundational works of my formative years.
We used to chant the titles of Ngugi’s books as though they were
mantras. I once thought that if I ever saw Ngugi, it would be like
seeing man on the face of the moon. Great, almost mythical writer, who
one later had the privilege of seeing in the flesh; and to see the
radical writer so human, so aged, almost frail (from the detentions and
cigarette torture burns). A beautiful mind surpasses the limitations of
the physical body.

And to later
discover ‘A Grain of Wheat’, ‘Petals of Blood’, ‘The River Between’ and
of course, ‘Decolonizing The Mind’. Had Ms Nwaubani read enough Ngugi,
she would never have written the following: ‘There’s actually reason to
celebrate Mr. Ngugi’s loss.” There’s nothing to celebrate about Ngugi
missing out on the Nobel, and it’s difficult to see how the prize going
to someone else becomes a “loss” for Ngugi.

Furthemore, it’s
baffling that, nearly 25 years after Nigeria bagged her own Nobel
through Soyinka, a Nigerian writer saw nothing wrong in suggesting that
a Kenyan should not get the prize. Ngugi, Soyinka and Achebe have since
the 60s formed the great tripod of the humanising literature of Black
Africa. Soyinka has his Nobel, Man International Booker winner Achebe
has been celebrated to the heavens for ‘Things Fall Apart’, and
suddenly it’s a Nobel for Ngugi that will spell the death of African
writing?

Nwaubani’s argument
is deeply flawed; and it is regrettable that someone with a platform
like the New York Times to postulate about Africa, chose to use her
new-found international voice in this manner. The author of ‘I Do Not
Come To You By Chance’ must realise that it will not be by chance that
her argument will play into Western prejudices about Africa and African
writing. ‘Oh, let’s not give another African a Nobel because, knowing
no better, they’ll only copy themselves.’ Might as well go the whole
hog and cite Shakespeare’s Iago: “These Moors are changeable in their
wills.”

Arguing for the
emergence of new styles of writing, Nwaubani lumps Achebe, Soyinka and
Ngugi into a questionable sameness, purveyors of what she calls “an
earnest and sober style”. But what is so “sober” about Soyinka’s plays,
or his prison memoirs, ‘The Man Died’? Or indeed Achebe’s ‘A Man of the
People’? Have the likes of Helon Habila, Chimamanda Adichie, Sefi Atta,
Lola Shoneyin and Uzodimma Iweala come to prominence simply because
they ‘copied’ Achebe and Soyinka? And which of these two has Nwaubani
herself copied? Of the supposed sobriety of the triumvirate, Kinna says
on the blog, “Soyinka is far from sober. And what of Ngugi’s ‘Wizard of
the Crow’, which successfully mixes humour, satire and fantasy and is,
in my opinion, one of the most entertaining books by an African author.
Is sober the new word for old?”

The part of
Nwaubani’s argument that has provoked the most consternation, is the
suggestion that literature in the indigenous languages serve only to
exacerbate “tribal differences”. She declares, “This is not the kind of
variety we need.” Chielozona Eze issued an early rebuttal to Nwaubani’s
“cowardly ideas, the core of which sought to suggest that it is
separatist for a writer to write in his native language or even to
claim that he is a writer from his ethnic group.” As for Carmen McCain,
a Hausa literature enthusiast, writing in indigenous languages “is
exactly the variety we need.”

My own imaginative
universe has been formed to a significant extent by the works of D.O
Fagunwa, which I devoured as a child and still marvel to read today,
novels that form the bedrock of Yoruba literature, books which might
not have had the same power written in English. And what of
Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and others, whose immortal works were not
originally written in a Western European language? What of ‘One Hundred
Years of Solitude’, ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ and other works by
Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Their initial publication in Spanish has done
nothing to prevent them being read the world over through translation.

I suspect Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani could not have intended to be
understood as saying a writer should not identify with an ethnic group.
The bio on the UK edition of ‘I Do Not Come To You By Chance’ informs
that the author “grew up in the eastern part of Nigeria, among the Igbo
speaking people” – a construction that reads more like an ethnography
citation from 70 years ago, but which nonetheless serves the purpose.
But if Ngugi must be denied just so we don’t write Igbo, Hausa or
Yoruba literature, it’s fairly standard that Nwaubani’s New York Times
piece is a hard sell.

(Click to read Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s New York Times article)