PUTTING LITERARY CRITICISM IN THE
PUBLIC SPACE
There was once a time when literary
criticism occupied public space in Nigerian newspapers with popular pullouts
like Guardian Literary Series and Post Express Literary Supplement. They are no
more. Worse still, upcoming writers are oftentimes denied access to relevant
theories that could enhance their creative effort if they don’t belong in the
academia.
At a recent literary conference in
Abakaliki, the Association of Nigerian Authors, in partnership with Alex
Ekwueme Federal University, has taken a bold step in bringing literary
criticism to the public domain. Michael Jimoh was there…
Literary conferences mean different things to different people. If you don’t
much care for the hundred and one theories professors, writers and critics
swear and live by, it isn’t such a bad place to nod off in-between yawns while
talk on post-colonial this and post-colonial that sail overhead. But if you are
a professional student of Literature or English with a bias for writing hoping
to be taken seriously as a writer, you are sure to pay attention for much of
the time the conference will last.
So, it was with students of
Department of English and Literary Studies, Alex Ekwueme Federal University,
Ndufu Alike, for two days starting from Tuesday, July 2 to Wednesday, July 3 in
the main auditorium of the campus. Home to Nkwagu Military Cantonment, Ndufu
Alike is the host community of one of the newest universities in the entire
South-east. It is about half an hour drive by car from Abakaliki, capital of
Ebonyi state. Majority of the students reside off campus, which means they
commute to and from school every lecture day.
A month before the literary
conference cum workshop commenced, students and teachers had publicized the
event through campaigns, word of mouth, level by level in related departments.
Add those who must have done that through several platform on the social media
and you will understand why the hall was impressively filled when it began on
Tuesday morning. It also helped they were exempted from classes for those two
days.
It helped even more that, instead of listening to lecturers droning on about
routine topics that could become soporific, there were half a dozen or so
professors around they’d heard of and read their works but never seen in
person. There were many more writers from across Nigeria to update them on the
latest literary trends, the importance of criticism to creative writing, how to
or not become a creative writer and the role of digital media in all of that.
One professor came in from America. Another flew in from Lagos. As with the
students and lecturers of the school, all of them would have looked forward to
be part of a conference themed: “Nigeria’s Literary Criticism in an Expanding
Space of Creative Writing and Digital Production in the 21st Century.”
Above all, it was dedicated to
Professor Pius Adebola Adesanmi whose tragic death occurred aboard an Ethiopian
Airline on March 10 this year.
Adesanmi was professor of African Studies at Carleton University, Canada, and
an intellectual superstar following the footsteps of pioneer African writers
and academics such as Achebe, Clark, Kane, Okpewor, Senghor, Soyinka, Wa thiong
o, etc.
More important, Adesanmi was, in the
words of one writer and admirer, “a public intellectual who transcended the
formal academic space and used the digital platform to reach a wider audience
of fellow scholars, students and the general public.”
The theme could not have been more fitting, considering the late scholar’s
versatility as a writer and critic who used all that modern technology could
offer to broaden his intellectual base and followership. It was thus
appropriate that before the end of the opening day of the Conference, a special
panel was held on the works of Pius Adesanmi as a public intellectual,
moderated by Dr Ezechi Onyieronwu and which featured Dr Amanze Akpuda of Abia
State University and Dr Onyebuchi Nwosu of Federal University , Ndufu
-AlikeIkwo.
But why another literary conference
so close to the annual convention hosted and organized by the Association of
Nigerian Authors which will hold this October?
As the president of ANA, Mallam Denja Abdullahi himself put it, “the conference
is to bridge the gap in the criticism of contemporary Nigerian literature,
where critics would be encouraged to give rigorous attention to contemporary
literature, make young scholars acquire some critical tools they can use in
their lifelong career and to make criticism more popular in the public space.”
Begun only last year, the conference is his brain child. Soon after Abdullahi
was elected president of the writers’ body, he promised to “unbundle the annual
convention” by having such meetings at least once a year in relatively young
federal universities willing to partner with the association.
Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu Alike (AE-FUNAI) readily welcomed
Abdullahi’s idea, pitched, first of all, to Professor GMT Emezue, Dean Faculty
of Humanities last year who, in turn, told the Vice Chancellor, Professor
Chinedum Nwajiuba. This is the second of such conference in the school since
last June. The way it is, it should be a continuous programme as long as ANA is
willing, post-Abdullahi’s tenure as president.
“This programme has taken its own
life and anybody that comes will have to continue with it,” Mallam Abdullahi
told me. “It is also good that in a non-profit making association, when you
change the departing leadership, always link it to the incoming one because
they should be able to continue with the good thing that your predecessor has
left for you.”
Very well said, for the association itself will meet this October in Enugu to
elect new executive officers to run its affairs for the next two years. Having
such readymade projects is a plus for those in a profession other people praise
less for their administrative savvy than their writerly skills. Moreover, there
is a N3m grant for ANA against such contingencies outside its annual
convention. In fact, it has been there for eight years.
“That means the grant will be there for whoever becomes president of ANA,”
Adullahi said confidently, insisting that “the way to institutionalize this one
we are doing now is to get a regular grant.”
Apart from continuity, the
conference, as Abdullahi also said, “was conceived to focus on new works and
young scholars within and outside the academia and one of the major objectives
is to divert critical engagement to authors and works that may not be receiving
the critical attention.” In his reckoning, most critical attention on
literature in the country today “is within the academic circle. So, we want to
bring that into the public sphere as an activity just the way Pius Adesanmi in
his lifetime was able to move some critical thoughts into the public space.”
If he were alive, it is impossible
to imagine the late professor turning down invitations from ANA and FUNAI were
he invited to the conference. Indeed, in 2012 in Uyo during the annual
convention of ANA, Adesanmi delivered the keynote speech presciently predicting
the influence of the social media on Nigerian literature in the coming years,
leaving behind his unique imprimatur “Cyberia” in social media lexicon.
It is also impossible to have a conference on literary criticism anywhere in
Nigeria, especially east of the Niger, without expecting to see one of the
granduncles of the genre, Professor Ernest Emenyonu, a dynamo of a man with a
corresponding formidable academic credential.
He has been professor of English
focusing on African Literature for 40 years, privileged to have been thought by
some of the greatest Nigerian scholars, Emmanuel Obiechina, and has had contact
with many others, MJC Echeruo, Isidore Okpewor. Alone, Emenyonu started a
conference called International Conference on African Literature and English
Language (ICALEL) where he was Deputy VC in University of Calabar.
He has also been Provost of Alvan Ikoku College of Education, editor, since
2000, of the oldest journal on African Literature, African Literature Today,
begun by Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones, published every year on November 18
with simultaneous appearances in London, New York and Nigeria. Emenyonu is
currently at University of Michigan, Flint, a professor of African Literature
since 2002. As recently as 2017, he was chairman of the panel of judges of the
Nigeria Prize for Literature in the poetry category sponsored and awarded by
Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas.
The renowned professor’s fascination
with African literature is less because of his provenance and more because of
the courses he studied while in the university. Back in the sixties at Nsukka
as students under Professor Donatus Nwoga, Emenyonu recalled that all they read
as English majors were British literature, American literature, “everything
except African literature.”
He graduated with a first class.
Anyone would be quite delighted to have made such grade. Emenyonu was, but less
so because it was in foreign literature. Though he did a graduate programme on
Victorian Literature in London, Emenyonu returned to the U.S. and did his PhD
on African Languages and Literature. Since then, it has been, in his own words,
“my second wife, my second love.”
The professor amply demonstrated that love at the conference. Like a paean, he
told both students and lecturers to “embrace African literature,” since it is
only Africans who can better tell their stories. As erroneously believed,
Emenyonu said, “African literature didn’t start with European languages. We
have oral literature, literature in Nigerian languages which they (Western
scholars) cannot access.”
To prove his point that Europeans didn’t bring literature to Africa, the
professor himself embarked on years of research – what else do scholars like
him do? What did he unearth? He discovered and translated what he calls the
first Igbo novel, Omenuko by Peter Nwapa. It is remarkable to note that the
novel itself was first printed in 1933. Making a case for the entire continent,
Emenyonu insists that Chaka Zulu by Daniel Kunene, a South African author, had
a head start after it was published in 1925. Also, Soyinka translated DO
Fagunwa’s A Forest of a Thousand Demons in 1938.
As for the conference, Emenyonu
maintained that both students and their minders would benefit tremendously from
it. “It is going to help them because nobody can succeed in literature anywhere
in the world without a sense of history. It is even more so in the African
situation. That was why the keynote speaker enjoined the younger ones to read
the critical literature before now. Achebe was not only a novelist. He was also
a critic, a literary philosopher, Soyinka the same thing, JP Clark, all of
these African writers and they were gifted. What ANA is doing is unique, what
the VC of the university is doing is also unique because what they have done is
to create a partnership whereby ANA can now come here every year. Nigerians are
looking for international conferences elsewhere. Why can’t we create
international conferences and let people come here? This is a wonderful
beginning and, honestly, with the kind of momentum I am seeing, they will do a
wonderful work. What ANA is trying to do now is to be the literary umbrella
that covers all of these, learning of African Literature and talk about African
Literature from the African perspective, from the African point of view. These
children will now know that there is something called African Literature.”
As such conferences go, it wouldn’t
be complete without a panel of discussion on anything literature, as well as a
keynote speaker, which was for this conference Prof Olu Obafemi represented by
Prof Abubakar Abdullahi of the University of Ilorin. The trio of Amanze Akpuda,
Obari Gomba and Greg Mbajiorgu had the floor during a session on writers/
critics forum. Akpuda is of the Department of English in Abia State University,
Uturu while Gomba is in a related department in the University of Port
Harcourt. Mbajiorgu is of the University of Nigeria Nsukka.
Gomba ruffled literary feathers when
he accused Emenyonu of contributing to the brain drain syndrome in Nigeria. In
other words, rather than remain in the country and let young scholars sip from
his pool of knowledge, the professor has spent much of his time teaching in
American schools. Emenyonu rose stoutly to his own defence, insisting that
though he currently teaches in an American university, he has spent much time
here in the country as a teacher.
One of the speakers is also a teacher in a foreign country. Dauda Bivan Amos is
of the Department of English Studies University of the Western Cape, South
Africa. In his presentation titled “The Nigerian Novel in the 21st Century, he
noted that “literature springs directly from life…it is in life that we have to
seek the sources of literature, the impulses which have birthed the various
forms of literal production.”
Amos also let it be known that the
Nigerian novel in this century is “irrepressible” despite “the several
challenges confronting it. It is a novel born and garbed on the cradle of
discontent (ment) and wears many faces in confronting its tremendous challenges.”
One of such challenges was what the
second speaker touched on. Onyekachi Peter Onuoha teaches in the Department of
English and Literary Studies, University of Calabar. At more than 20 pages, his
paper would, no doubt, have sent many heads nodding on desks. Mercifully, he
didn’t have to read all in a presentation titled “Creative Writing and Digital
Production: Constraining and Expanding Nigeria’s Literary Criticism in the 21st
Century.”
For him, criticism of literature is
forever changing, especially in the digital age. “The expanding nature of
creative literature in the cyber space also challenges traditional critics
perception of what literature represents, predetermined participation in its
own space…the failure of the patronizing prevailing criticism on the digital
space and how it makes its own impact on the art of criticism.”
For sure, it was not all talk at the conference. There was drama, on stage and
real life drama to keep things moving. The first was spontaneous when Ms Ofoma
Mma, Public Relations Personality of the institution who also doubled as MC all
through the event, announced that the invited guests would have their lunch
somewhere else while the students would be served in the hall. Shouts of
discrimination almost brought the roof down.
But they were soon pacified when Mma
declared in the same breadth that a drama presentation would be staged during
lunch for them. Title of play: “When Women Go Naked,” by Nwagbo Pat Obi.
More drama was to come by way of a solo performance by Ifunaya Idinedo, a
teacher of Igbo language in the school. Urged on by a flutist, she
praise-chanted the guests one after the other as she danced around the hall,
rendering several songs as best she could.
One of Nigeria’s foremost female
writers, Professor Akachi-Adimora Ezeigbo, danced with her and gave the vote of
thanks as the conference wound to an end. She thanked the VC “for empowering
people” through such conferences. (The VC was, at that very moment, chairing a
meeting of VCs in the South east so, he was unavoidably absent.)
One of the persons already empowered was a 200-level student of the Department
of English and Literary Studies, Gerald Ede. He followed avidly the workshop
from day one. Though Ede has a first degree from Calabar, he is now reading
English as a second degree and hoping seriously to become a writer. For him,
the conference is “to help students who aspire to be writers and lecturers to
hone their writing skills, know what is going on in the literary landscape.”
This literary empowerment for students was achieved at the conference via
literary workshops on prose, poetry and drama facilitated by Dr Wale Okediran,
Dr Obari Gomba and Greg Mbajiorgu respectively.
But do such literary conferences
really help, considering that the founding fathers of Nigerian literature never
relied on such meetings to establish themselves. True, responded Ede when asked
on the conference’s relevance to making good writers. The older generation, he
declared, had no such conferences but they had people who inspired and
encouraged them to write, insisting, for example, that when Achebe was at
Government College, Umuahia, “they made reading some novels compulsory some
days of the week. That was the foundation. It is true that that culture no
longer exists in most secondary schools in Nigeria today, the culture of trying
to indoctrinate people into reading creative works that could motivate them
into writing. If that culture has been lost, this conference is filing that
gap. The Achebes had a way of being inspired then, the kind of way their
studies were programmed, the kind of teachers they had; times change even
though.”
It is apparent from the joys on the
faces of the students, the enthusiastic involvement of the management and staff
of the host university and the high spirit exhibited by the visiting writers
and scholars that the partnership forged by the Association of Nigerian Authors
with the Alex Ekwueme Federal University , Ndufu -Alike Ikwo for the cause of
literature and its criticism , is going to endure.
