Questions on Artistic Responsibility – Chimamanda Adichie’s Imperfect Sun

The emails below recently caused furore in the academic and intellectual circles of Nigeria and I have posted them below in a bid to sample even more opinions on artistic freedom and the responsibility for its use. The context is, of course, primarily Nigerian. But I hope the questions raised are not merely the preoccupations of a Nigerian writer.

On Miss Adichie’s Sensibility


I am currently reading Miss Chimamanda Adichie's second book, "Half
of a Yellow Sun" and I am now just at page 170. In the last fifty
pages I have read her description of the death of Sardauna Bello in
1966 and my principal reaction, after disgust {at her ends] and
distaste {for her bad taste}, is anger. The sort of anger that a few
years ago would have set me off on a 5000-word criticism – yet, such
hagiography is hardly the worthy work of a critic or a critical
reader. That is what anger does. It makes us do unworthy things. But
now I am calm and not angry as I type out this email. In this calm, I
type as I think. Why is it that Miss Adichie finds it in her to
describe – mind you, not the death of Sardauna Bello, but that he
died bleating like a goat in a Rex Lawson song? Why? She repeats it
ad nauseum on page 130 of the Harper Collins edition of that book, a
book I only got after a year of "we no get am, try Modern Bookshop".
Why did she do it? And because I am thinking, I realize it is because
she can. I cherish the artistic freedom above all the HR's so I
understand how she did it. It is because I, in each cell of my body,
affirm she should be able to write anything she wants. But this
writing – this nauseating description I find so disagreeable, is it
sensible - for Miss Adichie to have written it? She is an artist and
inspiration is the reception of special sensitivity, perceiving the
commonplace differently. That is where our writing comes from.
Considering this, do we, should we, not be mindful of the
sensitivity, cultural sensitivity, of others? Is Miss Adichie trying
to set herself up as a martyr? Why? Has she been sensible or
sensitive?

Sardauna Bello's death, his murder, his assassination, the eclipse of
his sun – there was a context to it and I have so far appreciated
Miss Adichie's attempt to write a balanced if at times enervating
novel about the sixties, a trying time for Nigeria. But I will go to
that context later. I return to sensibility and sensitivity. Am I
insensibly questioning her sensibility – do I seek to curtail her
freedom by questioning its use? Let me carry out a test. If a German
were to write a book setting out in glory terms the history of the
Third Reich, for the purpose of "memory", and in it he describes the
details of the holocaust in stark, gory detail using the simile that
the tragic equanimity in the faces of Jews just outside the gas
chambers was like the harmony of the first movement of Tchaikovsky's
Swan Lake – what would be the reaction? Outrage! If I or a Fulani
friend of mine were to describe the 1945 or 1966 killing of Igbo's in
Northern Nigeria in the terms that the wail of Igbo women as they
were being raped and disemboweled, the scream of their husbands and
sons, sounded like the sweet music of Dan Maraya's violin – what
would be the reaction? Why, outrage! Yet, here Miss Adichie has
described the death of Sardauna Bello, the son of a sultan and an
almost mythic leader of a still conservative northern Nigeria,
describing his murder by a man he knew personally and trusted, by a
man who had eaten at his table, repeating that that same Sardauna
died bleating like a goat in a Rex Lawson song – what should be the
reaction? But no, I am calm. I am typing calm. Has this test been
unreasonable or insensible or insensitive? The outrage I am spending
typing this email, is it in the first place, unjustified? I also am
an artist and I ask if a people are not entitled to their religious,
political, cultural, all else, sensibilities and its respect – must
the freedom of art be used to bait those sensitivities as you would a
bear with dogs? Miss Adichie, is that simile necessary to your plot,
a must-be-there flourish of your style?

I am going back to the real terms, past and present, context of the
1960's including Sardauna Bello's death. Oftentimes, I hear the
ha'tuppeny demagogues the Nigerian middleclass routinely throws up
relentlessly say that the "North" has ruined Nigeria, you do not need
to prod for them to lay back an reel out their fingers; the war
criminal Gowon, squandermania Shagari, grim dicatator Buhari, wily
minded Nobel laureate compromising IBB, the Ken Saro Wiwa killing
Abacha and soon, perhaps, "the Olusegun Obasanjo foisting
Abdulsalam". But amnesia makes none of them say that of all these
Chief Executives, only Shagari won an election, the rest of them are
soldiers.

But how did soldiers get to be Chief Executives of Nigeria, who
opened the sluices for them to come in? The same men who killed
Sardauna Bello and PM Balewa and Chief Okotie Eboh. The same men who
killed duly elected Nigerian politicians. The same men who murdered
Colonel Pam. THEY opened the sluices! Yet, Miss Adichie has described
the death of an elected premier of a region comprising at least half
of Nigeria's 1966 population with the distasteful, odious simile she
has used. In denigrating the Sardauna, she elevates his murderer: in
rejecting teething politics, she accepts shinbone dictatorship. It is
as simple and horrific as that. My grandfather and the grandfathers
of my friends voted for that man, I took my degree in the university
he built, I and many young people in this country revere him for what
he set out to achieve and what he did achieve – now, is Miss
Adichie's description not baiting? What else is it?

Okay, I follow her. Creative naiveté! Of all the intellectual, talk
less behavioral, crimes which I find most odious, creative naiveté is
by far the most disgusting, the one that sets my hair on fire.
Because it rests on "I did not know . . . " when the most
unreasonable reasonable man OUGHT to know! To this email, Miss
Adichie's response would be either "I did not mean to hurt your Arewa
sensibility, I was merely trying to write a novel with the end of
blaming the British. . . . ." or she could say "I don't give a shit,
I wrote my novel and that's that!" Both possible responses fount from
creative naiveté, the first because she should have taken reasonable
care and the second, because she is a proudly Nigerian writer and the
consequent truth that both sides of the yellow sun, "north" and
south, read her novels. Creative naiveté.

Another example, I want to say why another cause of anger amongst the
youth of my "north". A friend from Nnewi, a true friend who protected
me from my mischief in primary school and who has kept in touch over
the years, has told me on more than one occasion that Nzoegwu and his
murderous crew were stymied, "hijacked in motion", that their ends
were visionary and they indeed were patriots. Nzoegwu, Ifeajuna –
they were educated men, in fact, I discount their altruism. Now, tell
me a single revolution, from Moses to Alexander to Tewodros II to
Marx unto Lenin to Castro, that has not been stymied either by
reactionary forces on the ground or by the force itself, Time? Tell
me a single one. Yet, they, for their brilliant altruism and quarter
baked communism, killed amongst the finest officials and officers in
the North and West. Did you not know the end, Mr. Nzoegwu and Mr.
Ifeajuna, did you not know how it would end, that in blowing up
Sardauna Bello's house in Kaduna, you were opening the gates for a
three and a half decade long soccer game for camouflage wearing black
bats? Ah, I see, I understand, you claim the privilege of creative
naiveté! "We did not KNOW." Miss Adichie, you who were born in '77,
you who know how it ended, do you now see the interlinked matrix of
your pedigree, the correct understanding of your simile, why I am
outraged, why I could be very angry as I type this email? I detest
bumblers. The most atrocious things in history have always begun with
a bumbler, a unit of quirk – Hitler, or syphilis.

My head hurts, I think I am tired. I really wish Miss Adichie would
be more sensitive and sensible in her future writing. She is a
Nigerian writer and we all, in the north and south, are damn proud of
her - for the acclaim and recognition she has garnered
internationally because it inspires us to keep trying to tell the
little Nigerian story each of us has, it validates the little Nigeria
we carry around with us and makes possible the future Nigeria we
dream each night about. Her debut novel was first referred to me by
an ex-girlfriend Hadiza, who is from Bauchi – Hadiza bought 5 copies
of the Kachifo edition when it became available, just to give away,
she loved Miss Adichie's Kambili and Jaja, "Kambili is such a fine
name!" she would say, and maybe her husband would let her name her
child Kambili. But I know for a fact, that she is from Tafawa Balewa
and if Miss Adichie were to use the sort of tasteless simile she has
used for Sardauna Bello to describe the PM's killing in the
subsequent pages of Half of a Yellow Sun, Hadiza would be as
disturbed as I am now.

Miss Adichie might consider the Sardauna mis-reference as a small,
little thing, one page in over four hundred pages. But that is what a
bumble is, a tiny little auspicious quirk. Look at the news from a
few days ago, the Danish embassy bombing in Pakistan – see what a
little quirk does? I get angry sometimes. There are people who
rationalize things, who understand and quite easily discount the
quirks of others; most times, I am that way. But there is a tiny
minority, as tiny really as the inciting incident, a cartoon or
paranoia or a paragraph in a historical fiction, who can be counted
on to creatively use their outrage and tempers to do atrocious
things, the bombing of embassies or the burning of books. I love
people trying to make a living each day, artists burning their brains
to create, I respect innocence and genius too much to kill or burn
books. But I am not everyone.

Nigeria is a beautiful quilt - a hundred and forty million pixels,
two hundred and fifty patches of varying sizes, colors, textures, and
sensitivities. I think it is possible to tell our stories and to
impress each our histories, without losing, without discarding or
downplaying the importance and sensitivity of each other piece of
fabric. We are a quilt in the making. As your people say, "let both
the eagle and the hawk perch, if any says no to the other, may it not
be well for him" – egbe belu, ugo belu.

Now my anger is gone. I will finish the book.


Re: On Miss Adichie's Sensibility

I wish to make further comments on the comments posted viz my post.
However, I will only comment on those posted as at Fri Jun 6, 2008
7:02 pm. If there are any other opinions expressed viz this strand,
I shall respond to them when I am through with HYS, I have just
under 150 pages and will expedite my pace in view of the sampler
I've gotten. Now –

Dear Oga Ike.
I quote you –
"The passage he'schosen, where the cries of the murdered Sardauna
are equated to the bleating of a goat, is the one part of the
book where Adichie is hardest on her own
people, the Igbo. That passage recounts that some Igbos
celebrated the
Sarduana's death, partying to the tune of the Rex Lawson song.
In the
endless competition between our ethnic nationalities over who has
hurt who the most, Adichie in writing that passage . . . "

I hope in breaking your long line, I have not hurt your meaning. My
question to you is – does Miss Adichie's "balancing" the odious
simile on page 130 by "being hard on her people" compensate for the
insensitivity of that misuse? That really is the simple question.
However, for you to have brought it up, you have answered that
question and your answer is "yes". On that score, we are different.
I do not compensate insensitivity and I think no one, in creative
fiction should – what I do is to state or not to state. Compensation
breeds atrophy, whether it is in fiction or in "sharing the national
cake." And for good measure, regarding that passage – I am NOT
compensated!

Then you go on about "ethnic nationalities" competing. This is part
of the problem, the competition between "ethnic nationalities", what
ethnic nationalities? What is competing with what? Ethnic – is it
Igbo words fighting duels with Hausa words? Or is it the Igbo way of
paying "bride price" competing with the Fulani "sharro" ordeal? Or
is it the Igbo concept of having an "obi" versus the Hausa concept
of having a "zaure"? Ethnic. No sir, ethnicities do not compete, do
not duel! It is political interest that duels, that competes;
economic interests are at odds, power play, plays for power – yes.
But not the ethnico-cultural components of superstructures. Is
there, has there ever been any point in time when ethnic components
have clashed? Look at the conquistadors and the indigenous people in
South America – was it ethnicity, or "civilization" that was
competing or clashing? Or was it economics and politics? To assume
that Nigerian history is one of "competing ethnic nationalities" is
to prove a Unified Filed Theory with a false equation ab initio. I
do not think such time wasting conceit is more forgivable because it
has become ingrained.

And I particularly dislike this mis-adaptation of Joseph Nye and
Bernard Lewis.

Then you go on "justifications given by apologists of the 1966
pogrom is that Igbos were openly rejoicing in the North when the
Sarduna was killed". I tell you, any apologists for the 1966 killing
of Igbo's in Nigeria or any other killings in any country, is a
fool. What apology? People were killed and you are writing and
reading apologies? People were killed, on both sides, two parties
fought a war and you are justifying – what In the name of anything
is there to justify? Who are you justifying or apologizing to – the
dead? Tell me, as a human being, was it not atrocious that the
Sardauna was killed – was it not atrocious that Igbos were rejoicing
in Kano on that day, was not the subsequent retaliatory killings
atrocious?

If we must write historical fiction, let us either be as close to
history and its nuances as possible, or let us so caricature history
that no one would take it seriously. Or let us disclaim history, as
Helon Habila did in the authorial note at the back of his first
novel, and simply write fiction without context. I know there are
scholars who question even the appropriateness of the novel format
when writing about serious history. What in Gods name is more
serious than a civil war? Miss Adichie has not indicated in any way
that her novel was meant to be a burlesque pantomime and I do not
think you should assume so on her behalf.

You go on, I quote "Is Rugbali reading the book Adichie has written
or another book which he thinks she might have written?" I find this
question insulting. When you, Ike, read a book – do you read the
words or what you think is on the page?

You comment on Ama Ede's post, saying some main Igbo characters were
not disposed to Ojukwu. Correct. So, what is Miss Adichie's point of
writing HYS – was it to upset everyone, or to write a screed the
sort only silly academic critics in the West would praise?

Oga Austyn,
To your amazement. You say "Of all the gory scenes and atrocities
committed on both sides, as Miss Adichie graphically portrayed in
Half of a Yellow Sun, without being partisan, it is simply laughable
to me, a non-hero worshipper, that Ali should single out the
reference to how the Sardauna died as the centre point of his
outrage against a book he has not even finished reading!"

Let me test your "amazement". Do you not find it equally "amazing"
that in my 1,000-word post, you only single out my outrage over the
Sardauna's killing? Did I not mention related issues to the
Sardauna's killing including why my part of the north would be
outraged by that sloppy portrayal? Are you not equally amazed by
your own "singling out"? My point is this – we are outraged by
particulars, hardly ever by genera. I read that page and I was upset
by it, I could not go on reading without sending out that post
because not letting it out of me would have colored the rest of the
book.

You go on "When we fly into a fit of outrage upon perceived
insensitivity to our personal sensibilities, do we not sometimes do
so out of the fear of demystification of our supposed heroes? Do we
not often refuse to query our age-long beliefs and norms out of the
fear of new discoveries? Has Ali read Helon Habila's account of the
savageries committed against the ibos in Measuring Time, during the
same period Miss Adichie wrote about? Has he also read R.A
Masagbor's "like rats" in SOLEMN CHANTS? and many other eye-
witnesses accounts?" –

I say: Fine point! If only Miss Adichie had set out on demystifying!
If she had set out on demystifying my "supposed hero" she could have
set out in her prose say perhaps how he was pilfering state funds to
build himself a pyramid in Eqypt, or something like that. How on
earth does her restating with such bad taste that he died bleating
like a goat in a Rex Lawson song demystify the Sardauna? I am
afraid, yes, but not of demystification – I am afraid of the foster
child of disgust arising from her insensitivity. And insensibility.
And there is nothing "personal" about our collective history. You
mention Helon Habila's second novel, I ask you, is there any page in
that book where a description of the war went past the use of
necessary adjectives into the realm of denigrating individual
Igbo's, talk less a Premier, with a simile similar to the one I
refuse to repeat? What I think is that if such a page exists, I
would have heard thunder asking for Mr Habila's head.

Sardauna Bello did the best he could do for his people just as
Awolowo and Zik did the best they could do for their people. They
were men of their times and let us not denigrate them, else we
should not complain of what came after them.

To your use of "ibos", I have been cautioned severally that the
correct word is "Igbo's". But perhaps that was a keyboard error.

My position, thus far, has been well stated by Ama Ede, he says "HYS
is good writing no doubt, nevertheless perhaps the problem is that
authorial position on certain sensitive historical matters are
ambivalent, equivocating. No clear self-positioning on something so
sensitive. That is the problem."

I sincerely hope that at the end of the 400 plus page book, Miss
Adichie would have redeemed this malady in her writing.

I have as yet, made no comments on HYS as a book, that I will do in
good time. What I have done is to comment on an offensive little bit
of HYS.

I hope to finish the novel sometime next week and I will surely keep
my opinion on HYS posted on this board.

Have a fine weekend everyone!

R.Ali


Half of a Yellow Sun -my opinion, related issues

I have been made aware that my previous post on Chimamanda Adichie's
Half of a Yellow Sun has put me in the untenable position of having my
literary objectivity distrusted on account of the passion of opinion
viz Sardauna Bello's murder. I shall comment on this questioned
subjectivity later in this post. Nevertheless, I wish to set out,
first, my opinion on the book – I finished reading it 2 hours ago –
and then I shall move on to related issues.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a very interesting and remarkably
well-researched book. That is my opinion. The only accusation I make
against it is the one of insensitivity and a related insensibility
regarding page 130 where she relates the death of Sardauna Bello. I
have stated my opinion of that flaw and highlighted its significance
even if the second has been lost in the reactions to the first. It is
my opinion that she could have related the same thing without using
that simile. I think HYS is an important book.

Now, a girl, Olohi used to be in charge of fashion a few years ago
when I was Editor of Sardauna Magazine and my memory of her comes down
to two phrases – "Style is personal" and "Your style is up to you."
Agreeing entirely with her, I should not make any comments concerning
the style of Miss Adichie's book published two years ago. But au
contraire, I choose to comment on her style in spite of that futility.
Only in doing so would my idea of the character of her novel come out.

I think it was wrong for me to describe HYS as being "soulless", it
was the wrong word; a phrase is more appropriate, HYS has a "scattered
soul". It does beg the question whether a soul can be scattered and
whether it still would be a soul if it has that scattered quality yet
I feel this distinction is necessary. The characters in HYS are
clearly more delineated than they were in Purple Hibiscus yet it would
seem that in delineating them she has gone so far as to plasticise
them, giving the novel a stage production feel of stock characters.
The literary authorial style is ambivalent, describing event after
event related only because they occur to the same set of people. It
seems surrealist and I, personally, think that surrealism – Dali and
his contemporaries- is Fraud and not Art. I get the distinct feeling
that Miss Adichie is not in this book. I get even, the queasy feeling
that while I am reading it, she is sitting under an udala tree
laughing and saying "They are going to puzzle over this one!" Deux ex
machina is contrived by a playwright but sometimes, the playgoers also
realize it and they can discount or not discount that trick depending
on whether it works for the play or not. Miss Adichie assures me {in
the extra interview-QandA behind the Harper Collins edition} that this
style was deliberate and it somehow comes from her reading of Harvest
of Thorns by Shimmer Chindoya and the intro of a Giovanni Verga novel.

Now, is this style appropriate for the subject of Half of a Yellow
Sun? I don't know, but I am determined to find out.

Christopher Okonkwo in his post has said `In any case, HYS is
categorically a "historical novel"' and I agree with him, sort of.
When writing creative fiction, especially historical fiction, a writer
is faced with his context – whether he wants to be purely historicist
or whether he wants to be creative. There really is no middle way
between the two until Miss Adichie's novel and her novel within a
novel – a historicist novel within a pseudo historicist one. The
historicist one is character Ugwu's novel "The World Was Silent When
We Died" and the pseudo historicist one is the one that has Olanna and
Kainene and ends with Susan Buchan's pictures from Biafra. This
stylistic choice, even before going to the characters themselves,
mires the novel in the ambivalence that seems to me frightfully close
to indifference.

When a novel relies solely on its received historical context {what
each reader/critic knows about it], aspersions are cast as to the
talent or sincerity of the writer. It is the same thing as saying to a
child, "This is Magic Beans, it turns into gold at night. But only
good people as we both can see it. Anybody who cannot see it is not a
good person." HYS context is the sixties and Biafra. Let us compare
HYS with its contemporaries. Sefi Atta's context is Nigeria between
the 1970's and 1995, the erosion of constitutional rights in that
period – take away that historical context and you still have a
powerful story of Enitan and Sheri and their relationships with women
and men. Helon Habila's Waiting for An Angel is set in Abacha's
dictatorship but if you remove that context, you still have an
engaging story of Lomba and the other characters living interrelated
lives. But take away Biafra from HYS and what we have is sibling
rivalry {Olanna and Kainene} in its stark triteness – pretty sister
versus "ugly" sister, "kiss ass" sister versus "don't give a damn"
sister. And as a creative writing, I do not think that that theme is
remarkable in any way. And neither has it been handled in a remarkable
way.

But then, why should I want to remove the context from a novel – don't
mind me, only for critical purposes. Let us replace the context. The
bloody stillbirth of Biafra and what I think Madeibo calls "the
Nigerian revolution" that predated it are very sensitive issues,
remain sensitive issues today. It remains sensitive because is we stop
snipping little pieces of it we would still see that the great rend
made to our politics by the murderers in January 1966 is still here
with us. Every single goddamn coup, every silly dictator sporting a
grim face, gap tooth or dark goggles traces his antecedence to that
coup. Nigeria's progress has been held back for no reason greater than
the ineptitude of the military regimes since independence. Nigeria's
progress has been held back because of the events of the sixties which
for the backdrop to HYS.

Let me digress into Constitutional Law, what each of those military
regimes did was to simply modify Aguiyi-Ironsi's constitution
suspension Decree which had remained part of our body of laws, not a
single junta promulgated a new decree to take power, they simply
"suspended and modified". Even with the current state of international
jus cogens, you cannot try anyone in the Nigerian judiciary, from
Gowon to Abacha for taking over power in Nigeria via a coup – the
persons primarily culpable are Nzoegwu and his pals and I think all of
them are dead now. Today, there are many of us who are unhappy with
Nigeria as it is. The point of this digression is to show how germane
and sensitive the stuff Miss Adichie is playing around with is to the
collective sensibility of Nigerians. Yet, for this, she has willfully
chosen a leisurely style, one based on "balancing" atrocities so we
remember!

Am I wrong to say that what she has succeeded in doing is to poke at
an old national wound without having any medicine for it – and that
for memory, "just so you remember you were wounded before?"

If I think of it, her entire authorial and narrative perspective is
VERY offensive. But I refuse to think of it because I am afraid that
if I do, I will be "subjective."

I wish to make comments concerning my objectivity-subjectivity in the
post titled "On Miss Adichie's Sensibility" posted here on Krazi.

TYAbiola has doubted my ability to be objective in giving an opinion
on HYS because of my posts regarding the simile HYS repeats viz the
assassination of the Northern region premier and in his words, the
objectivity of my criticism might be doubted on account of the "too
much passion, too much subjectivity, too much pre-conceived opinion"
that I bring to the topic. Well, if I did not have passion, why would
I comment in the first place? I hardly think that anyone can read
literature, especially historical fiction without passion. Yet, does
passion, the expression of it, equal "subjectivity" and a
"preconceived opinion"? "Preconceived" at what point? What makes this
aspersion doubly interesting to me is not so much that it has been
stated by Mr. Abiola as that is merely being re-stated by him – I have
heard it before said by other persons. Methinks such an aspersion
comes either from my opining, or, the nature of my opining. If it were
the first then it would be a moot intellectual point. And critics
perhaps hundreds of years ago would have come out to say "Every
opinion should be distrusted because it is subjective" – I am not
aware of our predecessors having with this phrase knocked off the
basis of discourse. So, it must be the second – the nature of my
opining. At this point, I would like to say my next point is exploring
a general symptom in Nigerian letters and has long left the particular
prognosis of Mr. Abiola.

When I hear on the Beebs that some scholars in the west are
re-appraising Edward Said's "Orientalism" and its theme of
preconceived stereotypes of the East in the West, I find myself
thinking of the "Northernism" {sic} in Nigerian letters, preconceived
stereotypes of the "north" of the Niger by intellectuals by that
river's south. It has become ingrained that anything written, which
has its centerpiece as a northern Nigerian figure or nuance, such as
the Sardauna or the issue of Sharia or even a different perception of
the paper cut notions of what makes a page in a book like HYS
insensitive or insensible is viewed by the southern intelligentsi with
that curious "they have started again" which smacks of preconceived
prejudice. I have wondered often the innate assumptions of superior
"objectivity" so easily wielded by my southern countrymen, an
assumption so latent that Ike feels Miss Adichie's {to me} denigration
of Sardauna Bello should be borne by the offended me because she has
been equally "hard on her own people" or Oga Austyn's even more
remarkable assumption "The northern elite has a choice to either
understand it in the context in which it is written, or throw it to
the Almajeris with a covering note. Mischief is also a function of
sensibilities, political or religious"! In simpler English, what Oga
Austyn's quote means is that in not "understanding" the "context" {of
Miss Adichie's simile}, I {assuming I am part of that "northern
elite"} would effectively be being mischievous! I would like to know,
please, Oga Austyn, if I have misunderstood your phrase. These
comments, these posturing, these perspectives have become ingrained –
I do not think any of these three fine people are any more aware of it
that they are the inner working of their digestive systems.

Oya, I am interested now and it is Oga Austyn's quote, the last one,
that interests me. Am I being mischievous by not understanding Miss
Adichie's "balanced" context? And if I accuse Miss Adichie and Austyn
himself of being indifferent, creatively or really, to my own context
nko? Is my reactionary context a "preconceived" notion while Miss
Adichie's radically "balanced" one is not?

My problem is not so much with HYS as with that odious simile on page
130 – I cannot understand why Miss Adichie had to repeat it.

And a story {novel} is very important business; do you remember what
the bard says about the primacy of the story and the storyteller – I
think it was in Anthills of the Savannah. He said when a storyteller
looks around and sees no one in his age group; he will transform
chicken pox spots to wounds he suffered when "our men beat their men"!
I take Achebe very seriously and in the same breath that he eulogizes
the story, he advises that we tell our stories and keep our stories,
if others tell them, true. The man at the center of this post,
Sardauna Bello, once said "Tell us the truth about others; tell others
the truth about us." Not just us, as persons, but Us, as history.

I am a Nigerian writer and will proudly stand on that pedestal against
any person in the West, I would stand with any of my countrymen on
that pedestal anywhere. Yet, within my country, I speak for a part of
the country that has largely not spoken for itself and against the
rude assumptions consequent upon that incapacity to speak, I make a
stand. Yes, damnit, it is related to the Civil War – the same thing
Miss Adichie is playing around with. Over the last two decades, longer
for some, attempts have been made by many writers of southern
extraction in their writings to foist the North {excluding the defacto
West} with a guilt that it does not feel for that war or
alternatively, for the intervening dictatorships. This aspersion of
guilt is never attempted with the Yoruba in the southwest – on what do
these attempts lie? On the denigration, little by little, of our
memory of that war – in the Lagos-Ibadan press, on page 130 of Miss
Adichie's second novel.

That is my personal context and unlike many in the north, who are
content to remain in Zaria and Kaduna and Abuja, I am not so content –
I demand to engage with the south with my historical context in tow.

I like testing. Let me test something again. June 12th is around the
corner, please, those of you who can still buy more than one newspaper
a day, do note the media coverage/editorials of that watershed in
Nigerian history. Most of what you will read will be about Basorun
Abiola and how his mandate was snatched from him by the "north"
{meaning the little dictator erstwhile friend of the Basorun's} and
such other cant. Yet, and we were all here, none of us were born
yesterday – two people were murdered by the Nigerian state in the
aftermath of Sani Abacha's death. They were Basorun Abiola and General
Yar'adua. You wont hear the latter's name in the southern press. Yet,
in real terms, how did the Basorun get to win the 1993 election? On
whose machinery did he ride – certainly not on his own! But Yar'adua
is conveniently forgotten in the creative coverage of the June 12th
and he more than anyone else, more than all the silly pundits and
NGO's, is linked to the death to that mandate. Go on, observe the
papers over the next week or so and say if I am wrong.

Why do I bring this up? Because that is my context! My context is of
my historical and cultural sensibilities being eroded by others whose
historical and cultural sensibilities are no more authentic, are at
best complementary, to mine.

I really think this email has gone on for too long, let me recap.
Chimamanda's novel is, as I said, "interesting" and "well researched".
But page 130, which I have a problem with, projects a certain
mis-perception of historical fact that is a part of an ongoing
discontextualization of comprehensive Nigerian history. Perhaps it is
not her fault, she writes what is conditioned in her.

But do not accuse me of subjectivity because I point her error out.

Thank you.

Changing Chairs at JosANA

“For the reason that your friends are moving on up in their lives, do you feel less sad that they are moving away?” That question precisely, in its convoluted syntax and import, confronts JosANA. We are faced with the loss {not in the sense of death though} of our Chairman, Allen AbdulJabbar Omale, who has most unexpectedly been poached away by the smart alecs of ANA Abuja following his taking up an administrative appointment with the Nigerian College of Education Commission {N.C.E.C.} Abuja. The meeting held on Saturday 31st May 2008 at the Nigerian Film Institute, Jos was the last at which Allen Omale would preside as Chairman.

The meeting started with the arrival of Bose Tsevende who drove in with Alpha Emeka, Michael Emeka and David Onotu. They met Richard Ali just outside the gates and together they set up the chairs for the meeting. Redzie Jugo subsequently showed up. Chairman Allen was late in coming and Richard Ali assumed the chair of the meeting. Person by person, the balcony filled up with our members including Prof. Kanchana Ugbabe who had not been attending meetings as regularly as she used to and her student Stephanie Onyejekwe, poet, who just picked up a B.A. in English from the University of Jos. Banter and news about the fortnight were exchanged. Richard Ali confirmed that five of his poems were published in the well-approved African Writing 4 journal which until very recently was edited by Afam Akeh. Everyone congratulated him and Redzie Jugo asked, via a “motion”, that such information as how to send in submissions to journals such as AW ought to be relayed to the members of JosANA. Ali, who is Secretary General, agreed and said he would spread the word on that. At this point, Dr. Agboola arrived with his two kids, ‘Laja and Opeoluwa, aged ten and eight respectively. We really are catching them young at JosANA!

Adam Abubakar read an interesting poem - the typical situation writers find themselves in where they express their hearts to a woman in the form of verse and yet claim to have no words to say! It was a fine poem and Redzie Jugo made comments about a clash of imagery in the second stanza. Bose Tsevende and Alpha Emeka also suggested modifications. Abubakar eventually read the poem again and Richard Ali said the trouble with the stanza was that too many similes followed each other and the use of “fumes” in comparison to love tended to jar. Abubakar, BBC 2007 African Performance Playwright, took the comments in good faith. Dr. Agboola then took the floor and read a poem title “Iwa”. “Iwa” connotes “character”, “manners”, “grace” in Yoruba language and the striking thing about the poem was its blend of Yoruba and English. Its first stanza was a Yoruba proverb and it really came to life being read in the baritone of the dreadlocked poetaster. The House loved the poem and took the poet on on the Yoruba. Unwittingly, that poem set the theme of “performing” poetry as opposed to merely reading it. This theme kept recurring through the meeting like a hidden hand at cards. While Dr. Jide Agboola was reading, Chairman Allen Omale {as he then was} came in with his delectable wife, Rahmah. The House broke into applause. But it was strained applause, not because we were sad but because the exertion of our hands was for a fellow collaborator who was moving on and away.

Chairman Omale acknowledged the felicitation of his lieutenants, cronies and troops, each of us highly effective operatives, skilled in the operational arts of contemporary Nigerian writing and intellection. Like General Lee taking leave of his troops at Appomattox, the sadness was mutual but had to be borne like the soldiers we are. We went into the practical matter of the succession. The Vice Chairman, Matthew Mzegha, had declined the Chairmanship because he expected to be transferred from the Nigerian Television College, Jos in the near future. Richard Ali’s stay in Jos was not determinate so he could not take up the Chairmanship for what would amount to an interim period. It was decided that a Chairman be picked from the floor, someone who would guarantee the continuity necessary to consolidate the gains made by Allen Omale. Though we have always been aware of it, we became increasingly more aware of the immense role Allen Omale’s energy and dedication has played in reconsolidating JosANA. Allen Omale mentioned that Bose Tsevende had also declined the post.

However, the House, speaker after speaker, re-nominated Mrs. Ayeni-Tsevende. Everyone, from Redzie Jugo to Richard Ali to Kanchana Ugbabe to Michael Emeka affirmed their belief that she could do the job of chairman. Alpha Emeka however mentioned that the Chairmanship must not be forced on Mrs. Tsevende if she did not wish it. Aunty B, as she is fondly called, was then asked why she was declining. Her reasons were that she was new to JosANA and was not really an administrative person.

Concerning being “new”, the House replied that literary associations were like Phoenix’s; they renew themselves, spend themselves, revive and flag. Indeed, most current members of JosANA are new and it would be recalled that we did have some serious fractious troubles a few years back. Only Redzie Jugo, Allen Omale and Steve Rwang Pam remain from that “old” JosANA. In this way, Aunty B. Tsevende’s first excusat was discounted. As to the second, Richard Ali promised that he personally, and the rest of the EXCO, would be with her all the way if she accepted the JosANA Chair. It was resolved that Aunty B should reconsider her refusal over the next fortnight {until the next meeting}. Baring further declination, it is expected that Bose Ayeni-Tsevende, professional dancer, internationally recognized choreographer and lecturer of Dance at the University of Jos will be the next Chairman {or is it Chairwoman or Chairperson – na which one dey politically correct now sef?} of Jos ANA.

Redzie Jugo said he was sad Allen Omale was leaving but was happy since JosANA would get some “Abuja” checks {possibly Ghana-must-go’s} through him. The laughter following this crack led the House to a more important matter – literature. Matthew Mzegha informed us that Nigeria’s top breakfast TV Show - A.M. Express - had requested that JosANA feature in one of their upcoming editions. The House was so happy about this that grins broke across every face. It really was gratifying that JosANA is increasingly being taken seriously by the media as being one of the most active Association of Nigerian Authors chapters in Nigeria. Allen Omale commended Richard Ali on the work he had been doing viz publicity. But of course, only reality can be publicized, so the commendation went back to Chairman Allen and the members of JosANA.

Next, Stephanie Onyejekwe, the freshest B.A. in the House, read her poem “Africa’s Maid” which was written for Aunty Bose Tsevende. It was a fantastic poem and as is typical of Stephanie’s finer poems, it was full of allusions well blended with exquisite diction. However, it prompted the show of the erstwhile hidden hand. Stephanie read the poem. But it was a poem that demanded to be performed. Allen said that the delivery is what gives life to a poem and he mentioned the Abuja Poetry Performance’s he had witnessed in the past. The Vice Chairman, Matthew Mzegha, who works for the NTA, hammered on the primacy of “performance”, saying basically that a listless performance made for ambivalent reception of an erstwhile extraordinary poem. Allen advised Stephanie to read her poems into a tape recorder so she could improve her presentation.

It was then that our first time member, the ten year old ‘Laja Agboola wowed us with his poem, “a sort of short rhyme” he called it. It went –

“Here comes a hungry man looking for some bread
If you have a piece of bread, don’t wait till he’s dead”.

- do you doubt now that the boy is a worthy son of his father and bonafide member of JosANA?

Dr. Agboola brought up the issue of artistic synergy. He noted JosANA comprised playwrights, poets, choreographers and very talented storywriters, arguing that there ought to be greater collaboration between all artists for the holistic expression of our take on Nigerian literature. Almost on cue, Jos City playwright extraordinaire, Paul Ugbede, joined us. The thing really is that when a writer writes, it takes a most perceptive reader to hear the text as it exists in the writers’ head. Considering that the average reader {while not in the least insulting the discernment of our literati} is not so sophisticated, a synergy between artists to provide a complete performance would go a long way in impressing our work in the minds of posterity.

Matthew Mzegha read a poem “Water is Life” which exalted the primacy of water much in the manner of Akeem Lasisi to whom Allen Omale rightly compared the Vice Chairman. It really was a fantastic poem except for the little-big issue of the title, which Redzie Jugo rightly said was cliché-ish. Mathew Mzegha’s poetry has been improving steadily over the last year and his effort was roundly praised. He told us that he had performed the poem with props, complete with beard and animal skins, for a TV program recently. Once again, “performance” slipped into our deliberations.

Redzie Jugo read an engaging short story title “Mirage” in what is becoming his characteristically punchy style. It was a tale of Dutch courage, a girl, father and son with cross-purpose expectations of each other, inopportune time, and a desire for marriage that goes fantastically wrong. Mirage. And all this in 601 words. Truly remarkable. Next David Onotu read “Season of Rain”, dedicated to his friend Michael Emeka who was present at the reading. I don’t know if Niyi Osundare has had anything to do with Jos City. I wonder because he has a protégé here! The tame lyricism of Onotu’s poetry begs comparison to Osundare’s “Waiting Laughters”. Richard Ali compared it to TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” for its diction and the curiosity the poet sustained throughout the long poem.

There really is a Fourth Generation extant in Nigerian letters and many of its components are found bi-weekly at JosANA. One feels as if one is in the cusp of something auspicious and from my study of the Third {1990’s} Generation, it was the same with them. While we do not have dictatorships to rail against and be made martyrs by, we have our contemporary re-explanations of the world. This re-explanation is necessary because increasingly, appearances, in international politics and social interaction are not what they seem. Where are all those Lagos-Ibadan publishers? Come up north and catch the next wave of cosmopolitan, definitive Nigerian literature.

Richard Ali read next, but neither of his readings were his work, he chose to pay respect to his elders. The first was an Ifa divination for the outgoing Chairman, he took the liberty {hoping the purists don’t ask for his head} of reading five odu’s for Allen Omale at this most auspicious juncture of his life. He then presented the hand copied sacred verses to Mr. Omale. Next, he read from Olatoun Williams’s 1992 “The Triumvirate”. He read two paragraphs, a short story in its right, from that book titled “The Wild Rose Garden”. JosANA listened enthralled as he read and applause, for Ms. Williams, followed. Ali said what struck him was the sheer beauty of the lines –

“If sanity is provisional, the line separating mental health from lunacy is not the great distance we think it is. Not the gulf from which we feel ourselves spiritually removed. And if indeed it is an abyss, then we all float on its vast cerebral surface – from which access to the brink of a mad world is rapid.

If madness is incomprehensible, how can we hope to understand it? How can we hope to save the madman who may have traversed the nightmare journey of a life, punctuated by glimmers of light, thereupon reaching the frontiers of a uniform world – where the days number one, and the sun shines through moon rays and bathes in an acid-golden haze? The heady perfume of madness within which the man is drowning, cannot be restrained, drop by drop, its scent emanates from the private and passionate jungle of his senses.”

Where is Olatoun Williams now?


The meeting wound to a close with the reading of Alpha Emeka’s short story “The Celebration of Ugba” written for Allen Omale and Aunty B’s reading a passionate paean to the pen and all penners in a voice that was powerful and reminiscent of Toni Morrison. The poem was performed as only a natural habitué of the theatre can. Finally, Adam Abubakar read an excerpt from his debut novel due out in the United States by August. The novel is titled “The Quest For Nina” and he brought to bear his skill from writing drama and screenplays, creating a compelling, subtly powerful chapter.

At JosANA, we celebrate our own – our own that is leaving, our own that remains with us. And we are not sad, for we are wiser, we are happy.





Richard Ugbede Ali is Secretary General of Jos ANA. Enquiries may be made to 08062392145 or emailed to rugbali@gmail.com.

The Fluorescence of JosANA

The Fluorescence of JosANA

For some reason, the word “ferment” has always fascinated me with its ambivalent Marxist undertone. For a long time, I heard it used in speech by campus demagogues and find myself checking up its meaning again for this article. Oxfords assures me that it still means “a state of social or political excitement . . .” Very fittingly, this word can best describe Jos ANA as it is now, something heading for its full bloom, a crescendo.

The last meeting of JosANA was held on Saturday 3rd, April 2008 at the Nigerian Film Institute, Jos and it began at exactly 1 p.m. with the arrival of the Ag. Secretary General, Richard Ali. The Chairman had made it known he would be unavoidable late but that the meeting should go on without him. {So Ali was Chairman for the day!} Already in the hall waiting eagerly were three members – Esther Chinke, winner of the 2007 Uyi Efeovbokan/ANA Plateau Prize for Poetry, our youngest member, Hamaya Frama Abraham and a new member, Patience Eguwrube who is an actress, a television producer/scriptwriter and is currently working on a book, fiction but one that concerns the Railways, a trip across Nigeria by rail. Pragmatic fiction? The retired but untired educationist, Silas Nnamonu, came in next with yet another new member, Amaka Dike, who seemed rather shy but soon enough the intellection of the house warmed her up. Gradually the hall filled up.

Everyone had had a more or less very busy fortnight and they shared the highlights of the preceding two weeks with the house; basically meetings, deadlines and preparing for exams.

The first reading was by Hamaya Abraham, {our youngest member at a little under seventeen years old}, who read the prolog from her unpublished first novel, “A Chest Of Letters”. It was a most fascinating piece of prose, especially from one so young; it suggested kinship with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American classic, “The Celestial Railroad”. Mr. Jerome Dooga of the University of Jos claimed the honor of primus criticus {sic] and he first of all praised Hamaya for her effort – then he noted that she had trouble with her point of view which kept vacillating from an “omniscient” to a “third-person” voice and that, of course, is a critical no no. He suggested she try the “omniscient” narrative voice, as the “third person” did not seem to be working very well for her. Richard Ali, adding to Mr Dooga’s comments, said she had sometimes fallen into the error of breaking sentence syntax in a manner, which while might be acceptable in schoolgirl speech, did not work while writing of serious content, a novel no less. He also mentioned that while sometimes writing was didactic, it must not be “preachy {Dooga’s word}”; Ali said it is the novel, taken as a whole that should be didactic and not the authors voice within it. There were plenty of kind comments for Hamaya’s novel.

Next was read the first chapter of Michael Emeka’s draft novel, “The Divine Will”. The first chapter was the background of the story and an introduction of the major characters, a father and his son. The father was a ”soft spoken giant of a man who would only push back when he was forced to the wall” while the son “did not even need to be pushed a little” before unleashing the fury of a storm. The story is set in Eastern Nigeria, precisely in Abia State somewhere near Isialangwa. Michael Emeka’s reading was one of those that because of their sheer perfection, the admirable control of diction and story flow, there were no comments save those of praise. One can easily imagine that Chinua Achebe, if he were younger and still writing, would have approved of Michael’s work. Michael is the younger brother of noted Jos City novelist, Alpha Emeka.

During the reading of Michael’s work, the Chairman, Allen A. Omale, arrived with his pretty wife, Rahmah. The Chairman had attended the Achebe Colloquium held at Nsukka and he proceeded to give the gist of all that had happened. He also distributed the Nsukka program of events. He told us that Odia Ofeimun was there as well as other high priests of Nigerian writing. He told us about a certain Dr. Dennash from India whose paper advanced the thesis that the ruin of Okonkwo lay squarely with Nnoka, his father. It was in the desire not to be like Nnoka that the seed of Okonkwo’s tragedy is firmly planted. Considering that Nnoka has erstwhile been considered a ‘minor’ character in “Things Fall Apart”, this thesis was well received by the house. Strangely, the Jos based playwright, Paul Ugbede had advanced the very same thesis to this writer privately three weeks before. This reinterpretation of Nnoka’s role seems to be largely beholden on the psychoanalysis of Okonkwo and it is tribute much to the credit of our own bard, Chinua Achebe.

But Chinua Achebe was not around for his own colloquium.

The Chairman however informed us that ANA Lagos had come with a larger-than-life painting of the bard by which those aspiring to “bard-hood” {including our lucky Chairman!} could have their picture taken. The Chairman also showed us a clip he made of Nigerian writers during their pilgrimage to Chinua Achebe’s old house at the University of Nigeria Staff Quarters. Our lucky chairman also had his picture taken touching the brick of the house reverentially. Our own Professor of Creative Writing, Kanchana Ugbabe, presented a paper at Nsukka that was very well received. The Chairman however expressed sadness with the dilapidated state of infrastructure at the University of Nigeria and indeed the generally deplorable state of the roads in Southeastern Nigeria, Nsukka particularly. Mr. Nnamonu, whose village is just twenty kilometers from Nsukka, lamented this and wondered why things were still so bad in the Southeast so many decades after the Civil War. Some of those roads are federal roads and the University is a federal University. He said that in one country, no one area should be put at a disadvantage. JosANA members generally concurred and we hope that the FGN would do something about UNN, which is a national university and without which, together with Ibadan, Ife and Zaria, the history of Nigeria cannot be properly told.

Chimamanda Adichie’s family lived in the same house that Chinua Achebe lived in at Nssuka and it was wondered if they had slept in the same room. “Not at the same time,” Mr. Nanamonu wittily interjected. As we say up here, “da haka ne, da magana ya kare”. Were it otherwise, the issue {the genesis of her literary talent} would have been put to rest!

Another new member who came fully prepared was Babajide Agboola. He came with a poem and an excerpt from a play but was only able to read the poem. It was a poem about the sabotaging of the environment and it was the first poem read at JosANA on that theme for a very long time now. However, it came under critical fire from Mr. Dooga who commended the theme but nonetheless condemned the prosaic nature of the poem. Richard Ali said there was a little less poetry in the poem than the poem required. This unleashed another storm as a debate started, following Mr. Dooga’s assertion that there were ‘basics’ of poetry that cannot be deviated from. Patricia wanted to know whether these basics are those of technique or content. Though not unanimously, the house agreed that it was the basic of technique, a poem without a metaphor, or rhythm at least, cannot be a poem. The Dissenting Party held that if the content was profound and written in verse, it was poetry. Jide, whose reading had sparked the row, said “Art is best interpreted by the artist”, a platitude worthy of Oscar Wilde even when one {me} does not agree with it, especially in the context of that particular debate.

Somehow, the house got talking about short stories, how “short” {or longly short abi} they can be. Richard Ali came to this, corroborated by his British Council Radiophonics compadres, that indeed a short story could be as short as one line. He gave the example of Katherine Atkinson’s -

“It can’t be; I’m a virgin.”

- much to the enjoyment of the House.

The new member, Amaka Dike, who had by now overcome her shyness read an excerpt from her unpublished novel. The novel is also set in Southeastern Nigeria. It was a situation of Nwabuife and her suitors. Her use of language was so controlled that I can stake my last Bic Biro that she will be the next great Igbo female writer {watch out, Chimamanda!}. It was one of those reading that elicit only critical praise.

Richard Ali read two poems, “Lady Butterfly” and “Suite of Blue” and opened the floor to another round of critical appraisal. Steve Rwang Pam, the Country music crooner and radio personality, said the poem reminded him of another JosANA when he and Allen were still underdogs, that Ali’s poems reminded him of the things Allen used to write back then and which brought him {Allen] into the eye of philistinic storm. Most people loved the poems and Chairman Allen commented on Ali’s unusual use of simile. A new member and first timer, Ajih Gabriel, also a poet, asked Ali to explain the second stanza of “Suite of Blue” –

A lynched cat swings with dead eyes
Popping educated and too late knowing
The singularity of its day, I pass on
I pass on, leaving some of me behind.

Ali said that the dominant idea regarding cats is that of their ‘nine lives’; but “if I take a gun and shoot a cat, or take a rope and string it up, what happens? The cat dies. Imagine the cat who all the while thought it had nine lives. You grow old and things happen to you and you start wondering whether you are happy or not and what it mans to so be.” Mr. Nnamonu asked why Ali did not use or sparingly used commas and other sentence complements in his poems, to which Richard Ali replied that he heard a personal rhythm in the lines of his poems and that rhythm did not necessarily and indeed is more often than not outraged by the insertion of commas, full stops and the rest of that butting family.

Allen Omale, in a reminiscence brought about by Ali’s “Lady Butterfly”, read a poem from years back, before his marriage, “The Heart is an Organ of Fire”. It was a fine poem, love, but not profane love. It was deeply moving and well received. Allen Omale said sadly that he knew he was incapable of writing such a poem now after all the years, so many things had happened. The house contributed variously to this statement about the spontaneity of poetry and how when you do not write a poem at its own sacred time, you cannot write it again.

Poe3 is the most sacred of all the arts and the poet is something of a prophet in the service of an awesome god, arbitrary in its power and resolute in its finality.

Barrister Redzie Jugo, disciple of Prof. Victor Dugga, the playwright, read a short story, “The Divorce.” It was a court situation with a judge, who disliked drunks and drinking, faced with the case of a man who has beaten his wife to pulp and she was petitioning for divorce. The man, drunk as a lord, interrupts the proceeding with “Mr. Judge, my name is Chuwang Pam and nor ‘Mr. Man’ and you know my name is Chuwang Pam because you, father, gave me that name.” It was just under 600 words and was as punchy as they come.

Barrister Jugo also recently won the top prize, a laptop computer, in a reality TV show called “Shine Plateau Youth” put together by the Youngstars Foundation in collaboration with the British Council.

The meeting ended after that and everyone got together to take a group picture.

Back to ‘ferment’. JosANA is in a state of intense ferment right now and anyone who has been around for a while knows that ‘revolution’ is the next thing; in the case of Nigeria, there is an intellectual revolution afoot comprising foot soldiers {pun intended} who are here on the ground and are increasingly making themselves relevant within the national space. The early Christians in their catacombs were in ferment. The flower of Christianity and its still ongoing revolution of international politics and history is the result of that.

Bow your necks and spread at the fluorescence of JosANA.








Richard Ugbede Ali is Ag. Secretary General of JosANA.

Poesondra: Stylistic Innovation at JosANA

The last JosANA meeting on the 5th of April proved a memorable one.

Quite atypically, it started a behind schedule due to the lateness of our chairman and the little problem with our venue being locked. But of course, the informal workshop had already commenced in the corridor with the arrival of Mr. Nnamonu, the educationist, and Richard Ugbede Ali. In time, other members joined in and the Chairman arrived with his apologies.

The meeting proper began with Richard Ali’s report on the British Council sponsored Radiophonics program at Kano which he had attended with three other members of JosANA; Abubakar Adam, Redzie Jugo and Alpha ‘Meka. The house was very interested in hearing about the experience and asked questions regarding it. Questions were also put to Abubakar Adam and later to Redzie and Alpha when they arrived. Aunty B Tsevende, who had arrived with a crate of chilled soft drinks, asked about specifics of radio writing and discourse followed. Abubakar Adam replied that the trick was to keep the audience’s attention. Repeating the words of our facilitator, Mike Harris of the University of Sheffield, he said that when you’ve written a book, if the reader gets bored, he could close the book and maybe give you another chance later; with radio on the other hand, he simply reaches out and “OFF”, and that ends the whole thing. So, good radio writing must be like a drug, given in small doses, and spaced out with highly dramatic reversal points. Sound effects are also a very important aspect of radio writing.

Next was talk on the at hand Achebe Colloquium. The Chairman updated the house on how far the arrangements were going and generally, what the latest news was.

The activities held in honor of Prof. G. G. Darah’s 60th birthday anniversary had culminated the week before at Abraka and Mr. Dooga of the University of Jos, who attended, gave us a rundown of the whole event. He made everyone feel the heat of the intellection that had gone on there and yet, each person felt a bit sad that they had not been there in person to see the likes of Tanure Ojaide and other highly esteemed literary icons. Mr. Dooga showed us pictures taken at the event, which was well attended, and a clip of the “ovedje {sic}” dance. He also brought us up to speed on the intellectual pulse of the Niger Delta. It would seem that the same anger we up north feel for the Niger Delta intelligentsia who we see as having been railroaded by thugs like Ateke and Dokubo, is replicated with their own anger directed at particular northern academics. From the foregoing, there is the necessity for greater interaction between the north and the delta, especially amongst the academics; there are obvious differences, resource control et al, but they should not be insurmountable ones.

The Northern Writers Conference scheduled for Minna from the 4th to 6th of May was announced and all who wished to be delegates from JosANA were asked to get their names across to the Chairman.

Aunty B Tsevende would be touring the United States this week with a production of Queen Idia, which she has choreographed.

Richard Ugbede Ali read “Seesaw Selection”, the fruit of his one-week stay in Kano to the critical acclaim of the house which included Paul Ugbede, noted Jos based playwright.

But the high point of the meeting came with the rendition of piece by a new member, Ejiofor Okolo; he called his style “poesondra”, a fluid style incorporating the character of poetry, song and drama. Needless to say, it was an interesting performance, and a definitive experience. Ejiofor rendered his piece, really rendered it, with action, gesticulation and voice modulation. One was put to mind immediately of the griots of Mali and Senegal and our own Yoruba drummer boys from the 1970’s Lagos, with their little talking drums who seem to improvise their poetry as they moved along the streets. But then, you wonder, such deep poetry cannot have been improvised there and then, the complexity of meaning in them betrayed the true skill of a poet as gifted as any. We at JosANA have witnessed the birth of what may turn out to be a new thrust in Nigerian literature, which has been long dormant since Niyi Osundare swept up a storm with his highly lyrical “oral” poetry in the 80’s. If that movement acquires a stable form, its most visible representative would be Ejoifor Okolo, an Igbo griot and very importantly, a member of JosANA.

Following this, the meeting broke up once again into informal groups, some clustering around the Radiophonics people, others around Ejoifor and yet others around the chairman.

The next meeting is for Saturday 19th of April at the Nigerian Film Institue, Jos.

biyi bandele's things fall apart

egbe belu, ugo belu

When this gem of a phrase first struck me a year ago, I asked a literary friend of mine what it meant and she told me that translated from the Ibo tongue, it meant "let the eagle perch, let the hawk perch also". The counterpart English aphorism would be "live and let live". Subsequently, I remembered having come across it in one of Chinua Achebe’s novels, either Things Fall Apart or Arrow of God.

The reason for this recall is that yesterday I happened to be at the Jos Repertory Theatre where I watched the thespians rehearse Biyi Bandele’s adaptation of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, perhaps the finest sociological novel Africa has produced. Its main character, Okonkwo, has engaged over the decades as the most tragic of humanist heroes and a fitting metaphor of Africa as a whole, both in terms of the tragic and the heroic.

It being 50 years since the book was first published, Nigeria is right held in celebrations of this golden milestone. Generally called the "Achebe Colloquium", amongst its details is the staging of this aforementioned adaptation by the Patrick Jude Oteh directed Jos Repertory Theatre on the 19th and 20th of April 2008 at the Cultural Center, Ibadan and Abeokuta respectively. The staging of the play is sponsored by the Ogun State Government and the Association for Nigerian Authors.

I watched the rehearsals in company of the ANA PRO, Alkasim Abdulkadir, the ANA Plateau Chairman, Allen Abduljabbar Omale, his wife and the up and coming Jos based writer, Barrister Redzie Jugo. By the end of the two-hour long production, the phrase "egbe belu, ugo belu" kept repeating itself in my mind. A complex but flawlessly controlled play told from the perspective of Obierika, Okonkwo’s friend, I found in it worthy obeisance to Achebe himself and to the emerging spirit in the Nigerian stage and literature.

Perhaps, being an Ibo phrase, it would lend itself to further construction? If the eagle perches and the hawk perches, it means that everyman comes into his own time, let no one hold the rest to ransom by snatching the trappings of forever. Perhaps we can say that no matter how long ugo {hawk} has slumbered, when it arises, its place is still there in the scheme of things, waiting to be claimed? Shall we not say that the generations of writers following in the trail blazed by Achebe and his contemporaries are coming into their own? Both Biyi Bandele’s generation who have adapted this novel and my generation, the players of Jos Repertory, who have brought it to life?

Among the most haunting passages in the drama adaptation, made if possible even more surreal than in the novel itself, is the point when Okonkwo finds that the cancer of the white man has spread so deep into the tribe that it cannot hold anymore, that the tribe, which gave him accolades through his life for his strength, had become attributed with the blemish of Nnoka his father, that of "effeminate" weakness. In Biyi Bandele’s adaptation, I still see Okonkwo looking to his fellows to follow his action and finding their backs turned to him, I see the deconstruction of truth work its way across his face and his heart, the superstructure of a broken tribe’s soul. I still see him, his face haunts me even now, taking off the cap of his title, the ozo, the toga, his machete once trusty now sterile, his life, placing all on the impotent earth of Umuofia. And Obierika’s ringing indictment, "That man was the greatest man in Umuofia; now he will be buried like a dog!"

Though I have been honored greatly to watch the rehearsals of the Jos Repertory, as it were, from the vantage of a private box, I am not merely a trifle sad that I shall not be in Ibadan to watch the premier from the public stands. I can only say that the shimmer of my sadness would be tempered only in the knowledge that my high regard for this production might draw even one more lover of literature to be there with his own eyes, to see and hear Nigerian progress for himself.

My musings end with the thought that every generation hears its own drummer, its own sound and it betrays or acquits itself by the sincerity of its dance to that thrumming. It has been our blight, this long period of time reversing itself. But we have overcome that blight, we have overcome the differences of an Igbo novelist adapted by a Yoruba playwright and played by a Northern Repertory because we realize that all these, all this, is uniquely and authentically Nigerian. We have come of age and have come to our own.

Egbe belu, Ugo belu.

A Review of Landscapes of Realities

Poet Alert: Dr Yusuf Adamu

Not being a cricket, this piece should not be considered a work of cricketism; it is rather a sanarwa, news, a review, and an acclamation of a newly published poet. Once every few years a collection of poems comes along that so definitive it can only be reviewed on its own terms. Dr Yusuf Adamu has provided us with just such a collection with the publication of his 2008 Poems, Landscapes of Realities. This review is meant to offer lovers of verse everywhere a studied opinion of this latest offering from the generally considered literary-arid northern Nigeria.

The poet is a football aficionado and geographer, he lectures at the Department of Geography, Bayero University, Kano. This background proves important in considering his poems. His literary grounding is in the Hausa language where he has published three novels; Idan So Cuta Ne {If Love Is a Crime}, Ummul Khairi and Maza Gumabr Dutse. He is also a blogger of note; {http://www.africanpublicpoet.blogspot.com/}, {http://www.tagarduniniya.blogspot.com/}.

Landscapes of Realities is a very slim volume of fifty six pages comprising forty three poems written entirely in free verse. The poet has conveniently divided them into three thematic hubs; “Innocence”, “Places” and “Realities”, comprising five, seven and thirty-one poems respectively. The poems included in Landscapes were written during the years 1997 and 2000 and perhaps their being published in 2008 is an acknowledgement by the writer that the content and context of his poems have remained relevant over the last decade.

The arresting individual characteristic of each poem in Landscapes is leanness – an almost anorexic control of diction such that each poem renders a chosen reality starkly, without the confusion of ambiguous words or an obscurantist style. The collection, taken as a whole, betrays an acute social conscience that is prescient but not overly sentimental in its comment, exhortation and, more often, denunciation. The bareness of geography, where a hill is a hill and a plain is a plain, have been transposed successfully into the poems of Dr. Yusuf Adamu, where Nigerian realities – the motorcyclist, eclipsed dreams, the corruptions of power and time – are rendered in severe relief.

The five poems comprising “Innocence” – “The Child”, “Truth”, “Childhood Dreams”, “Almajiri” and “Happiness” adequately reflect the bare template of each Nigerian, before experience ups and happens to them. The innocence of childhood and truth, the beauty of a child’s dreams are captured in their fragile ephemeralty. This nostalgia is punctured by the poem “Almajiri”, about the agonizingly human fodder, child-scholar-beggars, that have become an embarrassing fixture in the cities of Northern Nigeria. The blight of Innocence, occurring in “Childhood Dreams” –
. . .they wake up growing
into a world full of malice
falsehood
diminishing glory and shame
. . .guilt replaces innocence
ancient dreams
barely materialized
-is given a context in the lines from “Almajiri” below –
he is very young an frail
the economy is biting hard
the Mallam cannot sustain him
. . .he must hunt for himself.

The second part of the collection, “Places”, comprising seven poems, are poetic descriptions of Kano City, Jos City, the Plateau, Kura falls, Wembley Stadium and the town of Sussex. They are simple poems. However, a poignant question is sneaked in which forms the prelude to the next part of Dr. Adamu’s poems, the poet asks –
Where shall we be
If there is no geography?

“Realities”, comprising thirty-one poems, provides a rich mine for critical exploration. The poet-persona in these poems is above the fray of the realities being described yet we can feel the organic, umbilical relationship between the two. “Realities” probes maternal mortality and poverty, germane issues in the North, with the poems “Child Birth” and “Malnourished Child”. “Fuel Scarcity” and “Motor Cyclist” critique the nature of government insensitivity vis a vis the devious and oftentimes, dangerous, “survival” activities of the Nigerian citizen. Beggary, another social problem in Northern Nigeria is given the treatment of clinical satire in “Professional Beggars”; “Career Beggars” on the other hand denounces the beggars for their ignorance, however, it doesn’t stop there, the poem ends –
their minds are enslaved
by false beliefs and ignorance
chained by laziness
their minds may never be free
until the society decides to set them free.

On the late General Mamman Vatsa, he says –
His sprit shall forever be
Nourishment for his memory never ceases
As the living drink from his lines
In the same spirit of the Ecclesiasticus, of paying respect to “great men and their fathers who begat them”, he honors the “Ancient Revolutionary”, Akhenaten {1338-1358 BC} and a “Brave Captian”, Sultan Attahiru of Sokoto who defeated by the British, was subsequently killed at Burmi, on his way to join forces with El-Kanemi or Rabih in the Sudan –
Maxim gun he hasn’t got
Can he remain on the throne?
. . .our glory has fallen and broken.

Perhaps in correcting the conservative and reactionary stereotype of Northern Nigeria, Dr Adamu has in a series of poems affirmed that the radical, revolutionary streak has been in the north long before the south knew of cause and anti-cause, I speak of men like Muhammad Rumfa, Shehu dan Fodio, Sa’ad Zungur, Aminu kano, Hamza Abubakar. In the poems “Strike”, “Rebellion”, “Smash Them” and “Speak Out”, he idolizes revolt in the face of malevolent power. Says he –
But if they are unjust
If they oppress you
Day and night
If they mismanage your funds
If they deny your rights

Then rebel
Fight in the open
And in the close
Do not fear their might
For God is not on their side.

However, even judging this collection by its standard, there are shortcomings. On the ground of “leanness”, there are poems laden with prosaic fat so much so that the poetry of the poem is lost. Examples of this are the poems “Problem” and “Kindness” which read too much like penny motivational tracts. Secondly, the poet’s style involves the breaking of sentence syntax and while this stylistic preference has in the main worked superbly, it has not so worked all though. An example of the jarring and unaesthetic effect of this is the line “His colleagues he betrayed” from “Driver’s View”, “For, truth they represent” from “Kayan Sarki” and the first stanza of the poem “Frankenstein”.

Another critical charge, this time of complacency may be laid against the poet. Instances abound where the non-printing of a single letter, “s” or “’s”, have discontextualised poems and hurt the flow of their line. One inevitably pauses at such a point. An example is the first stanza of the otherwise correct “The Sun”. On another limb, “The Poet Died” is rendered unwieldy for its sheer and abrupt vacillation between past and present, sample –
The power of the gun
He knew quite well
Yet it is the power
Of the written word
He believes in
I have no doubt that General Vatsa for whom this poem is in memoriam “believed”; but he cannot “believe” {L4 excerpt above} because that would imply living contemporaneity and Vatsa, we know, has been dead for decades.

These shortcomings can easily be overcome during the expected reprint of this Poems. They do not much hurt the beauty of the collection or derogate the sincerity of the poet behind the lines. Among the emerging voices in Nigerian poetry, Dr. Yusuf Adamu’s Landscapes of Realities would definitely find a niche for itself.

Kano Memoirs: Creative Writer’s Forum

Among The Brothers

During my recent literary sojourn to Kano City in Northern Nigeria, I had the unanticipated pleasure of meeting the crème of that city’s young writers and thinkers. The accusation variously laid against the northern part of the country has been that, vis a vis the south, it has largely been unable to tell its story. Not on one occasion, in salons across the length of this country, the question, axiomatic, has been – the south has produced Wole Soyinka, Eastern Nigeria has produced Chinua Achebe, who, of that stature, has the north produced? I was well aware of that typecast even as I attended the Forum, as the meeting is called. I merely reminded myself that stereotypes must be held in abeyance until real evidence can prove its truth or falsity.

The writers of Kano meet monthly under the auspices of the ANA/EEL British Council Creative Writers Forum. It is a partnership between the local chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors {ANA} and the English and European {French} Languages Department of the Bayero University, Kano with support from the British Council, Kano. The meetings are held on the last Wednesday of the month at the Council’s premises along Emir’s Palace Road, which is an exemplum of traditional arewa architecture with its thick mud walls and old style motifs printed on the exterior walls. Together with my friend, Abdulaziz Ahmad Abdulaziz, I entered the meeting hall at exactly 4:30 p.m. Were not for Abdulaziz’s foresightedness, we would have joined the others standing at the corners or on tables – the hall was full.

A young man was reading from a poem, his very words were –
Like a river cut away from its source
A day without sunshine, shrouded by envious clouds . .
- “a love poet”, I thought, “a poet in love” and wondered the fatal connexion betwixt the two. Muhammad Balarabe Sango who is the PRO of ANA/Kano State was chairing the meeting. He showed his courtesy by recognizing my work with ANA/Plateau State and inviting me to the dais where I declared myself delighted to be there. There were over sixty persons in the hall; six times more that Lenin said would have stopped the Bolsheviks coming to power in Russia. Indeed, the Muse of writing dwelled amongst the Kannawa.


About twenty writers read that day, the 26th of March 2008, mostly prose and poetry; Bakano 80, Muktar Ali Hikima, Terungwa Isaiah Itiav, Abdulaziz Ahmad Abdulaziz, Abdullahi Sufi, Muttaqa Yusha’u Abdulrauf and M.B. Sango amongst others. I read my short story “The Ravages of Dust.”

The health of a country’s letters can be ascertained by the themes its writers tackle, the literary is the thermometer of the social. The themes of the Kano writers are astonishingly varied, ranging from the everyday such as love within the society, love and lust between the sexes, the road as a vehicle to social harmony to the clearly metaphysical such as Ali Muktar Hikima’s “An Odd World” and Abdulaziz Fagge’s “The Untold”. Bakano 80, a writer, in answering a critical salvo from the floor viz the crime obsessed theme of his work replied that he felt crime had been marginalized in contemporary Nigerian prose, hence his desire to affect this discrimination in his work. Needless to say, I found Bakano’s reply highly perceptive and true.

However, while protean themes indicate literary virility, the general style of the Kano writers leaves much to be desired. Liberal construction, and inevitable the misconstruction, of grammar has taken its heavy toll on the work read during that meeting, perhaps indicative of the corpus itself. Without paying attention to the “personal” nature of a writers style and the miring myriad arguments on that, I venture to say grammar, as synthesized in that unit of sense, the sentence, is and must remain the building block of style. Grammar is organic and an at least rudimentary mastery of it is necessary in order to avail a writer the defense of “style” when accused of linguistic or grammatical miscarriage. The writers of Kano have either largely failed or been careless in their use of grammar and I do not think the defense of “style” avails them. The grammatical liberties taken in some of the work read, prose and poetry - the appropriateness of syntax, imagery, and diction – too many times, those liberties were over-taken.

The real workshop proved educative and insightful critiques were made. Among the gathered that day were Drs. Yusuf Adamu and Bala Garba of the Bayero University, Kano. The former lectures geography while the latter is from the English Department. I left the meeting with the appropriate words of Dr. Bala on my mind, he said, concerning creative writing – “it is not the creative we lack, it is the writing!” Dr Adamu stressed that one should not call oneself a writer before one becomes one and the fitting toga of a true writer can only be worn at the end of a long process of writing and rewriting, refining and editing, and critique.

I agree entirely with the dons. The trouble with up and coming Nigerian writing is the impatience to get the cattle to the market. But you only get a good price when the cow is fattened. And fattening a cow is not a day’s job. Yet, the abundant energy that brings about impatience is very important because it pointed out the reality, that those twenty writers that day were confident enough and willing to put their work on a pedestal, to be critiqued and to accept criticism. That is, of course, the beginning of improvement.

On leaving the meeting that day, I felt that the future was promising since even as far up north as Kano, there are writers passionate about writing. It would only be a matter of time before critical appraisal would nudge these fine young persons to even greater refinement of their language and ultimately, the good of Nigerian writing.