By Obi Nwakanma
Congratulations to Ogaga on winning the LNG. I have very serious concerns and unease about the LNG prize: its process, its mission, its organization and its incredible limitations. But here’s yet not the place to address these concerns. Needless to say, that the award to Ifowodo is much well deserved and I salute his work, and his longstanding contribution to the National imaginary. I have not read this work, but I hope to order it; in fact a couple of it, for Christmas gifts to a couple of my friends and colleagues who, because of my own work, have become very interested in contemporary African literature- particularly, poetry. I talk up quite the storm about new African poetry; a most fecund, but tragically neglected bastion of the imagination of a generation. I am currently working on three books which I hope will define or substantiate my labor as not only a practicing poet, but as a critic, and historian of ideas: the Zik biography- basically, Zik and the foundations of Nigerian literary modernity; the Mbari Movement and a work I am titling, “ The Third Zone: Nigerian poetry , 1970-2000.” Now, the working premise is, from my view, the failures of contemporary Nigerian imagination as well as its triumphs. I will take into account, the work of criticism in shaping the discourse of the craft of poetry . As we know, there are no landmark critics among us today of the weight of the Obumselus, Echeruos, Obiechinas, Nwogas, Ireles, whose bookends is Jeyifo. The question I want to pose and answer is, whether indeed Nigeria literature, particularly its tradition of poetry, has made any cultural impact in the formation of a National conscience. The question, even as I am trying to do Adorno, is also whether there is a Heidegger or Horkheimer among us. Basically my concern is the absence of a phenomenon of the tradition of thought from which philosophy can use to formulate, formalize and imagine Nigeria into being in spite of its current phase of fragmentation. My fear is that Nigerian poetry and its critical tradition has not given Philosophy much meat to bite on. I would like to celebrate our friend Harry Gaurba, who was among the loveliest of men. But brilliant and talented as he was, Harry did not do grounds shifting work. We must begin to acknowledge the facts as we examine his ouevre, and this is not because he was untrained, untalented or unprepared for it, this was because of what I discern now as the grip of melancholy. Perhaps Ezenwa Ohaeto might have pulled it off, because the last time I spoke with him, while he was sick in Cambridge, Mass, he hinted extensively about doing a summative work of an African cultural theory. Death clearly did not permit that. But it is still an open call. There is so much excavation to be done. Nigerian writing is a rich output trapped in poorly published books , beautifully published books as well as in unpublished manuscripts which hopefully may one day be gathered by the National Archives as evidence of the Nigerian imagination in a particular era. But I think in general, weighed on impact, that unlike the visual arts, Nigerian literature failed. We have evidence of why: the collapse of its industry of transmission and circulation is one reason. The school system and the universities are jaundiced by a certain kind of deadly medivialism, which makes us keep talking about how lovely Keats is, and what we have lost for not going into exile. It is sickening! We have a circus of pretentions; folks who teach Nigerian literature without undertaking its clinical surgery or understanding the purpose of literature as the repository of the spirit of nation; they have hardly read nor been able to define the writings and the trajectories of ideas of these inter generation of writings that they purport to teach, nor are able to situate it within a philosophical framework that constructs the nationalist imago. They generally wait for the donors of ideas, coming from outside, to determine the contours of their own ideas and its production. Obi Wali was truly prescient! Like the Nigerian critic of these writings, Nigerian writers are trapped in protest and melancholy. We reproduce this mood in various ways . It is all serious and humorless perhaps because the nation itself has not humored us. The language and the mood has remained invariant since 1970. We mythologize writerliness, much more than the writing itself, perhaps because, African writing itself has arrived at that Dead end which Obi Wali foresaw with such fierce clarity in 1962. Perhaps, its greatest symptom is the decline or atrophy of nation, because without the clearest idea of nation and nationness, the entire enterprise of writing and literature is imaginative fraud. And here we are.
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