Nnolim is a professor of English and a literary critic whose works span decades. He has written profusely and observes works of generations of African writers. Although a university lecturer of repute, it is his contributions to the development of African Literature that places him as one of the progenitors of African literary criticism. His seminal essays are not only engaging but always throw up debates, making him somewhat controversial. Charles Nnolim, through his exploration of sundry works and issues, has made the African literary discuss as germane as other world literature. Some of the issues tackled in this interview with Udo Okoronkwo Chukwu emanate from his books, essays and topical debates on literature.
You accused contemporary literary scholars in Nigeria of being lazy, for not actively critiquing the works of writers of their generation. You made the observation in 2008 in an interview with Ezechi Onyerionwu and further see it as an impediment to literary scholarship of the nation. What can be the cause of the lethargy in view of the robust critical activity in your days?
Since people don’t read, their intelligence seems to be limited. Because of the Internet people, don’t read again, online has taken over; people are more materialistic than interested in knowledge. When we see people like you talking about literature and books after so many years of interacting with lecturers, it pleases us a lot. I think the reason is that the quality of education is deteriorating little by little. People like Aristotle they went to an academy, but we are still reading their philosophy, they are still guiding us. Now those who go to secondary school cannot even write. My brother who sent me to school had only Standard Six Certificate and wrote the History of Umuchu, which has been discussed all over the place. What does Plato say? “When an inferior marries an inferior he gets an inferior represented.” If somebody who is not good teaches you, you can’t go beyond him.
You described the African Literature of the 20th Century in “The Nigerian Tradition in the Novel” as an unhappy one, “a literature of lamentation, a weeping literature following Africa’s unhappy experience with slavery and colonialism”. However, when it comes to contemporary writers of the 21st Century, you lack empathy. In Contemporary Nigerian Fiction, you described the third generation of African writers as a “people adrift”, and their “fiction depicts a society adrift and a people lost in the imbecilities of futile optimism”. The male writers you said are of “fleshly school…whose works are characterised by debauchery”. Femi Osofisan also accuses them of being too concerned with “full disclosure and unrestrained loquacity…and unbridled surrender to the goddess of Eros”. But, Prof, as we know one of the factors that validate literary work is period and these writers are called the third generation…
The point is that every generation writes about what happens around them. If you look at Achebe’s group, Soyinka and others, it was colonialism, independence, and so forth that dominated their thinking. It’s about how do we get independence? How do we get free from these unwanted oppressors? That’s what we are talking about being unhappy literature. It began with slavery through transatlantic –carrying away black people. When I was in America, if you did something as a black person, a white woman would tell you, “Take your cotton picking finger out of my business.” That thought didn’t make us happy; slavery didn’t make us happy. The Whiteman didn’t even believe that we are human beings. They thought we were higher monkeys. Look at the situation in South Africa, the Whiteman arrived there and made everybody inferior!. He divided the country into districts; you couldn’t go to the white district as a black. This was a stranger who came now to lord it over you in your own father’s house. So these are things that when we write about in literature shows unhappiness. So when we look at average literature of the 20th Century, it is more about the situation we are talking about, whether it Things Fall Apart, Cry the Beloved Country or Weep Not Child. Unfortunately, when the Whiteman left, we found out that our brothers were worse, and corruption came in.
Talking about “fleshly” people, if you look at most of our authors’ works, it is hotels, prostitution, human trafficking in Africa. In Chika Unigwe’s Black Sisters Street, for instance, we are no longer talking about prostitution; they go there to live. Most people now, instead of travelling to Italy or Paris, now go there and have a street to live there. They call it Red Districts of Europe; and I am like, no white woman comes here to prostitute –those things do not make us happy. Coming to the new writers, they are trying and getting awards; our problem with the new writers is that they are not very moralistic. This issue of sex and prostitution, etcetera, is what made me arrive at “fleshly writers”. They are so interested in enjoyment. I think the reason is that we are no longer fighting independence; we are no longer fighting for our place under the sun.
While you and Osofisan feel they are desecrating the ethos of literature, others have come to their defense. In an interview I had with Odia Ofeimun, he disagreed with your description and termed you to be “part of that frigidity of the older critic who did not see that life is a bit freer”. Another critic Damola Awoyokun describes you a puritan, like the Victorian critic, who treats literature like a branch of moral argument. To him, literature is special, accommodating, open and free. Both of them are emphasising freedom.
They are making a point, and the point is true; and because what is possible is not always expedient, what is possible is not always advisable. It’s possible to kill your child; it’s possible to come and make love in the middle of the street. So, because the society is free, people should not abuse that freedom. As I said, we are fleshly now; it is prostitution; it is human trafficking; even buying in human parts. They are possible, but not advisable. So there must be some restraint. In Black Sisters Street, we now move to Europe and dominate the streets. Why can’t white men come to us, especially in immoral behaviour? We are seen as loose; anything that can be purchased, we sell –using what you have to get what you want. It is because we think that what is possible should be done. And we say no, what is possible is not expedient and not advisable; and I think that we like money too much. There is need for restraint. What we hear in Africa and Nigeria is corruption, corruption, corruption, Why? Do we have more money to corrupt ourselves? I was in America for 18 year and witnessed three to four presidents. If you see where ex-presidents live, it just one bungalow; the only thing they do is to give it a little garden so that they can play tennis, go hunting and other things. But, here, they like to build a village. Our problem is that we are immoral –we are not very disciplined –and that’s why we are getting worse and worse. When you talk about school, people don’t want education; they want certificate. The Whiteman doesn’t do all those; the Whiteman wants to say, “This thing I know it”. And that’s why they are ruling the world, not because they’d give you money; it is because they respect what it is they know we know. But our own is that we respect money. And you’d see most of our boys who went overseas don’t come back again. In our own time, after making it, you come back.
Generally, the new writers have progressively established themselves in the themes they project. However, the incursion of Diaspora writing raises the question on placement of value. Prof Harry Garuba of the University of Cape Town, in a lecture presented during the 2015 ANA convention on “The Local and Global Texture of a New Nigerian Writing”, recognised that our new writers are making inroads by way of new phenomenon, where the West are now familiar with their local names, plus the fact that they are getting Western awards. According to him, their emergence and the heavy Western influence introduce a disturbing value shift for our literature, adding that before, there was a convergence of a local value and then the international scene; but, now, value is transferred internationally and filters locally. He condemned the apparent irrelevance of local opinion while international view is revered. That lecture, once again, brought to the front burner of literary interactions some problems challenging African Literature. With your wealth of experience, you will help us with some answers?
First of all, we have an imposed power in our literature. The first imposed power is the alphabet; it’s not our making. The alphabet we use, we only added our own, but it is English alphabets. And the point is those who control those alphabets, who taught it to you, will always have influence on you, because they started to know those alphabets before you. Anything we call literature now, as we say, it is from abroad. Because writing was never part of us, from copying ABCD, we are copying the language. We are copying the spoken word; we are copying even the manner in which they taught us. We are copying even the way we are reading the books. So every bit of things they are doing, those things are copied. When we say copied, we mean English or European. When it is European, it carries authority with it. Carrying authority means we must learn, take Achebe, for example. How did he learn how to write a novel? He must have learnt, of course, but when he learnt the way the British taught him, he wrote his own. And those who want to write like Achebe are indirectly as they copy Achebe are copying the Europeans. I have written articles on the sons of Achebe and his daughters. So the influence we have had from the British and also copying the British will also help us promote our own.
There are several significant questions Prof Harry Garuba raised at that conference. What determines a good literature? Do international papers have the privilege of passing judgment on our books or local critics?
Yes, they have. If you don’t tell the story so well, they’d stop there. If you tell the story so well, they’d like to know how you did it. It must be so interesting; somebody else knows how it is done. English is world language, and those things they do, they do it so well. It is persuasion, style and craft.
I think that should answer his question, “Do literary prizes set specific agendas?” In fact, he emphasised that finding out the agendas they are promoting will help ascertain if local authors are mimicking.
For one to win a prize, there must be an agenda. If you do it the way they do it, you’d get the prize –that’s the point. If you did it the way they do it you’d get the prize, and that’s why influence comes in, either because of narrative style or something like that.
If “criticism legislates taste and sets the standard”, as you pointed out in your award lecture “Morning Yet on Criticism Day: The Criticism of African Literature in the Twentieth Century”, why then do you think the debate on what constitute African literary aesthetics failed to produce a result other than disharmony of ideas. Is African Literature that complex?
Not more than other literatures. It cannot be resolved; the matter of aesthetics cannot be resolved. On matters of aesthetics, taste and beauty, notions of people are not the same. Some people may think that a girl is beautiful because of her height, nose, and so on. But others may have other criteria, which can be used to equate beauty. In matters of beauty, there is no definition, for no two people can agree on what is actually beautiful. Also, matters come and go according to ages. There was a time in the 19‘60s Russian novels were very popular. They were big, up to three hundred pages; but it is no longer the case now; they are slimmer now. So matters of aesthetics cannot be resolved.
The divergent arguments of African female writers on feminism made you to call them “a house divided”. But we’ve noticed some changes; almost all of them are professed womanists.
For Ogunyemi and the rest of them, the work is womanist; they are accommodationists. A womanist says that most writers are no longer just for rabid womanism. womanism is neither male nor female. The problem with Ogunyemi is that some feminist writers do not end their stories with female victories. Look at Marriama Baa –that complementarity is what it should be, and not male chauvinism or female feminism. That time I wrote “House Divided’ is to show that they were in frameworks. But, at the long run, best thing was for the male and female to find accommodation with each other, instead of war, and the more women go to school, the more they are going to express their own views; the more you will have to accommodate them. Feminism is an interesting literary idea, but the end of it is that man and woman should find a meeting point.
Sometime ago you decried government’s lack of recognition and honour to writers while politicians are highly respected…
The point is that here writers are not rewarded. The British has a life plan for writers of poetry. But here we are very materialistic; one day somebody asked me in Umuchu, “Kedu uba gi (Where is your wealth)? What have you done for us? You haven’t built us a tarred road. You haven’t done all these for us. We are very materialistic. If good writers don’t get significant rewards noticed by the “values” of our people, they think they are wasting time. But they can reward their influence; they can reward their fame by giving us you know either Writers Residence or something like salary where you can retire and be a prominent man. In 2009, they gave us five million naira and say, whenever I write my name, put “NNOM” (Nigerian National Honour of Merit), and that’s where it ended, because being a critic is not a gift. It is not something that influences anybody. There was a time they were naming streets after footballers, building houses for teenage footballers. But what did Achebe get, even Wole Soyinka, if not Europe that gave him Nobel which earned him seventy two thousand dollars? So the point is that the reward system is not appreciated. It is not even noticed by those who could have. And you know also that this thing called writing is a gift. That you want to write doesn’t mean that you can or if you write people will notice it. Look at Chimamanda, she is very famous; if you are not inclined that way it doesn’t matter to you. So the value system has not made impression so far.
How can literature be used to promote indigenous languages? These languages are disappearing…
How did people learn Greek or Latin? It is because of the power of language. Those who wrote Greek made it so interesting; you’d have to have that extraordinary narrative power. You have to have one enthusiastic enough to tell you the story. Human beings want to learn things that are a little extraordinary. People wanted to read Greek because of logic of Aristotle and Plato. You’d want to read Latin, because people like Julius Caeser told stories of civil wars and how they conquered. Translation is very important; when we read about classical stories, we read them in translation; the Bible in translation. The story they tell in the Bible is so interesting that people wanted to know the language the story is told. And that’s how these things spread.