Professor Chimalum Nwankwo is a professor of African Literature, African-American Literature, American Literature and World Literature. Educated at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and Texas A & M University, USA, Nwankwo is also a creative writer famous for his poetry, an orator, a culture activist and a revered member of the legendary Altar-Native School of Nigerian poetry, which include legends like Professors Niyi Osundare and Tanure Ojaide. He is an expert on Post-Colonial Literature, African and African American Literature, World Literature, Creative Writing, and Dramatic Literature. He has taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka; East Carolina University, USA; Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria; Turkish University, Abuja, and North Carolina A & T State University. He was Guest Editor of African Literature Today, vol. 30. Among his seminal works include Of the Deepest Shadows and The Prisons of Fire (2010), The Womb in the Heart and Other Poems, and Lovesong for Julian Assange and Poems from Love Mountain. He is also the author of Toward the Kingdom of Woman and Man: The Works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1992).
In this interview, HENRY AKUBUIRO engaged him on some pertinent issues on African literature, culture and society.
Considering that politics in Africa is seen as a dirty game, is it not negative for any writer to embrace politics?
Anybody who makes that awesome decision to enter politics, writer or not, must accept that it is the quintessence of civic responsibility. If you do not have the guts or stomach for the proverbial thing of calling a spade a spade, you have no business in that arena. Look for a clown show for your pastime. A confident writer, informed and well politicised, should understand the implications of gravitas and commitment, no matter where his legs stand on the spectrum of activism. His name should abide there with a resonance constantly aware of the issues of probity, and of the relationship between a politics of meaning and social relevance and morality. Your words must always count on the side of social justice and human dignity. You must remain a soldier standing sentry for the soul of the nation, the voice of nonpartisan commitment to reason and radial fairness. Recall that, in his condemnation and fictional trial of Christopher Okigbo, Ali Mazrui saw the writer as someone who belongs to a rarified clime and who should not get himself contaminated with politics of any type.
What is your response to the idea of the writer being a prophet figure?
The issue is the manner or character of the writer’s participation and not just the participation. P.B. Shelley was not diminished by his participation in the Spanish war. One must note that you are involved even just by writing as you have in writers like America’s Stephen Crane (Red Badge of Courage) or John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath). Alexander Solzhenitsken (The Gulag Archipelago) or his earlier kinsman, Maxim Gorky (Life of a Useless Man), Charles Dickens (Christmas Carol or A Tale of Two Cities). There is a whole slew of writers during the Civil Rights Movement In the USA, from the Harlem REnaissance to the sixties and beyond, The African Independence movements were largely dependent on writers From the Apartheid enclave of Dennis Brutus to writers from Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and so forth. It is, indeed, an endless list of indirect or direct involvement as in the telltale case of Christopher Okigbo. Forget Soyinka’s latest campaign for social justice. Goats and sheep in Nigeria understand that this is no longer the Soyinka who nearly lost his life because of the Biafran war and his detribalised reaction to the most heart-wrenching upheaval in Nigeria’s history. Think about Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart remains a cudgel for shutting up people everywhere who neither understand nor appreciate how Africa has been maligned and exploited by Western powers. Ngugi remains as dreaded as Dennis Brutus in the days of ugly nihilism in Apartheid South Africa. A writer cannot be neutral or non-partisan in his society.
Chinweizu once contested the Romantic notion of the artist or writer being categorised as someone set apart. Could you respond to this?
Inspiration for social action or activism and upheaval of any kind resides in the albumen of all people of conscience. The gravitas of vision and commitment makes it look as if the writer is special like a prophet. No! Writers and artists in all cultures and times are always in the public eye. Their fictional predictions of the course of human history look like prophecy because of the acuity of analysis and perception.
In what ways can or should a writer portray African culture?
Of course, the presumption rises sometimes to preposterous and comical levels, which deserve incisive questioning and merciless interrogation. Professionally, writers are fortunate to be in the public eye to espouse the visual or subjective parallax or to detect and call out the erring dictator or the failing public servant. The only appreciation for such privilege is to give back to society as staunch warriors of freedom ready to even take the metaphorical, putative or even real bullet for the soul of the people.
How should a writer cope with a difficult economy such as we have in Nigeria?
In a verisimilitude which holds up the banner of consciousness in a way which while promoting indigenous culture must not occlude self-criticism through a peculiar Achebe mode, which I have dubbed in one of my essays as tropological polysemy. That’s an art which shows all sides. Its representation bearing in mind what Paul Ricoeur and his friends, in cultural theory and criticism, call the hermeneutics of suspicion: suspicion of writer, critic and reader. In that mode, you represent the world as a ratiocinative agent of recovery. I said somewhere else that you operate forensically, though this time not probing in criminal terms but as a fixer of damaged and abused cultural goods and artifacts.
You run for your life to be able to fight another day. Or you fight like someone stuck in mud, with desperation in your loins. Hahahaha! For Heaven’s sake, do something. Don’t just stare or go comatose in your surrender to evil. Or worse, become a crass comedian marionetting in the halls or corridors and banquets of power.. Former president Obasanjo who sometimes is uncanny in wisdom and perspicacity is peering in a way that makes him selectively speaking, a genius in social criticism and understanding of our predilections, fallibilities and unguarded foibles. Ruminating over the partisan political postures and often exuberant and loud-mouthed intervention of a reckless, youthful political pundit has this to say in paraphrase. If you give him food and drink, after eating and drinking, he will sing and dance for you! Every writer must learn to avoid attracting that king of aspersion or opprobrium. Show solid character and sturdy resolve in your political philosophy. If you want to endure in the minds of your readers and fans as a soul to be trusted. Be a visionary riding for the people and giving voices to the voiceless.
Can we have what you think about the legacies of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka?
They are both irreplaceable as visionaries in terms of the recovery I suggested above, soldiers of cultural restitution, if you like; that vision which does not take the African world for granted, something paternalistically recalled by the cultural or conquistadora adventurers from the Western world. Veritably, they will remain in the vanguard whenever African independence from not just politics but cultural imperialism appear in any foreground of history and posterity.
How do you rate the activism of Femi Falana and Dele Farotimi?
They should be patriotically or iconically or canonically baptised by the inimitable words of George Orwell (Animal Farm). “At a time of epochal evil, It’s an act of heroism to speak the truth!” When I watched Farotimi’s tears, I cried very freely too on my couch. I felt like somebody sitting on hot stones. Empathy was forbidden. I felt his pain inside my heart and bones.
Why is it hard for many African writers to break into the mainstream of Western literature in terms of enjoying wider readership across cultures and earning fat royalties like their Western counterparts?
Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, and all our big names did not begin their careers with the aim of breaking into the Western world for your proverbial Eldorado. Just tell your stories or writings well. Look, permit me to be a little bit vainglorious. Many years ago, I went to an Oral Literature conference with my late friend, Professor Isidore Okpewho, at the University of West Indies. While browsing through the African Literature holdings, I saw The Womb in the Heart, my 2002 ANA-CADBURY prize winning volume. I opened it out of curiosity and, to my surprise, the stamp on the first page of the book was: “Do not remove from the Library, A Must Read in African Literature!” I do not know anybody there. I was there with the most self-effacing gentleman, Okpewho. I kept quiet and moved on. We have to learn how to keep our mouths quiet and just go on with the writings if you love the art. Time will find you. Do not worry about when or how it finds you!
What would you consider your greatest contributions as a writer and a literary scholar?
Oh my God. As a critic/scholar, I always joke with my friends that I was born without fear, though I have learnt from my late friends, like Okpewho and Donatus Nwoga and another young self-effacing writer, Festus Iyayi, who sadly died prematurely to conduct yourself quietly. Let what you write do the talking. People who talk about their works too loudly are mostly people who deeply dread the quality of their productions! Look at our visual artists dead or alive: Ben Enwonwu, Bruce Onabrapeya, Obiora Udechukwu, Meki Nzewi, and so on. Look at our young performing artists; Flavour, Burnaboy, Davido, Simi, and so on. We hear them.
They do not run all over the place in self-promoting broadcasts. Their arts do all the talking. Many young Nigerian writers, especially poets, write lines which can only fit onto a stamp, and print cards proclaiming their identities. It is comical. So when people ask me or when I suggest to my young friends to submit their works in competitions, I tell them that I also do that not necessarily because I want the prize/s. It is a subtle promotion to let those who like my writings to note that I am still in active cultural production. Thanks for inviting me to this interview