you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
must a national literature eschew critical voices? without critical voices, critical of national regimes and societies at home, as well as critical for foreign oppressors, you have nothing, you have national praisesingers whose voices are bought by the state or the cultural lords. can you name more than a very few african authors whose voices have not been raised against the kongis at home?
you are right that the criticism of abani is two-sided. the flip side is that he, like ben okri, adichie, and virtually any other nigerian singer poet writer fela osundare etc etc, dares to take a critical position.
on top of it, abani dances around the edges of surreal or magical real fiction.
to measure this by the standards of foreign press exotica is not serious, not worth a real consideration. it invalidates the valid point that africa is indeed an exotic, savage land in the eyes of many in the west, and that they view must be expunged. it won't be expunged by extending it to all critical voices, new writers, by suspicions about exploiting western prejudices. i believe that will lead us nowhere
what i liked about your posting is calling abani hermes. that is a good term to extend for many, including oyeyemi. however, hermes is not writing newspaper accounts, and you are judging him by the wrong standards, not only for literature, but more, for the site of critique.
ken
On 12/6/11 5:21 PM, Rex Marinus wrote:
Ikhide,--
Abani's story rose up many years ago on a different forum and we drew much blood. I personally took him to task and I had raised my doubts about many of his claims. I still think these claims fantastic in the extreme, and I still doubt that Abani went through torture in Kirikiri, or that he met Fela in prison, or that he was arrested by the military because of street theatre. I was an active journalist in Lagos and I was very involved in the public discussions about the military in power in that era; had my own run-ins and near misses like many a journalist; and I knew, as did any working journalist in Lagos in those years, much of the story of who got locked, went undeground, where and when, and the means of setting up the many underground networks in those years. Moreover, I was on the other side of Kirikiri. I did not hear about that 14-year old Abani held for staging a play. I was literary editor of the Vanguard, I would have known. Lagos was a vast sieve of information, and many of us were committed to making much hay of it.
That said, I think that Abani's case may turn into a witch-hunt in your hands if you focus merely on Abani. You'd have to examine the total picture and the many you also know, who have retailed all kinds of fibs and cornered the market of "African victimhood" to draw sympathies and left-handed gifts from the west. Of course, I hate to continue what many of you now think as the cliche of the "west and the rest of us" - but Abani reflects a most intriguing phenomenom - what I call the game of stories. It is gaming of the sorts that is double-tongued and double-edged; in which the "image of Africa" is the commodity. People buy the image of Africa. They love Africa of the jungles; of mindless brutality; of the miseries of man writ-large. And Achebe was right, in that dialectic, the only useful or usable Africa in the western mind is the brutal and mysterious continent plagued by war, poverty, disease, ignorance and war. It is the antithesis of the West. The poor of the western world need a most damned Africa for consolation. Also, because at the roots of power is that which we call culture, the more visible and vivid form of value that allows for bragging rights, it is often neccessary to demean Africa in order to subvert it. We use literature - writing - and other means of representation to make vivid and visible the nature of our worth. It is therefore not surprising that the writing that appeals to the publishers in London and New York are those that overdetermine contemporary Africa. The writings on the new booklists from the prestigious western publishers of contemporary African literature (who therefrore teach Africa and shape its canon by validating the things they publish with their own prizes and laurels also) remains those that continue to make it a profoundly antinomic space - the other, more horrifying face of 21st century man. Check out the publishing list: from Helon Habila's stories Waiting for an Angel- and I find Measuring Time as unreadable as Uwem Akpan's silly story "Say You're One of Them" - to Adichie's Purple Hibiscus - whose redemptive figure is squarely the ancsetral presence of Papa Nnukwu to even Abani's Graceland.
I think Adichie escapes with the same paradox that makes Achebe escape with Okonkwo's character in Things Fall Apart - because both novels were published for the wrong reasons. But if you closeley examine the new fiction - and it is generally fiction - from contemporary African writers published by the International publishers, it is often, at the core, stories that feed into the Abani phenomenon. Stories that make the African experience of life a horrifying experience; that tweaks the tear-ducts of the kind-hearted western reader - with the donor instinct - unable to see beyond the terrible fib and the feud in the souls of the purveyors of this cant. EC Osondu in "Voice of America" has had to shape up too, stab Nigeria in the back, and get his own laurels as a voice for Africa. What is often ignored are the more humane and more balanced stories that speak about a more humane, even if complex and flawed continent. Abani had to neccessarily feed into this - that neccessity to demonize Africa in order to be affirmed by the Euro-American academy and its canon-making machinery. The more dangerous thing in all this however, is that your own mindset, Ikhide, feeds into that terrible ritual of self abnegation when you too declare that "ours is an illiterate leadership" - and in seducing hyperbole to run your own errand of demonization, I personally do not see anything diferent betweebn you and Chris Abani, except that Abani does his with the garb of Hermes, and with a Saxophone accompaniment. I say let Abani be - he is Hermes - thief, liar, creator of text, master of the herbs and of the act of dissapearance and fabulation. He has sprouted from the fabric of a Hermeneutic that began long, long ago. When Achebe sank Conrad, it became neccessary to recruit "native Conrads" as I have called many of these contemporary African writers to justify the new CCC - Commerce, Christianity and Civilization - which today in Africa rides on a profoundly new wave of neo-liberal political and economic masterplan for the dark and woebegone continent. To understand it, look to the 19th century. We have run the full cycle.
Obi Nwakanma
_____________________ "If I don't learn to shut my mouth I'll soon go to hell, I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell." --Christopher Okigbo
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 12:05:38 -0800
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Olu Oguibe on Insanity and The Creative Genius: Draft for A Future Note
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; Ederi@yahoogroups.com
"Over the years, as Abani's compatriots ponder his fantabulist tales, several theories have been floated to explain those stories. Some have suggested that because he only came out with the tales after moving from the UK to the US as a young writer, he might have felt the need to concoct stories of personal persecution and horror like many immigrants do in order to gain work papers or asylum, apropos the Senegalese lady who was allegedly assaulted by former International Monetary Fund chieftain Strauss-Kahn. Others have suggested that he told his tales in order to gain liberal sympathy and support for his writing especially at a time when such tales needed no verification because Nigeria was still under dictators. Having found not only acceptance and sympathy, but acclaim also by telling those stories, some have suggested, he has continued to tell them out of a need to remain consistent as well as generate publicity for his books. I have suggested, rather quite speculatively, that perhaps after years of being mistaken for the activist and former prisoner of conscience Chima Ubani, thanks to their seemingly similar surnames, Chris Abani might have purloined Ubani's identity and remained in character afterwards. Some others, still, have suggested that he might be engaged in willful subterfuge against Nigeria and Africa as a whole, intent on painting them even darker than they are."
Read the rest here...
- Ikhide
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