"The end of dictatorships has spurred rather than slowed the flight of writers from Africa. Virtually all African writers of stature live in the West. Some of them flee with dog-eared reams of foolscap paper in which they have stored what they imagine will sell in the West. And it does. Made-in-Africa misery sells like hot cakes in America. Thanks to lavish Western funding, there is now such an animal called African writing. Africans created it. In their works, Africa is a morbid museum, romanticized in perverse ways that would be racist were they to be penned by white writers. Yes, the West should start calling African writers on their hypocrisy. Virtually all African writers of stature beginning from pre-colonial times have been nurtured by Western aid. It bears repeating: The paying reading audience is in the West. No writer can live on what passes for a reading culture in Black Africa."
-Ikhide
The problem with equating a critique of the "west" with ingratitude by African writers suggest that one feeds on the other. This amorphous "West" is nice to African writers so these African writers must be nice to an amorphous and benevolent "West." I think this suggestion in itself is insulting both to the West and to the African writer. I do not think the good and benevolent people of the west are so crass as to ask African writers, as a condition to their benevolence, to squat in perpetutal gratitude. There is certainly an unequal exchange between the piper and whomever pays for his pipping, and the suggestion is made not without some justification by Ikhide Ikhelola, the African writer must repay the benefactors of African writing with sanitized praise-songs that would no doubt justify their debts and make the "West" sleep more soundly. One such way of repaying this debt is to shape an image of Africa suitable to the audience in the west. The other is sustained adulation - a high praise of the west. The African writer must, in Ikhide's very wise ways, become either a panegyricist for this West or remain silent; eat your humble pie African writer; either signify like the monkey, according Henry Louis Gates, or dance... indeed sing in loud gratitude to your "western savior" who embraces you when you run from tyranny and hunger, clutching only dog eared foolscaps of prose or poetry otherwise unpblishable in Africa. Very profound indeed.
Are African writers ungrateful to the West? Is the west - a single "whiteman" - against whom the ingrate African writer asserts complex animus? If an African writer points to much of Western journalism and literature as perpetuating and constantly reproducing dangerous and unneccessary myths about the African continent, does that suggest a lack of appreciation for the real moments of amity with this amorphous West? I think there is, above every thing else, a terrible lack of rigor in much of Ikhide's thought on this matter which makes a response both neccessary and frustrating.
I will leave an analysis of the a priori factors that have conditioned the last fifty years of African life, and merely suggest, as I have frequently done in various other situations, that in historical terms Postcolonial Africa is mere sappling. It is in a transitional and demonic phase of history, and is yielding, by the very condition of that history, a form of ghostly literature - what I call the phase of the African gothic. The shattering of time in the last five hundred years in Africa makes quite inevitable this search, through our imaginative enterprise, either in literature, the plastics arts, music or architecture, a certain level of the perverse until Africa and its global footprints reconnect and re-emerge from its current Dantesque hole. It is an image suggested to me most powerfullly in the psychic descent and re-emergence of John Edgar Wideman's character, Eye, siezed by ambiguity in Cattle Killing. So, the image of Africa as a "morbid museum" is a current and neccessary phase of its life and imagination, what is hypocritical is to suggest for African writers to live to outside of that reality. Some have certainly found a calling in merely constructing a linear, essentialist view of Africa - at the center of which is this western missionary angel who saves Africa from itself and its people. It is "western" - and not neccessarily "white," we must point out. This is the kind of imagery that publishers in London and New York consistently seek to publish by writers from Africa. This is the point that Teju Cole and Wainana argue against, but which Ikhide insists is a churlish self-regard, and an ungrateful response by African writers. Those African writers unwilling to write to measure, either stay silent in exile, refuse to hawk their manuscripts, or if they try, have the doors shut to their faces. It is a price you pay for your conscience. It is not ingratitude against the west. It is engagement with it. Every African writer published, marketed and canonized in London and New York in the last 15 years often has stuck in-between their story, that view across the bend. Africa remains this strange place for child soldiers; journalists who are jailed, women who are abused; children who are left on the streets; scam artists who have not come to you with empty hands, and so on. There is no love story in Lagos.
So, most Africa writers write for the west? well, years ago, the Macmillan series had a fantatsic young readers series which in the 1980s sold cheaply - between 70k and N1:00. Every secondary school kid I knew went to the bookshops when new prints come from kalu Okpi, Agbo Areo, etc. Not any more. Something changed between then and now. This is where our search must begin - that condition that exerted such powerful changes that made it imposible to sustain the reading culture, the Langston Hughes prize first awarded in 1966 in Dakar, the President's prize for Nigerian writing first awarded in Nigeria in 1962 to Achebe, etc. Yet, we have the ANA prizes and the LNG prizes which continue to be awarded and have been sustained. The problem is with the Ikhide's of Africa and the crossroads; the only prizes worth anything, and worth worrying about for them, are the prizes awaredd to some strange African book in London and New York retailing some crazy western savior and validated by some ghetto prize funded with the hard currency of blood diamonds or blood oil for which we must all be grateful. It is a symptom of the dispossessed. It is the Naipulization of Ikhide Ikelola.
Obi Nwakanma
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Empire Talks Back
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; ifuemia@googlemail.com
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:19:50 +0000
Thanks for your question. Here is a simple request: Google "The Wole Soyinka Prize." Trace its inception every year, report back to us what you find, its history, consistency in awarding prizes every year, etc etc. I am tired of doing the research. You help us by contributing something ;-)
Have a great weekend!
- Ikhide
There is not a single award in the arts in Black Africa by Africans that has been sustained for more than a few years.
Ikhide
i thought the Wole Soyinka Prize can be described differently?
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-Ikhide
The problem with equating a critique of the "west" with ingratitude by African writers suggest that one feeds on the other. This amorphous "West" is nice to African writers so these African writers must be nice to an amorphous and benevolent "West." I think this suggestion in itself is insulting both to the West and to the African writer. I do not think the good and benevolent people of the west are so crass as to ask African writers, as a condition to their benevolence, to squat in perpetutal gratitude. There is certainly an unequal exchange between the piper and whomever pays for his pipping, and the suggestion is made not without some justification by Ikhide Ikhelola, the African writer must repay the benefactors of African writing with sanitized praise-songs that would no doubt justify their debts and make the "West" sleep more soundly. One such way of repaying this debt is to shape an image of Africa suitable to the audience in the west. The other is sustained adulation - a high praise of the west. The African writer must, in Ikhide's very wise ways, become either a panegyricist for this West or remain silent; eat your humble pie African writer; either signify like the monkey, according Henry Louis Gates, or dance... indeed sing in loud gratitude to your "western savior" who embraces you when you run from tyranny and hunger, clutching only dog eared foolscaps of prose or poetry otherwise unpblishable in Africa. Very profound indeed.
Are African writers ungrateful to the West? Is the west - a single "whiteman" - against whom the ingrate African writer asserts complex animus? If an African writer points to much of Western journalism and literature as perpetuating and constantly reproducing dangerous and unneccessary myths about the African continent, does that suggest a lack of appreciation for the real moments of amity with this amorphous West? I think there is, above every thing else, a terrible lack of rigor in much of Ikhide's thought on this matter which makes a response both neccessary and frustrating.
I will leave an analysis of the a priori factors that have conditioned the last fifty years of African life, and merely suggest, as I have frequently done in various other situations, that in historical terms Postcolonial Africa is mere sappling. It is in a transitional and demonic phase of history, and is yielding, by the very condition of that history, a form of ghostly literature - what I call the phase of the African gothic. The shattering of time in the last five hundred years in Africa makes quite inevitable this search, through our imaginative enterprise, either in literature, the plastics arts, music or architecture, a certain level of the perverse until Africa and its global footprints reconnect and re-emerge from its current Dantesque hole. It is an image suggested to me most powerfullly in the psychic descent and re-emergence of John Edgar Wideman's character, Eye, siezed by ambiguity in Cattle Killing. So, the image of Africa as a "morbid museum" is a current and neccessary phase of its life and imagination, what is hypocritical is to suggest for African writers to live to outside of that reality. Some have certainly found a calling in merely constructing a linear, essentialist view of Africa - at the center of which is this western missionary angel who saves Africa from itself and its people. It is "western" - and not neccessarily "white," we must point out. This is the kind of imagery that publishers in London and New York consistently seek to publish by writers from Africa. This is the point that Teju Cole and Wainana argue against, but which Ikhide insists is a churlish self-regard, and an ungrateful response by African writers. Those African writers unwilling to write to measure, either stay silent in exile, refuse to hawk their manuscripts, or if they try, have the doors shut to their faces. It is a price you pay for your conscience. It is not ingratitude against the west. It is engagement with it. Every African writer published, marketed and canonized in London and New York in the last 15 years often has stuck in-between their story, that view across the bend. Africa remains this strange place for child soldiers; journalists who are jailed, women who are abused; children who are left on the streets; scam artists who have not come to you with empty hands, and so on. There is no love story in Lagos.
So, most Africa writers write for the west? well, years ago, the Macmillan series had a fantatsic young readers series which in the 1980s sold cheaply - between 70k and N1:00. Every secondary school kid I knew went to the bookshops when new prints come from kalu Okpi, Agbo Areo, etc. Not any more. Something changed between then and now. This is where our search must begin - that condition that exerted such powerful changes that made it imposible to sustain the reading culture, the Langston Hughes prize first awarded in 1966 in Dakar, the President's prize for Nigerian writing first awarded in Nigeria in 1962 to Achebe, etc. Yet, we have the ANA prizes and the LNG prizes which continue to be awarded and have been sustained. The problem is with the Ikhide's of Africa and the crossroads; the only prizes worth anything, and worth worrying about for them, are the prizes awaredd to some strange African book in London and New York retailing some crazy western savior and validated by some ghetto prize funded with the hard currency of blood diamonds or blood oil for which we must all be grateful. It is a symptom of the dispossessed. It is the Naipulization of Ikhide Ikelola.
Obi Nwakanma
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Empire Talks Back
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; ifuemia@googlemail.com
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:19:50 +0000
Thanks for your question. Here is a simple request: Google "The Wole Soyinka Prize." Trace its inception every year, report back to us what you find, its history, consistency in awarding prizes every year, etc etc. I am tired of doing the research. You help us by contributing something ;-)
Have a great weekend!
- Ikhide
From: ifuemia <ifuemia@googlemail.com>
Sender: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:08:59 +0000
To: <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
ReplyTo: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Empire Talks Back
Ikhide
i thought the Wole Soyinka Prize can be described differently?
On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 3:27 AM, Ikhide <xokigbo@yahoo.com> wrote:
"... Quite a few African writers of stature have been supercilious and condescending in their engagement with the West. They feel entitled to the generosity of their hosts. However, virtually every penny they have earned has come from the West because they write exclusively for the paying Western audience. Back home no one cares much. African governments only scan through books to see who is criticizing them after which they hunt down the poor chap. The writer is lucky to escape the continent into the arms of the waiting West."- IkhideStalk my blog at www.xokigbo.comFollow me on Twitter: @ikhideJoin me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide
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