kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
Sent: Saturday, October 9, 2021 8:19 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - In Defense of Abdulrazak Gurnah
Thanks for this list. Now I see the light.
The Noble Prize givers seem to have a soft spot for settler colonists and theirdescendants. Reminds me of theBrits during the colonial era.
But of course I may be wrong.
GE
On Oct 8, 2021, at 14:18, Cornelius Hamelberg <CorneliusHamelberg@gmail.com> wrote:
We ought not lose sight of the fact that so far (1901 -2021) a grand total of seven African writers have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature :
1957 : Albert Camus (Algeria)
1986: Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
1988: Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)
1991: Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)
2003: J.M. Coetzee (South Africa)
2007: Doris Lessing (UK-Zimbabwe)
2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah ( Zanzibar)
Yesterday, my dear Brother Biko Agozino wrote to my equally dear Lord Olayinka Agbetuyi: "There is no comparison of Africans with African Americans, we are one people"- and since we are One People, United by Blood and History, albeit separated by the Atlantic Ocean, I'd like to squeeze in
1992; Derek Walcott ( Great Poet) – Saint Lucia
1993: Toni Morison ( United States)
And if it's by country, and a bit of colour added to the mixture, what about the one who so many people on this list-serve love to hate, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul ( Trinidad and Tobago ) ?
We've got to admit that this year's Nobel Laureate for Literature was something of a dark horse. He wasn't even featured at Ladbrokes and that's why Professor Harrow is asking the question that must be burning in many minds, including Wa Thiongo's :
"what drove them to choose him over the most obvious of choices, ngugi."?
By " them" Professor Harrow means The Swedish Academy selection committee for the Nobel Prize in Literature
In my opinion, the Swedish Academy snubbed my dear friend Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ( we became friends, shared a few beers, whilst, as James Ngugi he was a writer-in-residence at the University of Ghana where I was a postgraduate student in African Literature in 1970). They ( the Swedish Academy) took their revenge on him, not inadvertently but deliberately they were going to teach him a lesson .that you don't preach to the Oyibo who are supposed to be awarding you their prize that it's time to stop using the Oyibo's Language and to start going places with your own God-given Mother Tongue) and this lesson should be driven home ( so they think – perhaps, not unanimously) by making the choice that they made - a so called radical departure from some former norm - and this new "breath of fresh air" is being vastly celebrated in the Swedish Media and at the same time it looks like their well calculated intention was to counter Wa Thiongo's advocacy of African Literature being written/ created in indigenous African languages by pointedly awarding the prize to Abdulrazak Gurnah whose first language /mother-tongue is Swahili but has wisely, nevertheless adopted Her Majesty's English as his chosen weapon/ vehicle of communication and as the surest means of delivering his literary skills to the world at large and bagging the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021. The award took him by surprise, he says. Ditto – took Bob Dylan by surprise since the Ladbrokes odds on him winning the prize that year was 500 to 1
I sympathise with both Wa Thiongo'o and Gurnah, neither of whom is an uncle tom. Recently, I had to explain to a Swedish relative ( Karin Fant) that my Creole - my idiomatic/colloquial/conversational Creole / Krio Language skills are not great enough for me to write poetry in that language – but in global English, I find another kind of range as a world citizen
I followed the discussion on Swedish TV just before the winner was announced. The TV pundits all had their favourites - nothing wrong with that - on the way to seeing Wole Soyinka off to the airport bus after the PEN Conference in Stockholm in 1979, I had told him that he was then at the top of my list for the Nobel Prize. He had smiled and told me, " I also have my favourites" and I'm sure that Philip Roth also had his favourites, most probably, so did Graham Greene. That's why there's nothing wrong with the Besserwisser Swedish pundits and some of the ignoramuses too pontificating about African Literature and telling us that e.g. Nigerians write in a peculiar English known as Nigerian English and that there are several kinds of Englishes, true ( we even have a recently appointed "full professor" of that kind of rubbish, writing in his own ridiculous, pompous, inflated way that he writes because he thinks that's how a very intelligent, half, or a great, big, highly educated, full professor should sound.
All I wanted to say before I got slightly carried away is that none of the TV pundits had even mentioned the name Abdulrazak Gurnah.
One last little thing: You know, there are the sort of writers that are discerned as purposefully working for a Nobel Prize in Literature award - whereas e.g. Jamaica Kincaid said explicitly in an interview with her that I read about a year ago that she does not want the Nobel Prize!
You also know that if, e-g. You are a homophobe, there's no way you're going to be awarded a Nobel Prize in anything.
Here's another quality that the Nobel Committee must have found particularly endearing about this year's Noble laureate reminiscent of Lakunle lecturing Sidi :
"A savage custom, barbaric, out-dated,
Rejected, denounced, accursed,
Excommunicated, archaic, degrading,
Humiliating, unspeakable, redundant.
Retrogressive, remarkable, unpalatable...
An ignoble custom, infamous, ignominious
Shaming our heritage before the world."
Well, here is Abdulrazak on the attack ( against FGM)
On Thursday, 7 October 2021 at 23:18:43 UTC+2 Kenneth Harrow wrote:
i agree he is certainly not obscure, but i wouldn't have thought major. i fear asking what drives the stockholm syndrome... maybe he is really great. i will certainly read more to find out,and like all of us wonder what drove them to choose him over the most obvious of choices, ngugi.ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 7, 2021 4:02 PM
To: USA African Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Today's QuoteAbdulrasak Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Prize In Literature winner is not obscure, he is known in the circles that matter in his chosen endeavour.
-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO)
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet and Founder/Publisher of; PublicInformationProjects (www.publicinformationprojects.org)
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