CELEBRATION OF A MASTER OF WORDS AND IDEAS
PIUS ADESANMI AND THE INAUGURAL PENGUIN PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING
Toyin Adepoju
Congrats to poet,scholar and literary promoter Pius Adesanmi on the splendid achievement of winning the inaugural award of the Penguin Prize for African Writing in the non-fiction category for his book manuscript titled You're not a Country,Africa: A Personal History of the African Present.
The progression of Adesanmi's pictures in this essay,from his younger to his more mature years, is chosen to suggest,through his physical changes,the developments of consciousness represented by his prize winning manuscript.
Pius Adesanmi is a very engaging writer, the power of whose work comes from his being able to interpret everyday experience and historical contexts with an alert mind sharpened by insights derived from the theoretical frames of literary and cultural theory,along with a mellifluous style,made even more distinctive by the integration of expressions from his native Yoruba and at times pidgin English,if I remember well.A relatively recent essay of his that comes most readily to mind now is the one inspired by his seeing an old woman at a bank, titled "Oju loro wa",a Yoruba expression he translates as "The face is the abode of discourse",in which the Yoruba expression becomes a springboard for reflection on differences and similarities between Western and Yoruba contexts in the framework of the social tranformations created by modern technology.Another recent memorable essay of his is the one on the dislocation his self perception as a Nigerian undergoes through contact with a Francophone country in which his identification with the then official description of his country Nigeria,the most populous African nation and one of the world's top suppliers of oil, as the "Giant of Africa", receives a very sobering shock.
I expect the manuscript that won the prize handles skillfully a subject he often develops with a customary sense of creative tension,a kaleidoscope presentation of an African's developing self perception as an individual and a child of that continent,as this self perception emerges and undergoes change through the impact of the writer's experiences as he traverses various countries within and outside Africa.
The title also suggests the reductive description of Africa as a country that emerges from time to time with some Euro-Americans whose knowledge of the continent is made up of a black hole in which whatever solidity is present is formed of often unreal images.In that light it suggest an effort to combat such reductive conceptions as a cosmopolitan African most of whose study and work has been in the West.On the other hand,could the title of the work suggest the multifarious character of the continents identity/ies? Identities that suggest the vast difference between a country and a continent?
The introduction to the manuscript describes it as an effort to make meaning of the question "What is Africa to me?" a question that,in Adesanmi's words, "stands unanswered at the idealogical core of Pan-Africanism,Negritude,nationalism,decolonisation,and all the other projects through which Africans sought to restore their violated humanity".
He describes the work as an exploration of the subject through the lens of his personal experience as he traverses various countries,from his rural upbringing in his hometown Isanlu,to various linguistic zones of the continent,and to the West.Travel,both literal and metaphorical is at the core of the book.The mercurial character of journeying is also at the core of the tension between ideational definitiveness and fluidity in terms of which the writer describes himself as actualising his understanding of the continent and of himself as a child of that continent,a tension summed up for him in the poetry of Abioseh Nichol: "...Africa [is] a concept fashioned in our minds,each to each,to hide our separate fears,to dream our separate dreams".
Having traversed the continent in its physical and social manifestations, as well as through its mental embedding in the perspectives of others across the world,he comes to focus on his country, Nigeria,the most populous and one of the more challenged countries on the continent.The personal, the social,the economic and the political are among the issues he engages with in the examination of the experience of this country.
I look forward to some very stimulating reading when Penguin publishes the book.
A description of Adesanmi as a poet whose "The Wayfarer and Other Poems
won the Association of Nigerian Authors in 2001"is here at African Writing Online.
His statement of scholarly research interests is at his Carleton University page
where he is Associate Professor, Dept. of English Language & Literature
where he describes himself as " [specializing] in the literatures and
cultures of Africa and the Black Diaspora from a comparative
Anglophone/francophone viewpoint. My research focuses on the modalities
of contemporary African knowledge production and how those knowledges
are inflected by local and transnational issues in the age of globalization.
Taking literature and its criticism, along with film, music, and other
popular cultural productions as points of departure, I examine how the
postcolonial texts of Africa in particular, and the Black world in general, self-fashion
as delegitimations of Western epistemic formations."
He is also the founder and director of PONAL-Project on New African Literatures
"a major online audio-visual resource project archiving and presenting
new writing from Africa to an international audience" [Presenting]
exciting new and emergent African literatures, especially
those trapped within the ideological, political, economic,
and institutional contexts of the Postcolony, and excluded
by the canonising mechanisms of the metropolitan academy.
Apart from facilitating critical conversations, we will disseminate,
archive, and comment on the works of well-known, emergent and
relatively unknown but equally engaging writers of the third generation
from the entire continent.
Image credits
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Also blogged at Ifa Student-Cognitive Diary and in posted in Toyin Adepoju's Facebook Notes.
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