Who’s Afraid of Nigerian Literature?

Recently, when conversations about the health of Nigerian literature resurfaced online, spurred by the mass exit of a new breed of writers in the face of economic decline, it was this conversation that came to mind. The claim made was that Nigerian literature was dead or dying and that writing from within a Nigerian context, from home, was becoming an endangered art. The claim and the reactions that followed it mirrored many aspects of the Roy-Rushdie conversation but, crucially, it contained a half-truth. Nigerian literature has, to borrow a phrase from the poet, Nicole Sealey, been capable of ‘brief animations’ from time to time. But save for a small cluster of significant events, it is doubtful that a sustained literary awakening has occurred yet in a way that might indicate that the Nigerian writer in any mould has not always been the rare, endangered thing.

Of the many questions posed since these conversations began (by several writers), the most compelling have been these: what losses accrue when the writer chooses to leave home to become a ‘working’ writer in search of a promised ideal? And, whatever gravity we assign this loss, is it equal to a psychological death, writer suicide; a rejection of the real and absurd? It’s an old question with a new urgency. Again, it invites us to think about the peculiar limitations faced when anyone anywhere in the world tries to become a writer and comes up against the all-too-real barriers to entry. But, specifically, the cost of doing this in a country without framework. A new generation of writers is coming to terms with these questions that are somewhat metaphysical—about fate: who is fated to write the work that defines a generation? And socio-political—a probing of complacent hierarchies and the distribution of resources? What, the aspiring writer wonders, can a competent (even remarkable) writer do with the resources that they are allotted in an unequal, dysfunctional society? Time being a fixed or finite quantity, and writing being Sisyphean. Thus, invoking the great Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and novelist, Leonard Cohen, who bore with grace his fate as an absurd hero and declared with great equanimity that he thought he would do well posthumously. This was Cohen acknowledging the maxim of the marketplace. A writer as cog in a production line, awaiting ordination by the variable forces that make a writer a writer: the Gods; a great marketing team; if Michel Foucault is to be believed, a significant alignment/misalignment of the writer’s aims with the aims of the powerful; and most definitely, hopefully, good prose.

In wading into the discourse, I’m not attempting to answer any of the questions posed so far. I’d like to offer the account of a witness primarily because I fit the profile of the accused: that week when these conversations peaked, I had a poem out in an American literary magazine bemoaning my newly immigrant fate. Hence, this is in a sense a response to the accusation of leaving Nigeria.

I first came online in 2007. By word of mouth and some coercion, I opened a Facebook account and found them, the young Nigerian writers and readers who shared things like ‘Reading Kafka and sipping green tea’ on their walls, impossibly (at least to me) self-aware, clear-minded, and ambitious. Disciples of Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, and Albert Camus alike. They wanted to preen over a sentence imitative of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, but also, they wanted to reimagine possible worlds for a new kind of Nigerian writing. They shared their writing online and got into hot-headed arguments. They considered these often-polarizing online fights critical to the health of the literati. A significant subsect of these people was overtly fascinated by the then-new writer on the scene Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and seeking the likeminded. Just as fascinated, I wanted to discuss the marginal characters that Adichie had an uncanny ability to render with such acuity—evident for me in the astute and exacting Obiora in Purple Hibiscus—the kind of young Nigerian whose pragmatism and idealism is a crushing weight, who you might walk past in the entryway of some book reading with the literati gathered, engrossed in the quiet rooms where literary events were frequently ongoing. In these readings, an online brigade often materialized in real life. They would stir up controversies by asking probing, dissenting and passion-charged questions of an author, and then resurface online again to finish what they had started.

It is from this crowd that a new generation of writers would emerge. Most of them, too young to, or decidedly unwilling to buy into the preoccupations and romanticisms held sacred by the older generation—case in point: was it a great moral failing for the poet ancestor, Christopher Okigbo, to abandon his primary duties as a poet to fight in the country’s civil war or was it not? In the years that followed, they began to actively regroup in MFA programmes in the US and the UK and Canada. Several events overlap here before the migrations: a hunger for new literary heroes; the birth of a new cultural force online; the flourishing of literary festivals. These, happening alongside the gradual socio-economic decline of Nigeria began to undo policies that had engineered the literary awakenings within which the current literary stars flourished. Why did migration become inevitable? The generation spawned within these cultural spaces, as other writers have noted, saw the signs early.