Reading the Great Nigerian Literary Debate

On 30 March 2023, over a month after the publication of Aigbokhaevbolo’s essay, the young maverick of Nigerian literature, Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí, published an equally polemical treatise asking: ‘Is Contemporary Nigerian Poetry “Nigerian”?’ Ògúnyẹmí would answer in the negative. For one, Ògúnyẹmí does not ‘think “Nigerian poetry” exists, yet.’ This is because ‘[m]any of today’s Nigerian poets are working within a tradition that is not ours, a tradition that is mainly American.’ In my essay, ‘A Principle for the New Nigerian Poetry’ (SEVHAGE Publishers, 2023), I explain why this is essentially a misdiagnosis. Indeed, American confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton, as Ògúnyẹmí and Lakanse before him argue, have a considerable influence on the new school of Nigerian poetry. However, national literatures across the world are not now so idiosyncratic in their techniques, poetics, and aesthetics as to differentiate them convincingly. For instance, I was recently reading Antonella Anedda’s book of poems, Historiae (NYRB, 2023) translated from the Italian and Sardinian by Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart, and if not that the edition is bilingual, there is no way I or anyone could tell that such poems in the book as ‘In Front of the Closets of the Dead’, ‘Lisbo 2015’, and ‘December’ are inherently Italian in translation. Or American for that matter, which is the immediate cultural idiom of its two translators. Although self-contradictions would seep into the essay when Ògúnyẹmí declares the likes of J. K. Anowe, D. M. Aderibigbe, and Pamilerin Jacob as writing ‘thoroughly Nigerian poetry’, it is impossible to overcast the accomplishment of the essay with criticisms as petty and invertebrate as the ones directed at its acerbic tone and structure.

In ‘The Miseducation of Nigerian Poets’, the essayist, Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera, enters the conversation from a similar perspective as Ògúnyẹmí, with the same diagnosis that this vocational miseducation is American-born. While Ògúnyẹmí gives a detailed account and examples of what Nigerian poetry was, has been, and should be—the same way Chukwudera does of what it has been at the beginning of his essay, albeit in a summarizing facture—Chukwudera’s exegesis has a chronological structure to it. He begins with the discussion of the Nigerian traits in poems of the first three generations, namely J. P. Clark-Bekederemo’s ‘Ibadan’, Christopher Okigbo’s poems in Labyrinths, Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’, Niyi Osundare’s ‘Not My Business’, and Kanma Oduwegwu’s ‘Their Fates Might be Mine’ [sic]. Also, he argues that our new poets’ discovery of foreign literary magazines, which is a considerably good thing for Nigerian literature and its performers, is not all perfect. In hindsight, according to Chukwudera, this discovery ‘became a correspondent to the American literary magazine culture… [which] resulted in a situation where many poets began to write similar poems about similar issues and, worse, with similar diction.’ But more on this later.

For once in recent Nigerian intellectual history, our literary intellectuals showed great restraint against silence as well as ideational uniformity. For once, each interlocutor of the great debates refrained from regurgitating the earlier analysis and judgements on the issue of the disintegration of cultural authenticity from our literary process. With almost every essay coming out against or for the issue at hand, the next always addressed the issue from a different perspective that, if not completely unique, was at least well-grounded. Out of this admirable intellectual tradition, came such an essay as Bestman Michael Osemudiamen’s ‘Much Ado About the Criticism of Fourth Generation Nigerian Poetry’ which, I think, has made not only the most important but the most convincing argument yet on why Nigerian literature is in its current state. The core of Osemudiamen’s argument is that culture, which our new literature is lacking according to critics like Ògúnyẹmí, ‘evolves side-by-side with societal organisation—both on political, economic, and social grounds,’ which ‘reflect on the consciousness of the poet and critic.’

Each response that comes after Aigbokhaevbolo’s essay has engaged in purely theoretical arguments on what Nigerian literature is or should be. For instance, Ògúnyẹmí’s and Chukwudera’s projects have, as their unpronounced ambition, an attempt to change the ways our new writers go about expressing themselves. Their ‘nativistic’ tendencies—to use Kanyinsọla Olorunnisola’s nomenclature in ‘Our Literature Has Died Again’—want our new literature to be more Nigerian according to how both of these critics define it. ‘I aim to inspire consciousness about the artistic forces that elude the poets of my generation,’ writes Chukwudera towards the end of his essay. Meanwhile, the transformative tone adopted by the aforementioned critics is also inflected in Oko Owi Ocho’s challenging-to-follow retort to the great debate in ‘The Crisis of Interpretation and the Temper of New Nigerian Poetry’, an essay in which the critic concerns himself with ‘the link between the poets of the third generation, and the emergence of the fourth at the interstice where they converge and depart.’ I agree with Osemudiamen’s judgement that Ocho’s treatment of this concern is somewhat unsatisfactory. For instance, Ocho claims the ‘intention of this essay is to show the missing link that led to where we are today’, but I do not see how his analysis of the historical relation between the third and fourth generations improves upon or corrects, as he asserts, the thematic and stylistic analyses of our new literature by Liam and Terver respectively, both analyses Ocho curiously judges to misunderstand their subjects. ‘Though evaluative at its best’, Osemudiamen also notes, ‘his essay still falls short of the same problem it raises: “the crisis of historical consciousness and clarity of ideas.”’

However, against these critical idealisms, Osemudiamen shows, by way of the Marxist approach of dialectical materialism, why all these transformative ambitions against the status quo of literary Nigeria are almost impossible to accomplish. Unarguably the most pragmatically minded argument yet on the issue after Aigbokhaevbolo’s, Osemudiamen’s essay moves away from the theoretical views of the guardians and performers of the arts, from the critics and writers, to the most important consumers, at least in the commercial sense, of literature: the common readers—the reading public who have no professional inclination to write about what they read but merely read to enjoy and perhaps discuss their readings with their reading relations. In his grounded view, Osemudiamen feels we are also ‘ignoring the class relations that bind writers, and even critics,’ since ‘what matters to the [Nigerian] poet,’ according to Ocho, ‘is survival rather than the value of poetry to the development of society.’

Given Osemudiamen’s convincing argument about the culturally transformative effect of globalization and its progressiveness, I believe it follows that faulting our writers for ceding their national consciousness for the expression of their immediate one in their literary performance is an engagement in critical futility. What this says, at least to me, in our aim to practice serious criticism, is that we should devise new criteria against which to read, evaluate, and discuss our new writing beyond our writers’ acquired freedom from their cultural imagination. This is the point of engagement in the third section of Olorunnisola’s essay and Kéchi Nne Nomu’s ‘Who’s Afraid of Nigerian Literature?’ Faintly considered by Nomu as ‘a response to the accusation of leaving Nigeria’, Nomu’s essay also doubles as an apologia for immigrant reality and how it affects the literary production of our writers in the diaspora. This new reality and its influence on literary consciousness is precisely why our critical criteria need to be reconsidered, however ‘limiting’ the new criticism still might be as a system of ‘value assignation and canon-making’ to Nomu and other writers that share her sentiment.

For this re-evaluation of criteria, I bring you John Crowe Ransom’s remark on aesthetics in his 1938 seminal essay, ‘Poets Without Laurels’, from his book The World’s Body. ‘The union of beauty with goodness and truth has been common enough to be regarded as natural,’ Ransom writes. A book or a poem or a short story replete with ‘the Nigerian elements’, as Ògúnyẹmí prescribes and Osemudiamen soundly rejects, does not necessarily speak to its automatic accomplishment on the purely aesthetic plane: the imagination, cognition, and execution therein—each of which can be so poor it desecrates the literary weight of these cultural elements it elects. In the end, I believe we cannot come up with more precise criteria for the evaluation of our new literature than reading across our writers’ thorough commitment or otherwise to the accomplishment of the beautiful, the good, and the true in their process of imaginative expression. After all, according to Leslie A. Fiedler in ‘Toward an Amateur Criticism’, ‘In criticism as in art, the false is most often the boring.’ Therefore, it is crucial as well as necessary that we scrutinize our writers solely on aesthetic grounds and principles, lest we enter into a futile battle which our new reality of mass cultural transition has already decided.