Interesting times for Nigerian literature

By Ihechukwu Madubuike, LITERATURE

Being excerpts from the keynote address delivered on the occasion of the public presentation of Red Nest by Arc. Thelma Nwokedi.

These are very interesting days for our literature. It is no longer the exclusive preserve for professional writers as in the past.  And this may sound quite unusual in a world that seems to lay emphasis on atomization of knowledge in order to better understand and appreciate objective reality.And it is happening in a country in search of “professionals” and “technocrats”.

Everywhere we go to these days our ears are tantalized with the potent miracle of these captive words, of persons who will transform our dear land into the club of developed nations.

We are also being persuaded to believe that development can take place only when these technocrats and specialists are on the driver’s seat. Fair enough, but I think we need technocrats, specialists as much as we need astute administrators and visionaries, a good mix, with proper appreciation of their responsibility to the nation.

If not it may not be long before we realize that there are things that the professionals and technocrats do not know that can be supplied by those not so described, yet competent in other ways.

I refer you to the book of Professor Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, titled GLOBALIZATION and its Discontents, where he warned technocrats of the danger of “reinventing the wheels of governance”, and informed them that  there are things that the people know which the technocrats do not know.

The fact is that it is a combination of well-articulated programmes and visions rooted in the socio-cultural realities of the country that will engender reform and progress.

L-R Prof. Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa & Prof. Wole Soyinka

More than this is the political will to carry out the transformative agenda set by or for these experts. In all these, experience and cherished values cannot be allowed to take the back seat. We are practicing democracy and not technocracy.

Literature provides the platform for this developmental ideal. As one of my friends, Professor Charles Nnolim, a National Merit Award Winner, said in his inaugural lecture at the University of Port Harcourt in 1988 and I quote him:

“That literature affirms through its progressive vision, the limitless possibilities of the human mind and thus inspires technological and scientific development by inculcating visionary and positive values in the populace and that through the process of social criticism, literature influences the direction of national development and is a weapon for the total education of society because, our culture as a people is promoted, propagated, and preserved in our national literatures whether vernacular, written or oral”. Reasoning along the same line I had proffered as follows:

“It is therefore apposite to connect literature with development, for the reason that all known factors of existence are interlinked with it. From this contextual social prism, development as a process of conflict resolution, as a process of providing panacea for our existential problems is the end of literature”(See my book, Literature, Culture and Development: The African Experience, 2007), p.11.

It is thus fortunate that literature has broadened its compass by admitting, as it were, other disciplines within its fold. Literature is the distillation of the human condition as it reflects itself through the various departments and disciplines of human existence.  It is the transposition of reality in an imaginative form. It is not reality but it is rooted in reality.

We should therefore not be surprised that the book being presented to us today is by an architect.

The subject of the novel is not architecture; it is fiction in its fullest dimension, embedded in the art of story telling, that is, one of the oldest pre-occupations of mankind.

Life, indeed, would be a bore if we do not tell stories, if we do not re-create our experiences, transposed or imagined, in order to have a recreation, or an understanding in an act of enjoyment or relaxation.

Yet the architect and the storyteller can meet because they have certain things in common: they are lovers of the beautiful; they are servants of the art of the functional and the pleasurable and they must subject themselves to its immutable demands incarnated in its pursuit of, especially, objectivity and verisimilitude.

Characters in the novel must be convincing; they must be like human beings, developed and well rounded. Not just types or stereotypes.

A house designed and built by an architect must look like a house, and convey pleasure by yielding to proper connections, interlinks and conventions, without necessarily limiting the freedom of the designer.

It must not be destroyed by the improper use of, let us say, colors or mosaics, texture and painting, else it would be a riot, a displeasure to the sight and eventually to the sense.

Aesthetics has to do with these senses, especially of taste and sight. Architecture is therefore, the art of building that combines stability with comfort, and economy of means with beauty.

Beauty has its own integrity and both the architect and the storyteller must and do strive to ensure this, if their work must give pleasure. Because they are in the world of creativity, they must have, above all, taste. They must adhere to order.