Professor Tony Afejuku, you belong to the younger generation of Nigerian critics and literary scholars that members of the older generation accuse of not being as enterprising and industrious as expected, especially in terms of writing and talking about writers of your generation. How would you react to such an allegation?

That statement is pure falsehood. It is not at all correct. I don’t want to talk too much or appear immodest, but I can tell you without qualms that my generation was well taught; my generation had a very solid scholarly foundation.

We were well brought up in the finest tradition of literary scholarship. I trained for my first degree at ABU Zaria and Professor Bruce King was my Head of Department as at that time. My contemporaries at ABU Zaria also benefited from the kind of rich literary exposure available at ABU at that time.

For instance, Professor David Ker, who was one time Vice-Chancellor of Benue State University, is a fine scholar. Professor Olu Obafemi was a year ahead of me. Looking at it from all angles, these are some of the finest scholars writing today in Nigeria.

Professor David Ker for instance, is a specialist in prose studies. Professor Obafemi is a fine dramatist and drama critic. There is also the late Toryma Jenkwe, a very fine specialist in orature. One of my erstwhile colleagues in Benin, Professor Abdul Yusufu who has made a name for himself in South Africa is a specialist in poetry.

There is also Professor Adebayo Williams. You can say that things started to fall apart because of the economic situation and poor rulership caused by the military.

I think the problem does not lie in the kind of training you had. From what you have said, you had a very rich training in literary scholarship. The problem lies with productivity. What we are saying is that members of the older tradition think that you have not done enough in the criticism of your own contemporary writers, just as they did with their own contemporaries…

Well, your first question does not exactly specify that. But that is also not entirely correct. When you talk about industry, we have done so much. When you talk about productivity, we are not only talking about volumes of essays.

We should also be looking at it from the perspective of quality. When you talk about quantum also, members of my generation have done well, seeing what we’ve written, in several aspects of literature, and from all over the world, you cannot take anything away from my generation.

And whether I write about writers of my generation or writers of tomorrow’s generation or writers of yesterday, I have the liberty to choose the works I want to study and comment on and the writers I wish to study, as it were. Productivity does not mean that because I am not focusing on writers of my generation then somebody will say I am not productive.

And of course, the older generation of Nigerian critics who claim to have written on writers of their own generation, were a kind of lucky, because African literature was just beginning to spring up, and these critics said “let us promote this young literature.”

Then, the writers were not too many. Even then, members of my own generation have written better about those writers they claim belong to their own generation in terms of productivity, in terms of industry, scholarship and focus.

The things they did not do well we are doing. Now, back to the issue of our focusing on the members of my generation, myself for instance, I am presently doing a work on Nigerian autobiographical writers and I am essentially focusing on writers of my own generation.

I am doing a kind of comparative and contrastive study between them and those who came before them. I know many other of my colleagues are seriously occupied with one aspect of our literature or the other. So it is a misplaced conclusion if they say because we have not focused on writers of our time, therefore we are unproductive.

If you are asked to mention one or two places where you would want members of your generation to channel attention in the scholarship of Nigerian literature, what would your response be?

Let me say that an area that is lacking critical attention now is the area where I am doing my best to promote. This is the area of autobiographical and biographical criticism. There has been a very erroneous impression in some quarters that autobiographies and biographies are not literature.

But substantial evidence has come up especially in the West (to prove) that autobiographies and biographies are literature, and that no literature actually is better than autobiography. Wole Soyinka’s autobiographies can hold their own against any other work of literature and art anywhere in the world. Those works are classics and they deserve and demand solid examination.

We are seriously lacking in that area. You can see that for instance, among Wole Soyinka’s works, his autobiographies are the least discussed. This area has lacked attention especially in Nigeria. Apart from, may be, Remi Oriaku of University of Ibadan and myself, you can hardly find any other person that has devoted substantial academic energy to the autobiography and the biography.

I am not talking about fortuitous scholars of autobiographical and biographical studies; I am talking of those who have done solid research in the area, those who have seen enough in the autobiography and the biography to make them the focus of their research.

Having said that, and coming to the other leg of your question, I am not particularly comfortable with legislating a direction for literary scholarship, as it is something that has more or less to do with the individual involved.

Having made that point, I would like to say that formalistic criticism has not also received sufficient attention. People don’t dwell in formalistic criticism, which again is something I believe in and  grounded in, both in training and in practice.

Cultural studies are good; historical, social studies are also good. But we should try to give attention to the text itself - the form. Even if you are doing a biographical or autographical analysis, do so from the text, not just the socio-cultural background.

Don’t you think you are talking from a perspective of a disciple of somebody like Professor Romanus Egudu?

If you say so, you wouldn’t be wrong. But, when I was doing my doctorate degree, I was interested in inter-disciplinary historical studies. Egudu wouldn’t quite subscribe to that direction, but you could still say that I am his disciple and that of other formalists.

But I am also advocating a marriage between formalism and cultural and inter-disciplinary studies. Our people engage so much in thematic studies and that is not good enough. I mean, we have to ask ourselves the question: “what is literature?” Literature is about how it is being done, not so much about what is done.

Do you think we have sufficient body of autobiographical works that can sustain the career interest of somebody like you who is devoted to autobiographical criticism and scholarship?

Yes we have a good number of autobiographies in Africa but let me qualify this statement. There are autobiographies as autobiographies…

In terms of fictional and non-fictional?

We have realistic autobiographies and literary autobiographies. Autobiographies can be historical and political too. But you can ask me, “where does fiction end and realism start?” If you look at many of the poems, plays and novels we write, you have plenty elements of autobiography in them. In fact, like I have said somewhere, Achebe for instance is a biographer, a fabulist and a historian.

Some of the things Achebe has written can be seen from the perspective of the biography of the Igbos. Look at Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. He is an Igbo man who sets out to tell their story at a significant point in time.

He tried to look at what happened to the Igbos at a particular stage in their lives. Autobiographical studies are genuine. We need them. Even Niyi Osundare, Femi Osofisan - they are highly autobiographical in their writings.

You find passion and pathos in these works. Niyi Osundare’s Song of a Market Place for instance, is highly autobiographical. In fact, when I read that book, I remembered William Wordsworth, another great biographer.

Christopher Okigbo is also an autobiographer, whether you like it or not. J.P. Clark also ranks among autobiographers. Look critically at Night Rain. Nothing can be more autobiographical than Casualties. History is biographical and autobiographical and autobiography and biography are historical.

People do not see these elements and that’s why they are not looking at these works as autobiographies. Scholars who have the knack and the eyes to see these things are the only ones who can engage in them.

You talk about autobiographical criticism, which should take into consideration what happens outside the text; the socio-historical, cultural and political circumstances which give rise to the events being talked about. Doesn’t this contradict your formalist standpoint? Can they actually be brought together in the kind of scholarship you are engaged in?

I am talking about investigating the motives and circumstances from the text. Even if you go outside the text, you still do so by upholding the evidence before you in the text.This appears to me a difficult enterprise…No, it’s not. I’m engaged in it, I’ve examined what I’m saying.

If you look at Romanus Egudu’s poetry, especially Prayer of the Powerless, which I’ve written an essay about, what I am talking about, I did in that essay. I basically and effectively operated from the point of view of the evidence before me, without going outside the text.

If you don’t go outside the text, you won’t find out that this thing is a biographical fact about the author or the biographic subject;  There’s no way you can reconcile the fact of an event in the author’s life and what he is telling you in the story. To me, biographies and autobiographies depend so much on socio-historical facts.

Look at the text if you are a very perceptive critic, you will find out that what most of our writers try to do even without calling the work an autobiography is  to write about their lives and those of people around them. Don’t forget that autobiographies can also be written in the second and third person points of view.

Francis Salomey’s The Narrow Path is autobiographical. When I studied that text, I did not have to go outside it in order to confirm that it is an autobiography. Kofi is Francis Salomey. So this area of scholarship is very broad and lucrative, not in terms of making money from it, but in the sense of scholarly fulfilment and satisfaction. We need to open our eyes very well as critics.

 I still wonder if your biographic motives do not contradict your formalistic standpoint...?

No. There is no contradiction. I’m saying, look at the text. But you can resort to history or biography but you must not lose sight of your formalistic considerations. The text is the thing as Hamlet tells us in Hamlet, “The play is the thing”; from the way the man will behave in that play, within the play we would know whether the man is guilty or not.

That’s the evidence. So look at the text within the text, the evidence within. You can even make text outside the text, text within the text. You can read a work like Mcphilip Nwachukwu’s So Long a Night, and you will find out what I am talking about.

Can you respond to an impression that contemporary Nigerian literature especially fiction, no longer has focus, that Nigerian fiction of the present day has become “fleshly”, according to Charles Nnolim, because of the inordinate dominance of sexuality, drinking, clubbing and general engagement in the vain and immoral, and has therefore taken us back to the same sensibility that we condemned Cyprian Ekwensi for?

 A writer can write what he wants to write. Recently, I said something; I said that we did not have schools of writing. If we had schools, you wouldn’t have accused Nigerian writers of lack of focus. I said at that time that creative writing in present-day Nigeria was rudderless. But I have to qualify that statement before you accuse me of contradiction.

There is nothing wrong with literature of the ‘flesh’; it can be a school of its own. But may be we rather call it “wine” literature rather than “flesh” literature. I think it is better that way. Don’t we drink wine? If literature captures sex, what is wrong with that?

What is life after all? Why do people make money? Is it not essentially for enjoyment, especially those provided by women and wine? When men make money, what do they do with the money? I am talking about even robbers and men in government!

They go to women. Then of course, they take the choicest wine. These could be the themes of literature if there is nothing wrong with them. But this is not even the problem; the problem is how is it done?

Those who are engaged in this literature, even when we don’t like the themes or ethos being expoused, the question should be how are they promoting or expousing these ethos? There is nothing wrong with wine, or the “wine school”.

After all, all of us cannot be dwelling on the state of the nation, colonialism, post-colonialism, neo-colonialism, feminism, Marxism, bad governance etc. Let’s talk about the individual life; let’s talk about wine, let’s talk about the flesh because that could be a school of writing. We can say that our writers have graduated from socio-political concerns to some other things. For God’s sake, literature is about life; and love and enjoyment are parts of life.

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