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QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - Anyone who has ever attempted to put his thoughts on paper knows how much nerve-flaying writing is. Whenever one tries to put something on paper clichés and vague intimations crowd the mind much more readily than anything fresh and exact. To hack one's way past these requires a bleeding effort of the mind, which most people just don't have patience for, which might suggest why most people are not writers, or rather good writers.
The disadvantage doubles over when one is compelled (reasons don't matter much) to write in one's second, third or fourth language. Apart from the above-mentioned effort, and the anxiety of self-exposure, there is an added effort of mastering an alien language. Most people express themselves better in a language they dream in, which is usually the mother tongue. The added anxiety of competence in an alien language tends to impede the creative process of writing. Yet. for writers who want as big an audience as possible, there's no alternative but to write in an international language like English.
Anxiety over self-revelation is not much of a problem when the exposure is channelled through conventional forms that mask the writer's identity to some extent. In the African scene, simply telling tragic stories like that of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe's competent novel, Things Fall Apartí used to be a conventional way of telling an African story. But this reached its saturation point about the time Achebe published his second novel, No Longer at Ease. Before then, African writing had always favoured a political novel because it doubled over with fighting for freedom.
Carl Niehaus, the Afrikaner who joined the African National Congress (ANNC) when it was still at one's peril to do so, put it thus:
I think of what Engels saidArt, in the oppressive milieu of the African colonial scene was testimony to social aspirations, and by necessity, the only available vehicle for social change.
about freedom being
the understanding of necessity.The likes of Nadine Gordimer and Wole Sonyika, with their sophisticated obfuscation, flirted and refined the African political novel until it gained the attention of world, especially the Occident. They mingled it with modern forms of art that were in vogue in the West but had not yet caught on in the African scene.
One of the changes that were brought about by modernism was the introduction and development of artistic neurosis in writing. Modern writers wanted to get past the vague, cliché-crammed characters of conventional writing to the actual nature of experience. This forced modernist writers to go deeper and deeper into the unconscious, pushing toward madness by scaring theirs audience with the shadows of their world. The trick was to go as close as possible to madness without actually crossing over. Fyodor Dostoyevsky became the pioneer, and Saul Bellow the master of the genre.
This raised the stakes once more for the non-mother-tongue writer. The situation demanded a new African writer. The likes of JM Coetzee and V.S. Naipaul tried to fulfill the role but only ended up using Western forms to interpret African experiences, which appealed more to the western audience. Art as a neurotic experience has never been popular in African writing. To those who tried it, it betrayed a sense of non-belonging that is pervasive in the writings of Coetzee and Naipaul; coming from the difficulty of being authentic in a false-faced world not of your origins.
In African writing, using art as a neurotic experience felt more like the case of using a mallet for the job of a scalpel. African literature had not reached the stage where the doctor (psychoanalyst) needed to be called in. Most African writers had not yet become estranged to their world. Indeed there were exceptions of African neurotic writin g here and there but they came largely as consequences of harsh experiences, like incarceration or exile. The existentially bewildering writings of Wole Sorete; the dazzling, sometimes cloying in overdose, sensationalism of Ben Okri are a couple of examples. They followed the genre of art as a neurotic experience with more zeal than discretion.
If the unexamined life is not worth living, what can you say of the over-examined life? Is it worth sharing? Art as neurotic experience is usually surrounded by neuroticism of private life; squalid love affairs, homosexuality, bad relationshipa with parents, mood disorders that jump-started and overcharged the world's literary imagination. From this overreaching came the reaction; the hungering after simplicity and a measured cultivated style of writing. The mood for dazzling megalomania and elation passed at about the same time Africa was getting tired of the purely political novel. African writing was hankering for a artistic sense and depth.
Thus entered the reign of Coetzee whose terseness, sobriety, chiselled delicacy, economy of materials, remarkable inventiveness and lapidary calm, preference for simplicity and directness of language conveys an impression of great reserves of power. His Stoic earnestness does for the novel in our era what Tolstoy did for it two centuries ago: reflects the storm of an age (without projecting personal philosophy) in engaging artful style. But with all its clear, strong lines, firm rhythm of taut and balanced bardic language, Coetzee's writing is many things wonderful but it is not African. It has not the easygoing unconscious African life. It captures African scenes with accurate psychological observation combined with felicitous choice of details but misses the sedentary scope. This might be deliberate in Coetzee, whose Nobel Peace Prize lecture, if anything, demonstrates that he has an increasingly incurable sense of apartness, exile and anachronism about him. Anyone looking for redemptive art is bound to be undermined by Coetzee who actively eludes any attempt at easy understanding. He's after dramatizing, not clarifying the moment.
One of the things urgently demanded by this century is the great African novel that has long been talked about but never really been achieved.
When is the last time you talked politics with your dog?
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It might appear as though we're breaking reeds on our writer's backs or digging dirt out of their armpits instead of getting on with the business of African writing. But they're the ones who ploughed the field we have to sow. We have to understand what they've been doing to see which seed will be suitable for the soil they've tilted. African literature has become something elusive, something most recognize but can't define. The true question concerning African writing, or any writing that's been subjected to the humiliation of colonisation for that matter, is Beatrice Nwanyibuife's question in Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah:: "What must a people do to appease an embittered history?"
Put in another way, the question demands to see the authentic African identity unshaded by colonial maladjustments. As much as African writing is usually the portrayal of African customs and manners against historical background, there're no Median and Persian rules about it. African beauty and vividness in writing can also be portrayed through an individual throttling of personal energy trying to improve his/her social condition and achieve personal happiness. Andre Brink attempts it in his late writings; but though he captures the zeitgeist of the African scene he misses the Weltanschauung of African life. This because he too, like the rest, is trained by Western tools; he can't see beyond them when expressing African life. After all is said and done, the burden of identity remains excommunicated.
Zakes Mda tries to solve the dilemma by creating common national idioms but ends up using semantically barren words that lack exploitable connotations. This because he relies only on definitions in his writings, which makes for an impressive sociological treatment but not literature. Words must first acquire a tone, have a local habitation, echoes and shadesí for them to be humanized into national literature. As much as literature is the art of outpacing the times, no one man can create or anticipates culture on his own. One might give significance to certain words or phrases only to find them dying without even living a decade because of a forced accent that assumes false sophistication. Culture is naming and giving valuable significance by unconscious intent to that which we all move in; it cannot be contrived.
An answer to "What must a people do to appease an embittered history?" is living in search of our true identity. The identity that was vandalised by colonial and imperialistic history. Our true lives will form the catharsis for redemption of our lives if we've enough courage and suaveness to live them authentically. Their haunting archetypes, unique and peculiar to African life, our writers have only brazed through so far. They must be reaffirmed, consolidated and extended. There is no need for lofty theories or forms. All that is needed is finding our true identity that's not necessarily derived from other forms and live by it.
Literature is a response, by a genuine life, to an overmastering reality. To paraphrase Thoreau, " ... a writer resides behind the truth he utters." In other words, writing is a constant confession of who we are through blurring or enhancement of facts, or myth; the supplantation, transposition and translation of memories, hence it is crucial not to brush aside Nwanyibuife's question in Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, lest it comes later to haunt us. When we reach the autochthonous essence, what'll come out is who we are. Writing is more associated with identity that anything else. Once we find our true identity and intimate it, it'll communicate itself. From there the literature of our lives shall emerge, and perhaps now and then shall come genius in our midst who'll outpace our times, that is, delineate us to the future we must be.
© 2004, GENERATOR 21.
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