Abdulrazak Gurnah, Not Ngugi Wa Thiongo!
Okey Iheduru
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Not Ngugi Wa Thiongo!by admin |
The Africans, however defined, have their own idea of which African writer should win the Nobel Prize on Literature. The Swedish Academy which decides who wins have their own idea of which African writer should win the prize. So, each time the award is given to an African, a clash of preferred meaning occurs. Although the 2021 award is to an African writer of postcolonial theory persuasion, that is not stopping the clash. What appears to be the first shot is Bhakti Shringarpure’s piece on that theme, originally titled ‘But, first we’ll take the win’. Africaisacountry.com which first published it did so with its own rider: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize for Literature win raises questions about the role of the LitNobel and how they construct what we think of and buy as African literature.
Africaisacountry.com introduced Bhakti Shringarpure, the author, as an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut and Editor-in-Chief of Warscapes as well as author of Cold War Assemblages (Routledge, 2019).
Well, not to Chimamanda yet but it is not beyond the Swedish Academy, says its critics
Prof Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 winner
The feeling was stronger than previous years, and it did seem like the Swedes were gazing towards Africa. One of the most infuriating things about the Nobel Literature prize committee is how hard they try to be cool and to surprise everybody, and to make sure never to pick anyone who’s on the betting rosters. That’s why I was certain that the Nobel Prize in Literature would not go to perennial Ladbroke favorites, Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o or Somalia’s Nuruddin Farah. I was ready for something outrageous like the prize going to Chimamanda Adichie (you never know though, they may give her the Peace one). I was frankly ecstatic that this year’s choice was Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose novels come to us by way of the sea, from the Swahili coast of Zanzibar.
Read more: https://intervention.ng/24900/
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2021 5:21 PM
To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Abdulrazak Gurnah, Not Ngugi Wa Thiongo!
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Okey Iheduru
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Cornelius Hamelberg
The Booker Prize is also interesting. Ideally, Wa Thiong'o could also win there.
Professor Harrow, I read Nobel Laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio's “ Onitsha” and was not terribly impressed.
When it comes to Jorge Luis Borges and all the other great writers, literary artists, voices that the Swedish Academy has either evaded or ignored, the list is long.
For Literature, the list could be even longer
Re - Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire and the many others, there's also the matter of chronology: Wole Soyinka was crowned in 1986 ( thus boosting the image of the Nigeria and Africa who produced him) and talking about chronology, that was fifteen long years before Sir Vidia who is commonly known as V.S.Naipaul could also claim the prize as his long overdue recompense and recognition. We all recall Sir Vidia, bristling with indignation and sinking to the lowest depths of literary despair - unlike George Bernard Shaw's alleged put-down of William Shakespeare ( "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.")
In Sir Vidia's case, I imagine that when Sir Vidia was informed that Wole Soyinka had bagged The Prize in 1986, he must have spat on the ground or the floor. At least according to Paul Theroux, “Sir Vidia retorted, "Has he written anything?" And added that the Nobel Committee was "pissing on literature from a great height"
The Prize and regional representation. Hmm...
Every year, there's the patient expectation that The Prize will be going to Africa ( the same prayers and expectations for the FIFA World Cup) South America also wants it, so do many of the nations in Europe, the United States ALWAYS wants it. In 1973, Australia was most ably represented by Patrick White, a great writer, with a keen ear for dialects..
Indeed, there's also the language issue – some of the prize-winning languages so far, in alphabetical order: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Yiddish (Isaac Bashevis Singer !)
Pan African literary champions are slowly approaching - at a snail's pace, the idea of granting a mighty, worthy, grand, literature prize of Nobel-like stature - Mo Ibrahim could chip in a few million dollars annual prize money..... and just like the humble Mt. Sinai which the Almighty chose to announce in His own Voice, the first and second of the ten commandments, so too we could humbly propose e.g. Ile-Ife as the centre from which the African Nobel Prize for Literature would be announced, annually...
In the meantime, if Toyin Adepoju wants to nominate his namesake Toyin Falola for the Stockholm based Nobel Prize, he should follow this nomination procedure
BTW, I would also like to nominate Adepoju's good friend Kperogi, for his storytelling / telling stories. I discussed the matter with Baba Kadiri this evening, but the idea was anathema to his ears. He says that instead of awarding the Nobel Prize for mere big grammar, he would prefer to see some electric light coming out of darkness, Africans being awarded the Nobel Prize in other categories such as Physics, Chemistry, Medicine...
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2021 4:34 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Abdulrazak Gurnah, Not Ngugi Wa Thiongo!
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/21440424-7f7c-490c-a3a4-aff00ea8eb02n%40googlegroups.com.
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2021 7:08 PM
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Abdulrazak Gurnah, Not Ngugi Wa Thiongo!
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2021 9:43 PM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Professor Harrow,
It's surely not a matter of some pretentious monkeys arrogating to themselves the right to be awarding prizes, crowning kings and queens, justly or unjustly confining others to the dustbins and waste heaps of history when you complain and ask these kinds of questions: “this is an elephant in this room, which is the elitism of awarding any prize. who is awarding? based on what? what good does it do? what bad does it do? “
In my humble opinion, you may have done what you perceive to be your duty as rebel, iconoclast and revolutionary (the big three) but as you can see, your throwing down the gauntlet to the status quo and your long wish list written so defiantly and as unconventionally as usual with no capital letters where as a sign of respect capital letters should be, that left to their own devices, the Swedish Academy and the French Academy, both of which institutions have as their dedicated aim the promotion of the Swedish Language and the French Language respectively, that these institutions, along with the Booker Prize Organisation had best be disbanded or dissolved immediately/ fall into desuetude/ be drastically reformed, by a change of perspective. Such an appeal has not and is not going to gain any traction apart from from folks like Adepoju...
Indeed, Trees that've stood for a thousand years suddenly will fall …?
With regard to meritocracy, Wole Soyinka had more or less won all the literary prizes in poetry and drama that the Commonwealth had to offer within the English Language Empire before the Swedish Academy conferred their supreme honour on him...
As to your other questions, you must admit that the Soyinka award had a very positive effect, was like a catalyst, stimulating and generating a new wave of ambitious literary output from Africa and other faraway, forgotten places, a post-Soyinka generation of the quality writers that you have mentioned so often, writing purposefully in both English and French, also to be rewarded, to win whatever prizes including Alfred Nobel's ( “I play the music for the music you see, for money I do publicity”) or like once upon a time Fyodor Dostoevsky writing in his mother tongue Russian, serially, piecemeal, developing, honing the skills to pay the bills...
You say that ”the hubris of awarding the nobel prize in literature has always irritated me--not just because of the exclusions or inclusions, but because of the implied canonical values. that's what got naipaul his renown. his skill as a narrator, as a constructor of tales, never mind the content, never mind the racism. never mind the perspective and values.”
True: Like a self-hating Jew, even in his non-fiction, the honestly speaking, brutal, often disdainful Naipaul didn't even spare his Mother India ( “An Area of Darkness” //”India: A Wounded Civilisation//India”// A Million Mutinies Now”, nor does the Hindu in him spare the Muslim Faithful in his “Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples”. He does not disguise his unreserved contempt for some of Black Africa's indigenous religious heritage either, in his The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief.
You cry about his “racism” but the Swedish Academy say that they were ostensibly moved and motivated by his “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."
Naipaul could not have also won The Booker Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize , for racism marinated in bigotry and wrapped up by some narrative skill?
Re - What you say about the unethical “notion of art above all over values, which no serious theorist could accept nowadays “, I wonder how you react to the fact that some crazy person or other had the effrontery to suggest that Lars Vilks' infamous portrait should be on display at our Stockholm's Modern Museum and that the offer was roundly rejected for the very reason's you suggest as the ethically unacceptable notion of art – or so-called art “above all other values “
Lastly, still in the English Language hierarchy, The Caine Prize, and now, most recently, still in the English Language tradition, to add to the canon, The Toyin Falola Prize Shortlist for 2021 ( also guaranteed quality, although no one from Sierra Leone and Ghana has made the shortlist. Personally, I'm looking forward to some more from Aoiri Obaigbo
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Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Cornelius Hamelberg
Of relevance to the awarding of local prizes (after reading this interview it's clear that neither our friend V.S. Naipaul nor his brother Shiva Naipaul would have qualified for the JCB Prize for Literature
Interview: Mita Kapur, Literary Director, JCB Prize for Literature - “I want to make the JCB Prize a true representation of what India reads”