How Nigeria can produce another Nobel winner, by author | The Nation
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
cornelius...@gmail.com
First things first : The world is round, All the world's stage, there are 195 countries in the world and “you can bet your bottom dollar” (a Liberian English expression) that apart from Nigeria, there are representatives of each and every other country that would like to “win” the Nobel Prize in Literature.
We could also take note that there’s no magic formula or writing prescription, or that following in the footsteps of Wole Soyinka, Mister Follow Follow, can be assured - guaranteed - that just because he or she was born in Nigeria he or she is going to bag that award sometime soon, but there’s a guideline, and it does not depend on the greatness of any ridiculous postcolonial big English grammar; nor is the prize necessarily awarded each year, to - by the connoisseur writers or elite readers popular consensus, to the “most brilliant” or the ”best “ writer, supposing that there could ever be such a beast, standing like a colossus, head, snout and shoulders over and above all the others (decrepit petty bourgeois vermin very unlike him) in today’s world of letters. But a little learning is a dangerous thing, and hence we have to be on our watch against the colonial complex about Big English with little feeling about when and how big is too big even for the English. I love you is more powerful than I love you very much. There’s also the virtue of understatement, part of that wide range of nuance / expression/ communication known as - not virtuosity but flexibility, and what about humour? We know all this in our various cultures and tongues, and that there's the artistic possibility of exaggeration for comic effect - I always have in mind Charles Dickens,
If the Nobel Prize were to also be awarded retroactively, I’d vote for The Book of Job ( although I don’t know who wrote it) and then there are some of these amazing speeches, civilised oratory in Kebra Nagast , and there are all the great Arab and Persian and Hindu and Chinese, Greek, Latin, Russian, English, and French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Hungarian, Portuguese, Finnish Language Poets - even in translation. Poetry, I said not prose. Prose? Bruno Schulz. Who wants to be Franz Kafka ? Jane Austen? Patrick White or James Baldwin ? Nikolai Gogol or André Gide? Hermann Hesse or Emile Zola? Mo Yan or Ernest Hemingway? D.O.Fagunwa or J. R. R. Tolkien ? Chinua Achebe or V.S.Naipaul? Wole Soyinka or William Shakespeare?
Here it is 👍
The complete list of Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature 1901 -2023, role models galore…
I may be wrong, but I think that when the Nobel Committee awarded the Prize to Abdulrazak Gurnah, it was curtains for Ngugi WaThiong’o, that it was a conscious and deliberate snub on the part of the Nobel Committee, choosing a fellow African from Ngugi’s Kenyan neighbour Tanzania, so, at least, ostensibly, this Good Friday, the Nobel Committee could be absolved of any potential criminal charges of “racism “, “ tribalism” or downright Negrophobia, to all of which charges The Swedish Academy, ordinarily no respecter of persons, would be duty bound to protest their innocence and plead “not guilty “.
Nor did they consider awarding the prize to Adonis - that too, too politically charged, or to David Grossman, but this year, who knows, for precisely political and spiritual reasons, on World Awareness Day, the Prize could be awarded to a Palestinian Human Rights Poet, Novelist or Playwright with the understanding that given the conditions in which the Palestinian nation lives to survive, at its very foundations and according to nature, contemporary Palestinian Literature must be Protest Literature and in that case we could make the case that Palestinian Literature as Protest Literature fulfils Alfred Nobel’s criteria of “an idealistic tendency “ / “in an ideal direction” :
According to Alfred Nobel’s last will and testament the Nobel Prize for Literature should go “to the person who in the field of literature shall have produced the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency”
Talking about ridiculous postcolonial big grammar, on the contrary, and on the opposite side of the learned “sabi book” wannabe colonial big grammar, I was quite touched and pleasantly impressed by Ojogbon Falola’s spunky Delulu Is the Solulu! - it’s got what we know as verve…
In 1979 the Stockholm PEN International over, before seeing Wole Soyinka off to the bus to Arlanda Airport, I remember informing him in a rather obsequious (but sincere) manner that he was one of my favourites for the Nobel Prize. ( I omitted to tell him about his rival, my other favourite, Derek Walcott with whose poetry I had got more deeply acquainted a few years earlier with a view to becoming a Papa Doc, with a PhD on him - but refrained from mentioning this so that he ( Soyinka) would not become a little jealous - even if unlike Almighty Yahweh, OLODUMARE does not say, “I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” I could have spared myself any guilty feelings or unease, because Brer Soyinka in those days sporting a magnificent big black and proud Afro - and not in a hurry, assured me, “ I also have my favourites.” Not “I also have my favourite” but “my favouriteS”; so, I was in good company. Imagine : six years later he bagged the Nobel Prize and entered the international Who's Who book of fame. But back then ( in a hero worship spirit I was with him every day for, about six days, had breakfast with him at the Grand Hotel, he showed me one of his manuscripts in progress - still being hammered out on his portable Olivetti typewriter, he arrived at a party at which I was a co-host - but he left in a hurry because the host, a Kenyan guy by the name of Arthur Opot - who later on turned out to be a CIA agent, was getting too arrogant ( a sad characteristic of some CIA agents of a humble background like mine) - years later Arthur reported circa twelve other CIA agents to the main Swedish newspaper, and the Swedish Government ( little America, “medium sized dog with big dog attitude”) gave the unfortunate agents 24 hours to leave the country - but I stray, I merely wanted to say
“ Fortune and fame's such a curious game.
Perfect strangers can call you by name”
back in 1979 as we strolled through Kungsträdgården, he in his mountain-high Afro ( in Sierra Leone Creole we call that hairstyle “high barb”) he looking like early Gil Scott Heron and me like his weedy bodyguard, some sellers approached us and offered to sell us some Hashish. What do they want ? They were speaking Swedish and Alagba Soyinka wanted to know - oh just some bullshit, I told him, because they had actually asked, “Do you guys want to buy some shit?” ( “Shit” being the Swedish name of the product)
No doubt there's a lot of nationalistic dreaming and unbridled patriotic fervour and partisan brinkmanship for this and that great African writer being awarded every year’s Nobel Prize for Literature; apparently there is less fervour about this or that little or great African nation being served the Nobel Prize in the other genres, the other Nobel Prize Categories such as Physics, Chemistry , Medicine, Economics ( awarded by the Bank of Sweden) and I'd like to ask Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju why this is so. Maybe we should recommend that they include Music and some Pentecostal Theology of tithing into the bargain? The theory of tithing should easily qualify for Alfred Nobel’s “in an idealistic direction” -for the salvation of all humanity…
One of the many important recommendations Akin Akingbogun makes, re- ”According to the author, one of the challenges faced by many writers in Nigeria is the lack of access to learning platforms to hone their skills.”
Concretely - apart from writers workshops, there are many Literary help outfits such as this one that I’m subscribed to : Blue Pencil Agency Literary Consultants. right now I’m taking a look at “Casting Your Characters”
BTW, one of the characters I have in mind is Black Jesus who fits in beautifully with the image of the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 , and with the omniscient author’s privilege to spin a yarn, some fairy tale extravaganza full of magical realism and superstition, a tale - an old wives ’tale if you like, that begins in Egypt with “the ten plagues”, the tale of God splitting the Red Sea or the Sea of Reeds to create a land corridor - a safe passage for the Hebrew slaves and the mixed multitudes to pass through, more magical realism and surrealism with manna falling plentifully from the sky to feed us all through the forty years trek through the wilderness with Moses, during which time our shoes did not get worn out, fast forward to Black Jesus’s return to judge the living and the dead, starting with his passing judgement on the Sanhedrin headed by the unholy trinity of Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and their military chief, Yoav Gallant and possibly as punishment, the Lake of fire that we’ve heard Hon. Minister Louis Farrakhan talking about
Protest Theology:
# Louis Farrakhan on The Lake of Fire