Re - “Why Ngugi wa Thiong'o never won Nobel Prize for Literature”
Cornelius Hamelberg
As I’m sure Dr Oohay would say, “It AIN*T a beauty contest!”
Perhaps they have the last word on the matter, but I haven’t read The Standard’s specifics or any of the better known literary journals / magazines’ deliberations on “Why Ngugi wa Thiong'o never won Nobel Prize for Literature”.
In the past decade or so Wa Thiong’o has been on the speculators list of popular candidates - and assuming that by ”popular” is meant “by popular acclaim and expectation” - he has sometimes been high up on the list of potential winners of the world's numero uno literary prize that’s awarded annually by the Swedish Academy. ( I well remember in 1979 when Wole Soyinka was over here in Stockholm to attend a session of the PEN Club, just before seeing him off at Vasagatan, as he boarded the bus to Arlanda Airport, I told him that he was one of my favourites for the Nobel Prize. “I also have my favourites” was his exact reply.
That year, Odysseas Elytis, a Greek Poet and Man of Letters was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The numerous authors, and there are hundreds who may merit the Nobel Prize according to Alfred Nobel’s last testament, about “ an ideal direction" - reminds me of a joke about the local priest being astounded to find the local bus driver from the Owerri Motor Park sitting in one of the best pews in heaven - because in some strange ways, for some people - spectators and writers alike, the supreme honour of being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature is the equivalent to being granted a visa to dine with Jesus in Paradise, Nirvana, Moksha, or the olam haba
And there are literary heavens too, I assure you. For idiots only. No kidding.
There are of course those who may be prepared to sell their grandmothers or sacrifice to Moloch, in order to be awarded the Nobel Prize in this and that or even to be invited to the Nobel Banquet - sell their grandmothers for a pittance or a pot of porridge/ beans and cabbage
There are unconfirmed rumours that Jamaica Kincaid has said explicitly that she does not want to be awarded the Nobel Prize For Literature - if this is true, then, whether the Nobel Committee respects her wishes or not is another matter - if this old world is still spinning round, they maybe feel free to award her the Prize posthumously in accordance with the magical realism of Dead men don't smoke marijuana
There are many significant people who were not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature - I surmise that some, among whom I number e.g. Philip Roth went to their graves, disappointed. Perhaps, so did trailblazer Chinua Achebe.
Given Wa Thiongo’s ideological baggage, should he have been awarded the Nobel Prize for his output in Kikuyu or for his advocacy?
You who have read him, what do you think?
I’ve tried to explain somewhere in this forum that in awarding the Prize to Abdulrazak Gurnah ( all of whose output my Better Half has read) I think that the Swedish Academy didn’t overlook Wa Thiong’o (who I last saw in October 2017, here in Stockholm being interviewed by Binyavanga Wainaina at the International Writers Forum at the Kulturhuset -an event to which I invited my friend Claude Kayat (because I had an extra ticket) In my view, it was not a great interview. Binyavanga Wainaina took up far too much space, projecting himself.
There are also a few authors who were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but outright rejected it. One such outstanding example was Jean-Paul Sartre.
(At this point I’m wondering what Bernard-Henri Lévy is saying, in English or French about Trump, Macron, Netanyahu, The Arab League and the the Middle East Imbroglio
According to some theologians the Black Man is GOD.
Perhaps, if the prayers to the African ancestral gods are answered, an African North or South of the equator will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature every year, for the next 100 years.