"The black and
African writer is expected to write about certain things, and if they don’t
they are seen as irrelevant. This gives their literature weight, but dooms it
with monotony. Who wants to constantly read a literature of suffering, of
heaviness? Those living through it certainly don’t; the success of much lighter
fare among the reading public in Africa proves
this point. Maybe it is those in the west, whose lives are untouched by such
suffering, who find occasional spice and flirtation with such a literature. But
this tyranny of subject may well lead to distortion and limitation.
It is a curious fact that the greatest
short stories do not have, on the whole, the greatest or the heaviest of
subjects. By this I mean that the subject is not what is most important about
them. Rather, it is the way they are written, the oblique way in which they
illuminate something significant. Their overt subject might seem slight but
leads, through the indirect mirror of art, to profound and unforgettable
places. The overwhelming subject makes for too much directness. This leaves no
place for the imagination, for the interpretative matrix of the mind. Great
literature is almost always indirect."
You can read the full article at the link below:
A mental tyranny is keeping black writers from greatness | Ben Okri
Living as we do in troubling times, we look to writers to reflect the temper of the age. The essential thing is freedom. A people cannot be great or fulfilled without it. A literature cannot be great without it either. The basic prerequisite of literature is freedom.
BELOW WAS MY RESPONSE:
Ben Okri is,
as I imagine we all know, an artistic writer - a brilliant one at that. So it
is not surprising that he would take a stand for fiction-writing as art...art
as an end in itself. However, I have the following objections to his article:
1) The broad-brush generalisations
about the aim of literature is nonsensical at best. Literature is itself art,
the very crafting of a novel need not have stylistic-artistic appreciation as
its sole aim...in fact, literature would be poorer if that were the case. Another
function of literature is indeed the recording of history e.g. Dickens'
portrait of a poverty-stricken England, Achebe's explanation of the impact of
colonialism on the colonised.
2) Okri's yardstick of artistic
brilliance is mainly the art that emanated in an overly-pretencious European
moment...an art endowment that was created against the backdrop of tyranny and
oppression....and by artists highly-favoured (and, so, commissioned by
dictatorial monarchs). That is, art cooked in an anti-freedom kitchen! The fact
that these artworks serve as the standard-setters (as opposed to Benin bronzes,
Egyptian and Sudanese pyramids, or the likes) in Okri's imagination is itself a
product of a mind, however utterly brilliant, unfree!!!
3) Whatever disdain Okri may have for
some writers who happen to be African (or "black" which he supposes
is a different thing or an acceptable tag!), Okri, as a competitor of these
writers, doesn't get to adjudicate literary merit...I don't believe such power
comes with winning the Booker prize.
4) Okri's article seems to suggest
that once the subject is heavy, the art will suffer. However, writers such as
Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka (incredible writer even if not primarily a
novelist) have produced artistic works that are nevertheless centred on heavy
subject matters.
5) Writers, like all artists, need
inspiration. And many find inspiration in the things that affect them and
matter to them. How then should the fact of colonialism not have weighed
heavily on the hearts of colonial and post-colonial African writers? Or slavery
to have escaped the attention Toni Morrison? Can Adichie really have ignored
the tremendously destructive war fought in the aftermath of Biafra's demand for
independence?
Not every African writer writes about
the heavy subjects or does so without art. Amos Tutuola wrote about a man
intoxicated on palm wine in a book published during Nigeria's colonial days
(which Okri himself mildly alludes to)!
Yours,
