From New National to World Literature

Essays and Reviews

Bruce King

• Publisher: Ibidem Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783838268569
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

From New National to World English Literature offers a personal perspective on the evolution of a major cultural movement that began with decolonization, continued with the assertion of African, West Indian, Commonwealth, and other literatures, and has evolved through postcolonial to world or international English literature. Bruce King, one of the pioneers in the study of the new national literatures and still an active literary critic, discusses the personalities, writers, issues, and contexts of what he considers the most important change in culture since modernism. In this selection of forty-five essays and reviews, King discusses issues such as the emergence and aesthetics of African literature, the question of the existence of a "Nigerian literature”, the place of the new universities in decolonizing culture, the contrasting models of American and Irish literatures, and the changing nature of exile and diasporas. He emphasizes themes such as traditionalism versus modernism, the dangers of cultural assertion, and the relationships between nationalism and internationalism. Special attention is given to Nigerian, West Indian, Australian, Indian, and Pakistani literature.

II. African Literature

Chapter 3
Those Magical Years: The Making of Nigerian Literature at Ibadan: 1948-1966

Robert Wren mentions a conversation between the Nigerian critic Abiola Irele and the French Africanist Alain Richard concerning the need for a sociology of literature with attention to the material conditions that influenced and shaped the production of culture. In retrospect, this is what Those Magical Years (1991) attempts, although the unnecessarily convoluted structure of the book, moving backwards in time from Christopher Okigbo’s death, a breathless, wide eyed “you are there” style, and way too many remarks about people telling unrepeatable gossip, result in a lack of focus, chronology, narrative or any generalized insights. Between 1982-1983 Wren interviewed some of those who taught or studied at the University of Ibadan between its foundation in 1948 and the start of the Nigerian-Biafran civil war in which Okigbo was killed. Wren asks why there was such an outburst of original creative writing at the time from Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, J.P. Clark and others associated with Ibadan. Although Wren keeps shrugging his shoulders and claiming that he does not understand more than when he began, much of the material for an answer can be found in the interviews.

Because of material scattered throughout the interviews, this is an essential, if frustrating, book for anyone interested in Nigerian Literature or in comparing the rapid development of Commonwealth literature since 1950. I do not know whether Wren’s thumb-in-mouth dumbness is just one pose in a book filled with his attempts to appear as if he were writing a popular scratch-my-head thriller, whether he really was puzzled and ignorant, or whether the manner is an unfortunate result of his death before completing a final version of the manuscript. The book certainly has its faults beginning with its undue reliance on J.P. Clark for much information, and the refusal of Wole Soyinka to be interviewed or have any association with the project. As Clark is notorious for his Clark-centered view of the world, his envy of Soyinka, and his defence of and involvement with the Nigerian Federal Government that imprisoned Soyinka during the Nigerian-Biafran war, Wren’s reliance on Clark is bound to produce a narrative which others will find suspect. If this appears harsh, then read what Clark says about others here. European journalists in Lagos during the civil war learned to listen to Clark as a source for one point of view―at the time the only point of view officially allowed; Wren, who taught under Clark at the University of Lagos, appears to have thought that J.P.’s was the only horse’s mouth.

It is not just Soyinka who is filtered through Clark’s eyes. Ulli Beier, O.R. Dathorne, Begum Hendrickse and others are either not given their due or mysteriously become villains. With Okigbo dead and Soyinka unwilling to co-operate, Wren might have interviewed Ulli Beier, Christine Obumselu, Omolara Ogundipe, O.R. Dathorne, W. Feuser, Denis Williams, Arthur Drayton, W.H Stevenson, John Ramsaran, Aig Higo, Gerald Moore, Peter Thomas, Paul Theroux and Ezekiel Mphahlele.

For someone so late on the scene there is this odd innocence about Wren as if he had to invent the wheel. Those Magical Years shows no signs, either in acknowledgments or influences, that Wren had read the sociology, scholarship, thoughts or memoirs of others who had written about the origins and history of Nigerian or African literature. There are useful articles, theses and books that touch on the subject by J.P. O’Flinn, W.H. Stevenson, Begum Hendrickse, Dapo Adelugba, Omolara Ogundipe, Bernth Lindfors, Bruce King, Jeanne Dingome, and others. The articles in volume 2 of European-language writing in sub-saharan African, edited by Albert Gérard (Akademiai Kiado: Budapest, 1986), might be useful before reading Wren. They have information that is sometimes new to me, although I was there during six of Wren’s magical years.

Writing the history of the new literatures should not be radically different from the history of other artistic movements, and it is frustrating that Wren has not approached his task with professionalism and method. If you were not already familiar with most of this story you probably could not understand it. There is not even a chronology of events and publications. Some comparative awareness would have helped. The Ibadan story is so similar to what happened at the same time at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica (also founded 1948), that it is instructive to draw parallels. Other comparisons might be to the take off of modern Indian English poetry in Bombay after 1947, especially during Nissim Ezekiel’s years at the University of Bombay, and even the Tish group at the University of British Columbia. Basically universities brought together talented ambitious people, who were introduced to new ideas, techniques or styles, which were transformed into something more local; the universities also provided means of production, an audience, readership, critics and publicity.

Modern Nigerian literature did not begin at the University of Ibadan; arguably modernist Nigerian literature did. The context was decades of West African writing in English especially in local newspapers and magazines from the late Victorians onward. Nigerians had to learn how to write in older styles before the Ibadan generation could bring West African Anglophone literature into modernism. Whether one takes into account the Negritude of Senghor and Césaire or the take-off of Ghanaian writing with Awoonor and Armah, the common element is some aspect of elite westernized “black” culture finding its expression in the style of modernism, a style that was taught at the University of Ibadan but not at the few existing colleges of higher education which earlier African writers attended. The one previous Nigerian whose writing showed awareness of modernism was Gabriel Okara. In many ways, including being the first Nigerian to publish in Black Orpheus, Okara was the precursor of the Ibadan group; older by a decade, without the chance of a university education, he somehow found the path from Wordsworth to Langston Hughes to G.M. Hopkins to Senghor. It was because writers like Okara and intellectuals like Olu Bassir were already familiar with Negritude that Soyinka and Okigbo could dismiss it as passé, although Achebe and Clark were partly influenced by the ideas associated with it.

The story of how Nigerian literature reached the point of what economists call “take-off” would need to include modern literature in local languages, especially D.O. Fagunwa’s writings in Yoruba; popular Nigerian literature in English; cross cultural products by the semi-educated such as Amos Tutuola; Christian missionary literature; children’s literature; the Arts Festivals of the 1950s; the British Council-led writers clubs, publications and anthologies; the many South African refugee intellectuals, American foundation money, the influence of Negritude on Black Orpheus founded by Janheinz Jahn and Ulli Beier, the model of the Leeds University Poetry and Audience on the Martin Banham-Clark University of Ibadan Horn. Basically the Nigerians wrote in relationship to the European literary tradition as taught them by the British. Achebe would find a model in Hardy and reply to what he felt were misrepresentations of Africa by Graham Greene and Joyce Cary. Even Tutuola made use of Bunyan, Swift and the way Fagunwa had Christianized West African tales.

A major influence, as shown in the interviews, was the excellent teaching in the elite schools, with their small classes, constant practice of reading and writing, and many school publications. The students had a traditional African culture marginally around them but their actual, primary culture, was Western, British and from secondary school through university they shared in a British culture of school and university magazines, dance clubs, choirs, musical societies, drama groups. Their parents were school teachers, pastors, businessmen, professionals, a Westernized elite more likely to wear London-made clothing than have African masks on their walls. Their schools and families were mostly Christian and inter-tribal. They were not very political in the sense of being part of a struggle against colonialism. They were more likely to be politically disillusioned with the already notorious corruption of Nigerian politicians. The British had been trying to get Nigeria off its hands for the past decade, but disagreements among Nigerian politicians held up formal independence.

This was, however, the first generation to go to university in Nigeria (although Soyinka went to Leeds after doing a university entr...