LET AGE NOT BE
DIVISIVE ISSUE IN KENYAN LITERATURE DISCOURSE
Nigerian literary legend and Nobel Laurette for Literature Prof Wole Soyinka presents his speech at the Storymoja Hay Festival at the Nairobi Museums yesterday. Looking on is Dr Auma Obama the festival Patron. Wole Soyinka calls for fundamentalism to defend human rights and liberties PHOTO GEORGE ORIDO
How to negotiate
the weighty subject of literary theory in relation to age appears problematic
to a few young people in Kenya. It seems to have boiled over following a
meeting reportedly held at the University of Nairobi’s Literature Department,
and further at the Sarit Centre during the Book Week Exhibition on September
27, a meeting which I attended.
I was not at the former meeting. But
having read both sides of the same story, I combine the two incidents to show
how politics and intellectual dishonesty have permeated the age myth in our
literary academia. Let me observe early that I have no problem with youth. Nor
do I have any with old age. Both are natural cycles of our lives. Indeed,
I am just a few years older than my friends who associate seniority with
conservatism, senility, and death – apparently they are unaware of a very
recent theory which disputes that view – and when my hair will finally begin
turning white theirs won’t be any different. I will then turn back and throw
them a knowing wink. But even more important than the age debate, I think we
should note that we are dealing with culture, hence the need to weigh how our
verbal pronouncements involving age hurts our national cultural growth. I
observe generally that it is in countries where the generational gap is
narrowest that cultural development is also the most robust – DR Congo and
Nigeria come to mind. In the former, not even a needle can pass between any two
generations of Congolese musicians. The bond is very closely knit. As for
Nigeria, it might be useful to ask yourself why Chimamanda Adichie is called
‘the next Achebe’. Is the age debate responsible for our failure to make
a smooth transition from pioneer to contemporary Kenyan art? Maybe. Is the
debate beneficial to our cultural development? It can never be. I do not know
how it all began, but I posit that the period shortly before Kenyans kicked out
the Kanu regime in 2002 – when we first heard of ‘age’ as a signifier of
non-electability – marks the beginning of a very energetic effort to smear
longevity with everything negative, an attempt which has fully flared in the
literary scene. What is not coincidental though is that a literary group with a
certain kind of writing (and overt politico-ethnic leanings) was founded around
the same time in 2003. At the two meetings above, my friends who think that
viewing Kenyan literary theory through the ‘traditional’/’progressive’ binary
openly swear allegiance to the Kwani group. I have written several times about
the Kwani and Storymoja platforms. I give it to them, publishing has increased.
Literary discussion has also tremendously widened. But so has every kind of
racial and ethnic prejudice in Kenya, including ‘intellectual gambling’. I think
that’s what we should attribute to some of our colleagues who sneak into, and
quickly steal out of academic meetings, but who then write whole thesis papers
about discussions they were probably too scared to sit through.
This is the truth about Kwani: it is mainly funded by the Ford Foundation, a Western establishment headquartered in New York. Its literary style is wholly borrowed from the group we in Literature known as the ‘Beat Generation’ in the history of American Literature, a cultic literary underworld associated with Allen Ginsberg, William S Burrough, Jack Kerouac, and others. The Beat writers believed in a host of very interesting ideals: “rejection of materialism; rejection of received standards; innovations in style; experimentation with drugs (we add that most of them were convicted drug peddlers); alternative sexualities; an interest in religion; and explicit portrayal of the human condition”. But – and this is the interesting part – the Beat Generation began after World War Two in 1945, and peaked in the 1950s. I think we shouldn’t struggle identifying all the above tenets with the Kenyan ‘progressives’. So you have a situation where friends in their youthful 40s dash back and gobble up an aspect of American literary culture which flowered 74 years ago, but who then claim that they are ‘progressives’. Not only that: they also request you to weigh their worth on an ‘indigenous African literary scale’.You are saddled with youngsters who say they ‘reject received standards’, but all their poetry reads like Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), and Burrough’s Naked Lunch (1959). On the other hand, you have an ‘old’ man who leaps over the Postcolonial Theory because of its weaknesses, but who then proposes a ‘Post-Racial’ Approach. Deciding who is more nostalgic and conservative than the other should then be easy. Part of the problem, I suspect, is our Third World mind which assumes everything that comes from the West is new, even if it comes from the medieval ages. Alongside the age myth, I have yet to come across a Kwani discussion where the West is not thoroughly maligned, but only rarely justifiably. You would never imagine that the same West has funded our friends for over a decade. They are silent on the other ugly truth that Kenyan Literature in English actually saw the light of day courtesy of Western funding of East African literary journals. But where does that leave the progressives’ perception that certain theories are superior to others? We know that not only are literary theories extremely impure, but also that they serve the same purpose. Traces of classical theory, founded hundreds of years before Jesus was born, still influence theoretical philosophising. Thus it would appear that mere theory is not the problem; the youthful extremism with which we rush to erect rigid boundaries between the strands of theory is (and we do not know of extremists who aren’t conservatives).
The agenda is this: that the so-called ‘modern’ theories comprising Modernism, Postmodernism, Post-Colonial and even Queer Theories, through their collapsing of literary categories, have offered the modern-day Kenyan writer a carte blanche to voyeuristically decorate their own sexuality on the pages of the text. I no longer interact with a text when I read some Kenyan books these days; I battle with strippers. Age, then, is not (and it ought not to be) a generational barrier in Kenyan Literature. It is irrelevant. Before you say it is, please explain why the same debate thrives elsewhere inside Kenyan politics. We should fear that streams of Freudian complexes may have seeped into our noble discussion of age vis-a-vis Kenyan literature. But it is a waste of valuable time. In future, I suggest we first declare our relationship with our fathers – whether they are dead or alive – before we attack a writer or critic as either old or conservative.
This is the truth about Kwani: it is mainly funded by the Ford Foundation, a Western establishment headquartered in New York. Its literary style is wholly borrowed from the group we in Literature known as the ‘Beat Generation’ in the history of American Literature, a cultic literary underworld associated with Allen Ginsberg, William S Burrough, Jack Kerouac, and others. The Beat writers believed in a host of very interesting ideals: “rejection of materialism; rejection of received standards; innovations in style; experimentation with drugs (we add that most of them were convicted drug peddlers); alternative sexualities; an interest in religion; and explicit portrayal of the human condition”. But – and this is the interesting part – the Beat Generation began after World War Two in 1945, and peaked in the 1950s. I think we shouldn’t struggle identifying all the above tenets with the Kenyan ‘progressives’. So you have a situation where friends in their youthful 40s dash back and gobble up an aspect of American literary culture which flowered 74 years ago, but who then claim that they are ‘progressives’. Not only that: they also request you to weigh their worth on an ‘indigenous African literary scale’.You are saddled with youngsters who say they ‘reject received standards’, but all their poetry reads like Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), and Burrough’s Naked Lunch (1959). On the other hand, you have an ‘old’ man who leaps over the Postcolonial Theory because of its weaknesses, but who then proposes a ‘Post-Racial’ Approach. Deciding who is more nostalgic and conservative than the other should then be easy. Part of the problem, I suspect, is our Third World mind which assumes everything that comes from the West is new, even if it comes from the medieval ages. Alongside the age myth, I have yet to come across a Kwani discussion where the West is not thoroughly maligned, but only rarely justifiably. You would never imagine that the same West has funded our friends for over a decade. They are silent on the other ugly truth that Kenyan Literature in English actually saw the light of day courtesy of Western funding of East African literary journals. But where does that leave the progressives’ perception that certain theories are superior to others? We know that not only are literary theories extremely impure, but also that they serve the same purpose. Traces of classical theory, founded hundreds of years before Jesus was born, still influence theoretical philosophising. Thus it would appear that mere theory is not the problem; the youthful extremism with which we rush to erect rigid boundaries between the strands of theory is (and we do not know of extremists who aren’t conservatives).
The agenda is this: that the so-called ‘modern’ theories comprising Modernism, Postmodernism, Post-Colonial and even Queer Theories, through their collapsing of literary categories, have offered the modern-day Kenyan writer a carte blanche to voyeuristically decorate their own sexuality on the pages of the text. I no longer interact with a text when I read some Kenyan books these days; I battle with strippers. Age, then, is not (and it ought not to be) a generational barrier in Kenyan Literature. It is irrelevant. Before you say it is, please explain why the same debate thrives elsewhere inside Kenyan politics. We should fear that streams of Freudian complexes may have seeped into our noble discussion of age vis-a-vis Kenyan literature. But it is a waste of valuable time. In future, I suggest we first declare our relationship with our fathers – whether they are dead or alive – before we attack a writer or critic as either old or conservative.
Source: standardmedia
No comments:
Post a Comment