| Now we must also realise that cross-cultural influences can be a two-way traffic. Think about Picasso and modernist cubism. It was strongly influenced by African Art. Now on the other side of the street, take Soyinka’s plays and the influences of classical Western theatre. There should be a mutual and enriching interaction of cultures.
It is when one culture presents itself as the measure of all things that you get a reactionary traditionalism, which can be wrong-headed because history like waters will find its own level and we will all fill in spaces on different levels, depending on how cosmopolitan our vision is.
Take Fuji music or sunny Ade’s juju. They still have the rich oral choral traditions of the Yoruba song, but the instruments are contemporary or a mix of the modern guitar and the traditional shekere. It is inevitable. What of high life music? Even Fela Anikulakpo-Kuti. He may insist on the traditional motif in dress while singing in a decidedly very hybrid Pidgin English, laced with ribald Yoruba, yet his major instrument, the Sax or piano are European. There is Manu Dibango too.
I do not set out to consciously reclaim African sensibilities. But I find myself doing it as the subject of and in response to a history that has been overtly Hegelian. Modern history has also been a catalyst of change in matters traditional. It is inevitable that the stronger historical forces have bent things their own way, such that I write in English, even if I can still speak one African language fluently. Who was it that said you cry only in the language you spoke first? When situation demands you could embrace the intimacy of your mother tongue. This is what Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is probably trying to do by writing in Gikuyu, his mother tongue…but that was only after making a name working in English, his “step-mother tongue”. There is the irony for you. To insist on only traditional elements simply takes the biscuit.
NA: While we are in the neighbourhood of this subject, is the experience of exile by many African writers likely to be beneficial to the development of African literature in the longer term?
AE: Yes, painful as exile can be, in terms of the alienation that attends it, it does open the door to other experiences, which will always expand the writer’s choice of subjects. You get richer even while the experience wracks you. So I would say on the long run it will be beneficial to African literature. Again take the example of that wave of South African writers, which flooded London in the wake of Apartheid. Arthur Nortje, Dennis Brutus, Tati Loutard, Peter Abrahams and so on. Look at the copus of what they have produced. Or take the case of the black writers in the Diaspora like Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, Ben Okri, Derek Walcott, and Hanif Kureishi. The experience of racism for example, painful as it is, has resulted in some beautiful writing. There is this collection of essays by Caryl Phillips (apart from his novels), “The European Tribe”, which focuses on that. I remember him recounting somewhere how ‘go home Nigger’ was written on his dormitory door while a student at Cambridge.
NA: And by the way, what is the new definition of exile? Take the Ogaga Ifowodo paradox for example. In an interview with Vanguard (Nigeria, December 21, 2024), Ifowodo insists he is not in exile, but interestingly his name appears on the Writers In Exile Committee on the PEN Nigeria website alongside yourself, Unoma Azuah, Pius Adesanmi and Akin Adesokan. Is it possible that there is some new thinking, such as Obi Nwakanma’s article on the unsexy nature of exile in the same newspaper? Is the exile phase on the way out?
AE: Exile like hybridity is not a condition you choose, it falls on you, the longer you stay away the heavier the fall. Have you not seen old grey-haired Africans on some street in London, sometimes without family, lonely and forgotten by home, without contact to any one member of their original families or a very tenuous connection? Well, I saw them in Germany and wondered, hoping my fate would not be the same.
There are several ways in which exile exhibits itself. It could be in a physical objective form as described above or it could be in an emotional form as in a ceaseless longing, or an unacknowledged longing. It could be in the form of alienation or an unremitting culture shock. And the most terrible kind of a feeling of exile is the kind that James Baldwin felt in his native America, where one feels completely irrelevant in the contemporary history that shapes your roots.
Yes, it does sound ironic when Ogaga insists he is not in exile. Well, it depends on your emotional resilience sometimes. Whatever the case the spiritual cul-de-sac of being physically uprooted claims you finally. The only solution is to go back. For example it affects your writing in the sense that you might become more and more far from the madding crowd at home. It affects your range of subjects. Even such a thing as what you eat. Continue>>
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