ktravula – a travelogue!

Nigeria’s New Feminism – Say-You-Are-One-Of-Us-Or-Else

by Yẹ́misí Aríbisálà

___

My name is Yẹ́misí Aríbisálà. Because of context I must state that I am not a feminist nor will I ever be one. As made clear from the paragraphs below, the “or else” will come to my door and meet it open.

Over the last few months and especially after an interview in recent days, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has become the woman that we all love to hate. What irony. I only have one indictment for her regarding the attacks on social media for words spoken to the press in that interview: It is that she wittingly contributed to the creation of the “We”, the same mob that turned against her. It is what happens when people are not allowed to go away and really think and decide what they believe as individuals, and they are coaxed and persuaded and ushered into making decisions in groups. What happens when we all become a “body of feminists” without a a coalition of working, dissenting brains is that we are and become a mob.

The most recent social media uproar against Adichie is over her differentiation between feminisms – hers and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s. It is allegedly also about Adichie’s arrogance and the way she expresses herself that seems to condescend to the person being addressed. It is about causing a rift between feminists and seeming thereby to designate some as intellectuals and others as liberal and possibly nonintellectual. That feminists should not be distinguished thusly is the crux of the protest. Lastly it is about a supposed change of position indicated by Adichie’s permission to Beyoncé three years ago to use her words in the song Flawless suddenly retrospectively retracted in the interview. Or if not retracted, sidestepped in a clarification that said that giving permission for the use of her words in no way indicated that she and Beyoncé’s feminisms were moving along the same track.

So people are angered by the backtracking and the condescension and the lack of acknowledgement by Adichie that she got plenty of mileage in allowing Beyonce to insert her words in her song. But really the whole thing is about being fed up with Adichie’s condescension.

Here are my thoughts:

Adichie’s responsibility to her audience is completely different from Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. Both may be in the public eye but Adichie is an intellectual and a woman of words. Someone whose philosophy cannot and should not be ignored. It is not a philosophy of entertainment that belongs to Beyoncé. The philosophy of entertainment allows all kinds of things that real life will not accommodate. For example, a woman in entertaining people may take her clothes off and bend over to show her crotch in front of a room full of people and they will clap and encore her. In real life, she cannot do this, she may be dragged off to an asylum.

If certain people do not like the fact that the artist has exposed herself, they don’t have to go to her show the next time, and if she really offends, she can pass it off as intrinsic in the licence of artistic expression. Not so Adichie. Even though she doesn’t have a very effective PR body advising her on how to manage the balance between the transience of celebrity and the more crucial creation of art and a strong body of ideas that will surely outlive her, she is still operating in real time, in real life where people do not react liberally or placidly to the showing of crotches and cleavages and erotic dancing. Even when people try to pretend that they have blurred the differences between entertainment and reality, we should not believe them. They are being false. Real life is real life and entertainment is entertainment. And we all understand that no matter what happens in the rooms of Big Brother Africa, the contestants have to go home.

Chimamanda Adichie. Photo source: MyCelebrityAndI

I do not like Beyoncé’s art nor her expression of it, but that is irrelevant because I don’t have to go and watch her or buy her records. More importantly, because she is an entertainer even if one who likes to include political material in her art, I don’t have to take anything she says to the bank. I don’t have to accept her philosophy of life and relationships. I don’t have to ascribe to my daughter sitting in a car and performing oral sex on a man and agree that this is liberal and open-minded. I don’t have to take her seriously at all. I don’t have to take a bat to a car. The agreement is that she is an entertainer and even if I am carried away by her beauty and power, and feel all hot and wonderful after her show, I don’t have to believe any of it. This is the contract of entertainment that exists but which people are attempting to falsely blur. Beyonce’s art is often about channelling pain and joys of relationships with men with very questionable language. The nudity, sexual language, and violence are in my opinion not powerful at all – not in any way about real power – and should be considered with great caution even in the realms of entertainment. But I am unwilling to tell people what to consider as entertainment. I love Billie Holiday’s music but on no account can I consider her doormat hood to husbands and lovers as expressed in her art as a sensible philosophy to life.

The contrast is that we cannot ignore Adichie. Not only because she carries enormous intellectual potential whether we like her or not, and possesses a great influence over generations of Nigerian women, but also because her views are daily being written down and concretised. She is a philosopher of real life in real time. More importantly, Adichie belongs to Nigeria and she is a beacon of that which is possible for the Nigerian woman. We cannot underestimate her worth nor her work. The attempts to disregard her are also a falsehood. Having said that, I must add that I dislike Adichie’s Americanah’s treatment of relationships between men and women. Her portrayals of traditional, non-“liberated” women in that work are uncharitable and tapered. Without a good balance of her art, her work, and her personal brand, she willingly inserts a fragility in her writing. Again I cannot take liberties in telling people how to live their lives. She can do what she wants. Adichie in the end is a powerful Nigerian intellectual with serious responsibilities.

In my opinion if Adichie informally retracted the permission she gave to Beyoncé to use her words in her song Flawless, then it was the right thing to do. Retrospectively, it is the right thing to do. If she never really gave it, then even better for Adichie’s ideas are in fact too good for Beyoncé’s entertainment. Too bad if Adichie did not know that, or if she saw it as an opportunity three years ago to get her words attention. If a person makes a decision one year then three years later changes that decision. That is what is called growth. And rather the person should be commended for growing and for changing their minds than castigated for speaking.

I will never pretend that I don’t change my mind.

The Yorùbá hold as sacred the head. That head has a mouth in it and each person has a head and a mouth. We can take this as a pointer towards individual thought and speech. We all have our irritating quirks, our mannerisms that rub people the wrong way, our crazy headless ideologies. We are all work in progress.

I am appalled that I can count on the fingers of one hand the people who stood up for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in a week of strong personal attacks against her from women like her, from women to feminists on social media. Not surprising, as a few weeks before that on Ikhide Ikheloa’s facebook page it was the annihilation of another woman, Abiodun Kuforiji Nkwocha, using language that made one’s mouth fall open in shock and disgust.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is not a friend, a relative, nor even an acquaintance that I bump into once a year. I did sit next to her for two weeks in 2012 during the Farafina’s Writers Workshop. I disagree with many of her ideas, as I am sure that she disagrees with mine. Yet I have a responsibility to look at her and say – this is a woman like myself, with her own traumas and challenges and insecurities. More flesh and blood than a feminist philosophy or tract. More present than BBOG or some vague profile of a woman who is a victim of domestic violence, or some powerless hungry hawker of a girl. She is a woman, a mother and a wife. One day her daughter might google in her name and find the hate and vitriol and ugliness spouted against her. It is self-preservation on my part. I don’t want my daughter to be the google-r and see that I am a grasshopper in a swarm of locust attacking one person by consensus – telling her she cannot speak her mind. My role as a woman is not to gag other women and take away their voice – whatever it sounds like. Debate(s) should, happen but not on vicious personal terms.

Why be the fighter for the rights of some faceless woman who I don’t know when I am going to be part of a mob rolling out the old tires and lighting a fire for burning another woman That I Do Know. If you do not like the woman, nor agree with her, is it possible to agree to disagree with decorum then let her be? I can determine that I find her tone arrogant but I don’t have to retaliate arrogance with arrogance. I can stay out of her way completely if it helps. I don’t even have to accept her philosophy for real life either. I don’t. Whatever my decision, it must be clear that like all tides things have a way of turning around.

I hope that if a mob does stand opposite me one day, someone will say “I know her, that lady that cooks moin moin on the internet. Let her be.”

____________

Yẹ́misí Aríbisálà is the author of a new memoir titled Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian tastebuds. (Cassava Republic, 2016)

In Pursuit of a Canon

One of the issues that came out of the conversation, yesterday, at the Q&A part of the Press Conference to announce the winner of the Nigeria (LNG) Prize for Literature is whether the judges on the award panel are too old to understand contemporary literature. It was an indirect hit in form of a question from one of the journalists in the room about the currency of the judges’ knowledge about current trends. But the chair of the advisory council, Professor Ayọ̀ Bánjọ, picked up the snark and addressed it fully, defending his team’s savvy and curiosity: “Because we’re old doesn’t mean that we don’t know what is going on. We try to keep up.” Or something to that effect.

But he also went on to suggest that the public make their work easier (if not also superfluous) by generating sufficient debate around each year’s long-listed (and shortlisted) works in order to enrich the canon with smart takes, appraisal, and criticism of each of the work during and after the process of the Prize announcement. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, If you don’t engage the work and create an industry of conversations around them and around the trade, we as judges, may be denied an opportunity to be familiar what is new, and we’d be forced instead to judge the works we are given by the standards with which we are familiar, which may not always be modern. It was both a humble cry for help and a smart take on the state of literary criticism in the country.

Perhaps aware of a criticism of the Prize as being rich in money but not in the elevation of the craft, Professor Bánjọ was throwing the challenge back to the community to not leave the important work of the whole process – criticism, which enhances the value of the work and engages the audience on a second level – to the judges alone. Notable was the fact that no one was rewarded this year with the prize for Literary Criticism which had always been a part of the annual award.

He has a point. Many writers who have won the Nigerian Prize – as also pointed out by another questioner – have gone into oblivion with no follow-up work, as if the cash payout of the award had delivered a knockout punch to their creative ability or drive. Certainly, the point can be made that if the work of past winners of such a prestigious prize do not gain more critical interest after such an honour, or increase in sales at the bookstores, or even show up in more quantity on book stands as a result of the award boost, the Prize would have failed in a major way. And what creates this kind of interest is not just the distribution of the books at the award ceremony as the NLNG already does, or a donation of copies to public libraries which is also a good thing, but a critical engagement by other writers and critics of each work as soon as the long list is made, and before/after the award winner is announced.

This is where the indictment of the community is deserved.

The Caine Prize is a much smaller prize in terms of cash reward, but has been deemed way more prestigious across the continent for its sustenance of critical conversation on African literary production though it only rewards writers working in the short story form. There is a couple of reasons for that. The prize has an active online engagement strategy that covers the continent, involves the writing community, and stays connected to the source of important conversations regarding the writers it shortlists. It also has an annual retreat/writer’s workshop in which writers are made to produce works that are then published as an annual anthology. It does this on a budget most likely smaller than that of a prize that awards $100k to an individual every year.

But perhaps more importantly, for the Caine Prize, is that writers and critics also pay attention to each shortlisted story, which are usually carefully reviewed online before the prize announcement. Notable among these annual exercises is the Caine Prize Blogathon founded by Aaron Bady through which interested critics take on each or all of the shortlisted stories each year, and review them individually and as against the criteria of the prize. I have been a part of this exercise since 2013 and enjoyed the process, which brings me much closer to the works than I would ordinarily have. We’d never know how much this annual exercise affects the decision of the judges, but responses to past editions of the Blogathon shows that the large literary community across the continent does pay attention to what is being said and how. It enriches the profession, helps the writers, benefits the readers interested in critical engagement, and makes the prize better.

We need the same for the Nigerian Prize for Literature. All shortlisted books should be made available for free – if possible – to interested reviewers for critical engagement on online and print platforms. Maybe it will make the prize better. But certainly, it will enrich the community of Nigerian readers, and writers.

The Nigerian Prize For Literature 2016: The Judges’ Report

Editor’s note: Today, at Sheraton Hotel, Ikẹjà, Lagos, the winner of the 2016 Nigeria Prize for Literature was announced as Abubakar Adam Ibrahim for his novel Season of Crimson Blossoms (Parressia, 2015) and for the “competent manner in which Ibrahim demonstrated the execution of his work.” Here is the full speech given by Emeritus Professor Ayọ̀ Bánjọ, the Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Prize, on the justification for the prize, and other commentary on the whole judging process.

_____________

__________

GENERAL COMMENTS ABOUT THE 2016 COMPETITION BY PROFESSOR AYỌ BÁNJỌ

The Nigeria Prize for Literature is an annual competition which awards annual prizes to winning entries in the literary genres of Prose Fiction, Drama, Poetry and Children’s Literature on a rotational basis.

This year, the genre in focus is Prose Fiction. The following advertised rules were applied during the process of short listing and selecting the winning entry.

Eligibility: The competition is open to all Nigerians anywhere in the world. This does not mean that writing about other peoples and cultures in a foreign setting is acceptable.

Relevance should be interpreted as consistency with the goals and aspirations of the Nigerian nation and its peoples – specifically, respect for their traditions and their identity as Africans.

Publishing: The prize is meant to encourage local publishing and book distribution, among other goals. Books published outside the country are eligible for entry. Only properly published texts are acceptable. However, efficient editing and good presentation of text are considered essential parts of publishing and are taken into account during the process of evaluation. The quality of the language is important, and errors of style and grammar are considered major blemishes; these errors may not pass as typographical errors.

Genre: for this year’s competition, a basic distinction is drawn between fiction – that is imaginative prose which may incorporate factual materials and non-fiction like history, biography and sociological tracts which sometimes feature in the submissions for the competition.

This year’s completion has attracted a strong field with such high quality that even without this current shortlist of 3 books there would have still been a winner.

COMMENTS ON SHORTLIST OF THREE BOOKS

All the three shortlisted texts cover a wide range of urgent societal and cultural issues such as the status of women in a patriarchal society, the education of youths, the search for identity, the danger of youth unemployment, corruption, insurgency, religious hypocrisy, migration, broken homes and single parenthood and attendant impact on women and children who are usually at the receiving end of most of these problems.

Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer, tells the familiar story of the continuing marginalization of women in Igbo society. The author shows a strong awareness of this context by the flavoring of the narrative with linguistic and cultural insertions. The novel tells the story of Mma, a young woman’s anguished search for her roots from the opening of the novel when she feels that she has been denied by her mother, until she gradually discovers that her mother had been deeply hurt by both her matrimonial and maiden families. In the course of Mma’s adventures in excavating her identity and her mother’s past, she is predictably confronted by the same cultural inhibitions that her mother had rebelled against. Mma’s own denunciation of those traditions and her belated adulation of a mother she had despised at the beginning of the novel is a slow and painful process of discovering the truth of her family background, and a radical change in her perception and understanding of this background. All this is aimed at validating Unigwe’s passionate call for the extension of the frontiers of women’s space in society.
Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday is a book about contemporary Northern Nigerian Society as seen through the eyes of a young man. The narrative is told from within a deviant community seen through the first person consciousness of street boys, popularly described as al-majiri. Virtually abandoned by parents and community the young boy, who tells the story in his own words, finds his survival through a brotherhood of other street boys. Their small outcast community is exploited by politicians and the brutally victimized as scapegoats by law enforcement agencies. They inevitably patronized and taken over by leaders of religious sects and become a source of recruitment terrorist groups. One of the strong points of the novel is its insight into the social mechanisms that lead to national crisis and terrorism or the social processes that give rise to religious fundamentalism and political hypocrisy, corruption and exploitation.

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms is a very skillful and sympathetic narrative handling of a most psychologically and emotionally painful between an aging widow, who seeks release from her culturally imposed sexual repression, and a young outcast leader of a group of “weed” – i.e. hard drug – dealers who are ready thugs for politicians. In the background as immediately cause of the widow’s troubles, is the violent history of ethnic hatred and conflicts in Jos, placed within the larger context of contemporary Nigerian history with its complex and sometimes violent intertwining of politics, religion and culture. The novel moves from its evocative and passionate first sentence through a web of anxious moments to a tragic and painful conclusion with hardly a moment of respite. All through its projects through is main action, the implications of certain key social issues for younger audience – key issues such as early marriage, drug abuse and impact of relationships on human action. It is a novel whose narrow domestic action has wider universal relevance beyond its relevance for its immediate setting.

On behalf of the advisory board of the Nigeria Prize for Literature and of the judges and international consultant, I have the pleasure of announcing as the winner of this year’s entry, Season of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim.

________

The award ceremony will take place early next year.

Jakande Unclothed

Driving by the Jákàńdè area of Lekki (5th roundabout) on Sunday, I noticed a few people with placards at the roundabout standing around with signs like “this is a peaceful protest, leave us alone here” or something to that effect. Behind them was a stretch of destruction that looked like a heavy storm had just passed through. (I’ve been to aftermaths of real life tornadoes, so I know). Behind them lay piles of debris as far as the eyes could see from the roundabout, made of brown roofing sheets and wood.

Before now, that area always looked a little too crowded, too dense, too unplanned to have been housing anything legitimately sanctioned by the state. But as we usually do to things that seemed out of place but seemed to satisfy those immediately concerned, we look away and assume that someone somewhere knows what they are doing. It seems, now, that the government has finally come to pay attention to the area. Now, after removing the shanty that had grown out of the space into a community of sex workers, touts, homeless vagrants, and other Lagosians of little means, what emerges is an open land seemingly ripe for some decent development.

This is probably the story of much of Lekki, anyway: a stretch of fresh land occupied by small communities of people now suddenly discovered by bigger powers with big equipment and big money ready to expand and develop the area for commercial purposes. The spot where the Jákàndè Circle Mall now stands used to be a shanty as well. Same with Márọ̀kọ́ at Sandfill which has now become a modern plaza with a big hotel. In all cases, after the owners of the land are compensated, a bigger human cost arises in the displacement of hundreds to whom these areas are all is left of home.

I wondered while driving through the beach road yesterday what the real cost would end up being. So far, we already have regular cases of carjacking and traffic robbery in early mornings and late evenings. There have also been kidnappings. According to the state government, these shanties are the real causes of such violence as they hide criminals who use them as springboards and hiding places. Demolishing their home and kicking them out would reduce violence and allow free passage of people. There is some allure in that thinking. Past upgrade of hitherto crime-ridden places in the state and the corresponding success in their removal of crime has shown the success of such an endeavour. Plenty spaces under abandoned bridges have been turned into public parks with lighting and security, making them easy to walk under at night without incident. But still, rendering homeless hundreds of residents at just 72 hours’ notice will no doubt have its own consequences. As I tried to read the despondence on the faces of all those I saw sitting around the open spaces, I wondered what those consequences would be in the long run.

But in this case, unlike that of the demolition of the national monument at Lagos Island or other cases still under the outrage of surprised owners angry at the state’s seeming high-handed behaviour in destroying them, there seems to be an overwhelming public interest. But unless something of relevance is erected in this spot, all these gains will be lost soon enough. A sustained involvement in the redevelopment of the now levelled area would be a welcome event indeed.

Across the West African Coast: Ghana

By Yẹmí Adésànyà

It was work that dragged me across the coast of West Africa in delightful week-long bouts of adventure, each country exhuming different parts of me long hidden beneath the lacquer of a time-guzzling occupation. Some ports were more enchanting than others, workload and available time was not equally indulging, and thus my impressions are naturally skewed in favour of cities where my schedule permitted extra-metier experiences.

My journey started with Ghana, a colonial sibling of beloved Nigeria. Accra felt just like home: a buzzing commercial centre, invoking the unfortunately familiar and tiring spirit of boisterous vehicular traffic congestion, co-witnessed by hardworking street hawkers. My hotel was only a stone throw from the office, in Ring Road; there was not much time to play, I therefore did not see much of Accra. Ring Road is largely a business district, but my daily commute offered a view of the residence of one of the top opposition politicians, with campaign banners and billboards clearly marking his territory. So one might say the area is partly residential too.

Any city that reminds me of Lagos meets with a kind of languid resignation and apathy, the kind in which I steeped for the duration of my visit. I got a lousy shot of the state house (although my driver was not sure it was safe to take these photographs) and a stationary armored tank, but no other sense of adventure or curiosity was piqued in me. I made a mental note to opt for a hotel in a different part of town when next I visit, as I prefer relatively less densely populated spaces, with minimal noise. I was later rewarded on one of these trips with two West African cities that felt like heaven to my Lagos-suffused soul.

An interest that seemed of inexplicable significance, to my lunch buddy anyway, was a matter of immense national pride which I had made a mental note of witnessing, and documenting my observation and verdict. Many Nigerians have taken part in at least one light-hearted debate on the staple continental dish – Jollof Rice – and I had too, before my trip to Accra. I thought the Nigerian Jollof was better, just because, of course, but I had no objective evidence in favour of my bias. I had ample experience with the Nigerian flavor, and wanted to taste the Ghanaian, to have some closure. Well, I achieved that.

During my week-long desk-bound sojourn in the city, I was condemned to a food-evader’s utopia of monotonous lunch at the Swiss School, chiefly because it was close to the office, plus time did not permit any exploration anyway. I ate Jollof Rice in Ghana, and it was flat, and unlike the pill Posner took in Ibiza, no high followed. It was the second most unjollofesque rice I have ever eaten. Almost completely tasteless, inadequately seasoned, and what it lacked in tomatoes and salt, it made up for in excess pepper. As if that was not enough disappointment, the Zobo drink I enjoyed with my first lunch had taken on a more pungent taste by day two. Zobo − the popular drink made by boiling dried calyxes of the hibiscus plant flower−is big in Ghana, I was told by my colleague. What he forgot to mention was that it is not always harmless. The variant I was served on the second day shocked my palate to astringent displeasure and reminded me of the need to pay a closer attention to food labels in the future. Spicy ginger does not belong in Zobo drink!

I left Accra with a memento from the Ghana Art Centre market; a Djembe drum, delightful to my little music maker, and a regular reminder that one can sometimes find pleasure in interruption.

« Older Entries Newer Entries »