Celebrating African and Diaspora Literatures: Of Canons, Poetry, and Walcott

Two "Africas", Canonization and the Immediate Futture of African Literary Studies: Random Reflections By Pius Adesanmi;  The State of Verse by Gabeba Baderoon;  An Evening with Derek Walcott By Nduka Otiono

 

Two "Africas", Canonization and the Immediate Futture of African Literary Studies: Random Reflections By Pius Adesanmi

 

Let me confess to a dilemma. I once authored an essay entitled, “Europhonism, Universities and Other Stories: How Not to Speak for the Future of African Literatures”[i], in which I took Ngugi wa Thiong’o to task for making what was, in my view, meretricious projections into the future of African literature and scholarship in an essay he had published in Research in African Literatures.[ii] Now that fate has played a fast one by putting me in a position in which I must make projections into the future of African studies, albeit through literature, I can only hope that the glass house I built – and from which I must now hurl stones into the future – would remain intact at the end of the exercise! That said, it is tempting to ask the organizers why the year 2020 has been selected as the temporal destination of the proleptic analysis we have been asked to undertake with regard to the nature and shape of African (ist) knowledge production. After all, regnant intellectual orthodoxies have been known to be so resilient as to invite the obvious question: are a decade and three years enough time span to imagine the very possibility of seismic shifts that would make the field of African studies radically different from what it is today by the year 2020?

 

The trajectory of knowledge production in the specific field of modern African literatures is a good indication of the resilience of certain modes of engaging literary texts since the inception of the field in the first half of the 20^th century. The emergence of Négritude poetry – and its enabling philosophy and ideology in the Black Paris context of the 1930s - is, arguably, the most significant development in Francophone African literary and critical production. After the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal essay, “Orphée noir”, Negrutidinist and/or Negritude-informed analyses of Francophone African literatures and cultures became the inevitable backcloth of Francophonic production of knowledge. It didn’t matter whether writers and critics agreed or disagreed with Negritude; it didn’t matter whether some – like Stanislas Adotévi and the Anglophones, Wole Soyinka and Eskia Mpahlele – became quasi-professional disparagers of the current; what seemed insurmountable was a certain Négritudinist literary and cultural ambience into which succeeding generations of Francophone African writers and critics were conscripted.

 

Indeed, the more dissenters declared Négritude passé, the more its shadow has continued to loom over that branch of African studies we refer to as Francophone African literatures. The advent of a new form of novelistic corpus produced by writers born mostly after 1960 or in the 1960s – the era of African independence – has not significantly moved the production of knowledge in the Francophonic context beyond the Négritudinist aura; those new writers, according to the Franco-Djiboutian novelist Abdourahman Ali Waberi, can be described as “les enfants de la postcolonie” (children of the postcolony). When France-based writers (and writing!) as far removed from Négritude as Waberi, Calixthe Beyala, Fatou Diome, Kossi Effoui, Daniel Biyaoula, and those based in the United States, such as Alain Mabanckou and Natalie Etoke are ‘discoursed’ as “migritude writers”, what better proof that Négritude critique has merely morphed into the concerns of contemporary postcolonial and postmodernist criticism by instrumentalizing migrancy and Diaspora, two inescapable staples in the production of contemporary knowledge?

 

With regard to the Anglophone African scenario, the language question offers a parallel window into the longevity/atavism of certain hermeneutic protocols in the field of African literary studies. The details are by now sufficiently familiar: Obiajunwa Wali’s 1963 essay, “The Dead End of African Literature?”, presaging the identitarian preoccupations of contemporary postcolonial and cultural theorizing, placed a question mark on the identity, authenticity, and, I daresay, ontology of the literatures produced in the European languages of conquest and dehumanization. The ensuing polemic, which involved such luminaries as Chinua Achebe, Gerald Moore, and Eskia Mpahlele among several others, provided the crucial inflatus for the theoretical bifurcation that subsequently pitched nativists/traditionalists against modernists in an increasingly variegated field of knowledge. The tensions between these two positions, anchored on such issues as the very definition of African literature, the conditions and modalities of its production, have maintained an astounding topicality: as recently as 2005, Abiola Irele, eminent African literary critic, entitled his keynote address delivered at the African Literature Association’s conference in Boulder, “What is African Literature?”  Ngugi wa Thiong’o has, of course, sustained the language debate as originally framed by Wali to the present day. As the whirlwind of postcolonial theory spread across literature programmes in North America, the language question, like Négritude, found its entry point in the Prospero-Caliban equation and was quietly recast around issues of authenticity, otherness, and identity.

 

It should be obvious from this snapshot that the discursive strategies and agendas of modern African literary studies have largely been shaped by hermeneutic strategies that have lasted since the 1930s - in the case of Negritude, and the 1960s - in the case of the language question. Given this scenario, my initial question regains its pertinence: do we have sufficient indications that the next thirteen years on the road to 2020 could produce the sort of discursive tsunami required to reshape the field and make it radically different from what obtains today?

 

In attempting to answer this question, we should bear in mind that the perennity of the models of engagement that have shaped the nature of African literary scholarship is due largely to the fact that Négritude and linguistic nativism are both products of the same Urtext: the physical, psychic, and epistemic violence of Africa’s historical encounter with the West as evidenced by slavery and colonialism. Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost and Caroline Elkins’s Imperial Reckoning provide two of the most recent and compelling historical accounts of the violence of encounter, and offer sufficient insights into why encounter and its heirs in the present have become such formidable loci of creative and critical energies. Sylvia Wynter has also averred that the modernity, which governed this violent encounter, is akin to a game in which all the cards have been dealt beforehand against the African. So long as Africans feel interpellated to renegotiate the terms of engagement, so long as African literary studies continues to instrumentalize the past – not only as a window into the sources of the modern African self but as a valid prism for engaging the creative text – it is safe to aver that the topoi may expand to engage such issues as transnationalism, globalization, post-humanism, and ecocriticism: the informing Urtext will remain relevant in 2020 and beyond.

 

This brings us to the question of what could change. Recent developments in Nigerian literature could provide a sufficiently reliable gauge of possible directions in African literary studies. Any serious follower of Nigerian letters would have become familiar with the following names in the last seven years: Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, Helon Habila, Uzodinma Iweala, Segun Afolabi, and Helen Oyeyemi. All accomplished novelists within the fold of Nigeria’s third generation writers, they have come to represent, for the literary public in the West, the only face of new Nigerian writing. The North American academy is, however, not as generous as the wider public. As far as institutional attention is concerned, this already very short list of writers is further reduced to three names: Abani, Adichie, and Habila. Thus Abani’s Graceland, Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and, lately, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Habila’s Waiting for an Angel have enjoyed a surfeit of critical attention in the last couple of years in conferences and other academic circuitries.

 

We may pause to ask: what do Abani, Adichie, Habila, and all the aforementioned writers have in common? They are based in Euro-America and their works, published by Western concerns, move essentially within Western modes of valuation, appreciation, and dissemination. A new Nigerian ‘canon’ has thus surreptitiously emerged and the Nigerian literary establishment has been wholly marginal to its constitution. This has largely been a canon from above, constituted in the United States and Britain, and news about it, thankfully, trickles down to Nigeria! The silences and elisions of this new canon are ominous. An ever expanding corpus of third generation novels published in Nigeria, such as Akin Adesokan’s Roots in the Sky, Maik Nwosu’s Invisible Chapters, Bina Ilagha’s Condolences, and Dulue Mbachu’s War Games, has largely passed unnoticed. This is, however, the least of the problems posed by this extraneous canon. It creates the false impression that the novel is the genre of predilection in new Nigerian writing. Since the mid-1980s, poetry has been the principal mode of generational expression with poets like Ogaga Ifowodo, Uche Nduka, Chiedu Ezeanah, Remi Raji, Lola Shoneyin, Afam Akeh, Obi Nwakanma, Obu Udeozor, and Amatoristero Ede being the arrowheads of a veritable poetic effervescence.

 

The emergence of this Euro-American contrived ‘canon’ of new Nigerian writing, the consequent false picture it presents, and the reactive praxes it has engendered in Nigeria all speak to certain fundamental issues that continue to overdetermine the nature of knowledge production in African studies at the moment and are likely to continue to do so through 2020 and beyond. First is the question of a seemingly unbridgeable gulf – Achille Mbembe calls it a “rift” – between the “Africa” of North American African studies and the “Africa” of African studies in the continent. This disconnect is so serious that those of us who move back and forth between the continent and North America always have the nagging feeling of teaching and researching two entirely different, unrelated African literatures, two parallel critical discourses depending on where one is located at a particular point in time. My colleague, Paul Zeleza, has done remarkable work in the area of the diasporalization of African studies and may have more insights in the course of this symposium.

 

Because this disconnect was produced and modulated by the unequal terms through which Africa was ushered into the regime of modernity, it goes without saying that the two different “Africas” of African studies exist in an asymmetrical power relationship. In a cruel, ironic twist of history, the expatriate “Africa” of North American African studies – with its crop of privileged African and non-African scholars – has effectively become the center, the very “Empire” it purports to deconstruct, operating its own hegemonic relationship with the “Africa” of its continental counterpart. Like its predecessor, this new Empire pretty much treats Africa and continental African (ist) scholarship as sites of discursive raw materials. Colleagues based in the continent and their scholarly productions are surreptitiously consigned into the native informant category. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the current field of literary studies were, as I have noted, a Euro-American “canon” of new Nigerian writing has emerged at a complete remove from, and in utter disregard, of trends in literary discourse and scholarship in Nigeria.

 

What are the enabling conditions of this schism and why are they likely to persist through 2020 and beyond? Beyond the familiar explanations of Western privilege, resources and, consequently, power, we must address the question of how modalities of professional valuation in Western African Studies – literature in the present case – impede any meaningful conversation between the two “Africas”. Rare are African literature programmes at the graduate level in North America that insist on any real familiarity with continental trends and developments. It is still largely possible for a doctoral candidate working on new Nigerian literatures to select texts from the North American “canon” of new Nigerian works, attend one or two meetings of the African Literature Association, and produce a ‘postcolonial’ dissertation ensconced in a theoretical pot-pourri prepared with the aid of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Timothy Brennan, Edward Said, Judith Butler, and Paul Gilroy. Hegel, Nietzsche, Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Slavoj Zizek, and Giorgio Agamben are of course regularly invited to aid the first set of theorists. Between an externally constituted canon and an extraneous theory, two decades of generational literary discourse and theorizing in Nigeria are swept under the carpet. Nothing would institutionally compel our hypothetical doctoral candidate to immerse himself in the Ibadan and Nsukka of the 1980s and 1990s – the physical and temporal cradle of the new writing.

 

The scenario is even worse at the junior faculty level in upper crust research universities. Procedures of evaluation on the road to tenure tend to place an unhealthy emphasis on the following: publication of articles in peer reviewed journals based in the West; publication of the tenure book in University presses based in the West; attendance of the “big meetings”, a euphemism for African literature conferences in the West. It is of course possible for this junior faculty to continue to churn out articles based exclusively on African creative and critical works published in the West without serious institutional mechanisms in place to insist on an infusion of works published in the continent into this hypothetical research trajectory. It is within the interstices of these scenarios that a largely superficial, North American “Africa” emerges, continually reproducing and reinforcing itself. But this “Africa” is a curious mix of Baudrillardian simulation and simulacrum, continuously performing an Africa that is not institutionally compelled to even listen to the real thing thousands of miles away.

 

Is a thirteen-year span sufficient to alter this state of affairs? I am no Barack Obama and there are serious limitations to the audacity of my hope. Suffice it to say, however, that Nigeria’s literati and culturati back home have not just been passive, complacent spectators in the scheme of things. Indeed, the ferocity of their resistance to the canon of new Nigerian letters constructed in Euro-America and the attendant affects of discourse that has devolved therefrom are safe latitudes for projecting into the future of African literary studies. If pre- and post-independence writing and cultural discourse in Britain’s erstwhile colonies constitute a deconstructive process of “writing back”, as Salman Rushdie and, later, the authors of The Empire Writes Back, have assured us, the new discourses that have animated the Nigerian literary scene in the last decade point to an interesting development. The postcolony is “writing back” at the hegemonic “Africa” of Euro-American African studies. While the merits of Nigerian works published abroad by writers based in Euro-America are not frequently questioned; while the success of every novel that has won an international prize has been deservedly celebrated at home, the modalities of their canonization in North America and Europe are consistently questioned and justifiably resisted. Resistance to the codes of African literary studies that we do here in Euro-America is so ferocious that not even third generation critics like myself have been spared the ire of home-based literary practitioners. We are constantly accused of haughtiness, love of foreign literary idioms, and ignorance of “developments at home”. Nigerian writers based in Euro-America are disqualified from entering their works for the NGLG Nigerian Prize for Literature. If location outside of Nigeria is sufficient to disqualify a Nigerian writer from a pan-Nigerian literary prize, it is easy to surmise that the struggle to define Nigerian literature will take us through 2020 and beyond.

 

Differing understandings and theorizations of Diaspora, migrancy, and expatriation will doubtless, inflect this struggle. For those of us who traffic in North American poco-pomo (postcolonial and postmodernist theorizing), these concepts, in their intersections with the Black Atlantic, will always evoke the tensions and dilemmas of arrival, hybridity, memory, loss, home, and deracination. For those based at home, the same concepts are increasingly read as indices of flight, selling out, abandonment, unabashed partaking of Western privilege, hence the resentment and hostility.  Will the two “Africas” produced by these disparate experiences - the one hegemonic, self-sufficient, extraneous, and forever navel-gazing and the other supposedly authentic, nativist, and resentful – be able to hold a meaningful conversation at the site of literary studies by the year 2020? This symposium will provide answers; perhaps.

 

[i] Adesanmi, Pius. “Europhonism, Universities and Other Stories: How Not to Speak for the Future of African Literatures.” Palavers of African Literatures: Essays in Honor of Bernth Lindfors, Vol.1. Eds. Toyin Falola and Barbara Harlow. Trenton, NJ.: Africa World Press, 2002. 105-136.

 

[ii] Ngugi wa Thiong’o. “Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship.” Research in African Literatures 31.1(Spring 2000): 1-11.

 

The State of Verse by Gabeba Baderoon

 

In 2006, South Africa’s poets and writers drew the attention of the rest of the African continent and the world.  The poet Lebo Mashile received the 2006 Noma Award for African Publishing for her debut collection In a Ribbon of Rhythm. South Africans also took home the Commonwealth Prize (Africa region) for a first novel, Maxine Case’s All We Have Left Unsaid and best novel, Shaun Johnson’s The Native Commissioner.  In a year full of excellent new poetry, Rustum Kozain was justly awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize for best poetry debut of 2006, and Mary Watson received the Caine Prize for African Writing for 2006.  Also in 2006, its inaugural year, the Cape Town Book Fair drew a massive 26,000 visitors to its roster of readings and, a healthy trade among publishers.

 

All the evidence show that South African writing is flourishing. The year 2007 promises equally good news.  Demonstrating that South Africa has grown beyond an insular view of poetry, Kwela/Snailpress is publishing a new collection by the Nigerian poet Tanure Ojaide this year, as well as a collection in Afrikaans by Loit Sols.  With support from the government, poetry in languages other than English and Afrikaans, a rare occurrence until now, is increasingly being published. The Centre for the Book, associated with the National Library of South Africa, is helping to ensure that under-served genres such as poetry and playwriting are being published and reaching the bookshelves. 

 

This diverse range of languages, styles and topics is generating new writing.  At the local level, reading and writing groups, open mic sessions and reading series, competitions and literature festivals make for a vibrant poetry scene in big cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town and even in small towns.  Every arts festival in the country now has a poetry festival as well.  The 33-year old Grahamstown Arts Festival includes the well-regarded Wordfest in July.  Writers from all over the world are eager to be invited to the Spier festival in Cape Town in February, curated by Antjie Krog, and Durban’s Poetry Africa in October, run by Peter Rorvik.  Franschhoek’s new literary festival drew Mary Watson, Ingrid de Kok, Maxine Case and Rustum Kozain to its lineup in its first year.  The University of Cape Town runs a much-admired MA in Creative Writing, which has generated several prize-winning novels.  Witwatersrand University’s MA in Writing is not far behind, with preeminent poets among its graduates, including Makhosazana Xaba, about whom more below.

 

What new landscape is poetry drawing?  An engaged one, a tender one, on in which race joins economics in a complicated new set of realities, a feminist one, and one which is sexually expressive in ways that subvert entrenched assumptions about men and women.  Read Makhosazana Xaba’s These Hands for love that is sensual, surprising and political. Xaba’s publisher is the heroic and multi-talented poet Vonani Bila, whose Timbila Poetry Project is a national treasure, and whose own collections and music are essential for any library of South African poetry. The pleasurable and surprising collection of Afrikaans poetry edited by Charl-Pierre Naude, My Ousie is ‘n Blom, confounds ideas of stilted verse and includes Black Afrikaans writers in its impressive lineup. The idea of a political love is one that speaks directly to South Africa’s contemporary and historical realities, because in South Africa politics is no less urgent thirteen years after the democratic transformation.  To love, to include, to forgive, to be tender toward – what more political questions can there be in post-apartheid South Africa?

 

There is an another side to this promising picture.  Economics is the undertow pulling at these successes.  South Africans cannot afford to buy books in the quantities that create sufficient publishing opportunities for the burgeoning interest in writing.  As a result, new writers struggle to become noticed among the flood of manuscripts that reach publishers every day, with only a small percentage selected for publication.  Illiteracy, apartheid’s ongoing legacy, abruptly removes millions of South Africans from the reach of books. Those who can afford to buy books face the competition of multi-modal technologies like the internet and a global culture for which the slow, interior pleasures of reading holds a receding appeal.

 

Despite these realities, the successes described above are clearly resisting the undertow.  The Nielsen ratings of book sales in South Africa show a significant increase in the numbers of South African books sold in South Africa.  There is an undoubted excitement among audiences about local themes that is giving impetus to a vital writing culture.  Here are some thoughts on how to sustain this pattern of achievement.

 

We need to write poetry tuned to the outer reaches of our reality.  We need to surprise ourselves, the way Sello Duiker did with his novels before his impossibly young death.  I recently heard the Indonesian writer Nukila Amal read her work.  She combines memories of stories told at night by her grandmother about the landscape of the Moluccas where she was born, the mesmerizing language of the Qur’an, legends of the medicine women who used to rule the islands, and produces mesmerizing new writing that sounds hundreds of years old.  What stories are our ears tuned to?  What sadnesses and stories receding behind the loud music of global television tug at our dreams, asking to be told?

 

There are new kinds of visibility and institutional support for poetry. New writing is often choked off by the need for writers to earn a living by doing other things, like teaching, journalism or editing and translation for example.  The brief chance to do nothing but write is a precious and far too rare thing.  South Africa’s great wealth should be measured in terms of its support of new art. 

 

Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa’s Poet Laureate for 2007, will be a powerful ambassador for the art, yet there is room for more such positions at different levels – City Poets, for instance. Imagine a City Poet of Cape Town; and one of Johannesburg.  What writing might emerge from someone whose task is to live in, walk amongst and write in a place?;  write a place?  Other institutions like universities can support Writing Fellowships.  Festivals can appoint a Writer in Residence, as Poetry International in London has done in its naming of Lemn Sissay this year.

 

Translation is one of the great gifts that writers can give one another, and the world.  This is a massive need, and also an opportunity in South Africa. The English that I speak has been shaped by Arabic, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Khoi and San languages, German and French, and includes sounds not known in British English or American English.  Such sounds are more familiar in the English spoken in Egypt, Indonesia and Nigeria.  Examples come close to home.  The several layers of gutturals that constitute my name are the sounds of words spoken in the presence of other languages.

 

On the more practical level, we also need books that are better produced.  Judging by the covers of Jeremy Cronin’s More than a Casual Contact and Antjie Krog’s Body Bereft/Verweerskrif, the design teams at many South African publishers have been doing an exquisite job.  Recent books are a pleasure to regard, touch, page through.  Some, however, do their authors no justice.  Spelling errors on the imprint page muddle the impact of collections that are heavy on translation.  Is the surprising mis-spelling a deliberate artistic choice, or a typo?  This is not the kind of question we should have to ask when reading bold new writing. Editing is a crucial and necessary skill we need to nurture in the book industry.  In fact, I have come to believe that the word “No” is one of the most valuable responses we authors can hear.  This is a hard-earned insight that has come from personal experience.  Two of my books have been published by the same team of editors and publishers at Kwela/Snailpress, with whom I have developed a perfectly attuned, mutually respectful relationship.  And yet, I have had a collection turned down by them.  In retrospect, this was the right decision.  Each new collection should be a quantum leap in quality and imagination compared to the previous one, so Nelleke de Jager and Gus Ferguson at K/S tell me.  Their “No” will lead to patience, a fine-tuning of my writer’s ear, reworking of existing pieces and hopefully better new writing from me.

 

In the 1980s, in-between spells in Apartheid prisons, Jeremy Cronin read his poems to students at Livingstone High School and left an indelible memory of his young, generous voice in the corridors of this 80-year old school.  I was one of the students who heard him read.  The experience shaped my sense of poetry, politics and love.  Twenty years later, I have also been asked to read my work and teach the writing of poetry at schools.  I would love this to become a regular practice - a way to bring students into contact with writers and writing, and for writers to bring their presence to the often-bare walls of schools today.

 

Because writing is silent and interior, what better place to teach it than in the besieged teenage years, when reflection and stillness are almost banished by the tyranny of outward appearances, inequality, the threat of physical danger, and the mental noise of consumerism. Poetry goes on writing its scenes of political love.

 

An Evening with Derek Walcott By Nduka Otiono

 

It is not often that one finds a locale that provides a perfect setting for a poetry reading. Framed by woods and hills, the scenic forty-eight acre Walnut Hill campus located in Natick, a suburban town of some 35,000 people seventeen miles west of Boston, is one such setting. It was inside The Jane Oxford Keiter Performing Arts Centre at the 114-year old Walnut Hill, the oldest secondary arts school in the United States of America, that I first met Derek Walcott, the West Indian-born, Boston-based Nobel laureate for Literature on the evening of Thursday, April 26, 2007. And there couldn’t be a better personality to introduce us than Askold Melnyckuz, a suave, unassuming Ukrainian-American writer and professor at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Boston where I have been a Fellow at the William Joiner Center for War and Social Consequences. Although he is in his middle age, there is something at once ancient and modern about Askold that speaks of an eclectic mind so vast in cultural history you wouldn’t know when you had begun to depend on him as a treasured guide. More so in Boston, perhaps America’s intellectual capital, where as a student thirty years ago, he founded AGNI, an acclaimed literary journal, and has been an official of PEN International Boston chapter as well as cultivating a vast network of literary contacts and uncanny familiarity with the most important cultural spots.

 

We arrived at Natick some one and half hours to the reading partly because we needed time to locate Walnut Hill, being first time visitors. Besides, Askold wanted us to meet Walcott, his old teacher and friend at Boston University, in the saner moments before guests swarmed the hall and had the better of the 76-year old writer. We were a threesome; the other writer being Etnairis Rivera, award-winning Puerto Rican author of ten books of poetry and professor at the University of Puerto Rico. She was visiting Boston as a facilitator of a writing workshop organized as part of the annual Hispanic Writers’ Week, and also to launch Return to the Sea, her first collection of poetry translated into English by Erica Mena and published by Arrowsmith Press -- championed by Askold.

 

It was not long after we got into the Keiter theatre, Walcott arrived, escorted by Daniel Bosch, Director of the Writing Studio at Walnut Hill and also a former student of Walcott’s who had invited Askold. Their faces lit up on sighting Askold. “Hey…” Walcott’s voice floated across the hall as we rose from the front row of seats to meet him stepping carefully down the stairs. Tall and wearing a rather bohemian blue jeans trousers, a dark blazer over a white shirt and tie, and a pair of brown shoes, perhaps the most remarkable thing about him was his graying thick-set signature moustache. There was an air of casualness about him that seemed to advertise “the ordinariness of life” which has become a recurrent trope in his writing.

 

“Hi Derek,” said Askold as we caught up with the Guest Writer of the evening who had been promoted as coming to read from and signing Selected Poems, his latest volume of poems from Farrar Straus and Giroux.

 

I haven’t seen you in a long while,” he said to Askold as they exchanged pleasantries.

 

This is Nduka Otiono; he is a very fine writer from Nigeria and a visiting Fellow at the Joiner Centre at UMass…”

 

Askold had hardly finished introducing me when Walcott asked if I knew his friend Wole Soyinka, also a Nigerian and the Black world’s first Nobel laureate for Literature.

 

“Of course,” I replied.

 

“Better say the truth now,” Walcott jocularly said, “because I’ll ask him. We were together recently.”

 

“Sure, how could I not when I had been the General Secretary of the writers’ guild in Nigeria for four years,” I responded, regretting at once having fallen for Walcott’s good-humoured prank which he was soon to reinforce.

 

“And this is Etnairis Rivera, another good poet from Puerto Rico whose new collection of poems we are launching on Sunday at Cambridge under Arrowsmith imprint,” Askold said as Walcott extended his right hand to shake hers, his eyes engaging her like a beautiful poem he would love to write.

 

“I am glad to meet you,” retorted Etna, flashing a girlish smile as we posed for quick photographs with the author of Omeros, one of the most remarkable poetry books of the twentieth century.

 

“Do you know Sir, a friend of mine in Nigeria loves your work so much he always calls you fondly, ‘The Homer of Saint Lucia’?” I asked rhetorically, recalling the near hero-worshipping by Chiedu Ezeanah, a highly regarded new generation Nigerian poet and friend of mine at the University of Ibadan who was so enamored of Walcott he did his Master’s dissertation on his works. I remembered how Chiedu would reverently open the pages of Omeros reverently, like a bible, sharing Walcott’s mischievous lines such as “Women smell better than books” (or “libraries”—I can’t quite recall the exact lines now).

 

“Oh, I’m glad you haven’t said ‘homo’,’’ Walcott said playfully yet again with a youthful accent, sending us all into another fit of laughter.

 

“Of course not,” I defended once more, regrettably. At that point he had become time conscious, realizing the need, like the playwright and director that he is too, to review the stage for the evening’s reading. He motioned to Bosch to lead him to the stage.

 

Shortly afterwards the hall was filled with a mixed audience of young and older people and it was Bosch’s duty to introduce Walcott for the evening. He spoke about how privileged he had been to be Walcott’s student and young friend at Boston University, and how knowing the great poet had been a passport in those days to sharing spaces with such eminent contemporaries of his as Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney—both of whom were also awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. “It’s only in Walcott’s car that a young boy like me would in those days talk to the back of Brodsky’s head while the poet was driven to the airport,” Bosch recalled ending on how truly privileged the audience in the 343-seater theatre was, having Walcott for the evening.

 

The Head of the school later gave a short speech, the high point of which was the announcement that Walcott had accepted his appointment to the Arts Advisory Board of the elite institution. The applause to the news heralded the reading by the author of nearly two dozen high quality books comprising poetry, plays and a book of essays.

 

Walcott prefaced his reading that evening with critical comments. A writer of two worlds—Caribbean and the American—he began by contemplating social practices in the latter.  He noted that the US is a country that encourages stardom. Hence “one has to be cautious so that one doesn’t get tempted to the wrong kind of reputation.” He was quick to add a rider though: “Well, poetry doesn’t offer that kind.” The hall erupted in laughter. He continued, arguing that “poetry should try to reclaim fiction as much as possible,” a view that a Walnut Hill student was to successfully challenge during the question and answer session at the end of his reading, forcing Walcott to admit that the idea actually made him ponder “the unnecessary existence of the prose poem.”

 

In quick succession the poet who has established a reputation for unusually short readings read from his new Selected Poems, edited, and with a short Introduction by Edward Baugh. Walcott read for one hour, during which he held the audience captive, his voice reverberating with the experience of a man who was ageing gracefully like old wine.

 

The repartee at the end of the reading further enriched the evening’s cultural experience. Walcott was made to ventilate his life and art. He recalled his times with Brodsky and Heaney, averring that they were “friends without envy and jealousy.” Instead, they shared their works, benefiting from one another’s craft. “I am a sponge,” he confessed at some point in his response to a question, “I take from anybody. I am open to ideas…”

 

He was full of nostalgia as he traced his beginnings in the island of Saint Lucia, saying: “I knew what I wanted from childhood because of my mother—who was a widow, her husband having died early at 30. She said, ‘go ahead,’ and supported me all the way.” He reflected on his gift as a fine painter—the delicate front jacket watercolour landscape on the new volume being his own work. Answering a question on the relationship between art and poetry he argued that he believes that “painting can help writing practically but not the other way round.”

 

There wasn’t much time to muse on his favourite theme of exile beyond its contemplation in some of the poems he read that evening. But he briefly shared his thoughts on the functions of poetry, questioning W.H. Auden’s controversial view that poetry doesn’t make anything happen. Speaking about the potency of poetry, Walcott invoked Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian poet who was incarcerated during the Stalinist era, declaring that “a poet in prison is not a hero” [because he couldn’t quite function].

 

At the end of the reading Walcott walked to the theatre lobby behind and obliged a few guests with photo and autograph sessions. The evening sped by and there wasn’t much time left for the exclusive dinner party in his honour. As we walked the short distance up a hill to the exquisite Head of School’s residence, the venue for the dinner, a discerning eye could trace hints of tiredness on the guest of honour. Once inside the house, Walcott settled into a comfortable sofa in the living room. Some other guests sat around him, making small conversations. Soon dinner was served and sponsors of the evening, and of the distinguished writers reading series at Walnut Hill, were recognized and invited to make short speeches. Not long afterwards, guests started to depart.

 

As we set out to drive back to Boston city that night I remembered the title of my first book, inspired by Derek Walcott, The Night Hides with a Knife.

 

“You should mention it to him,” Askold urged me. But it was too late. The dinner party was breaking up. And I had recalled the title more out of thinking aloud than desiring to tell Walcott about it. I was more concerned with reflecting on how much poetry overshadows our lives like the halo just above the heads of saints, and how critics feed on it. And I looked forward to perusing my autographed copy of Walcott’s new Selected Poems and re-reading William Logan’s unflattering critique of the book, especially Walcott’s later poetry, which had appeared three weeks earlier in The New York Times Book Review under the caption “The Poet of Exile.”

 

From The PONAL Magazine, GBOUNGBOUN