Breytenbach and Iweala event

Uzodinma Iweala, at Princeton University, Sept. 24, 2008. Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu


This past Wednesday, I attended a rare event here at Princeton; one of those days that, if you kept a diary, you begin by marking the date with an asterisk: a joint reading session by two remarkable writers, Breyten Breytenbach and Uzodinma Iweala.


Uzodinma Iweala reading, Sept. 24, 2008 at Princeton University. Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu

Uzodinma Iweala, the 23-year old Nigerian author of the brow-raising first novel, Beasts of No Nation, and currently a medical student at Columbia University, invented a writing style that is as poetic--particularly when you listened to him read from the novel, the cadence modulated by the inventive remaking of verbs and nouns into present participles--as the narrative is horrific. He read the passage in which the boy soldier experienced his first killing orgy. The beauty of fiction, in the hands of Iweala, is that it could present this story of sickeningly degraded childhood in a way that still made the boy soldier a sympathetic figure.

Of course during the Q/A, someone wanted to know more about the language of the novel. Did he invent it? Was he reflecting the way of speaking of this fictional West African boy? By way of response he stated that his was a conscious refracting of pidgin english to satisfy his own literary aesthetic, but also to come close to the inventiveness of the pidgin language spoken in West Africa, emphasizing that his effort follows on the tradition mined by writers such as Amos Tutuola, Ken Saro-Wiwa (who wrote in naturalistic pidgin), and others.



Breyten Breytenbach, Sept. 24, 2008 at Princeton University. Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu

The day before this event, I had been watching the 1978 documentary film "Afrikaner Experience: Politics of Exclusion, (in prep for my course on Art, Apartheid and South Africa) and therein was a discussion of Breyten Breytenbach as the foremost Afrikaner Poet, tried and jailed for 7 years after he "betrayed" his Afrikaner identity by marrying a Vietnamese wife (a crime under the law) and committed high treason by campaigning against the Apartheid regime while in exile. It makes you wonder why some South African artists never got the memo, considering that his older compatriot, Ernest Mancoba married the Dutch artist Sonja Ferlov and wanted to return to South African with her. Apparently in a more generous mood in its early years, the Apartheid regime persuaded the Mancobas to not come to South Africa. And they never did.


Breyten Breytenbach reading, Sept. 24, 2008 at Princeton University. Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu


Anyways, having watched the Afrikaner Experience the previous day, seeing the now 69-year old Breytenbach, gentle with a killing smile perpetually flickering across his face, you realize that such men as he have an incredible reserve of humanity that differentiates them from the crowd. For how else to understand the quiet decorous presence he shares with another former "terrorist" and compatriot Nelson Mandela? He read from his Windcatcher and the brand new All One Horse, which is illustrated with his own watercolors. I tried to count how many times the word "love" occurred in the poems; I could not, lost in the aura of a remarkable man, artist, and writer.

Chimamanda's Interview in Bookforum

BF: Are the people of Nigeria still grieving and processing this war?

CNA: A lot of people haven’t dealt with it at all, in part because we haven’t dealt with it as a collective nation. Nobody learns about Igbo culture in high school. You’re told that a war happened and nothing else. Igbo people have a sense that we’re supposed to pretend nothing happened. Now there is a new Biafran movement that’s been going on for about ten years. Mostly, it’s the poorer people in Igbo villages and rural areas who adopt things from Biafra and fly the Biafran flag. When I told people I was writing about the war, they thought I was crazy. They’d say, “You are just looking for trouble, you are encouraging violence.” I still get a few angry e-mails from people who feel I shouldn’t have written about that war. But then I do get pleasantly surprised by the many people who are asking questions about that period because of the book, people whose parents had been through the war and never said anything to their kids. Sometimes I get stupidly emotional. I did a reading in Nige­- ria, and a woman came up to me and said, “Because of your book, I can finally talk about what happened to me, and I thank you.” And then I start crying [laughs].

(Excerpt of interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

.......

Chimamanda s interview in the December/January 2008 issue of Bookforum, the literary magazine of the most influential contemporary art magazine, Artforum, is one more indication of the extent Half of a Yellow Sun, her award-winning novel set in Biafra during the war of 1967-70, has insinuated its story into contemporary consciousness. Thanks to this novel, Biafra, and the still-unaccounted-for, systematic mass murder of thousands of Igbo in Northern Nigeria in the months before the war—which remains a taboo in Nigerian political discourse—has returned calling for reexamination. As Chimamanda rightly points out, there has not been any effort by the Nigerian nation to grieve for the thousands of innocents murdered by fellow citizens in 1966, before the war. A pall of anxiety remains, while many Igbo await the process of healing of a nation.

The responses within and beyond Nigeria to HYS particularly the new interest in the story of Biafra and Nigeria of the 1960s is an encouraging sign that, perhaps, literature might actually provide the basis for open discussions about that dark period in Nigeria's postcolonial history. Already an important opportunity was missed when in the early 1990s an exhibition of war-time work by Biafran artists (works that circulated in Europe at the time and had just been repatriated to Nigeria after more than two decades) planned to take place in one of foreign cultural centers in Lagos was canceled after it became clear that the authorities might deem the show a dangerous attempt to open unhealed wounds. Then and even now Nigeria—the authorities and significant section of the citizenry—fail to learn from history: that old wounds cannot heal unless they are opened, cleaned and treated, carefully. Which is why the recent colloquium on literature on Biafra, which featured readings of HYS, and other works by Cyprian Ekwensi, Chukwuemeka Ike, and Ken Saro-Wiwa among others is a bold, courageous gesture on the part of CORA, the organizers of the Lagos Book Festival. These are signs that there might afterall be a gradual movement towards beginning a process long overdue. In which case Nigeria owes Chimamanda for helping weave the fabric of the nation, by writing a book of compelling, powerful fiction!