by Akinwande Jordan
Like a Greek festival with bloodied origins , our literary best and brightest gather bi-monthly for the scheduled “Achebe or Soyinka” debate. The former dead, the latter alive — one can only surmise that it’s an uneven brawl derived from intellectual boredom and discourse stasis. We, sometimes, account for the occasional Cyprian Ekwensi acknowledgement we throw into the mix of these riveting informal debates. And on the kitschy side of the tracks, there’s the uninformed defense of Last Days of Forcados High School as the best UTME-required text ever written. Conclusively, everyone says their personal graces after the great debates in anticipation of the next article in a literary pub sporadically bemoaning Nigerian reading culture, the state of literature and its death.
By nature, as readers we are dogged talkatives and for that reason discourse (of art) is inescapable when you are part of a scene — there’s ever the urge to participate, theorise or deconstruct. It’s a communal experience, and that could double as a learning experience if you find yourself amongst people with refined minds.
So here we are; contributing to the discourse factory about books. Overwrought as it might be to write about, the concept of a “reading culture” with regards to literature doesn’t exactly broaden or illuminate inter-demographical taste. The quintessential Nigerian reader, like any reader, is hard to describe but once every full moon you find the enthusiastic defenders of Damilare Kuku’s Nearly all the men in Lagos are mad convene to plead their case. You might also find a few shameless buyers at the reputable Roving Heights purchasing the novel and its cohorts in all their eccentric sex and the city glory.
This is not a diatribe against that strain of literature — on the contrary, if you are a self-avowed literary purist, your skepticism heightens, your acidic criticism lacerates the leash but if you digest the chaos, you see the appeal for books of this ilk despite your rightful revulsion. Not because they have any reverent literary quality that canonises them into the pantheon of African literature but because we are in the age of the immediately relatable and the great escape.
We take our curious eyes away from literary objectivism/subjectivism, authorial intent, theory and praxis for a while and pan them towards the alterable psychology of the readers — the audience. Publishing houses are first and foremost a business, tethered to the tides of the market, beholden to the economic calculus of demand and supply. Money is the dominant doctrine. The audience publicly demands easy so easy literally does it in this case.
However, it is essential to point out that the audience (like reading culture) is vague and not monolithic — it is at best a transient concept whose potency lies only the outspoken majority. In that regard, a few reiterative and sparse commentaries about the ‘traumatic’ plots of Nigerian writers could change the current of what is being sold and what the audience consents to reading. We want more happy books, some readers might demand with plaintive pitchforks, sentiment which originates from the quest to escape brutal realities through fictive worlds.
No longer should we religiously confront the unglamorous complexity of encompassing existence. The audience demands, as they always have — there should be something for everyone. Bookstores and publishers follow suit with that mantra as gospel, they follow the trail of profit and that can be difficult to understand or accept if you worry about reading culture or the general literacy of the country. That observation might prompt the emboldened to write a scathing piece about the unceremonious death of literature till it loses its initial novelty.
But there is no death. Not in the sense of a fatal mortal wound that requires these many swan songs. Not even in the trends of the so-called sensationalist titles that plague our bookstores or are championed by a handful. Nigerians read. Nigerians are obsessed with having read or having a book as decor in our foyer or living room, the commercial scourges that are James Patterson and Danielle Steele along with literary stalwarts like Ola Rotimi, Soyinka and Ben Okri reside in the holy shelves of what remains of the ailing Nigerian middle class.
Every father who donned a bootcut pant in the 60s and 70s has a supernatural connection to Mario Puzo’s The godfather, an inheritable connection one might add. There’s only an overt dissent or a lack of cohesion on what is certifiably good in our contemporary milieu. When people allude to the terminal illness of reading culture they often make the mistake of directly declaring that Nigerians do not read. While that is debatable, the issue was never the habit of reading but what is being read and the clashing of pretensions across the board.
We are in the Dickensian best of times, worst of times where African literature is as vibrant as ever with writers like Romeo Origun, Teju Cole, Leslie Arimah Nnekah, Sarah Ladipo-Manyikah etc are at the helm of prose excellence. Yet, the masses are emigrating towards the easy as they have always done and will continue to do till there is an indescribable shift in collective preference. Till there’s a raison d’etre to pay attention to more serious books, phenom writers or forgo arrested development. The many diatribes will not reinvigorate anyone’s interests in our personal canons. People are generally averse to being lyrically called dolts.
This is not advocacy. But the crusade-like prosecution of books that were primarily written with relatability in mind arrives moribund because you end up ostracising readers —who might come to someday show sincere interest in the literary creme de la creme. The appeal of books like Nearly all the men in Lagos are mad, its riposte and cohort, is in the relatable intent. Though the prose remains questionable, they are no different from Harlequin novels sold in thrift stores or pulpy crime novels and paperback spy novels sold at international airports . Upon critical engagement that requires an equal measure of aesthetic taste and reference point, one must read them within a context ; commerce and comfort. They sooth the platitudes and comfort of those who have only come to render the world through that periscope.
We must however discontinue the swan songs in favour of the intellectually contentious for they belie the works of the contemporary maestros who are working arduously to create fiction worthy of reverence in a world moving towards increased bleakness . Literature — for the reader whose interests lie in the density of texts — will never be extinguished by brief trends or titles or publishers in pursuit of profits as it is the practice of institutions of late-stage capitalism. We owe it to our aggregate intelligences to criticise and not sensationalise that which goads us into a redundant impasse of discourse. The true death of reading culture happens when we refuse to venture forward into the vast economy of language, only prophesying with vigor about the apocalypse of an art with sound and fury that signifies nothing.