East African literary critics should learn to live and let live

Literary critics should be the last people to fight over what they should write about because the gaps in the knowledge of literature are immense. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP 

In Summary

• The common denominator among East African literary scholars at home and the diaspora is the use of English as their tool of communication and the use of literary theories in their analysis of literature.
• The cultures of East Africa have brought them into being and given them categories and habits of thought, their ranges of feeling, their idiom and the tones of their writing.

By Chris Wanjala
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Literary critics should be the last people to fight over what they should write about because the gaps in the knowledge of literature are immense.

Whereas they enjoy what earlier English literary critics called “the common pursuit,” whatever literary criticism that has gone before in East Africa has led to new forms of literary criticism. Perhaps the best examples of developments in critical theories are found in the study of Western masters of literary criticism.

East Africa is not an exception as I illustrate in this article with my reference to The Prostitute in African Literature by F. E. M. K. Senkoro, and to Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes edited by James Ogude, Grace A. Musila, and Dina Ligaga.

In reacting to the attacks I have received on these pages, I have remembered the words of caution by T. S. Eliot who cautioned that to exist, the critic has to “discipline his personal prejudices and cranks… and compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible in the common pursuit of true judgment.” By disagreeing with me, my critics collaborate with me towards the final semblance of truth.

It is, therefore, a matter of gratitude that one finds a critic worth disagreeing with.

The common denominator among East African literary scholars at home and the diaspora is the use of English as their tool of communication and the use of literary theories in their analysis of literature.

The cultures of East Africa have brought them into being and given them categories and habits of thought, their ranges of feeling, their idiom and the tones of their writing.

There is a lot of trafficking of ideas between those who are in the diaspora and those who remain at home through books and the social media. But for them, literature is not only a criticism but also an enemy of culture.

CULTURAL LANDSCAPES

The new range of cultural landscapes and intellectual contours that James Ogude et.al analyse in their book are very much worth speaking about in terms of their healthy and humane values on the one hand, and the insidious and harmful values on the other.

Dr Joyce Nyairo’s concern with biographies of the common people might seem base to her critics; but the serious attention and severe analysis that she subjects them to is very much worthwhile as an integral part of literary criticism.

The way the tyranny of traditional African and colonial cultures are subverted continues in literature. The intellectual temperament of the 1970s is, no doubt, changing and is being replaced by the intellectual age of the 1990s and the early part of the 2000s.

One is quite aware of the new temper of the age and its ingenuity in all the responses to what the older scholars say in the print and electronic media.

There is a new language and a new array of attitudes expressed by younger scholars who stand behind professors Simon Gikandi, based in the US, and James Ogude, headquartered in South Africa, in the book referenced here.

In my heyday, the literary critics I admired were T.S.Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Georg Lukacs and V G. Belinsky. With time came Africanists — English and American literary scholars.

But times have changed. At the conception of Standpoints On African Literature (1973), there were only a handful of local literary critics in East Africa and the subjects they dealt with were restricted to what they came across in English and American literary criticism.

Most of the critics wrote for university magazines, newspapers, and student newsletters. In 1978, we published The Season of Harvest, which was followed by For Home and Freedom (1980). In the same period, scholars all over East Africa discussed issues raised in The Season of Harvest by writing papers and dissertations on “popular fiction,” and presenting them at conferences around the world.

These papers and books dealt with taboo subjects — dirty and forbidden — in African literature .

To the majority of critics of African literature, especially those brought up in the Anglo-American traditions, it was simply unheard of for words ‘prostitute’, ‘lesbian’ or ‘rape’ to appear in the indexes of their works. Indeed, one was considered a daring critic, if not a foolhardy one, to treat those aspects of life in scholarly writing.

Today, however, as literary critics say, African literature is flooded with “dayless cities, notorious red-light streets, shebeens, and cheap cafes filled with girls of the street, ladies of the night and painted women beckoning from numerous windows and balconies.”

Today literary critics deal with the negative treatment of the prostitute in African literature and celebrate the more critical tradition of handling prostitution in African literature, for example in works like Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu by Sembene Ousmane, Jagua Nana by Cyprian Ekwensi, Kiu by Mohamed S Mohamed and Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

I hailed the arrival of an autographed copy of Rethinking East African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes on August 30, 2012, a scholarly study with 19 chapters and an impressive bibliography. The editor wrote in the autographed copy for me the memorable words: “Mwalimu Chris — for being a pioneer. With complements.” The book carries essays by a galaxy of literary scholars who would make me feel I had not worked in vain. It incorporates the names of critics like Tom Odhiambo, who contributed, “Kwani? and the imagination around the Re-Invention of Art and Culture in Kenya,” and Godwin Siundu, with an article entitled “Gender Affirmation or Racial Loyalties? Women and the Domestication of History in Neera Kapur- Dromson’s From Jhelum to Tana.”

Dr. Garnette Oluoch – Olunya offers “The Popular Periodical and the Politics of Knowledge Production: Locating Jahazi.” Others are T Michael Mboya and Christopher J. Odhiambo. Mboya’s article is titled “The Serious People of Raha: The Politics in the Ethnic Stereotyping of the Luo in Okatch Biggy’s Benga.” C.J. Odhiambo contributed “Intervention Theatre Tradition in East Africa and the Paradox of Patronage.”

The book focuses on Eastern African countries and their diasporas, namely Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Somalia and Pemba.

The writer is a professor at the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi. cwanjala1944@yahoo.co.uk