Who really wrote it? The value of pseudonyms and literary disguises

A recent outburst in these pages bore one worthwhile literary tool that we should consider — the pseudonym; which is also known as a nom de plume, a pen name or an alias. ILLUSTRATION| JOHN NYAGAH 

In Summary

• In 19th Century Europe and North America, women were housebound; deprived of voice and visibility in public spaces. They had no vote and in most countries they could not earn an income without the knowledge of their husbands!
• Consequently, intellectually endowed women like the Bronte sisters — Charlotte, Emily and Anne — circumvented these conservative attitudes by adopting pen names.

By JOYCE NYAIRO
More by this Author

A recent outburst in these pages bore one worthwhile literary tool that we should consider — the pseudonym; which is also known as a nom de plume, a pen name or an alias.

Why did Eric Arthur Blair adopt the name George Orwell? Why does a writer don a disguise? The simple answer is: because the act of writing is as dangerous as a decision to go to war!

Throughout the ages — from the archaic to the millennials — writers have adopted alternative identities in order to avoid persecution for ideas that others might deem profane or otherwise unacceptable in polite society.

In 19th Century Europe and North America, women were housebound; deprived of voice and visibility in public spaces. They had no vote and in most countries they could not earn an income without the knowledge of their husbands!

Consequently, intellectually endowed women like the Bronte sisters — Charlotte, Emily and Anne — circumvented these conservative attitudes by adopting pen names.

Jane Eyre was first published in 1847 under Charlotte’s pen name, Currer Bell. Subsequently she adopted the pseudonym Jean Rhys.

NOT TRUE PRAISE

In explaining why she and her siblings had adopted male-sounding pen names, Charlotte later remarked: “We had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had

noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise”.

Victorian women were not alone in fearing the prejudice that comes with skewed biographical criticism. In 1865, the Cambridge University mathematician and Anglican Deacon, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, chose to publish under the name Lewis Carroll.

He was afraid that his day job might well be at stake if it were to be discovered that he spent his evenings delighting in the logic of word play and children’s rhymes rather than decoding the conundrums of calculus and trigonometry.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass contain some of the finest examples of the genre known as literary nonsense.

After Agatha Christie became a world-famous crime writer, she feared that her forays into romantic fiction would cause some to see her as nonsensical and would, therefore, devalue her fame.

Thus she published Unfinished Portrait (1934) and The Burden (1956) under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

Apart from obscuring the real person behind nonsense of various kinds, pseudonyms do have the capacity to drive urgent causes forward while shielding the author from unwarranted opprobrium.

Carolyne Adalla was one of the first writers in Kenya to break the silence on suffering, back in the day when there was fierce stigma attached to HIV/AIDS.

But her epistolary novel, Confessions of an AIDS Victim (1993) exposed her to unjustified backlash because some readers could not draw the line between Adalla’s personal life and the fictional world that she had created.

Earlier, when government chemist Nicholas Muraguri sought to unmask the inadequacies of Western-trained intellectuals and the corruption that was beginning to ravage the newly independent Kenyan state, he avoided the wrath of his employer by picking the pen name Mwangi Ruheni under which he published The Future Leaders (1973) and The Minister’s Daughter (1975).

In recent years, global narratives of violent extremism have found a counter discourse in the novels of Yasmina Kader. L’Automne des chimères (1998) and Wolf Dreams (2003), amongst others,

were received in France as the definitive new voice of Arab womanhood.

A WRITER INVITES ALL KINDS OF CRITICISM

Except that the author was not really a woman. (S)he was in fact a man — Mohammed Moulessehoul, a veteran Algerian army officer who had decided to adopt his wife’s name as his pen name

because he was weary of submitting his manuscripts for approval by a committee in the Algerian army. 

A writer who was a soldier invites all kinds of criticism. Moulessehoul has been brutal in his opinion of those who crudely challenge his ideas on account of his unusual career path.

“Let me tell you, it was a hard battle — there is no honesty or integrity among the pseudo-intellectuals I had to take on. There’s much more honesty and integrity among soldiers, trust me.”

One could argue that in the kind of writing where one is stridently critical of one’s benefactors, the term nom de guerre — the moniker under which a person goes to war — is more befitting because

in this cloak and dagger game, the author launches a missile and prays that it will not ricochet and pulverise him.

Arguably, the most famous nom de guerre in our local press came from an alias derived by blending the names of two world famous Leftists —  Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and our very own Pio Gama Pinto.

It is now an open secret that Cabral Pinto of the Saturday Nation was the current holder of a senior constitutional office. By picking a pen name, the official circumvented censure by his employer of the time.

He also insulated himself against premature dismissal by future employers.

Imagine what might have happened to his quest for the constitutional office if all of the panellists at the interview and at the parliamentary vetting had been aware that the man before them was the very one whose revolutionary column regularly demanded that “civil society should capture the reins of state power”?

Chanan Kapila is the pen name that the official adopted for a column in another publication. This alias paid homage to local legal luminaries — Justice Chanan Singh and lawyer Archhroo Ram Kapila.

In his autobiography, Justice Abdul Majid Cockar salutes Kapila for his “pin-pricking defence of political agitators”. If we pay attention to the words of American singer and activist, Tracy Chapman,

we will conclude that even when they “sound like whispers”, the official’s pen names are always “talkin’ bout a revolution”.

TACTICAL PLOY

Whatever their tenor and accent, calls for change, take on many forms and in the ensuing struggle, the pseudonym becomes a tactical ploy, rather than a mark of cowardice. However, a pseudonym only succeeds when editors or publishers act as the writer’s allies.

In any event, when the monies from publication roll in, the editor will need to know where to send the cheque! But from the onset, the editor must be convinced that the writer’s job, reputation or life may not survive the publicity.

In the case of Joanne K. Rowlings, the author of the famous Harry Potter series, it was agreed that her first attempt at a crime story would be unduly burdened by the weight of her famous name since readers had typecast her as the queen of fantasy fiction.

And so she became Robert Galbraith, author of The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013). One newspaper hired a British linguist who used a software programme to analyse the novel against other writing and ultimately identified Rowlings as the writer behind the mask.

But even prior to the birth of forensic linguists and the age of the Internet and its swift tools for unveiling anonymity, the pseudonym has rarely ever remained in the dark permanently.

Sometimes, the circumstances of history have changed and those — like Victorian women — who did not previously have a public persona, acquire one and come out to claim their sweat and genius.

In other instances, it is the writer’s own ego that swells irredeemably, eventually bursting forth so that he can dwell in the limelight of being the published author of a renowned masterpiece or two. 

And then there are those particularly amusing times when the disguise worn by the writer has been so thin. Between the first two paragraphs, a litter of familiar word play and a telltale signature, the seasoned reader easily picks out the identity of the ghost behind the spectacle and his enablers.

Camouflage tip: If you must use a pseudonym remember the six degrees of separation theory. There are just six acquaintance links, or less, separating any two strangers in the world. So everyone knows everyone!

Dr. Nyairo is the author of Kenya@50: Trends, identities and the Politics of Belonging. jnyairo@gmail.com