Alert! Following the fiasco, last week, of the non-awarding of Africa’s richest literary prize, the $50 000 NLNG Literary Award, one of the shortlistees has publicly questioned the awarding process.
Poet and author Lindsay Barrett – his collection, A Memory of Rivers, was one of nine volumes of poetry under consideration for the prize – is the only shortlistee to have issued a statement, as far as BOOK SA can tell:
I had intended to remain silent on the outcome of this year’s NLNG Nigerian Literary Prize exercise preferring to let others comment on what appears to have been a deliberate decision to insult eight other poets and myself by both the Panel of Judges and the management of the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Company.
However, I have been inundated with messages of sympathy and support from all over the world and with queries concerning my reaction to the judges’ decision to withhold the prize. I would have preferred it if the nine of us, whose work the panel of judges had praised in an official statement listing us as those shortlisted for the prize nearly a month before they announced their decision to withhold it, could have made a joint statement.
However pressure of work and the constraints of distance have made it difficult for us to meet and deliberate on this. I am therefore making this formal reaction to the decision on my own behalf in answer to the innumerable queries communicated to me.
1. I find it difficult to understand why the Panel of Judges called a formal press conference to announce the short list when they were not sure that they were going to award the prize.
2. I did not go to the Award Night because I was informed by the management of the NLNG Company that no one among the nine of us would be given a formal invitation but that we were welcome to show up and identify ourselves to gain entry to the venue. I found this demeaning to our dignity as well as suspicious.
Barrett has an interesting story, being not a native Nigerian, but a naturalized immigrant from Jamaica (see final link, below). For those Nigerian writers whose situation is precisely the reverse – who do not live in the country, but remain Nigerians – the NLNG prize rankles for other reasons: it’s not open to them. This year’s debacle provided fodder for emigre scribes to pronounce on the state of Nigerian letters generally. Canada-based Amatoritsero Ede comes within a hair’s breadth of saying that the NLNG judges were right not to give out the gong – because its most noteworthy achievement to date, according to him, has been the production of excesses of “bad writing”:
Bad writing proliferates anywhere and everywhere in the world – in Nigeria, Canada or Cancun. This is why a battery of editors, proofreaders and critics midwife a book. It is the reason there are creative writing schools, and workshops – as useless as those are if the prospective writer has no original talent. That is the logic for the institution of prizes – to separate the grain from the chaff and celebrate excellence. This is why the intention of the NLNG prize mystifies and is suspicious. Its administrators seem hell-bent on doing the opposite – laud mediocrity.
No, I am not saying – to borrow that apt description by Odia Ofeimun straight out of the pages of oil capitalism – that the “onshore” Nigerian writer is mediocre. The NLNG defines them as such by its very practices and lack of trust in their abilities – especially when it banned the “offshore” writer. The award-giving institution seems to have made up its mind to install a Flecknoe – John Dryden’s king of dunces in the satiric Augustan poem, “Mac flecknoe” – over the new-age dunce writer. The fury and haste with which books are churned out on the eve of the award is simply embarrassing and verifies that.
Molara Wood, meanwhile, would seem to be in agreement with Ede on the point that the prize should be scrapped, or re-tooled at the very least, calling the entire process a “charade”:
Chima Ibeneche, managing director of the Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas (NLNG) company, should fire his speech writer. If perchance he wrote the speech he delivered at the NLNG Literature Prize Award night himself, then he has passed a vote of no confidence on himself. His speech at the fiasco of October 10 was shot through with infelicities. Before the night was over, he promised, they would be crowning “the new kings and queens of Nigerian Literature.”
Anyone following the lacklustre build-up to the night would have questioned: queens? There was not one woman on the shortlist of writers to be honoured or – given what transpired – dishonoured, by the NLNG. For weeks, the literati stomached, rather too easily, a shortlist made up entirely of males; this, in a writing milieu in which women are doing great things. In an act of latent misogyny, the NLNG saw nothing wrong in effectively saying the best poets in Nigeria are men. No one raised any dust, which is symptomatic of the easy pass that has been given to this prize so far. $50,000 cash prize is worth any lapses in the administration of the prize, it seems.
Ibeneche set out the kind of people due for recognition by his company. “We have… passed the stage of having just a handful of men and women define this country,” he declared. Have we? A look at newspaper adverts proclaiming the NLNG’s grand award night in celebration of literature, is instructive. One listed former Nigerian head of state, Yakubu Gowon as chair of the award gala; special guests of honour were former military ‘president’ Ibrahim Babangida and Shehu Shagari of the second republic. Minister of Information, Dora Akunyili, completed the list.
Finally, a few more words from Barrett on Nigerian literature, in an interview with Anote Ajeluorou that was prompted by the NLNG controversy, and which brings some of Barrett’s own unusual biography into focus:
IT would look like you have been there forever, even while still having your works relevant to issues of today. When you look back at this long stretch of involvement in Nigerian Literature, what really occurs to you?
I’m always saddened by the fact that Nigeria has produced the greatest body of Literature of relevance and strength of any African nation yet little matching national development. Its work is as important if not more so to the rest of Africa than any national Literature, like South African Literature of resistance, Ghanaian Literature of political awareness. Nigerian Literature has cut across all formulas and yet we have produced a national Literature that seems to be at odds with our seeming inability to get the administrative strength of our nation right.
I came to Nigeria directly because I was influenced by her Literature. I came to Africa because I wanted to renew the spirit of ancestral hope. I felt that there was hope in knowing where you came from and that we could renew our links, that we could strengthen our systems.
But for anybody coming from the Diaspora, you don’t have to choose any one country. Quite frankly, if you come from Jamaica, you may be inclined more to Ghana. There is a strong sense of the Akan story in the Afro-centric areas of Jamaica. If you are from Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba or Brazil, you get inclined to Yoruba. If you come from Haiti, you will look back to Angola or Central Africa. Once you begin to know about cultures, you see similarities, you see polarities that attract you. So, if one is academically inclined, you may have a sense of this root movement. I have not been so inclined. I tried to be a Pan-Africanist. For me I look at the contemporary, political issues and see all Africa’s relevance in trans-nationality terms.
We’ll post more NLNG links as we get ‘em!
Please register or log in to comment
