The Burden Of Identity

I've been reading—trying to read is more to the point—Ngûgû wa Thiong'o novel called The Wizard of the Crow. Since I’ve not managed to go beyond half-way through the book, perhaps I should desist from talking too directly about it—but I’m sure someone would tell me if something changed to refute what I’m about to write towards the second end.

After Ngûgû’s book I went straight to Zakes Mda’s Cion; a similar thing happened to me. Of course I’m not that much of an egoist that I didn’t suspect that something might wrong with my taste in literature or something.

My dilemma is this: Here are well respected African writers who have written numerous novels—some of which I’ve greatly enjoyed. But these recent books of theirs I find boring. Why? Is it the topics? No. Ngûgû’s topic (ridiculing dictators) was what first attracted me most to the book. In retrospect I feel the late Ivorian author,Ahmadou Kourouma, in his book, Waiting For The Wild Beasts To Vote handled the topic much better.

Secondly; Mda’s character, Toloki, in Ways of Dying, is one of my old time favourites. Cion is overtly the shoot from it, so naturally I should have enjoyed it. And as usual Zakes Mda’s research skills are meticulous, but something about the book didn’t gel for me.

I was forced to shift the blame to the authors in explaining my lack of enthusiasm, and eventually stamina, in reading the two books. When I read a book, the first question I usually look for is good writing skill. I intensely care for fine, clear writing, which I credit Ngûgû and Mda with. But unfortunately the artful structure of their recent books failed; the books’ aesthetics are flawed. In fact Ngûgû and Mda gave me an impression that they regard aesthetics as mere impressionism.

When I attempted discussing the books with friends, most of whom say they enjoyed the books—they kept lauding them for their narrative simplicity. There’s simplicity, and there’s shallowness. Simplicity is cultivated suppleness, lucidity, precision, brevity and certain uncommon force in the use of language. Novels written in beautiful simplicity tend to depend more on the atmosphere they create, and subtlety of suggestion, than long descriptions, often impotent and turgid.

Supplicating eloquence (which is what I found in both books) alone cannot redeem the narrative that feels slack, and is without novelistic tension. Dan Brown—despite the plague of weeds in his writing—gets the right use of novelistic tension. He keeps you going, hence people read him in droves to the bafflement of the fundi. It is exactly novelistic teson that Ngûgû and Mda’s recent books lack. Hence they sometimes end up being baroque hodgepodges of parochial national melodramas, albeit magisterial ones; and epistemological non convincing repositories.

Alexander Pushkin is a panacea of simplicity in writing. With that last sentence I open myself to the accusation of making my judgement with Western acquired intellectual standards. I know that Ngûgû is in the forth front call of Africans writing in their indigenous language. I think the call is commendable when practical. But I’m afraid something vital is getting lost in its volatile intellectual hysterical fixation when the motive is fear of the full spectrum dominance, and specious threat of modern lingua francas, like English, to indigenous languages.
It was Salman Rushdie who saw a reflection of other struggles in the linguistic struggles। ‘[T]o conquer [the coloniser’s language] may be the completion of our process of freedom.’ He wrote. We cannot run away from the fact that most of us live a hybrid, exile intellectual life, shifting between different cultures and therefore, by necessity, are open to cross-culture influences. The issue to me is trying not to lose one’s identity in whatever language one uses. What is language after all, if not means of communication?

Things heat the complicated when we want to make language a cultural symbol. Powerless in themselves, and latent in their psychological associations, symbols can become immensely powerful when they are objects of psychological energies. But care must be taken for literature not to yield to epistemology.
I understand that literature cannot come into event without being demanded by the culture it springs from। That literature is a response of memory and emotions to the demands of the present. But what triggers artists is not a wish to control the disorders, prejudices and injustices. Writers write to express a need, which is different for every writer; not to right political wrongs.

It is imitative fallacy that mistakenly holds that one must use a certain language, be it a mother language or not, to support and express one’s identity. What is important is finding within the language—whatever language one chooses—a distinct, unmistakable, indelible voice of one’s own unique identity.
Indeed deep in the nature of writing might be the sense of refurbishing fractured identities, which is perhaps why some people mistake writers to be socio-histro engineers। But writers are just people with an inborn instinct for capturing experience and putting it in transcendental permanence of universalism. They’ve no obligation to be authentically faithful to, say, political ambiguities. What’s required of them are acute powers of observation and habits of narration.

To demand that writers write in their indigenous languages, or they be relevant to passing trends, is to murder the artistic instinct in them for political expediency. All artist need to do is achieve the state of equilibrium in their art, which comes from the unification of their identity and state of being comfortable around universal habits. I admit that means must be found of finding a sense of pride in our own cultures; but it’s prurient to behave as if there’s a linear equation that connects language with cultural heritage.
There’s no question that artists, especially writers, are usually a catalyst of creative process for the reinvention of a nation’s sense of pride। But these things must be organic if they’ve any hope of authenticity. Literature is an artefact of expression, not culture. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

There are no ready made stories of literature in any culture, only ghosts of stories that must be given artistic flesh, sinews and bones by artists. After they’ve been written, perhaps, those stories may excavate hidden ruptures in a culture. But that does not depend on language. It depends mostly on talent and the burden of identity.