By Yemi Adebisi, Acting Head, Literary/Arts
In one of her articles titled Blinded by God’s Business, the award winning author, Chimamanda Adichie, disagreed with the popular notion that Nigerians don’t read, claiming to have discovered why they preferred reading religious books to other literature.
“In all the bookshops I have visited, the shelves are overwhelmingly stocked with Christian and business self-help books, God’s Plan for You, The Richest Man in Babylon.
“This suggests, then, that our economy has not prevented us from reading; it has only prevented us from reading literature. Christian and business self-help books sell, then, because they sustain the status quo: the former affirm that God wants you to make money, while the latter teach you how to go about it,” she said.
Adichie, whose most populous novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Prize in 2008, said this unparallel attitude has indirectly affected the cultural realism of the country.
“There is no room for real literature and perhaps this is why there seems to be no room for subtlety in Nigerian public life. Because we are not literary, we are too literal. Because our religiosity is individualistic, we have neglected social consciousness.”
However, Adichie disclosed how her love for the literatures of the late Cyprian Ekwensi espoused her ingenuity in the classic world of writing. She rated Ekwensi’s stories as products of factuality with timeless value.
“We called the most stylish girl in my secondary school class “Jagua Nana”, after the novel by Cyprian Ekwensi, which was widely read and loved by us 15-year-olds. His retelling of a folk tale, An African Night’s Entertainment, was part of our school curriculum, as was Burning Grass, a novel about Fulani nomadic life. But we preferred his less sedate urban novels, such as Iska, People of the City, and Beautiful Feathers and Jagua Nana. We would have been startled to learn that his work was often marred by ‘disconcerting intrusions of bad writing and scenes of sheer silliness’, as John F. Povey wrote in a 1965 review. Other critics generally agree. His characters were flat. He was vulgar. He was too heavy on plot. He was too influenced by American popular crime fiction. The underlying assumption, it seems, was that because he was not sufficiently grave and dull, his claim to ‘literature’ was suspect,” she said.
Ekwensi, who died November 2007, was first published in 1947. He chose not to write about the past as many of his contemporaries did, but engaged with the rapid urbanisation of the new Africa. Lagos was found to be the central character in much of his fiction, portrayed with undertones of the noir thriller, his episodic style mirroring the urgency and restlessness of the city.
Adichie noted that “his lower-middle-class characters speak Pidgin English, their vernacular reminiscent of Samuel Selvon’s characters in The Lonely Londoners, and while they are stripped naked in public, confront nasty landlords, battle inane bureaucracies, have pepper put into their vaginas, die of political violence, seduce powerful politicians, commit murder-suicides and contract sexually transmitted diseases.”
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