Remi Raji

The Roles of Literature in National Development§

I want to thank the organisers of this lecture for inviting me to speak on the role(s) of literature in national development. I am particularly relieved that a conference on national development is organised by committed students, whereas others who are supposed to lead and direct our lives are busy fighting with maze and chairs in the dirty house of power. This organising has given credence to the importance, significance and the centrality of literature in the organisation and corporate existence of nation-states.

In dealing with this topic, the operative words need some specific definitions. I presume that by national development, we mean the quality of the development of the institutions which make a nation, a country; we mean the aggregation of the progress of a nation through the determination of its social, political and economic structures; and apparently, the qualification of the advancement of a nation by certain indices of growth, in accordance and in comparison with other developmental processes in other nations, regions or continents. To develop is “to go through a process of natural growth, differentiation, or evolution by successive changes”.

Literature refers to the sum total of the literary expressions of a people as composed in the works of individual authors who are often processed as cultural icons, or as representatives of the cultural imagination of nation-states. Literature is the tangible and scripted acts of the imagination of a writer or performer, an artist per se. It means the scripted or performed forms of poetry, drama, prose fiction and non-fiction, essays, as well as other sub-forms including speeches and sermons.

Although a literary work is the production of an individual author, it happens that it is usually assumed as a national property, a cultural production (having its own national identity) and that is why when a writer is described, there is always a connection between him and his nation, the environment that enforces the imagination through him to be able to write. The other assumption of the literary text is that it is written for a purpose, usually to bring illumination to the meaning, the beauty and ugliness of human existence. Literature itself might be said to be the aggregation of a nation without borders. Broadly speaking, if we must think of its roles in the context of a sentence structure, literature is both subject, object and complement of national development.

Now to speak of the role(s) of literature in national development is to deal with the familiar and the unfamiliar functions of literature in society.

By assuming that literature has a function to serve or contribute to national development, we already cir*****scribe the subject, that is literature, as a social artifact, the production of which must then have certain industrial (political or economic or social) purpose.

In his seminal essay, Matthew Arnold, the English literary philosopher raised a number of pertinent issues about the functions of criticism which by and large are issues related to the production of literature itself. In their own terms, and given their own cultural and colonial experience, a number of African writers have reflected on the importance of literature as well as the significance and precarious condition of the writer: Chinua Achebe wrote about the author as teacher, therefore, of literature as proverbial lesson; Wole Soyinka has confirmed how essential the role of the writer in a modern state; and Niyi Osundare has raised the moralist and ideological question of the role of the writer as “righter” in society. It is almost given, that the ideal writer is the conscience of the people, the watchdog of society, and the prodding critic of the nation.

By assuming that the literary object has beneficial functions for national development, as a possible quantifiable material which can add to the gross national product of the country, we agree, momentarily, to suspend an aspect of the irony of relationship between the authority of the nation on the one hand, and the freedom/rights of the author on the other.

By assuming that literature is a necessary complement to the making of a national culture, or by assuming that literature is crucial in the creation of a national or continental civilization, we shall come to the conclusion that development is as much about the raising of a people’s intellectual power as it is about the markable physical growth of a country.

So what are the roles of Literature? I have for this moment composed a seven cardinal point on the roles of literature in national development. But mark you, this nothing to do with the 7-point national agenda.
1). The bulk of a people’s literature is a measure of literacy and civilization; literacy is an index of national development. A civilized nation is the nation of literate population. Therefore, a nation that lacks or cannot boast of generations of writers, a nation that does not encourage or patronize her own literary genius, a nation that does not invest and sustain the tradition of literacy and reading (which Literature is all about) cannot be said to be a developed or developing civilization.
The United Kingdom celebrates Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, George Bernard Shaw, William Wordsworth, John Keats, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and a host of others; France celebrates her own (Charles Pierre) Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Alexander Dumas, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett, etc; Germany celebrates Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine; Croatia has her own Miroslav Krleža, Slovenia celebrates France Prešeren; Chile, South America and the Spanish language celebrate Pablo Neruda… Palestine celebrates Mahmoud Darwish; and Hebraic Israel celebrates Amichai Yehuda. National monuments, museums, institutions and streets are named in indelible memory of the contribution of these writers and philosophers to national development. Nigeria, her own Okigbo, Achebe, Soyinka, Clark, Okara and others, but how much of the imagination of these reputable writers is pressed into the national psyche, as proof of development and respect for literary genius? I do not know.

2). Literature immortalises the history and memory of a people; the grand narratives of Sunjata, the great histories of Songhay, Mali, Oyo, Ashanti and Benin kingdoms, as well as the myths and legends which they spawned, are made possible by the works of literary historians and poets. Beyond History, and Philosophy, Literature remembers the past much more inventively…Literatures re-writes the past in a fictional way that challenges the present state of things. Literature queries the present in order to illuminate or envision the future. When properly served and embraced, Literature influences and enforces the historical sense of a people, and therefore, it helps in lubricating the path towards national development.

3). Literature bears allegiance to the capture of great ideas, and it is in the composition of the literary text that national development is intellectualized. The writer is inventor of images; the writer is bearer of both personal and collective histories of people and nation; Literature is therefore the means for the establishment of individual and national biographies and dreams. In his book of essays entitled Home and Exile (2000), Chinua Achebe notes that allegiance to personal and national development:
for me, there are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you have an overpowering urge to tell a story. The second, that you have intimations of a unique story waiting to come out. And the third, which you learn in the process of becoming, is that you consider the whole project worth the considerable trouble – I have sometimes called it terms of imprisonment – you will have to endure to bring it to fruition. (38-39)

4). The production of literature encourages the establishment of other academic and social institutions which serve it: libraries, universities, publishing houses, museums and jobs.

5). Literature should be and can be read as a way of fostering national development, especially when the focus of the literary project is centred around the national imaginary, and around issues which are pertinent and germane to the heritage of the nation. A nation that cannot boast of a virile culture of literature across the divide of ethnic differences and multiplicity cannot be said to be a nation in development. And that is the fate of my country.

6). Literature can be employed as a revolutionary force to destabilize the roots of repression and tyranny…Literature liberates…and the author is bearer of testimonies of the survival of the human spirit. According to Wole Soyinka, in his essay, “The Writer in a modern African state”:
When the writer in his own society can no longer function as conscience, he must recognise that his choice lies between denying himself totally or withdrawing to the position of chronicler and post-mortem surgeon…The artist has always functioned in African society as the record of the mores and experience of his society and as the voice of vision in his own time. (20)

7). Literature can indeed restore pride, sense of belonging and a great deal of nationalism, and it is in the status of substantial pride that national development subsists. If the identity of a nation is contained in its literature, it goes without saying that national development can also be determined by the status of the nation’s literary imaginary and production in global literature. Ngugi wa Thiong’o has commented on how Western imperialism worked its way into the heart of Africa, through literature, which is part of what he called “the cultural bomb”:
The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. (3)
So, it is through the same channel that the restoration of a people’s pride, liberation and development can be made possible.

The roles of literature in national development is seven multiples of seven without ending.

Literature can also be employed to contain the revolution and the possibilities of the renaissance of a nation or race. Speaking about the need to reconfiguration of the African, at the onset of Western imperialism, Ali Mazrui used the term “Afrenaissance” in a 1994 paper presented at the Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio. He reflected on what he called the ‘seven pillars of the African Renaissance’:
Afrenaissance – or the Renaissance in Africa – must (also) be, in part, a ‘return’ to the classics. And what is a return to the African classics? It must involve a partial return to African culture and civilization. The African Renaissance must in part involve the re-Africanisation of Africa – based on seven principles. (171)
The cardinal points for the renaissance include (1) multiplicity of religion; (2) recognition of the force of indigenous languages – need for language policies; (3) the primacy of oral and indigenous history; (4) the African genius, re-awakening of talents; (5) economic & technological self-development and self-reliance, dynamic partnerships; (6) generative systems of governance – of humane self-governance; and (7) global connection/relations, … (172-174).

For the memorization of history, for the immortalization of a people’s civilization, and for the full capture of the genius and imagination of a people, we can do with the full complement and respect of Literature.

References
Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage. Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1988.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey Ltd., 1986.
Ali Mazrui, “Shifting African Identities: The Boundaries of Ethnicity and Religion in Africa’s Experience” (153-175).

§ This is the text of a speech presented at a national conference on “Language, Literature and National Development” organised by students of the Department of English, Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba, Ondo State, Nigeria. (February 10, 2010). – Remi Raji

Source: The News, http://thenewsng.com/opinion/the-nlng-endgame-when-the-gift-is-a-curse-%E2%80%94-remi-raji/2009/10, October 26, 2009

Let me preface this additional comment about the latest Nigerian ailment with the first stanza of “Counsels” by Czeslaw Milosz, the 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature:

          If I were in the place of young poets
          (quite a place, whatever the generation might think)
          I would prefer [not] to say that the earth is a madman’s dream,
          a stupid tale full of sound and fury.

In another age, this should be a time to celebrate the coming to maturity of Nigerian literature but the verdict is too venomous to inhale. To return to the unfinished matter, the calculus of corruption has run full circle, and Nigerian literature is the worse for it.

Against other wisdom, I opt to return in order to put some matters in proper light, in order to poke the heart of the matter. I opt to return because, as a member of “third generation” Nigerian writing, I feel a need to exorcise the siege.

Indeed, the euphoria of a shortlist beclouded any dispassionate engagement with my measured reaction to the disqualification clause that saw the ouster (some now say, fortunately) of Gather my blood…. The euphoria caused at least two sudden conditions: some who were not directly involved had vocal lethargy syndrome, for they could only grumble against the action in silence; of course, the hope of a future entry beclouded good reasoning and appropriate intervention by a few who read the deftness of the doublespeak; and sadly too, the culpability was mutually assured in others who were too involved to see anything wrong. This group suffered from amnesic moral myopia; those who spoke too soon now eat their words, and the winner actually is the inactive stock of the NLNG, the house of gas which desperately seeks relevance out of the misfortune of the ordinary man.

The sad fact that we must realise is that any multinational, private or federal corporation may opt to disburse its social responsibility fund in any direction that it chooses, especially in a society where there is very little respect for accountability, in a society where moral turpitude is pride. It is not, at present, an actionable matter to challenge the management of the NLNG on some of its CSR value; but it is time to begin to query the ethical correctness of the sobriquet “Nigerian Literature Prize” tainted as it were by extra-literary consideration and boardroom politicking. A truly “Nigerian Literature Prize” should be preserved and powered in the cultural and literary industry; an abdication of that duty by such organisations as the ANA, NAL and other related institutions has made this prostitution and disrespect for the Nigerian author too feral and doubly insulting. Other African countries, the best example being South Africa, have lessons to teach the Nigerian nation in how to make things work without recourse to blatant acts of robbery and foolery.

For the avoidance of deafness or misquotation, what I noted after the announcement of the shortlist was that the action of the panel was in bad faith, and it lacked integrity. I repeat it here because I want to differentiate between the descriptive qualification of an action or conduct, and the direct accusation of person or character. Once quoted out of context, I needed to re-state that the management of the NLNG has a political judge in its house who encouraged the disqualification of my work, and who chaperoned the plangent deflation of other writers’ dreams. Thus, on both counts, the actions of the management and that treacherous finger of the arm of its panel lack integrity. I do not need the gift of a prophet to know; it is about being natively prescient: you cannot sustain a lie forever.

Now, it is on record that nine helpless writers were led in tethers to the house of slaughter. How many of them knew the game was up? How many of us expected to be served the wine of a truly damning verdict, a sad commentary on the sludge in the conclave of contemporary Nigerian literary tradition? How many would wager the scenario that the political judge in the house of gas would be foolhardy to play with fire, he who has for long been known to be philistinic and discourteous to a section of the emergent generation of Nigerian poets, the one whose only claim to letters rests in the publication of, alas, a collection of previously published poems by other writers, the one who is neither critic nor writer of grace. This creature we speak of is forever silent but vindictive; as a literary consultant to NLNG, he led other more respectable colleagues to take the wrong step, one left foot after the other left foot. In another moment, I will be forced to share the tale of this national disgrace with nine other poets drawn from Namibia and Argentina to Canada and Romania, in a worldwide poetry festival in Berlin, with the German President in attendance.

How many of the surprised NLNG 9 saw the hangman’s noose closing in? Is this not déjà vu? How many of them went to dinner with the fork rightly held? And how many offered their works for symbolic disqualification on account of having the PPP virus - previously published poems - in their collections?

So as the legendary poet would say, we are all the casualties. Those who spoke in favour; those who abused; those who were silent; those who cried more than the bereaved; those who missed the point of the outrage; and those who laughed at other people’s shame. We, all. But the real shame goes to spineless writers, some actually hack writers, still cutting their teeth on the nib of the pen. This group was the one that put a semblance of seriousness to the lie of the nlng. Truly, the whiff of money is robed in the deafness of many dogs, especially those who set their eyes not on the significance of the prize but on the material potential of the prize-money.

The logic is in the calculus. Worked out conservatively, NLNG’s $50,000 is the exponential value of one thousand barrels of refined oil, which is only a dismal 0.05 percent of the total number of accounted daily production of petroleum products in the country. A period in the middle of two noughts: that is all this gaseous company prides itself in breathing into the life of the Nigerian literary tradition; in the process, it makes it a point to generate needless hot-air controversy; and each time, the breath has been toxic. Truly too, the NLNG is the winner every year if we go by the avant-garde theory in public relations and marketing that even bad publicity is good advertisement in the long run. Except that in the case of the NLNG, the deliberate slur on the body of Nigerian writing has caught up with a section of Nigeria’s academe, and no perfume of late remorse can cure the smell.

Clearly, I knew about the endgame by the evening of August 16, 2009. The pattern on the chessboard was too clear, too predictable that I pity those who even staged a walkout at stalemate time. People have roundly accused the Nigerian Academy of Letters for complicity but I said, no, we must differentiate between someone’s errors from the character of a statutory institution. NAL, the body some of us aspire to, will not go down because of this, but the white-maned dark horse in the panel, who played a similar role in the killing of KSW will not survive this shame. In fact, the panel’s report will be a good material for my students in the Literary Analysis class at Ibadan. We would be interested in determining the disjointed syllogism of the text and the many stylistic sleights that cover the dirty page.

But unlike other justified outrage, I would not ask the Nigerian writer to boycott the NLNG charade because that would be counter-productive. In the next plague, make it a point to rush some forty tattered verses to the printer; secure some acolytes to rub and bloat your ego, if you can pay the fee; or go, bribe your god and promise the priest a pittance in the event you win the horn of valour; bring all to the buffet except your craft and pretend you just fabricated a thousand poems in the millisecond of two years. The pallbearers are waiting, because it will be another vain death.

The horseman of shit will be there next time, but I will be shocked if the more respectable arm of that panel remains to legitimise the joke again.

Consider that I have no other job, like the character in Amos Tutuola’s classic, than to drink the gourd of words, roll the sparkles in the crevices and roof of the mouth, sing it, chew it, turn the word into a plane of tales, and in the track, tell the truth or catch the liar in prone nakedness, I close with some lines: “It is you” (beware, a version of these lines may just be another “previously published poem” gathered in another book!):

It is you
who told the toad how to spit on the lion’s grave.
It is you
who stole the wind from the parrot’s breath.
It is you who craved the gust of ash on our valiant forge
It is you.
Where the wind is absent
the charcoal burns slowly, to its own death.
It is you who brought the weevil into the cotton yard.
Oh, the weaver’s fingers pine in the absence of yarns
It is you it is you… It is you
the toad in the grave, the weevil in the barn.
You burst into the market like Sonponno, god of pox
Only the sacrifice remains in the square.
It is you who brought locusts and silence to the ceremony.
Now the pyramid of words is a trapezium, is a trap in the open museum.
It is you
The singer must seethe his tongue in the medusa moment
It is you
Snakes spikes and nails in the path of dance.
It is you
who brought this gift of a curse.

—Dr. Raji is Assistant Professor of English, University of Ibadan.

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