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.
Dryden was satirising contemporary hack writers, specifically Thomas Shadwell, the playwright, for his mediocrity. In that brilliant poem Flecknoe, the reigning king of dunces, contemplates his mortality and seeks a successor. Here is Dryden on Flecknoe's ruminations:
This aged prince now flourishing in peace,
And blest with issue of a large increase,
Worn out with business, did at length debate,
To settle the succession of the state,
And pondering, which of all his sons were fit
To reign and wage immortal wars with wit,
Cried it is resolved (for Nature pleads, that he
Should only rule, who most resembles me,)
Shad alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years;
Shad alone of all my sons is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity;
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shad never deviates into sense;
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through, and make a lucid interval;
But Shad's genuine night admits no ray ...
The dunce, Nigeria, has become a King Flecknoe over ‘Nigerian' rather than ‘Nigerian' literature. If we look at the texts the country has written since its independence, we know it is a failed writer, "confirmed in full stupidity" as Dryden says above. The invisible forces playing proxy to this king of dunces (judges, administrators, shady officials in a hurry) scour the land in search of successors to our usual national mediocrity. Our "genuine night" right from independence has decided to "admit no rays." This is a country that has taken itself out of all global competitions, literary and otherwise, and decided to be the butt of jokes, and a planet unto itself.
Even if we agree not to look this particular gift horse in its oily mouth, agree that the rich benefactor has a right to put its money where its pot-belly is and gag its only possible critics (writers), what about its erratic administration of the prize? So one is forced to muse aloud... Why put in place ancient judges who openly confess to their ignorance of new trends in local literary production? Why install administrators and advisors (publishers or educators) who have been central to the collapse of the publishing and culture industry in Nigeria due to their philistinism? More importantly - this is a question hardly asked of this impostor: why is an oil business administering a prize instead of simply endowing it and handing it over to a literary organisation?
One is forced to muse aloud from the clarity of exile. What is the reason for the rotation of the yearly prize amongst the genres? Is that supposed to spread the graft equally amongst different forms, the better for the benefactor to cover its over-exposed and oily ass? Why not let the best book win in whatever genre or, at best, split the prize money over several genres such that they are all represented yearly. Would that perhaps reduce the financial haul? One presumes that the working illogic is that 50,000 dollars is enough to shut the loudest critic up. And why denominate the prize in a foreign currency? How very ‘Nigerian' is a "nigerian Literature Prize" in a foreign currency? The naira is not ‘hard' enough, is it? How hard must one get to win a hard prize? The lower-case NLNG ‘nigerian' prize reminds one of an ailment numerous in these North American parts - bi-polar disease - in this case of a literary kind. The sick and, to quote Obama, "silly season", is here again, with its usual melodrama. One poet, Remi Raji, was shot in the leg by judges. No one is questioning the right of a judge to kill at will. It is part of the morbid manner of promoting the prize for dunces.
From this foreign perch, one muses... This is the age of the reign of Mac Flecknoe all over the land, in the public and private spheres, in institutions, civil and uncivil. The cancer has spread to our literature. The cultural arena is being high-jacked by those who are "designed for thoughtless majesty; / Thoughtless as monarch-oaks that shade the plain, /And spread in solemn/ State, supinely reign." We need to begin to remove the dunce caps and stop mad-capping around.
Canada-based Amatoritsero Ede is the author of ‘Globetrotter & Hitler's Children'.