Posted by By HENRY AKUBUIRO (akuhen@sunnewsonline.com) on
With four offerings in two years, Dr. Chris Anyokwu of the University of Lagos is following the tradition of the Ezeigbos, Kareen-Aribisalas and Eghaghas, scholar-writers from the university's department of English who are turning the citadel of learning into a hive of creative writers reminiscent of the popular Nsukka and Ibadan schools.
With four offerings in two years, Dr. Chris Anyokwu of the University of Lagos is following the tradition of the Ezeigbos, Kareen-Aribisalas and Eghaghas, scholar-writers from the university's department of English who are turning the citadel of learning into a hive of creative writers reminiscent of the popular Nsukka and Ibadan schools.
In his oeuvre include three plays, Stolen Future, Ufuoma and A Parade of Madmen, and a prose offering, Ol' Soja and Other Stories. Spare your judgment until you hear his defence, if you think he is guilty of prolificity: all the works published so far were written years back but were not published because he was honing his craft and undergoing a process of intellectual maturation as a student studying for his BA, MA and PhD. With the acquisition of all the academic accomplishments he desired comes a sufficient measure of self-confidence, which has made him to explode in creative writing.
Dr. Anyokwu wears medicated lens, and he radiates a bookish aura as he sits at a table in his office on campus this morning. Considering that his published works are mainly plays for a lecturer who teaches mainly poetry, you begin to wonder why they are not in his preferred genre. 'Fundamentally, I am a poet," his voice echoes in the hush as if to assert his latitude. There is modicum of bliss as he announces his forthcoming poetry collection, 'Currently, I am collating my poems."
Never mind that his oeuvre is not teeming with poetry volumes. 'Don't forget that late Chris Okigbo only had a published work, Labyrinths, while we have some poets who have more than ten collections and nobody knows them. The important thing for a poet is to write his poems and go over them several times. For me, poetry is the most difficult form to write. People think because you can string together words, you can go away with doggerels and versified prose and call it poetry," he tells me. On the other hand, writing plays comes to him naturally because it is much easier for him to write than writing poems and prose.
As a scholar-writer who makes the best of both worlds, does he share the view by Elechi Amadi that scholarship is a distraction from creative writing? He differs that they complement each other. 'I don't believe him, because what we call scholarship is normal pursuit of intellectual research, and when you indulge in a rigorous pursuit of knowledge, it accrues to you ultimately as a writer in the sense that it becomes a cornucopia of material which you will now convert into creative work. So, if you want to go into creative writing without extensive and intensive research, your work will not endure."
Steering a middle course is his position on the exchange between Professor Tony Afejuku of the University of Benin and the veteran writer, Elechi Amadi, over the superiority of the scholar-writer or the writer. 'I guess what is important is the innate talent," he hints. 'Soyinka says in Death and the King's Horseman and Kongi's Harvest that ‘a man is born to his art or he is not'. So, writing, for me, is inborn; it is a gift; it really doesn't matter whether or not you read English or Literature to be a writer. If you have the predilection for writing, you will be a better writer, but it pays better if you are able to hone your art through normal university training in a university reading English or whatever. But that doesn't mean that it will make you a better writer than the person who didn't read it."
He doesn't support the view that new Nigerian writing is rudderless for failing to adhere to literary schools, 'The idea of schools or labels is distracting and ultimately diversionary. You don't go all the way to put pen to paper having a set of artistic tenets or convention by which a particular school is known guiding you when you write. The so-called Metaphysical poets wrote the way the spirit guided them. The English Romanticists -Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Blake and Byron (the big 6) wrote the way they felt like writing. That's why we have great variety and individuality among them.
'It was the generation after them that had the perspective and distance to look at their works with totality and said, ‘Let's give them the name, the Romanticist school. For the Metaphysical poets, it was Samuel Johnson that derogatorily dismissed them as Metaphysical writers. So, you realize that, when you look at literary history, writers didn't write in the past trying to follow a particular school; they wrote what engaged their creative imagination. Therefore, the idea of trying to pigeonhole writers into schools, for me, is wrong-headed and sheer love for controversy," he thunders.
It is doubtful if Anyokwu is in the good books of the playwright, JP Clark. The veteran writer, Sunday Sun learnt, did not take kindly to the remarks by Anyokwu that his dramaturgy is classicized in an interview with the paper in 2006. 'When I granted that interview, I didn't go all the way to denigrate any of our predecessors in the business of penmanship, least of all Prof, JP Clark Bekederemo. JP Clark is somebody I had much respect for.
I wrote on Osundare's poetry for my PhD, and I realized that JP Clark rubbed on Osundare a great deal. In fact, Osundare considered him, and I agree with him, the most lyrical poet in Nigeria. I also believe that his work on oral literature, Ozidi, for instance, is also unparalleled and incomparable, but coming to the area of poetry, Prof. Femi Osofisan reviewed all his artistic oeuvre and came up with an argument that there seems to be all kinds of ambivalence, ambiguity, silences and contradictions, and what have you.
'In that interview, I only considered some of his plays as tending towards what I call classicization, that is, trying to sound very classicist. When you poetize for the sake of it, the stage will become a little stylized and people might consider you as hankering after the Greek model unnecessarily without sufficiently domesticating it within the intellectual ambience of the Ijaw-Nigeria environment.
'I wasn't dismissing his drama, but comparing him to Soyinka and Rotimi, I believe that Soyinka and Rotimi have had greater influence on my intellectual and creative formation than he. So, I wasn't writing him off completely," he clarifies urgently.
Elechi Amadi wants us to believe that ethnic factor determines the extent of critical attention a writer gets in Nigeria. Anyokwu is not in tandem with his logic, 'There is no truth in that. As far as I am concerned, university scholars like to write papers on established authors to gain academic promotion and preferment. It is only natural. So, if Chinua Achebe happens to be an Igbo man and people are writing their papers on him, it is purely an accident of history. If Chris Anyokwu writes a number of works which people consider good enough to merit extensive, intensive and sustained scholarly attention, it has nothing to do with ethnicity or provincialism at all.
'I don't believe in what he says. That is just trying to be mischievous for the sake of it. Amadi's works are good, and if they are not getting the same attention as Soyinka and Achebe, he should bid his time; he will get his dues in due course."
War cannot be considered a novel theme in literature, but it cannot be said to be overflogged, as far as Anyokwu is concerned, for it forms the basis of one of his plays, A Parade of Madmen. 'How can it be said to be overflogged when war is what engages the attention of the international community, especially with regard to Africa? I feel that so long as man is fighting his fellow man, we should continue to interrogate this menace until we are able to wrestle it to the ground, maybe resolve it and have a better world."
Responding to what fascinates him about the campus setting, which recurs in most of his works, he says, 'I guess that a writer should write about what he knows best. It tasks less on the imagination when you write from experience." He has lived in the university environment for close to twenty years. 'I know that if you consider the dialectics between the gown and town, in a normal society, the gown is supposed to tell the town what direction it is supposed to take. We believe that the gown should continue to provide leadership, moral direction and ultimately shape the collective destiny of the nation. So, if we get it right in the gown, the town can sleep with its eyes closed."
Fifty years after Achebe's Things Fall Apart, can we say we have told the African story well? 'I guess the African tale is a continuum," he remarks. 'People have been telling the African story the best way they know how. Don't forget that the African story is like the proverbial great mask dancing. So, we have to look at the form from different perspectives. In telling the story, we might cancel out one another; we might blur one another's perspectives, points of views, etcetera. It is the more the merrier. But the important thing is that I believe the African story is being told. The emphasis is the process. Achebe, Soyinka, Chimamanda, Ezeigbo, Anyokwu and others are telling the African story," his voive trails of with a whiff of confidence.