In Kampala, Christopher Okigbo famously lashed out unrepentantly at his literary critics. They had insisted Okigbo’s poetry was inaccessible to the masses.
The great man responded, trenchantly, that he writes poetry for poets. And that art was not a contest for the popular vote.
I love Christopher Okigbo for refusing the populist bait. When I go to Michel Foucault, Isaiah Berlin, W. Edward Said, or Wole Soyinka; it is my deliberate choice. That is not an engagement with Sunday school scripts.
I can opt out, if I choose to. I have agency.
Yesterday, in one of Biodun Jeyifo’s books, I encountered stories about Wole Soyinka in literary combat with some of his critics that amused me. I had not heard about these before.
Though, having read his “Who’s Afraid of Elesin Oba?”, and “An autistic Hunt,” I am fully aware of how scorched-earth Soyinka can get in debate.
Some Marxist critics’ said Soyinka’s love of Yoruba mythology is reactionary, a betrayal of the ideals of the African revolution. Soyinka labelled them as orphaned Marxists.
Then there were the acerbic feminists. They laid into Soyinka: his worldview was too chauvinistic, his feminine characters never played revolutionary roles, his descriptions of the female form were too tender.
Soyinka refused to retreat. He said he could only write about women as he knew and experienced them.
To which some feminists shot back that they did not see themselves in his books.
Wole being Wole thundered: then go and write your own books in which you see yourself, why do you want to make that my burden?
When an academic critic once said it was not clear for whom Soyinka wrote, that perhaps he writes only for himself, Wole was not to be outdone.
He asked for whom the critic wrote – academic assessors, for promotion? Because the critic had made professorship by criticising others books, never having written one himself.
There was a time when such debates happened a lot in Ghana, spilling over into our media debates, educating us all. Art is good for the soul of society, it inspires imagination
These days, sadly, in our media, it is always boorish partisan noises, deafening in the extreme. And with that pure Philistines sometimes rule the roost.
May a love for all forms of creative endeavour take root again in our young people.
There was the creative, before the Neoliberals came with their narrow lens on GDP and its corollaries. And before the soldiers came. Another day and another time, we can explore this further.
May the day of organic appreciation of creatives return; they make life worth living. We must dare to keep hope alive. Hope though, is only meaningful and useful, where there is a real capacity for hard work and creativity.
