by Adebowale Oriku

The title above has a gap. At first glance it may seem complete, a sentence that has followed all the rules of grammar and form. It truly has. But there is an elision, a lacuna. The word Excellence needs an attributive. What kind of excellence is the Nobel Prize the judge of? It certainly is not the sort of celluloid excellence rewarded by the Oscars or the sort of Eurovision excellence which made the Swedish pop group ABBA into a global item.

There is more to the Nobel Prize than spotlit spandex and glittery luvviness, it happens to be more solemn and deeper. If the Nobel was awarded in films, perhaps someone like Jean-Luc Godard might come in for consideration with his French-New-Wave, brilliant-cut  pieces – some of which I indeed do like. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Miriam Makeba or Bob Dylan would have been contenders, too, if the Nobel recognized contemporary musical genius.

But the Nobel had settled for less extrovert, less demonstrative disciplines than film and music. Leaving aside the Peace laity, there is Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and the latter postfixal of Economics.  Since Alfred Nobel instituted the patrimony more than a hundred years ago, men and women who have done rather well in the disciplines listed above have been rewarded with the Prize.

Coming back to what may have been missing before the word Excellence. One may be hard put to say the Nobel recognizes academic or intellectual excellence - there is even a  speck of nuance between the two words - and this may be true in all of the disciplines besides Peace. But in literature, the Nobel also takes cognizance of artistry, invention, bravura and, of course, the author’s grasp and treatment of the vast and involved subject of the human condition.

Even before Wole Soyinka won the Prize in 1986, I had been more au fait with literature laureates than any other discipline, but it was after the win that I read Irving Wallace’s The Prize, a thrillerlike, middle-brow fictionalisation of what happens during a year in the Nobel annals and, considerably, the author dwells on Literature.  

Just like most of his novels, The Prize thrives on jazzed-up encyclopaedics. There is a mention of the ruction over Boris Pasternak’s winning of the literature Prize in 1958, how he was at last pressured by the Soviet authorities into giving up the prize. Wallace wrote the novel a couple of years too early to include the magisterial way Jean Paul Sartre rejected the Prize in 1964.

Sartre had compared the Prize to a lifeboat thrown at a swimmer who has reached the shore. But those in the know had toyed with the deduction that Sartre rejected the award as a tacit protest against what he considered the insult of the award coming six years after his fellow Frenchman and younger existentialist, Albert Camus, won it. Even now Sartre - placed beside Camus - may still be considered the better, profounder, thinker, although possibly the less accomplished weaver and stylizer at the loom of the imagination.

Wallace’s novel also retrospectively reminds the reader of the fact that an African would have won Prize more than twenty years before Soyinka. Leopold Sedar Senghor was all but named as the winner in 1962. Although the novel also touches on other winners, as in Physics and Chemistry, it is literature that puts in fairer showing.  

Three things had put me in the mind of the Nobel Prize recently. I had read the chatty memoir of the man who won the physics Prize in 1965, American Richard P Feynman. In Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, the Nobel Laureate shows a side of him one does often see in uber-eggheads. Prankster, safe-breaker, conundrumist, pub-crawler, bar-brawler, chauffeur, friend and confidant of a gambler-gangster, and above all a bongo-drummer – among many diurnalities, for sheer lark, he played drums with a Nigerian acquaintance. But in spite of all this Feynman was one of the finest of the few pioneers of quantum mechanics, which was why he was awarded the Nobel in 1965.

Secondly, recently, Derek Walcott, the 1992 literature Laureate from Trinidad, gave his wry opinion on Poetic Justice when the newly appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry, Ruth Padel, resigned the post within only a few days of her appointment. She left under the cloud of being a sort of Lady-Macbethlike machinator, identified as the matrix of certain defamatory, poison-pen emails which circulated among Oxford dons during the heat of the contest for the revered chair. Derek Walcott, Ruth Padel and Arvind Mehrotra had vied for the chair. The likeliest winner, Derek Walcott, dropped out when stories about accusations of sexual harassment made against him in 1980s and 1990s by some of his students were round-robined via email. Ruth Padel, who had earlier denied  knowing anything about the mails, was rumbled when it became known that she had sent mails to a couple of newspaper editors about Walcott’s alleged past misdemeanours.

The other thing was a two-part South Bank Show on British ITV, dedicated to Professor Chinua Achebe and Chidimanda Adichie. Possibly because I was reading Feynman’s book, I recalled Achebe’s comment a couple of years after Soyinka won the Nobel, My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize. It's not an African prize. Other invidious-seeming pronouncement have been attributed to Achebe about the Nobel not being a measure of excellence or at least not a way of choosing the bellwether of Nigeria literature. In a word, Professor Achebe had only reminded me of the Nobel by default.

Now there is a niggling matter here. My name betrays me as belonging to the Yoruba ethnic group, although my rather bemusing surname had been made into Igbo Oriaku by someone who imagined there may have been an error in Oriku. Actually I would have been happy to straddle both ethnic groups and bear such a name as Adebowale Oriaku. Anyway, I can easily see the purely literary motive and drift of this article being problematised by those who would rather read the origin of my name than the content and intention of the essay. I have read about internecine ‘internet wars’ between people belonging to Nigerian ethnic groups. I tend not to read such traded ethnocentric philippics and it’s very unlikely that I would ever bandy words with anyone from the position of provincialism. I will always choose to rise above that.

Not to write about Achebe’s comment because I may be seen as ethnocentric is to reduce myself to a worm, and taking a worm’s eye view of things. But truly, just as Professor Achebe pointed out, winning the Nobel does not confer literary leadership on anyone, nor is literature a boxing match in which heavyweight pugilists bloodily fight to the death. At any rate, I would choose Achebe over Soyinka as the Grand Old Man of Nigerian letters, and not because I consider one as better than the other but that, whatever Western influence may have done to our common primogenitural cultures in Africa, it still counts that Achebe is the older man. 

And if literature is not about fisticuffs, it does not always allow itself a cognate and sympathetic relationship with the term Mutual Admiration Society. When Ayi Kwei Armah published the coprological The Beautiful Ones Are not Yet Born, Achebe had damned the book with faint praise, questioning Armah’s sanity, accusing him of excessive morbidity. The Ghanaian writer was so wounded that he sent several signed, shit-slinging letters to Achebe for many years. 

Although Professor Achebe’s views may have changed now twenty one years after he made the comment that the Nobel is a European Prize, as a global literary icon the comment would still be taken by a lot of people as writ. The statement is also worthy of revisit as the writer had only won the global Man Booker International Prize a couple of years ago.

I don’t think the Booker is any more an African Prize than the Nobel. Or the Orange Prize that Adichie won. Or even the so-called African Booker, The Caine Prize. And the fact that the great man accepted the International Booker with good graces can only mean that he may not even see the Nobel as a European Prize again. And members of the Nobel Foundation, who might not be certain whether Achebe would receive or reject the Prize seeing his comment, should feel easy about giving him now.

A lot has happened in the intervening years, though. In spite of drawbacks here and there the world has indeed become globalised, even universalised – at least pictures of Mars have been taken, projected to earth. The not-long-ago newfangled Worldwide Web has been zapped into a cyberspatial fossilhood by newbies like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. The calculus of Africa’s différance – the use of the Derridean word is deliberate - is losing traction by the day. At least if the Zulus (Africa) did not have a Tolstoy, as the Canadian/American literature Laureate Saul Bellow sneered years ago, today Nigeria (Africa) has a Nobel Laureate.

And it took the unapologetic Africa-hater, VS Naipaul, who had also passed sour-grapes comments on Soyinka, some fifteen years to reap the Nobel. I did not call Naipaul an Africa-hater lightly. While his novel, A Bend in the River, might be as subtly uncategorical as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness about how he truly feels about Africa and Africans, his pronouncements and declarations may point in the direction of snotty aversion. The self-admitted whoremonger, Naipaul, once told fellow Laureate, Walcott, who is ‘black’ to some degree, that while he does not like the manners and attitude of black women he likes schtupping them – which is a most polite way of saying what he said he did to black-skinned women.  

And is the Nobel worth it? You bet it is. Ask any young or middle-aged man or woman who has published anything, or even the literary daydreamer who hasn’t. And even backroom boys, most crave the recognition that the Nobel confers. Long before Feynman, Einstein won the Nobel in Physics. And just like Einstein, a few winners have been Jewish. Arab Naguib Mahfouz brought the literature Prize home to Egypt. His Cairo Trilogy remains memorable for me in its associative power to put Home, abidingly, in the picture wherever you are, however far away you are from it. I think it is a self-evident fact that the Nobel rewards excellence in the fields it recognizes, and racism is not something the Academy has often been accused of. Even as far back as 1913, India’s Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel in literature.

But of course, there are a number of writers who were more than deserving of the Nobel and were never given the Prize. Tolstoy. Even in its first decade, the Russian was an obvious omission. Crankiness and beardy religious faddishness may have been the flaw the Academy saw in Tolstoy. There was hardly any reason Thomas Hardy or Joseph Conrad should not have received the Prize. And two of the favourite authors of my postformative years: Vladimir  Nabokov and John Updike. Both may not have been given the Prize for similar reasons.

Could Nabokov have got the Prize if he had not written Lolita? Or if Updike had not written ‘entertainments’ like Marry Me or The Witches of Eastwick. Or were all these writers not good enough for the Nobel? While the Academy may often make efforts to be fair-minded, there is certain to be unexplainable, not to say Calvinistic, oversights. For years now I - like million of his readers - have been expecting the name of Czech/Frenchman, Milan Kundera, to be announced, and rumours of his win have yearly turned out to be unfounded. Still less likely to be given is Kundera’s fellow Czech, Ivan Klima. Somehow the name of this brilliant author refuses to etch, even register, itself in a lot of people’s mind. A Czech girlfriend introduced me to his work some years ago, and just last week I read his collection of short stories, seven stories arcing over the days of the week – the book is quietly, limpidly, remarkable.  

We know that we need to up our scientific ante in Africa if we are to be considered for the Prizes in medicine, chemistry and physics. And our economists need to plumb and master the treacherous slopes, the tectonic slips and shifts of intercontinental political economy to win the Economics Prize. Literature is where Africa still has the better potential. I have always believed Ngugi wa Thiongo might yet win the Prize even after he brought out his sprawlingly variable last novel, Wizard of the Crow.

A friend was one of the freelance proofreaders who looked at the book in its raw form. He had told me about the work, how ambitious and big it was going to be, more than a thousand pages. I bought a hardcover copy of Wizard of the Crow on Amazon. Although I found it engaging enough, the 700-odd page novel fell short of my expectation - such as that might be - or maybe it was because I found his earlier novels like Devil on the Cross  and Petals of Blood irreproachably brilliant. Wizard, possibly because of its heft, is lax-limbed, the farther you go in the novel the more it is leached of the weightiness its size prefigures. For a novel that was prepuffed as Africa’s own novelisation of Infinite Jest, with more of Shakespearean comedic gravitas than David Foster Wallace’s postmodernist braggadocio, its several limitations are unmissable. 

Just like Chinua Achebe’s 1987 last novel, Anthills of the Savannah, is not in the class of his earlier masterpieces. It is now axiomatic to say one grew on the literary and mental provender of Achebe and his contemporaries. For many Africans of my generation, Things Fall Apart was the retained text. And this is not just because it was a pioneer work of African written fiction, but also because Things Fall Apart is one of the finest novels published in the last fifty years. I have read the novel several times, and today I still relive – not just remember – the story with soulful fondness. Things Fall Apart is simply a beautiful work of genius, a miracle of human creativity. And Arrow of God, whose patrician magnificence has been occluded by its predecessor.

When someone asked me why Achebe has not won the Nobel, my answer was manifold. The Nobel is indeed not literature’s be-all-and-end-all. While it is worth winning for any serious writer who has been in harness for a considerable while, not winning it does not exactly signify deficiency or degradedness.

But  lest I should reduce the rather beggable question to mere quibbling, I had added that perhaps Achebe would have potted the Prize if, for instance, every novel he has written is as masterly as Things Fall Apart or Arrow of God, burying such a merely competent novel as Anthills among a tranche of works. But then again, few writers would go through such a long career consecutively birthing literary prodigies and magnum opuses, even Shakespeare’s omnificence has a weak seam or two. 

It has been suggested that perhaps Professor Achebe’s dismissal of the Prize as being European does not go down well with members of the Academy. Possibly. But Ernest Hemingway was a Nobel-basher, he was the person who first coined the term igNobel Prize. Yet he was given the Prize in 1954. And he accepted it. Although I think Hemingway somewhat - I have never found his works all that interesting - deserved the Nobel, he was said to have been given the Prize in honour of an elderly member of the Academy who adored him.  

Then there is the suggestion that Achebe’s criticism of Joseph Conrad may have been his nemesis. But the first thing that comes to any objective mind here is that even Conrad himself did not win the Nobel. I think for Achebe to have been considered by the Academy as having committed lese majeste against regal Conrad, the Pole turned Englishman should at least have won the Nobel. Unless the current members now take Conrad’s omission so wistfully and retroflexively serious that they, in compensation, see him as a winner in a spiritual sense and thus punish whoever blasphemes him.  After all when VS Naipaul won the Prize in 2001, his literary kinship with Conrad was cited, he was described as Conrad’s ‘heir,’ especially the way Conrad’s Heart of Darkness echoes in Naipaul’s works. As we all know, Heart of Darkness is Achebe’s bete noir.  

Professor Achebe will be 80 next year. This should be an opportunity for a rich and deserving Festschrift, a milestone commemorated with essays and speeches that would dwell less on might-have-beens like the Nobel Prize. The Nobel is a damn fine Prize but not every damn good writer will win it.

Robot  # 1 | 03.06.2009 07:22

by Adebowale Oriku The title above has a gap. At first glance it may seem complete, a sentence that has followed all the rules of grammar and form. It truly has. But there is an elision, a lacuna. The word Excellence needs an attributive. What kind of excellence is the Nobel Prize the judge of? It certainly is not the sort of celluloid excellence rewarded by the Oscars or the sort of Eurovision excellence which made the Swedish pop group ABBA 1973 into a global item. There is more to the Nobel Prize than spotlit spandex and glittery luvviness, it happens to be more solemn and deeper. If the Nobel was awarded in films, perhaps someone like Jean-Luc Godard might come in for consideration with his French-New-Wave, brilliant-cut pieces – some of which I indeed do like. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Miriam Makeba or Bob Dylan would have been contenders, too, if the Nobel recognized contemporary musical genius. But the Nobel had settled for less ext...Read the full article.

Eace  # 2 | 05.06.2009 13:00

The Nobel like any renowned recognition of a person's work is certainly worth winning. To be considered for one is remarkable even if only for the chance for one to turn it down. It is of course like every human accreditation considerate of 'public' opinion which opinion ultimately rests on the bias (positive or negative) of the judges of this prestigious prize.