After reading my recent article on Bongos Ikwue, which I posted on this forum, a friend of mine in Nigeria, a very productive thinker with a sharp analytical mind and a beautiful prose to boot, wrote the following words to me:

 “I read your piece on Bongos. It was concluded on a very fine note. But the texture is certainly too dense for home people. How do you handle that in your next intervention? Are you a post modernist?”

To which I wrote the following lengthy response that bared the depth of my own anxieties over the issues he raised. Nothing troubles me more than alienation from my cultural roots and from my national and continental constituency. I know that the linguistic and stylistic zone is where alienation from the “home” audience occurs with the most profound and rapid effect. Yet because this kind of alienation is stealthy, insidious, and seemingly a product of a “normal” involuntary process of assimilation in one’s exilic abode, it is the most difficult to detect, acknowledge, and correct. I am publishing our exchange to provoke discussion on what I think is an under-discussed culprit of diasporic alienation, one that is viral in its spread among African intellectuals and academics in the West.

A few years ago, a Kenyan academic friend of mine told me that when he sent copies of his writings to colleagues and friends in a prominent Kenyan university, they could not “enter” his turgid prose to retrieve what he was trying to say. They complained that he had eternally “lost” them as an audience for his scholarly production as his vocabulary was foreign to them. I told him that my own linguistic alienation wasn’t that bad but that I was worried that I was getting there. This was several years ago. Now I am not so sure if I am not afflicted with the same disease.

Do you worry that your grammar has lost its Nigerian/African flavor and that what you write—or even say—may not always be understood by “home” audiences? Are your metaphors, examples, proverbs, and turns of phrase so infected by the linguistic norms of Euro-America that you can no longer claim to write for Nigerians/Africans? If you are an academic or student in Euro-America, are your writings now so jargony and theory-laden that your colleagues and friends in the Nigerian educational system cannot or would not touch what you write? In short who do you write for?

My response

You’ve touched on an intellectual anxiety of mine, one that I have wrestled with since I moved to the states from Nigeria and became gradually socialized into American protocols of writing, understanding, and erudition. Your poser will require a very long but inconclusive response; inconclusive because it is a subject of ongoing contemplation for me.

Like most Africans who now function within Western institutions of intellection, I constantly find myself agonizing over my unconscious assimilation into the theory-heavy, jargony, and faddish acadamese of the American variety. I have to tell you, ***** (a mutual friend, an academic based in the United States) has done a much better job of managing the intellectual transition than I have; he is my model in this respect. When he writes for “home” audiences, he chooses his words and style carefully, customizing his prose to their reading and grammatical conventions. He and I have discussed our struggle against the tyranny of American academic and intellectual jargons and how they take away from our ability to communicate with and sustain a “home” audience for our writings. Partly because he writes regularly for ****** (a newspaper in Nigeria), I think he has had no choice but to adjust his style to the palates of his “home” readers. Even so, he still gets the occasional complaint from “home” about how dense and esoteric his analyses and writing sometimes are.

 I’ve become very self-conscious about the problem and I now try to tuck away my American academese when I write for a home audience, but I must confess that it is a constant struggle; it is sometimes like speaking in an unfamiliar language and entering and exiting two linguistic and intellectual worlds and trying to pander to both. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail. Clearly, the Bongos article was one instance of my failure. I worried that the densely jargony diction of my piece would not find purchase or comprehension on the streets of Otukpo. But in my feeble defense, I actually first wrote that piece for two Diaspora-based websites: one, a listserv peopled by African and Africanist academics mostly based in the West; the other a US-based, Nigeria-themed website with a membership that is very familiar if not obsessed with the vocabulary of American intellection. I sent the piece to ****** (name of newspaper blanked out) almost as an afterthought, and only because I wanted to increase its circulation, given the importance—from my perspective, anyway—of the subject matter. I probably should have kept its circulation among Westernized African audiences. I am sure you discerned my pandering to them in the piece.

The anxiety of misplaced intellection and the non-intelligibility of diaspora-originated knowledge to the “home” audience is actually a much broader malaise. The domain of vocabulary, prose, and style is only one arena in which it manifests itself. Most African academics and active intellectuals in the West resent the tyrannical strictures of writing and understanding that govern public and academic discourse in America. For those of us who attended graduate school here, it is often worse, as you cannot acquire a social science or humanities graduate education without being compelled to submit to the fads that capture the fancy of US academics from time to time. You quickly learn to write, analyze, and speak in a certain way—the normative language of the American academia. It is infectious, if not toxic, to already acquired forms of writing and analysis. Pretty soon, this new way of writing becomes a part of your intellectual repertoire, one that is etched in your unconscious, informing the very way you think and write about phenomena. It is a tragedy, my broda. The most tragic consequence is that you are no longer writing and thinking for “your people”—Africans, or in this narrow instance, the Idoma—but for Euro-Americans and diaspora Africans who use Euro-American intellectual and academic standards to evaluate your work. To stubbornly refuse to write in this hegemonic academic and intellectual language of America is to commit professional suicide. You live bitterly with this compromise for the rest of your academic and intellectual life in the West. As an African (and Africanist) Historian, for instance, I often wonder if regular Africans/Nigerians, whose history I purport to write, will understand my analysis or recognize themselves and their stories in my writings. What is the point of thinking and writing about Africans and their worlds if the African subjects cannot penetrate your prose to access the wisdom of your analysis? Have I become a historian of Africa who simply explains Africa to Euro-Americans on their own terms? Don’t a people deserve to have their story told in their own terms, in a prose that will resonate with them, and in a vocabulary that is compatible with the linguistic flavors of their communicative engagements? Every time I write, especially when I write specifically for a “home” audience, these questions disrupt my thought process. I know that many other “exiled” African scholars and intellectuals battle with this dilemma. I haven’t resolved it, and I worry that I never will.

No, I am not a postmodernist. Postmodernism is one of the many theoretical tyrannies of the American academy against which many of us continue to struggle. It is a classic case of a bifurcated academic and intellectual identity—and loyalty. When you write for a Western intellectual audience seduced by the allure of postmodernism, you have to be at least seen to be going through the motions and doing the honors of postmodernist acknowledgment. You have to at least demonstrate your knowledge of these theories even while deviating, as I did in my Bongos piece, from it. If you don’t observe these distressing niceties, the fanatics and enforcers of theoretical correctness will say: “ahhhh Moses is talking about identity, ethnicity, and other essentialisms as if they are stable categories. Where has he been with all the displacement of these simplistic categories that has occurred in the last two decades?” “Why is Moses talking about “the ‘world of the Idoma’ when he knows that philosophically and theoretically such a thing does not exist…bla bla bla bla!”

I knew that there would be several readers with heightened theoretical sensitivities who would scoff at my appropriation of Bongos as an Idoma cultural icon and my advancement of an organic Idoma cultural worldview—a no-no among the true believers of postmodernism. As you can see in that piece, I added enough caveats and disclaimers and acknowledged the postmodernist “consensus” enough to appease those who would, in the context of American intellection, use the piece to impugn my theoretical sophistication or invoke it to posit my ignorance of postmodernist claims. I was pandering to my American audience, much to my shame. That postmodernist “consensus” has weakened under the strain of sustained critique in recent years. Nonetheless, it continues to inform the ways that most academics here assess the deployments of categories that assume stability and certainty—like the notions of Idoma culture, Idoma identity, Idoma world, etc.

I think I should have re-written the piece or heavily edited it for a home audience that doesn’t need all the theoretical excursions and asides. I wanted to posit forcefully that there is a relatively self-contained Idoma world of cultural communication and symbolic truths without offending the gods of postmodernism. I wanted them to know that I know how postmodernist thought approaches these questions but that, as an African and an Idoma, I also know that the Idoma people cannot afford the abstract luxuries of postmodern disavowals of their values, belief systems, and fixed notions of who they are and what constitutes their identity. One of my discomforts with postmodernism, poststructuralism, and other posts- of the era of the so-called “linguistic and cultural turns” is their failure to respond to or reflect how Africans and other non-Western peoples secure themselves in cultural and epistemic certainties that the apostles of theoretical conformity in the West would consider simplistic and passé.

This, again, speaks to the broader dilemma of the “exiled” African academic. It’s all tied together. One constantly tries to balance one’s ingrained theoretical awareness with one’s responsibility to the African subjects and consumers of one’s writings. Unfortunately I don’t see an end to this struggle until African intellectuals, especially those based in the West, develop an independent and vibrant platform of erudition, one that is unencumbered by and, in some ways, designed to oppose the stiflingly ubiquitous presence of Euro-American theoretical perspectives and protocols of knowledge production and dissemination.

I am sorry to unload these loud thoughts on you. I have been thinking about this issue for a long time, so your question triggered more reflection in me while unleashing a stream of consciousness reexamination of its many dimensions.

I think this is a broad and consequential discussion worth having among and between Africa-based and foreign based scholars and intellectuals.

The author can be reached at meochonu@gmail.com

Robot  # 1 | 01.07.2009 13:53

After reading my recent article on Bongos Ikwue, which I posted on this forum, a friend of mine in Nigeria, a very productive thinker with a sharp analytical mind and a beautiful prose to boot, wrote the following words to me: “I read your piece on Bongos. It was concluded on a very fine note. But the texture is certainly too dense for home people. How do you handle that in your next intervention? Are you a post modernist?” To which I wrote the following lengthy response that bared the depth of my own anxieties over the issues he raised. Nothing troubles me more than alienation from my cultural roots and from my national and continental constituency. I know that the linguistic and stylistic zone is where alienation from the “home” audience occurs with the most profound and rapid effect. Yet because this kind of alienation is stealthy, insidious, and seemingly a product of a “normal” involuntary process of assimilation in one’s exilic abode, it is the...Read the full article.

quietswami  # 2 | 01.07.2009 15:08

A bemusing dilemma! To proffer an opinion - dichotomising styles and writing for a diaspora and home audiences wins no favours with either, except where decipherable intellectual reasoning of the two can be asserted. An extension of such rationale will require every form of writing to offer transcriptions or translations into "home" styles etc. A prejudiced reasoning will assume superiority of intellect where "home" writings are regarded as communicable but the reverse is not the case! Would rather not be condescending in any approach but be safe in the knowledge that intellect is universal regardless of style, languange, writer or location. Reference points and theoretical sources may differ - justifiably so - but therein lies the object of any intellectual reasoning - a timeless mutual exchange learning ritual unencumbered by space nor distance! If intellectuals of the globe can communicate accross languages, cultures, philosophies, religion, race etc surely situation as described bears little merit as a dilemma. To be elitist about it, intellectual cogitations is not necessarily the purview of the masses - that's what PRs are for - but rather for the consciously, discerning astutes who readily appreciate such offerings without pretentious shenanigans. Without further pretensions, get on with it already! - except if there is some lingering megalomaniac persuasions to be assuaged!

quietswami  # 3 | 01.07.2009 15:19

Shoot! Just been tagged a "Villager"! Much preferred the excluding anonymity of a "JJC"! Now I feel like some responsible insider of an undefined collective without a clue of the proceedings!

Pius72  # 4 | 01.07.2009 15:51

Moses: Thanks for sharing your dilemmas but let's clear a few misconceptions. Your piece on Bongos Ikwue is a mass appeal, popular audience article that no audience in Africa - whether Kenyan audience o or Gambian audience o - should have difficulty with. It is not jargony academese and it beats me that anyone would describe it as such - including you. I know your prose when it is addressed to strictly academic audiences. In fact you and Farooq are among my own models in terms of how to switch from mode to mode without losing one's signature. The second misconception here is you imply - unwittingly I think - that colleagues in Nigerian universities are less theoretical, less jargony, and hence more connected to streets of Oturkpo in terms of their prose. That is not true, Moses. Don't they send you their papers to assess? Don't you serve as assessor for Nigerian peer-reviewed journals? Don't you read the op-eds of home-based academics and public intellectuals? How are we different from Odia for instance? As for our colleagues in Nigerian Univesities, their references may be dated because of lack of access to current material but certainly their prose is neither less theoretical nor jargony. In fact, sometimes I find theirs a tad jargony than ours because they are under pressure to publish in international journals and to prove that they command the faddish prose we are running away from here. In essence, the alienation you are discussing here is not peculiar to Nigerian academics abroad. It is the eternal dilemma and damnation of academia- how to retrace it steps back to the street. How to reconnect with the idioms of the people without losing its sophistication. This dilemma affects colleagues in Ibadan just as it affects you. The response to this in my own field for instance is the growth of popular culture as a legitimate field of inquiry. That is why I can go to Nigeria to study the culture of paraga and burukutu joints. A third part of the problem that you failed to address is that we are in the age of intellectual laziness where folks prefer fast-foodish prose. When you were in secondary school, your teachers and parents gave you a dictionary culture. You remember that Oxford dico that we had to have with us always? You were socialized into checking up every new word you encountered in your textbooks, magazines or newspapers. That was part of one's education. Now you have a new generation that wears anti-intellectualism like a badge of honour. The instinct to check and inquire is no longer there. At the first unknown word - someone once emailed to abuse me for using a big word like 'pedestrian' in an essay of mine he was reading ! - they begin to abuse and insult you. In our days, you checked each word you didn't know and you thanked the author quietly for enriching your vocabulary and expanding your world. This laziness of the new generation is of course not peculiarly Nigerian. After all, no one can match the anti-intellectualism of American youth. We teach them and marvel at their ignorance. I've just sent this off-the-cuff. I should have more to say when you respond. You piece is too rich to be exhausted in one post! Pius

WayoGuy  # 5 | 01.07.2009 15:58

Let’s be honest and start with the major obstacle to any hope of some of our lost writers abridging the chasm between their Euro-American intellectual thinking and writing and our African intellectual thinking and writing. That obstacle is our false sense of intellectual sophistication attached to writing like Europeans and Americans. As part of this false sense, among some writers of African descent, they immerse themselves into the protocols and analytical thinking of the western writers and academics and, very often, blame such immersion on their western education and their need to survive in the western world of academia. What many Nigerian writers, who lay claims to intellectual erudition in Europe and America, want most is some esoteric prestige, the recognition of their western peers, and to impress their friends and audience with their writing styles. Thinking and writing in the ways of their African audience is often a secondary concern and usually surfaces only when their African audience complains. As a consequence, these writers are often too far immersed and indoctrinated in the Euro-American writing and thinking processes that it is difficult to, intellectually, come back home to Africa. Many of our prominent Nigerian citizens have been afflicted by this can't-go-home-again disease ever since we started coming to the west to acquire education. To be fair, this type of struggle among expatriate African writers trained and schooled in the west, trying to intellectually return home, is not new. The movement in the 1940s and 1950s called Negritude, attempted, and to some extent succeeded, among French-speaking Africans living in the west to fashion Afro-centered thinking and writing processes that would capture the values and minds of the African audience in ways that French intellectual writing, thinking, and colonial policies had been deficient. First, I place the blame squarely on the feet of the Nigerian intellectual writer who finds it difficult to articulate for his Nigerian audience his avowed message. I blame him simply because I consider such failure to be antithetical to true intellectualism which he claims. Second, acquiring western education, writing in western jargon, trying to fit in with western peers, are no excuses for alienation from the values, idioms, peculiarities, heritage, and proverbs of his Nigerian place of origin. I am solidly persuaded that if he, the Nigerian writer, were not alienated, by choice or negligence, from the peculiarities of his Nigerian home and internalized his western indoctrination, there would be absolutely no reason, yes no reason, why his thought-processing (which, after all, are informed by his Nigerianess) and writing cannot easily capture his Nigerian audience because he himself, as a Nigerian, is a part of his own audience.

Ph3y  # 6 | 01.07.2009 16:02

@ Quiet Swami...... You want to use grammar to scatter our heads??? Please in future do remember that there are small small children here o. so use less grammar....Thanx and congrats on your 'villager-hood'attainment.:shake::shake:

Ebe  # 7 | 01.07.2009 16:09

Let’s be honest and start with the major obstacle to any hope of some of our lost writers abridging the chasm between their Euro-American intellectual thinking and writing and our African intellectual thinking and writing. That obstacle is our false sense of intellectual sophistication attached to writing like Europeans and Americans. As part of this false sense, among some writers of African descent, they immerse themselves into the protocols and analytical thinking of the western writers and academics and, very often, blame such immersion on their western education and their need to survive in the western world of academia. What many Nigerian writers, who lay claims to intellectual erudition in Europe and America, want most is some esoteric prestige, the recognition of their western peers, and to impress their friends and audience with their writing styles. Thinking and writing in the ways of their African audience is often a secondary concern and usually surfaces only when their African audience complains. As a consequence, these writers are often too far immersed and indoctrinated in the Euro-American writing and thinking processes that it is difficult to, intellectually, come back home to Africa. Many of our prominent Nigerian citizens have been afflicted by this can't-go-home-again disease ever since we started coming to the west to acquire education. To be fair, this type of struggle among expatriate African writers trained and schooled in the west, trying to intellectually return home, is not new. The movement in the 1940s and 1950s called Negritude, attempted, and to some extent succeeded, among French-speaking Africans living in the west to fashion Afro-centered thinking and writing processes that would capture the values and minds of the African audience in ways that French intellectual writing, thinking, and colonial policies had been deficient. First, I place the blame squarely on the feet of the Nigerian intellectual writer who finds it difficult to articulate for his Nigerian audience his avowed message. I blame him simply because I consider such failure to be antithetical to true intellectualism which he claims. Second, acquiring western education, writing in western jargon, trying to fit in with western peers, are no excuses for alienation from the values, idioms, peculiarities, heritage, and proverbs of his Nigerian place of origin. I am solidly persuaded that if he, the Nigerian writer, were not alienated, by choice or negligence, from the peculiarities of his Nigerian home and internalized his western indoctrination, there would be absolutely no reason, yes no reason, why his thought-processing (which, after all, are informed by his Nigerianess) and writing cannot easily capture his Nigerian audience because he himself, as a Nigerian, is a part of his own audience. Wayo Guy, Ouch!!!!!!

Pius72  # 8 | 01.07.2009 16:10

"I am solidly persuaded that if he, the Nigerian writer, were not alienated, by choice or negligence, from the peculiarities of his Nigerian home and internalized his western indoctrination, there would be absolutely no reason, yes no reason, why his thought-processing (which, after all, are informed by his Nigerianess) and writing cannot easily capture his Nigerian audience because he himself, as a Nigerian, is a part of his own audience." WayoGuy: I give you twenty-five and a half gbosas for this statement. Remind me to send you thirty drums of palmwine. Moses must also give you the original LP of cock crow at dawn. The only draw back here is your reference to Negritude. It has nothing doing here. Negritude had nothing to do with the idea of writing to reconnect with the idiom of the street in Francophone Africa. At least not in the way Moses has framed this debate. Their "return to source" philosophy was ideological and spiritual. Senghor and the generations of writers he influenced never wrote for the "maquis" - what we would call burukutu joint. They returned spiritually to a rarefied version of Africa. Pius

Eace  # 9 | 01.07.2009 16:18

It is quite difficult to write with a different persona each time one prepares to put one's thoughts down and most writers will stick (unconsciously) with their mental and emotional thought process in writing - a piece of work is often reflective of the writer's personality. However, a good writer should like a good speaker, engage with his/her audience; it is therefore imperative that one must bear in mind the target audience for any write-up. Incidentally, once a writer gains some following enough to acquire notoriety or a reputation as the case may be, people will still read whatever he/she offers - they just may not read an article from start to finish! To gain loyal followership however, one will have to be selective over what one writes - salacious, controversial and, inflammatory material will always attract the most attention. Ultimately, 'who you write for' really depends on what a writer's personal ambition is - to gain attention, to pass on information or perhaps, the most noble of all - to influence thinking and impact human lives.

Suleimana  # 10 | 01.07.2009 16:38

I know I should keep quite and move on but how can I? After reading what is clearly an intellectual debate above my station, I counted all the books in my study and segregated them by African and Non-African authors. Seven out of every ten were written by Euro-American writers and I had lived most of my life under the illusion that I understood them!

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