Recently, at ANA reading, I raised the question that why should Nigerian female writers write mostly about the condition of women in the society and shy away from venturing into other aspects of life. The answer (always) is that a writer should write about her immediate problem, what bothers her, and ought to do so with a sense of condemnation and correction. Maria Ajima says the woman is always with pots, plates and spoons and should not avoid writing about them (even though the woman has learnt to sing anti-domestic melody). This, in its crudest sense, is social commitment. A woman eager to lend her voice to the unending condition of women in her society – often swollen-headed with the idea of reaching her fellow women in the society, even those who do not appreciate metaphors – easily abandons the potency of metaphorisation because it is theorised that the importance of the message alone can and do really make literature. It is this syndrome that is responsible for the deficiency of craft in the Nigerian feminist novel. When a woman publishes a novel, she is praised for upholding the course of the woman, not for any remarkable craft; and any contrary criticism is conveniently branded as phallocentric.

Since the writer eagerly commits himself to sociopolitical issues, he is set out, in his writing, to essentially mean something. He establishes an intention and this intention erroneously takes the place of craft. Meaning, which ordinarily should be the construction of the reader (which is why a literary work is susceptible to multi-interpretations) becomes the construction of the writer. One uncreative way our writers do it today is the imposition of prefaces and the purchase of forewords as egoistic prefixes to their literary works. What need is there for a volume of poetry or a novel or a play to have a preface (in which the writer explains his intention) and foreword(s)? A writer must not set out to mean, but to create; for when he does that he will ultimately fail to mean what he intends to mean. It is the reader who makes meaning from what the writer has created. And a literary language should hypnotise the reader with its fresh beauty before it means something to him. A writer's creation should be a free work of imagination artistically baked in a sublime abstraction that, at its apogee, does not take cognizance of any such economics and social studies as commitment. Since a writer is a product of society or belongs to humanity, his metaphorisation will certainly find contexts in his relationship with his society. But his first duty is the business of perfecting metaphorisation and creating a personal and peculiar idiom for himself.

Where is the heap of our socially committed writings through which the authors' have intended to make meanings to the ordinary masses of the society today? At a Faculty Seminar, I presented a paper on Femi Osofisan's dramas, reading them, of course, from the broadest path through which they can be read: Marxism. An issue that preoccupied the audience after my presentation could be summed up in one question: "When Osofisan found himself as Director of National Theatre, what revolution did he bring to it, since most of his dramas directly preach revolution?" To me, such questions are post-Marxist questions that should veer our minds away from the latest commitment sensation: Postcolonialism. When our writers (instead of critics) become conscious of Marxism, Feminism and Postcolonialism, a risk to our literature emerges which is that except such writers possess passionate artistry like Soyinka, Osundare, Okri, Nwosu Akachi-Adimora Ezeigbo, Chiedu Ezeana, Uche Nduka, Remi Raji and a few others, the literary craft will be mortgaged for the so-called urgent messages of the writers that those theories sermonize.

Writers like Kole Omotoso, Osofisan, Festus Iyayi, Bode Sowande, Funso Aiyejina, Tanure Ojaide, Ezenwa-Ohaeto and others, fascinated by socialist realism and consequently debase the language of literature by softening the metaphors, by surrendering aesthetics to bare folklore (where vernacular clichés and proverbs are presented as literary language, unrefined by creative tempers), and by insisting that literature must be made simple for the common man when, indeed, the common man is in need of sublime profundity of literature, create a literary precedence bereft of aesthetics but impregnated with impotent ideologies . This is the path the new writer woefully treads. To the common man, literature is naturally an intellectualised domain and he often wants to escape into it to test the metre of his intellectualism. The issue of gaining access into a work of literature by the common man is elastic, by the way. And to say a work of art has to be quite simple to be enjoyed results in the kind of fallacy that is associated with mediocrity. Each time I teach Osundare, my students have always disagreed with the general view that Osundare's poetry is simple (or deceptively simple, as some apostles of simpleness would put it) and yet they crow about that it is the poetry they enjoy most. Osundare's poetry certainly has complexity manifested in the profundity of his metaphors and startling diction largely picked from nature. Apart from his rare gift of eloquence (another poet with this gift is Remi Raji), Osundare it is who can match Soyinka in humourous coinages and very fresh turns of phrases. Nwosu is an emerging maverick in this latitude.

I do think that it is the simplistic (sorry, simple) literary language of the self-acclaimed Marxists in our literature that has sown the seed that we are reaping today in the expansive watery language that writers and critics lyricise and condemn at the same time. It has been preached in several quarters that simpleness is a literary virtue and complexity or profundity is a vice. Most writers have thus chosen to be simple: if you pick a passage from recent fiction, you will find the sentences mostly simple in the order of S + V + O. The words are usually plain and what we call figures of speech are becoming enemies to straightforward comprehension, as part of the preachment today is that a literary work has to be understood at a single reading, even if it is a poem. Combined with the inevitable grammatical and typographical errors, the plainness of the language becomes repulsive and today everyone rises at every occasion to frown at the language of the younger generation.