Contemporary Nigerian narratives have awakened some renewed international interests in the past few years after the hiatus that followed Ben Okri's Booker Prize winning novel, The Famished Road. Part of these renewed interests, I think, began with Helon Habila winning the Caine Prize for African Literature, which, from all indications, enhanced the publication of Waiting for an Angel (2003). In the same year Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published Purple Hibiscus. Then we have Chris Abani's Graceland (2004), Seffi Atta's Everything Good Will Come (2005), and Unoma Azuah's Sky-High Flames (2005). Each of these novels is different from the others in remarkable ways, and achieves certain degrees of sophistication that are miles removed from the dominant narratives of the previous years.

My goal in this short piece is to address some important issues raised by Emmanuel Sule in his inspiring essay, "Literary Language and Recent Nigerian Fiction " It is not in my interest to rebut any of his ideas. Rather, I am interested in putting them, especially the importance placed on literary language, in perspective. I will attempt to argue for lucidity of narrative language by drawing examples from two of the novels he has, perhaps mistakenly, dismissed as being too American, Purple Hibiscus and Everything Good Will Come.

There are many reasons we tell stories and these include imparting morals, teaching historical, religious or cultural lessons, upholding a particular tradition, providing entertainment, etc. All these reasons revolve around the human experience, which does not necessarily mean what took place in the past. The human experience especially in realistic novels is the crafting of stories within the parameters of the probable. While acknowledging various forms of story telling, I concentrate on realistic narratives in the grand tradition of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and of two of the newest female voices, Adichie and Atta.

I agree with Sule's claim that "serious fiction ought to be taken as a product of literary language." The truth, however, is that serious fiction is a product of literary imagination. This means that the world of fiction must be understood not literally, but literarily, not as facts but as "fixed," feigned, as Wolfgang Iser would put it. We understand fiction in this way because the author has (or supposed to have) presented it to us exactly in that frame of mind. This implies that the persons in that fictional world (characters), the world itself (setting), the progression of the story from A to B (Plot), the perspective/s from which the story is told (point/s of view), and the manner in which the narrator uses his/her words (language), are to be seen as having been crafted, made, or planted there to elicit our response, or, as some would say, to provoke a discourse.

What the above introductory ideas aim to demonstrate is that literary language is as important as other elements of narrative. For Sule, literary language has to be tautened, "deeply philosophical," "sublime" and must "require exegetical thinking." He believes that a novel can perish "for lack of style and tautened language." In the end, however, it turns out that his paradigm of style and tautened language is the technique of oral literature. Thus for him:

It is natural – as is seen in our oral literature – that a work of literature is characteristically profound and the more profound (what many people prefer to derogatorily call complex) the richer it is. When African traditional musicians use proverbs, it is not that there are no plain words that can express the meanings of those proverbs.

Proverbs in oral literature, I agree, have their merits. There is, however, a wide gap between literature, understood very strictly as belles lettres, and orature, meaning the body of knowledge communicated verbally. In belles lettres, one's audience is mediated by time and space. In orature it is not the case; the audience is there. The artist in the oral tradition essentially addresses those who must have experienced what s/he experienced, directly or indirectly. The world of the oral artist is by its nature, parochial. Judging from the above, therefore, it is clear that what worked for my grandfather, or, indeed for my illiterate father addressing our village meeting, might not work for my story, which I believe, addresses not only people from my ethnic group or nation, but also the next generations. Bearing in mind that I am already faced with a different audience, in and outside Nigeria, my language therefore must shed the parochial nature of village proverbs, and in doing so must necessarily bargain with the world. This implies that the first goal of a narrative artist is the simplicity, that is, clarity of language, for language is a tool, a means through which the human experience is communicated.