Not everybody likes living in exile, yet it could bring out the best in the exiled. Professor Obiwu Iwuanyanwu, director of the writing centre at the Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio, is making the most of a sad reality in the US. Before his present appointment, Obiwu taught at the University of Jos and Syracuse University, USA.

He has published two books, Rituals of the Sun (1992), a collection of poems, and Igbos of Northern Nigeria (1996), the pioneer book on Igbo diasporaic studies. He has also published many stories and critical articles, including “Achebe’s Poetic Drive” and “The History of Nigerian Literature, 1772-2006,” both in 2006.

Economic impoverishment made it difficult for him to continue his doctoral studies with any seriousness in Nigeria. So, he had no other choice than to abandon Nigeria to become an economic exile in a foreign land at the age of thirty-five. “I solemnly regret that Nigeria has given me absolutely nothing but an insistent pain from my childhood experience of kwashiorkor in mid-twentieth century,” he tells Sunday Sun online from Ohio, USA.

Unlike what many of us think here in Nigeria, the experience of exile has its perennial irritations. But, in the United States, such socio-cultural inconveniences pale into insignificance when compared with professional opportunities that reward hard work and excellence, says Obiwu. For instance, in 2006, he was appointed a member representing all coaches in the national program advisory committee of the Honda Campus All-Star Challenge. On April 18, 2007, the Greene County Board of Commissioners honoured him with a “Resolution” recognition, which is passed into law in the State of Ohio.

The Xenia Daily Gazette newspaper also honoured him with its front page “Applause” award of May 1, 2007. He has just been appointed a member of the labour force and education committee of the Greene County Department of Development. “In comparative terms, such honours are definitely rare in the life of a normal Nigerian university academic,” Obiwu declares.

How could the teaching of creative writing enhance literature? The enormous resources that the American university system invests in writing and creative writing programmes, he says, indicate the society’s value for the skill and art of writing generally.

One of his former students at the University of Jos, Helon Habila, distinguished himself as a journalist in Nigeria before he became an accomplished international writer. Chris Abani, one of the most prolific and accomplished young writers in the world today, came out of the same English and literary programme as him under the tutelage of Professors Ben Obumselu and Michael J. C. Echeruo at Imo State University, Uturu.

Both Abani and Habila now teach creative writing in the American university system. Obiwu is impressed that two of the most eminent young global writers today, Chimamanda Adichie and Uzodinma Iweala, studied creative writing at John Hopkins University and Harvard University, respectively; and E.C. Osondu, who is shortlisted in the 2007 Caine Prize, has recently completed his studies at the prestigious Syracuse University creative writing programme, which go to show that they have all benefited from American writing programmes.

Says Obiwu, “The possibility that creative writing will become a full-fledged programme in Nigerian universities is even more urgent with all the recent outcries against the entrenchment of poor writing skills among a vast majority of young, homegrown Nigerian writers. The standard of Nigerian writing at home has been on a rapid slide for many years now.”

Recently, he defended the poet, Tanure Ojaide, when some of his colleagues pilloried his position on new Nigerian poetry. What informed his position?
Obiwu replies, “I was opposed to the unscholarly verbiage or unguarded caustic language of Ojaide’s much younger opponents. Literary discourse neither precludes nor occludes aesthetic distance or linguistic decency.

Much of what passes for literary critique among many a Nigerian commentator is unnecessary self-assured ego-tripping and excessive verbal abuse. Such rhetorical debasement of discourse was pioneered in Nigerian and, indeed, African critical aesthetics by the Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, and entrenched as a tradition by Chinweizu and Femi Osofisan. The Senegalese, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and the South African, Lewis Nkosi, have variously expressed their displeasure in relation to the discourse of Soyinka.”

The poet, Omohon Ebodaghe, in a recent interview with Sunday Sun, lamented the “sterile cultural motifs” in African poetry. As a poet, does he think African poetry lacks a form, like European and American poetry, as he said? Or, what does he think are the distinctive features of African poetry, form-wise? He responds, “As the Igbo say, the firewood in a country cooks food for the people.

I don’t know, nor would I claim to understand, what is meant by ‘sterile cultural motif’ in African literature. Every national literature has its history; every generation of writers has its geopolitical locale and audience. Christopher Okigbo still remains the most seductive of all Nigerian and African poets till this day, as fresh and as relevant as William Shakespeare has ever been.

“On the one hand, politics and economics will remain prominent features of literary creation in Africa as long as the continent continues to be mired in the economic and political mercenary of the like of Olusegun Obasanjo.