After the Storm: NLNG Poetry Prize’s Report and Matters Arising
- By E. E. Sule
- Published December 2, 2009
- Features
-
Rating:
E. E. Sule
E. E. Sule is the pen-name for Dr. Sule E. Egya. He teaches Creative Writing, African Literature and Modern Literary Theory in the Department of English & Literary Studies, University of Abuja, Abuja FCT, Nigeria. He is the author of Impotent Heavens (a collection of short stories); Dream and Shame (a collection of short stories); Naked Sun (a volume of poetry); Knifing Tongues (a volume of poetry); The Writings of Zaynab Alkali (a critical book, co-authored with Umelo Ojinmah); In Their Voices and Visions: Conversations with New Nigerian Writers (a book of interviews), and What the Sea Told Me (a volume of poetry). His poems, short stories, literary and scholarly essays have appeared in journals, e-journals, anthologies and literary magazines in Nigeria, the USA, Germany, Spain, India, the UK, Senegal, etc. He has read his works to audiences both in Nigeria and abroad. In 2007, he had a nine-month writing residency in Senegal where he worked under the mentorship of the world class Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah.
View all Entries by E. E. Sule
There are dangers of catholicity, and there is a peculiar academic
delusion that is incumbent on professors of literature to praise
anything ever produced in the past.
- David Daiches, Critical Approaches to Literature (1967). p. 267.
It is true, I think, that these are times when the financial rewards
for sorry writing are much greater than those for good writing.
-Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” Ed. John Hersey.
The Writer’s Craft (1975). P. 47.
And a great writer – forgive me, perhaps I shouldn’t say this, I’ll lower
my voice – a great writer is, so to speak, a second government.
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn “Nobel Lecture.” Ed. John Hersey.
The Writer’s Craft (1975). p. 141.
Preamble
Prior to 10th of October 2009, when the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Prize for Literature, the biggest literary prize in Nigeria, was to announce a winner (this year the prize was for the best volume of poetry), the literati in Nigeria had great expectations. But it was not without some mixed feelings; the panel of judges had earlier released a long list of nine, with the promise that a shortlist would follow, but the shortlist, eagerly awaited, never came. Though it seemed unusual for some, the generality of contemporary literary minds in Nigeria waited fervently for the winner. Arts journalists, working in a tradition of vibrant literary journalism, had upped the tempo of expectations by profiling the listed writers, making juicy insinuations and getting people to bet as to the poet that would emerge the winner. Then the day came with a shocker, at least for those who eagerly expected that they would become winners, or their friends, or their relations, would become winners. The panel of judges rolled out an impressive report, a really impressive piece of contradiction and shocker: the nine volumes long listed (the report calls it a “shortlist of eleven”; two had been disqualified on technical grounds) were well rooted in the literary tradition in which they were produced but none of them was fit to win the prize! The report recognises that “the variety of subject matter covered by this year’s entries implies that literary creativity is still an active ‘participant’ in discourses over the state of the nation” and goes on to conclude that “the poets [‘shortlisted’] have worked within the ‘tradition’ of social commitment that has been a defining feature of African and specifically Nigerian literary creativity.” Half of the report focuses on the individual volumes, specifically naming the authors, and outlining what it considers each poet’s unique “personal voice or poetic idiom”. Then an anti-climax suddenly surfaces, announced by a subtle, almost inconsequential criticism: “the poets of the present time have taken advantage of, but have not really extended the resources available in the existing literary tradition.” The real anti-climatic hammer sounded tough and severe: “The Panel of Judges looked for a body of poetry of high seriousness and an all embracing vision that reaches beyond social satire and a private quest for meaning, and decided not to award this year’s literary prize for literature.”
Reactions were swift. Rage and outrage, already part of the aesthetic dimension of these contemporary poets, defined, underpinned almost all the reactions. Various in tones and tenors, like the overflowing poems of these enraged poets, the reactions ranged from the rational to the irrational, certainly more of the irrational, and suddenly the NLNG Prize for Literature acquired new connotations. Even poets who had rushed their works through the printing process to enter the contest are now convinced that the prize was no good for Nigerian literature. NLNG was castigated for disparaging writers. Some poets and writers based outside Nigeria, denied participation by the NLNG Prize’s infamous exclusionary clause, seized the opportunity to tell their home-based counterparts: “See, it served you right!”
I respond here as a scholar of new African writing in English, especially the poetry genre. I have been mapping, exacting, critiquing and discoursing the artistic responses of these new writers to the overwhelming existential challenges they have had to face as young people in the unbearable years of military despotism in Nigeria. My inquest is into the historicism, political, material, cultural, psychological, even individualistic, which is inextricably tied to their variegated craft. With a severely critical sensibility, I have tried to locate the forte, as well as the failing, of these new writers; to feel the fire, as well as the faint, of their individual idioms; to fathom the infiniteness, as well as the limit, of their rage. For this group of writers, as Niyi Osundare has said elsewhere and as we have seen in their responses to the report, are angry men and women, weepers and lamenters for a collapsed nation, for the stark fact that there is no more life to be lived in their country, that the only option, though self-damaging in a way, is to take to their heels to the global market square, to embrace a dispersal-narrative, only so they could survive. So these writers, today, after that spell of rage and elegy and total resignation to fate, are of globalised spirit, intensely nostalgic, still nationalistic, now focusing on the entire malady of Africa, as the recent award-winning short story of E.C. Osondu shows.
Of History and Aporia
Baffled like everyone else, my immediate reaction was to put the judges’ decision side by side with history: what I saw was that the two were at variance, with consequences. The poets, the report tells us, are worried by “our common political concerns as citizens”; some of them begin from “the self as the starting point of knowledge and experience, with obvious consequences for the social vision.” It praises the poets for having “fresh insights,” for erecting “impressive verbal architecture,” for “combining words and images in new ways in order to see the world afresh,” for celebrating “the freedom of the creative spirit,” and for taking “satirical writing even further towards a tortured and cynical social vision.” The report also affirms that “Quite a few of the poets on the list have moved towards literary maturity.” However, this maturity is not worth rewarding because the poets had not produced any serious poetry that reached beyond social and personal issues. It is difficult to fathom what, for Heaven’s sake, the judges, intellectuals in the sphere of literature and language, mean by a poetry that should go beyond the social and the personal. Perhaps something magical, fantastical? But we have a history; a sense of where we came from, where we are now (even if we do not know where we are headed!); a literary history, a history of literary prizes. Where exactly can we point out that there is any poet or writer in Nigerian history, in African history, in the history of the world, that has won a literary prize with a book that is not socially committed, committed to the struggles of humanity? As the report says, the NLNG Prize has a history; it has given out prizes to books before. The last poetry books that won it, Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s The Chants of a Minstrel and Gabriel Okara’s The Dreamer, His Vision, are overtly socially committed. In fact, in an afterword, Okara, waxing strong with a new-found theory of social commitment, declares: “The poet, whose tool is the word basically, is a visionary, idealist, revolutionary, and a conformist non-conformist, or he is all of these (sic) put together in infinite number of permutations. It is the Word he uses as tool to bring about the transformation and regeneration of the present to meet the demands of his society.” Is it the same panel of judges that adjudged those poetry books as joint winner? Could this be the same panel of judges that chose Kaine Agari’s Yellow Yellow, praised as a unique (not in craft but social vision) narrative that touches the very nexus of the interracial unease caused by the exploitation of petroleum resources and human beings in the Niger Delta? If it was not, did the panel know of this history? There is a disturbing, really alarming, hiatus between the decision of the panel this year and what had obtained in the history of the NLNG Prize. For the sake of clarification, the judges should have explained that the previous winners who won on the strengths of their social themes, (whose craft, as far as I know, is not anything close to that of some of the poets listed) were errors of judgement! That the NLNG Prize, in 2009, has come a long way (!) and does not consider a book committed to social contradictions as worthy of winning it as the report implies sounds outlandish.
So here is a huge contradiction, very distasteful. It is especially so in a country where writers have won almost all the prizes in the world, from the Nobel to the Booker, from the Commonwealth to the Noma, from the ANA Prize to the least local prize. There is therefore a vibrant history, a tradition, a commonplace, of prize winning in Nigeria; the books or authors that won those prizes are there for us to see, to read and, in spite of the judgement of each age, to measure their artistic worth. From what we know, what we have, it is not such a big deal for a work to win as to reaching beyond (whatever the limit) social and personal craft. A work of art, a creative piece, is either personal or social or both, indeed stronger as both. The author’s conscious craft, personal idiom, and exploits with the figuration of his/her chosen language is, as I prefer to argue, the biggest factor in determining the uniqueness of his/her work. This is what makes me return to the plays of Soyinka, to the poetry of Okigbo and Osundare, and to the fiction of Ben Okri. It seems with the kind of abstract hammer in the hands of the NLNG panel even these writers could not have won the prize, if they do really meant what they presented as the reason for not giving out the prize.
If the judges are humble enough to engage in self-criticism, an inward reflection, it would be clear to them how askew their judgement is, how injurious it portends to be, in the literary tradition in Nigeria. A prize, such as the NLNG Prize that claims to promote literature, that claims to discover new talents, should be awarded to any piece of literary shit as long as it is well crafted; the emphasis should be on whether the poems are well written or not. A writer’s vision ought to be sacrosanct to him/her: it is up to him/her to go social or personal or both. If the implication of the panel’s judgement is to urge new writers to produce works of art better than the existing classics in Nigeria, which have won prizes far better than the NLNG, then there is a chaos of perception. Of course any novelist may come out with something that surpasses Things Fall Apart or The Famished Road, any poet may come out with something that surpasses Labyrinths or Waiting Laughters (do not forget this is a subjective matter), but there is even no need for that because I think it is an error of criticism to measure a classic of one age by a classic of another age. Each age has its classics. Today there are readers who find what Uche Nduka writes far enriching, more meaningful (appealing is the word) than what Okigbo wrote years ago. Literature is not a domain of fixation. The return of historical and cultural considerations in literary theories should remind us that every genre historicises and is in turn being historicised; every history has its art, and art its history.
The NLNG Prize judgement is in isolation, one that is insidious. It traced the literary tradition of Nigerian literature and refused to award the prize to the new frontiers of this tradition. A better judgement, in my view, would have been to withhold the award on the ground of typographical and grammatical errors!
Interrogating the Canon
One of the implications of the refusal to award the prize, itself a topic of debate for quite sometime now, is that nothing artistically worthy is being produced by new Nigerian writers. In 2004, it was the fiction, riddled with grammatical errors. Now it is the poetry, perhaps error-free, but a minion to social commitment or individualism. Viewed from this angle, the judgement is a culmination of the criticisms, including mine, of the writing of our time, which mostly decry the weak, watery, literary expressivity of most so-called, self-important, award-craving writers of our time, and the absence, though not disturbing, of a collective vision, something akin to the Negritude movement or the Alter-Native tradition. Not disturbing because, as Harry Garuba and Obiwu explain at different forums, the beginning of the new writing was marked by a strong sense of dispersal, individualised idioms, wishful disconnect from the dominant tradition, and the infection of globalisation.
But does that denote an outright condemnation of the new writing, of all that is being written in our time? Does Charles Nnolim’s once controversial conclusion, after a cursory reading of some works, that the hero is dead in new Nigerian fiction imply the absence of great fiction in our time? Must the hero of Achebe’s age be the hero of our age? Does Tanure Ojaide’s conclusion sometime ago, even more controversial, that the poetry of our time is a mere footnote to the poetry of his time indicate the end of good poetry in Nigeria? How cogent it is to say the new poets have not taken poetry beyond the confines of the Alter-Native tradition? Someone somewhere too has said that the major problem of this era is that there is a lack of critical inquiries, in spite of the academic papers on new writing being published both in Nigeria and abroad. To some extent, these charges are true. They are vivid indicators that our period has its failings, its traditional flaws; it is a period that in responding to its peculiar challenges is bound to have shortcomings and excesses. What is often worrying is that the failings of this era are not put into appropriate contexts.
Every period of literature anywhere in the world has the good and the bad. It is easy for a writer, a critic, who belongs to an earlier period to be blind to the failings of his/her time, to take a superior, even condescending, look at the subsequent periods. In that order, some English writers and critics sneered at emergent African (Nigerian) Anglophone writing during the first phase of modern Nigerian writing; in turn, some pioneer modern writers and critics, I mean of the Okigbo era, sneered at the writing of the Alter-Native tradition; similarly, the writers of the Alter-Native tradition have looked down upon the writing of our time. In a way, it is a practice, perhaps one that typifies the very critical nature of literature. But a comprehensive, critical, look at the entire canon of Nigerian literature is pertinent to any defining features of any period. As the canon unfolds right from the beginning of modern literature in English in Nigeria, we are faced with more chaff than grain. You will see that each period in the canon has its lows and highs; its numerous pedestrian works and few masterpieces. If Amos Tutuola had written his The Palm-Wine Drinkard in our time, even in Osundare’s period, it would have been thrown into the dustbin. But it made the canon, the classic of its time. In the pre-independence era, the Okora period, many literary works did not survive; others survived because eager European academics, looking for books to showcase the exotic parts of Africa, welcomed them into the canon. The masterpieces of that period are early Okara, early Achebe, Okigbo and Soyinka. In my view, any other writer of that period was on the pedestrian. In the era of the Alter-Native tradition, I can only see two engaging poets who have moved to that high level: Niyi Osundare and Odia Ofeimun; any other poet is of course an ordinary poet, at the low level, no matter the clamour of critical reception. In the area of fiction, I see only one singular voice: Ben Okri. In drama it is Femi Osofisan and Tess Owueme.
delusion that is incumbent on professors of literature to praise
anything ever produced in the past.
- David Daiches, Critical Approaches to Literature (1967). p. 267.
It is true, I think, that these are times when the financial rewards
for sorry writing are much greater than those for good writing.
-Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” Ed. John Hersey.
The Writer’s Craft (1975). P. 47.
And a great writer – forgive me, perhaps I shouldn’t say this, I’ll lower
my voice – a great writer is, so to speak, a second government.
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn “Nobel Lecture.” Ed. John Hersey.
The Writer’s Craft (1975). p. 141.
Preamble
Prior to 10th of October 2009, when the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Prize for Literature, the biggest literary prize in Nigeria, was to announce a winner (this year the prize was for the best volume of poetry), the literati in Nigeria had great expectations. But it was not without some mixed feelings; the panel of judges had earlier released a long list of nine, with the promise that a shortlist would follow, but the shortlist, eagerly awaited, never came. Though it seemed unusual for some, the generality of contemporary literary minds in Nigeria waited fervently for the winner. Arts journalists, working in a tradition of vibrant literary journalism, had upped the tempo of expectations by profiling the listed writers, making juicy insinuations and getting people to bet as to the poet that would emerge the winner. Then the day came with a shocker, at least for those who eagerly expected that they would become winners, or their friends, or their relations, would become winners. The panel of judges rolled out an impressive report, a really impressive piece of contradiction and shocker: the nine volumes long listed (the report calls it a “shortlist of eleven”; two had been disqualified on technical grounds) were well rooted in the literary tradition in which they were produced but none of them was fit to win the prize! The report recognises that “the variety of subject matter covered by this year’s entries implies that literary creativity is still an active ‘participant’ in discourses over the state of the nation” and goes on to conclude that “the poets [‘shortlisted’] have worked within the ‘tradition’ of social commitment that has been a defining feature of African and specifically Nigerian literary creativity.” Half of the report focuses on the individual volumes, specifically naming the authors, and outlining what it considers each poet’s unique “personal voice or poetic idiom”. Then an anti-climax suddenly surfaces, announced by a subtle, almost inconsequential criticism: “the poets of the present time have taken advantage of, but have not really extended the resources available in the existing literary tradition.” The real anti-climatic hammer sounded tough and severe: “The Panel of Judges looked for a body of poetry of high seriousness and an all embracing vision that reaches beyond social satire and a private quest for meaning, and decided not to award this year’s literary prize for literature.”
Reactions were swift. Rage and outrage, already part of the aesthetic dimension of these contemporary poets, defined, underpinned almost all the reactions. Various in tones and tenors, like the overflowing poems of these enraged poets, the reactions ranged from the rational to the irrational, certainly more of the irrational, and suddenly the NLNG Prize for Literature acquired new connotations. Even poets who had rushed their works through the printing process to enter the contest are now convinced that the prize was no good for Nigerian literature. NLNG was castigated for disparaging writers. Some poets and writers based outside Nigeria, denied participation by the NLNG Prize’s infamous exclusionary clause, seized the opportunity to tell their home-based counterparts: “See, it served you right!”
I respond here as a scholar of new African writing in English, especially the poetry genre. I have been mapping, exacting, critiquing and discoursing the artistic responses of these new writers to the overwhelming existential challenges they have had to face as young people in the unbearable years of military despotism in Nigeria. My inquest is into the historicism, political, material, cultural, psychological, even individualistic, which is inextricably tied to their variegated craft. With a severely critical sensibility, I have tried to locate the forte, as well as the failing, of these new writers; to feel the fire, as well as the faint, of their individual idioms; to fathom the infiniteness, as well as the limit, of their rage. For this group of writers, as Niyi Osundare has said elsewhere and as we have seen in their responses to the report, are angry men and women, weepers and lamenters for a collapsed nation, for the stark fact that there is no more life to be lived in their country, that the only option, though self-damaging in a way, is to take to their heels to the global market square, to embrace a dispersal-narrative, only so they could survive. So these writers, today, after that spell of rage and elegy and total resignation to fate, are of globalised spirit, intensely nostalgic, still nationalistic, now focusing on the entire malady of Africa, as the recent award-winning short story of E.C. Osondu shows.
Of History and Aporia
Baffled like everyone else, my immediate reaction was to put the judges’ decision side by side with history: what I saw was that the two were at variance, with consequences. The poets, the report tells us, are worried by “our common political concerns as citizens”; some of them begin from “the self as the starting point of knowledge and experience, with obvious consequences for the social vision.” It praises the poets for having “fresh insights,” for erecting “impressive verbal architecture,” for “combining words and images in new ways in order to see the world afresh,” for celebrating “the freedom of the creative spirit,” and for taking “satirical writing even further towards a tortured and cynical social vision.” The report also affirms that “Quite a few of the poets on the list have moved towards literary maturity.” However, this maturity is not worth rewarding because the poets had not produced any serious poetry that reached beyond social and personal issues. It is difficult to fathom what, for Heaven’s sake, the judges, intellectuals in the sphere of literature and language, mean by a poetry that should go beyond the social and the personal. Perhaps something magical, fantastical? But we have a history; a sense of where we came from, where we are now (even if we do not know where we are headed!); a literary history, a history of literary prizes. Where exactly can we point out that there is any poet or writer in Nigerian history, in African history, in the history of the world, that has won a literary prize with a book that is not socially committed, committed to the struggles of humanity? As the report says, the NLNG Prize has a history; it has given out prizes to books before. The last poetry books that won it, Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s The Chants of a Minstrel and Gabriel Okara’s The Dreamer, His Vision, are overtly socially committed. In fact, in an afterword, Okara, waxing strong with a new-found theory of social commitment, declares: “The poet, whose tool is the word basically, is a visionary, idealist, revolutionary, and a conformist non-conformist, or he is all of these (sic) put together in infinite number of permutations. It is the Word he uses as tool to bring about the transformation and regeneration of the present to meet the demands of his society.” Is it the same panel of judges that adjudged those poetry books as joint winner? Could this be the same panel of judges that chose Kaine Agari’s Yellow Yellow, praised as a unique (not in craft but social vision) narrative that touches the very nexus of the interracial unease caused by the exploitation of petroleum resources and human beings in the Niger Delta? If it was not, did the panel know of this history? There is a disturbing, really alarming, hiatus between the decision of the panel this year and what had obtained in the history of the NLNG Prize. For the sake of clarification, the judges should have explained that the previous winners who won on the strengths of their social themes, (whose craft, as far as I know, is not anything close to that of some of the poets listed) were errors of judgement! That the NLNG Prize, in 2009, has come a long way (!) and does not consider a book committed to social contradictions as worthy of winning it as the report implies sounds outlandish.
So here is a huge contradiction, very distasteful. It is especially so in a country where writers have won almost all the prizes in the world, from the Nobel to the Booker, from the Commonwealth to the Noma, from the ANA Prize to the least local prize. There is therefore a vibrant history, a tradition, a commonplace, of prize winning in Nigeria; the books or authors that won those prizes are there for us to see, to read and, in spite of the judgement of each age, to measure their artistic worth. From what we know, what we have, it is not such a big deal for a work to win as to reaching beyond (whatever the limit) social and personal craft. A work of art, a creative piece, is either personal or social or both, indeed stronger as both. The author’s conscious craft, personal idiom, and exploits with the figuration of his/her chosen language is, as I prefer to argue, the biggest factor in determining the uniqueness of his/her work. This is what makes me return to the plays of Soyinka, to the poetry of Okigbo and Osundare, and to the fiction of Ben Okri. It seems with the kind of abstract hammer in the hands of the NLNG panel even these writers could not have won the prize, if they do really meant what they presented as the reason for not giving out the prize.
If the judges are humble enough to engage in self-criticism, an inward reflection, it would be clear to them how askew their judgement is, how injurious it portends to be, in the literary tradition in Nigeria. A prize, such as the NLNG Prize that claims to promote literature, that claims to discover new talents, should be awarded to any piece of literary shit as long as it is well crafted; the emphasis should be on whether the poems are well written or not. A writer’s vision ought to be sacrosanct to him/her: it is up to him/her to go social or personal or both. If the implication of the panel’s judgement is to urge new writers to produce works of art better than the existing classics in Nigeria, which have won prizes far better than the NLNG, then there is a chaos of perception. Of course any novelist may come out with something that surpasses Things Fall Apart or The Famished Road, any poet may come out with something that surpasses Labyrinths or Waiting Laughters (do not forget this is a subjective matter), but there is even no need for that because I think it is an error of criticism to measure a classic of one age by a classic of another age. Each age has its classics. Today there are readers who find what Uche Nduka writes far enriching, more meaningful (appealing is the word) than what Okigbo wrote years ago. Literature is not a domain of fixation. The return of historical and cultural considerations in literary theories should remind us that every genre historicises and is in turn being historicised; every history has its art, and art its history.
The NLNG Prize judgement is in isolation, one that is insidious. It traced the literary tradition of Nigerian literature and refused to award the prize to the new frontiers of this tradition. A better judgement, in my view, would have been to withhold the award on the ground of typographical and grammatical errors!
Interrogating the Canon
One of the implications of the refusal to award the prize, itself a topic of debate for quite sometime now, is that nothing artistically worthy is being produced by new Nigerian writers. In 2004, it was the fiction, riddled with grammatical errors. Now it is the poetry, perhaps error-free, but a minion to social commitment or individualism. Viewed from this angle, the judgement is a culmination of the criticisms, including mine, of the writing of our time, which mostly decry the weak, watery, literary expressivity of most so-called, self-important, award-craving writers of our time, and the absence, though not disturbing, of a collective vision, something akin to the Negritude movement or the Alter-Native tradition. Not disturbing because, as Harry Garuba and Obiwu explain at different forums, the beginning of the new writing was marked by a strong sense of dispersal, individualised idioms, wishful disconnect from the dominant tradition, and the infection of globalisation.
But does that denote an outright condemnation of the new writing, of all that is being written in our time? Does Charles Nnolim’s once controversial conclusion, after a cursory reading of some works, that the hero is dead in new Nigerian fiction imply the absence of great fiction in our time? Must the hero of Achebe’s age be the hero of our age? Does Tanure Ojaide’s conclusion sometime ago, even more controversial, that the poetry of our time is a mere footnote to the poetry of his time indicate the end of good poetry in Nigeria? How cogent it is to say the new poets have not taken poetry beyond the confines of the Alter-Native tradition? Someone somewhere too has said that the major problem of this era is that there is a lack of critical inquiries, in spite of the academic papers on new writing being published both in Nigeria and abroad. To some extent, these charges are true. They are vivid indicators that our period has its failings, its traditional flaws; it is a period that in responding to its peculiar challenges is bound to have shortcomings and excesses. What is often worrying is that the failings of this era are not put into appropriate contexts.
Every period of literature anywhere in the world has the good and the bad. It is easy for a writer, a critic, who belongs to an earlier period to be blind to the failings of his/her time, to take a superior, even condescending, look at the subsequent periods. In that order, some English writers and critics sneered at emergent African (Nigerian) Anglophone writing during the first phase of modern Nigerian writing; in turn, some pioneer modern writers and critics, I mean of the Okigbo era, sneered at the writing of the Alter-Native tradition; similarly, the writers of the Alter-Native tradition have looked down upon the writing of our time. In a way, it is a practice, perhaps one that typifies the very critical nature of literature. But a comprehensive, critical, look at the entire canon of Nigerian literature is pertinent to any defining features of any period. As the canon unfolds right from the beginning of modern literature in English in Nigeria, we are faced with more chaff than grain. You will see that each period in the canon has its lows and highs; its numerous pedestrian works and few masterpieces. If Amos Tutuola had written his The Palm-Wine Drinkard in our time, even in Osundare’s period, it would have been thrown into the dustbin. But it made the canon, the classic of its time. In the pre-independence era, the Okora period, many literary works did not survive; others survived because eager European academics, looking for books to showcase the exotic parts of Africa, welcomed them into the canon. The masterpieces of that period are early Okara, early Achebe, Okigbo and Soyinka. In my view, any other writer of that period was on the pedestrian. In the era of the Alter-Native tradition, I can only see two engaging poets who have moved to that high level: Niyi Osundare and Odia Ofeimun; any other poet is of course an ordinary poet, at the low level, no matter the clamour of critical reception. In the area of fiction, I see only one singular voice: Ben Okri. In drama it is Femi Osofisan and Tess Owueme.