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.
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In this era I cannot see any outstanding performance yet in a literature that has just emerged, but certainly its uniqueness points to a great future. Compared to the past eras, this era stands out in the realisation of diverse voices and idioms; it is the most tenacious era, consistent in its variegated exploits, exposed to overwhelming opportunities after a long spell under military repression. But sadly the opportunities often show the way to failure. Good literature is being written in our time. But it is fragmented, fractured by the globalised machination, scattered, as it were, into different corners of the earth. Maybe eclecticism. No collective vision, nor theoretically collectivised or communally coherent vision. But with disparate tropes, the poets are centripetally pulled towards that nationalist imagination underpinning the entire gamut of Nigerian literature. Contrary to the unfounded, unsubstantiated, at worst, flippant criticisms of new Nigerian poetry, never before has there been a consciousness among poets of the same era in Nigeria to write differently from one another. So while you can use the term modernist for the Okigbo era, and Alter-Native tradition for the Osundare era, there is no such one nomenclature, it seems to me, for the new era. To think this is a weakness is an error. To study this era’s text and fathom the nature of its disunity is a critical imperative.
In the critical circle there are commendable efforts, great names: Dan Izevbaye, Charles Nnolim, Ernest Emenyonu, Ime Ikiddeh, etc; their successors are also great in their ways. But what are the outstanding critical and theoretical breakthroughs gracing our critical canon today in spite of these big names? From Formalism to Marxism, and now to Post-colonialism, Nigerian critics and scholars, it seems to me, have remained ordinary followers, receivers (not givers) of critical tools fashioned by others. Marxism, its most general, most superficial, indeed most inferior type (what Raymond Williams calls “the received formula of base and superstructure”), raged in Nigeria; now it is spent, and self-professed Marxists have opted to dine and wine with the very authorities they howled against. Given the domestication of Marxism in Nigerian literature, its loud proclamations, what spectacular contributions have Nigerian Marxist scholars made to the Marxist theory in the way scholars like Pierre Macherey, Frederic Jameson or Terry Eagleton have done? Now the vogue is Post-colonialism. As Nigerian scholars, very talented, embrace Post-colonial theories, we are yet to see any distinct, radical addition to the theories from Nigeria. Is it not true, as Chidi Amuta said in his 1989 book, that Nigerian literature, nay African literature, suffers from “The wilful suspending of the instinct for rigorous theorizing”? Perhaps like Ayi Kwei Armah and Chinweizu, we should ask ourselves in this twenty-first century (forget the charge of Afrocentrism): why are our theoretical and aesthetic values motivated from the outside, in spite of, for instance, our very experienced professors of English and Cultural studies being comfortable chairs at foreign, world universities? It is perhaps in oral/performance theories and feminist theories that we can say Nigerian female scholars have made useful, distinct additions. So the issue for me is not that this generation’s critics are lazy; it may be that they have inherited a tradition of laziness in the entire critical domain of African literature.
Three Demons: Prizes, the Media, and Destructive Narcissism
It should be emphasised here that every age, era, has its very few masterpieces and many pedestrian works. Usually, in a tradition that is critically active, perceptive critics, interpreters, analysts, even ideologues, must perform one pertinent duty: evaluating literary works and erecting a genuine canon. So far, it seems that Nigerian critics and scholars are good at this. Consistently, and with a degree of competence, the critics of the Okigbo era identified the best of their time. In our new era, what seems too obvious is that everybody is a writer and there are no critics. But there are critics. While the few critics are at work, the writers, especially the poets are increasing in a geometrical rate, with works that betray an alarming degree of mediocrity.
The real problem is not that everybody becomes a poet; it is that somehow bad poetry always finds itself at the centre of the literary scene. In the age of technology and neo-liberalism, every person can write and publish any trash; in the age of descriptive criticism, in which anything prescriptive is consistently attacked, any piece of poetry can be described as good. At different forums the question has been thrown around derogatorily by pseudo-poets that who sets the standards for good poetry. A self-important pseudo-poet has once written me off, in my very presence, as a critic who prescribes standards and consequently sees nothing good in his poetry even though, in his thinking, he is writing great poetry. I have also been accosted by some poets in northern Nigeria who think highly of themselves as poets (whereas indeed their poetry is pure dross) for not giving critical attention to poetry from northern Nigerian, i.e. their poetry. But these pseudo-poets will continue to write some trash, more trash, rush to Ibadan and other places, and get their poetry books published as long as they have the money to pay the printers posturing as publishers. The pseudo-poets will also pay some journalists to review the books on dailies, praising them as the newest dimension in Nigerian poetry; the most wonderful poetry written in recent times, and so on. Surprisingly this wonderful poetry will win a major award. In the end, a great poet is made. This is how great poets who people the Nigerian literary scene today come to be.
Out of many such great poets that emerge in Nigeria, only very few are in the business of crafting poetry. Some of these few are indeed good. For instance, the only engaging poetry I have read from Minna, the self-styled Ibadan of northern Nigeria, is from Gimba Kakanda, unknown, trying hard to get his poetry published. The argument by some people in the wake of the NLNG conundrum that all or most of the listed poets are unknown, are toddlers who should be learning how to write poetry, confounds me. So how long should they have been in the act of writing poetry? How long should they have been apprenticed? We must take into consideration the peculiarity of creative writing, indeed, any form of imaginative work. A work of art is great not because of the length of time spent on it or the years of its author’s apprenticeship, but by the talent behind it. Great talents defy the logic of apprenticeship, of workshop, of systematic learning. Honing one’s skills is a very personal thing. Some people became great with their first books; we have examples littering African literature. Chinua Achebe became great with his first book; he did not obtain an MFA before writing it; he did not even know that he was writing a great book. What about Ayi Kwei Armah? Not knowing that he would become a writer, he wrote his first book in the confines of his room, with a wounded conscience, after being rejected as a revolutionary fighter. It sounds to me preposterous for people to reach a conclusion that someone cannot produce great poetry or any work of art in his or her first published work. It is rare for a writer to produce a great work as a debut; it is also rare for a writer, like Ben Okri, to hit it after some attempts. No writer can write beyond the scope of his imagination and skills at a given time. If we accept that great imagination is behind every great literary work, which is the case, then we can explain why a writer may produce a great work of art at a particular time, given his level of imagination at that time, and equally produce a poor work of art at some other time. But this is only so with people who are worthy of being called writers.
That is not applicable to the pseudo-writers whose major concern is to write, publish and win award. It is a mark of pride (which of course predicts a fall) that a writer, even at the stage of production, already thinks high of his work, wills it to win an award, and indulges in all forms of manipulation and high-profile public relation in order to win the award. Perhaps the age of literary awards thrusts itself upon us. Perhaps it is hard for us, especially given the level of poverty in Nigeria, to resist the lure of money-tagged awards, such as 50-thousand-dollar NLNG Prize. While the awards, such as the NLNG Prize, only enrich individuals without promoting literature, Nigerian writers, it is clear now, have put so much hope and faith in the awards that the judges’ seeming blunder so devastatingly shook the psyche of the new writers. Everyone should have known: as there are many literary prizes today, so also there are many strange, even irrational, ways of awarding them. What can be more irrational than awarding Barack Obama the Nobel Prize for Peace because he has the INTENTION of bringing peace to the world?
Some of the responses of the long listed poets sound anguished and neurotic; they draw attention to themselves as worthy of but denied the huge money. Strictly speaking, a worthy poet after completing a volume returns to his writing desk for the next volume, not to a public arena to contest a panel’s refusal to award his volume an award. Any quarrel ought to be between analysts, commentators, critics and the panel of judges. If a poet thinks he is denied fifty thousand dollars, such a poet in my view is a hack. The noisy and noisome responses that follow the panel’s judgement are a sure pointer to the ethical and psychic failure of the literati in Nigeria, and, more importantly, a mirror that reveals in full the pseudo-writers of our time. In recent times, Nigerian writers, even ANA, are not known for standing up in protest against the establishment. Instead of protesting the hypocrisy of rebranding Nigeria, ANA dined with the Minister of rebranding. But when a fifty-thousand prize is denied, writers suddenly jumped up in protest.
I do not undermine the benefits and perks of winning a literary award. In fact, my volume, What the Sea Told Me, was entered for the prize. But entering a literary award should be like throwing a valued object into the dustbin. Once you have entered the contest, turn your back (you can pray, though) and do not even think of it until such a time that you are told your work has won the prize. I do not think a literary prize has a direct link with the making of a great literature; a work of art does not need to win a literary prize to become great. Literary prize is the least of the factors surrounding the greatness of Okigbo’s Labyrinths or Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood or Osundare’s Moonsong. Award winners from ANA conventions have swaggered about, deluding themselves as great writers only to be forgotten or kicked off the path of the canon which has a way of unfolding by itself. The over-indulgence of the pseudo-poets in their perceived greatness, their shameless craving for awards, and their self-projection as great poets/writers have resulted in the picture, indeed a false one, of the kind of poetry written in our time. Listening to these award-mongers, one is convinced that there is nothing serious going on in the literary domain in Nigeria today.
Conclusion: the Way Forward
So, let those who want to be real poets return to their desks, to their privacy, to their consciences, where the only prize is the rigour of writing, the quest to touch humanity, the desire to surpass the self. It is hard to accept: paradoxically, literary prizes, in Nigeria and abroad, have reduced the worth of our literature! Along with this is the phenomenon of hyper-publicity, where worthless works produced by those who have the power of the media and technology have been given undue praise. The overall effect on Nigerian literature is that the progress tends to be backward. While the technology of praise singing increases, while the pressure of the media is exacting because the entire world, afraid of metaphors, is growing towards laziness and feeble-mindedness, while poverty and hardship and the hypocrisy of Nigeria’s self-styled new publishing houses (sorry, we don’t publish poetry!) are waxing stronger against the new Nigerian poets, the only hope for Nigerian poetry and, indeed, creative writing is the revival of the critical tradition. Here, even the poets are implicated. It is hard to understand why the new poets who have made considerable progress such as Uche Nduka, Ogaga Ifowodo, Remi Raji, Chiedu Ezeanah, Obi Nwakanma, Afam Akeh, Maik Nwosu, etc, do not have consistent critical or theoretical formulations about one another’s works, or theorise their own creative processes. Why are these poets so timidly silent, so complacent, not given to critical debates that can define their own time? Take a look at any serious literary epoch and you will see that the writers are also the great critics of their time. Like Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, for their time; like Osundare, Osofisan, Ojaide, for their time. It is also hard to understand why Kraft Books and others, which pride themselves as printers (sorry, publishers) of poetry in Nigeria today, cannot commission scholars to produce critical readers for their poetry books, especially those by poets that have shown considerable maturity. Is that not how Heinemann consolidates the critical tradition for its writers?
The greatest mistake, misconception, of our time is that we think literary prizes will be beneficial to our literature as a body of intellectual and critical tradition. Prizes thus seem to replace what ought to be a vibrant critical tradition. Increasingly, but sad enough, many writers’ organisations are emerging with literary prizes, other organisations, governmental and non-governmental, think they are helping to build Nigerian, African, literature by instituting prizes. It is certainly the wrong direction. NLNG’s 50 thousand dollars, for instance, only makes one lucky person rich and perhaps keeps him/her out of writing for the rest of his/her life. No huge amount of money can make someone become a better writer if that person is not instinctively, congenitally, cut out to be a great writer. No literary prize can make any poet or novelist of our time greater than Okigbo or Ayi Kwei Armah who did not consider prizes as important.
What I suggest, therefore, is that organisations instead of instituting awards should institute bodies that will be beneficial to the entire literary and intellectual sphere, such as creating writer’s fund that can be accessed by writers that have shown considerable maturity. Such writers can use such fund for research, for residency, and for travelling. A Nigerian writer based outside Nigeria, for instance, can use such fund to spend some months in Nigeria researching his/her next novel or play or poetry collection. For a direct effect on upcoming Nigerian writers, a body of professional editors and literary discussants should be established, funded, to read and assess the works of new writers and consequently recommend them to publishers. It is even more important to use such money to buy good books for public and school libraries (a writer is usually conceived in the library) for people to read inspiring works. These measures are certainly far useful than raising the ego of any pseudo-writer with award money, with the pretence that Nigerian literature is being promoted, while indeed Nigerian literature seems to be dying in our universities. And if awards are to recognise the literary output of an individual writer, the monetary attachment should be inconsequential; the money a writer receives does not give him/her any fame, what gives him/her fame is the degree of public acceptance of his/her work and the capacity of the work to attract critical responses. One of the greatest problems confronting literature today the world over, the reason for the diminishing quality of literature globally, is that things, such as prizes, which ought to be free of monetary bondage, are being tied to the vainglory of money. If you disagree, compare this age with the age when there were no prizes, or when prizes were not tied to money (when a poet laureate was determined by name and fame), when literature was far, far superior to money!
------------------
E. E. Sule is the pen name for Dr. Sule E. Egya, a lecturer in Department of English & Literary Studies, University of Abuja. He is currently a Georg Forster Fellow, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
In the critical circle there are commendable efforts, great names: Dan Izevbaye, Charles Nnolim, Ernest Emenyonu, Ime Ikiddeh, etc; their successors are also great in their ways. But what are the outstanding critical and theoretical breakthroughs gracing our critical canon today in spite of these big names? From Formalism to Marxism, and now to Post-colonialism, Nigerian critics and scholars, it seems to me, have remained ordinary followers, receivers (not givers) of critical tools fashioned by others. Marxism, its most general, most superficial, indeed most inferior type (what Raymond Williams calls “the received formula of base and superstructure”), raged in Nigeria; now it is spent, and self-professed Marxists have opted to dine and wine with the very authorities they howled against. Given the domestication of Marxism in Nigerian literature, its loud proclamations, what spectacular contributions have Nigerian Marxist scholars made to the Marxist theory in the way scholars like Pierre Macherey, Frederic Jameson or Terry Eagleton have done? Now the vogue is Post-colonialism. As Nigerian scholars, very talented, embrace Post-colonial theories, we are yet to see any distinct, radical addition to the theories from Nigeria. Is it not true, as Chidi Amuta said in his 1989 book, that Nigerian literature, nay African literature, suffers from “The wilful suspending of the instinct for rigorous theorizing”? Perhaps like Ayi Kwei Armah and Chinweizu, we should ask ourselves in this twenty-first century (forget the charge of Afrocentrism): why are our theoretical and aesthetic values motivated from the outside, in spite of, for instance, our very experienced professors of English and Cultural studies being comfortable chairs at foreign, world universities? It is perhaps in oral/performance theories and feminist theories that we can say Nigerian female scholars have made useful, distinct additions. So the issue for me is not that this generation’s critics are lazy; it may be that they have inherited a tradition of laziness in the entire critical domain of African literature.
Three Demons: Prizes, the Media, and Destructive Narcissism
It should be emphasised here that every age, era, has its very few masterpieces and many pedestrian works. Usually, in a tradition that is critically active, perceptive critics, interpreters, analysts, even ideologues, must perform one pertinent duty: evaluating literary works and erecting a genuine canon. So far, it seems that Nigerian critics and scholars are good at this. Consistently, and with a degree of competence, the critics of the Okigbo era identified the best of their time. In our new era, what seems too obvious is that everybody is a writer and there are no critics. But there are critics. While the few critics are at work, the writers, especially the poets are increasing in a geometrical rate, with works that betray an alarming degree of mediocrity.
The real problem is not that everybody becomes a poet; it is that somehow bad poetry always finds itself at the centre of the literary scene. In the age of technology and neo-liberalism, every person can write and publish any trash; in the age of descriptive criticism, in which anything prescriptive is consistently attacked, any piece of poetry can be described as good. At different forums the question has been thrown around derogatorily by pseudo-poets that who sets the standards for good poetry. A self-important pseudo-poet has once written me off, in my very presence, as a critic who prescribes standards and consequently sees nothing good in his poetry even though, in his thinking, he is writing great poetry. I have also been accosted by some poets in northern Nigeria who think highly of themselves as poets (whereas indeed their poetry is pure dross) for not giving critical attention to poetry from northern Nigerian, i.e. their poetry. But these pseudo-poets will continue to write some trash, more trash, rush to Ibadan and other places, and get their poetry books published as long as they have the money to pay the printers posturing as publishers. The pseudo-poets will also pay some journalists to review the books on dailies, praising them as the newest dimension in Nigerian poetry; the most wonderful poetry written in recent times, and so on. Surprisingly this wonderful poetry will win a major award. In the end, a great poet is made. This is how great poets who people the Nigerian literary scene today come to be.
Out of many such great poets that emerge in Nigeria, only very few are in the business of crafting poetry. Some of these few are indeed good. For instance, the only engaging poetry I have read from Minna, the self-styled Ibadan of northern Nigeria, is from Gimba Kakanda, unknown, trying hard to get his poetry published. The argument by some people in the wake of the NLNG conundrum that all or most of the listed poets are unknown, are toddlers who should be learning how to write poetry, confounds me. So how long should they have been in the act of writing poetry? How long should they have been apprenticed? We must take into consideration the peculiarity of creative writing, indeed, any form of imaginative work. A work of art is great not because of the length of time spent on it or the years of its author’s apprenticeship, but by the talent behind it. Great talents defy the logic of apprenticeship, of workshop, of systematic learning. Honing one’s skills is a very personal thing. Some people became great with their first books; we have examples littering African literature. Chinua Achebe became great with his first book; he did not obtain an MFA before writing it; he did not even know that he was writing a great book. What about Ayi Kwei Armah? Not knowing that he would become a writer, he wrote his first book in the confines of his room, with a wounded conscience, after being rejected as a revolutionary fighter. It sounds to me preposterous for people to reach a conclusion that someone cannot produce great poetry or any work of art in his or her first published work. It is rare for a writer to produce a great work as a debut; it is also rare for a writer, like Ben Okri, to hit it after some attempts. No writer can write beyond the scope of his imagination and skills at a given time. If we accept that great imagination is behind every great literary work, which is the case, then we can explain why a writer may produce a great work of art at a particular time, given his level of imagination at that time, and equally produce a poor work of art at some other time. But this is only so with people who are worthy of being called writers.
That is not applicable to the pseudo-writers whose major concern is to write, publish and win award. It is a mark of pride (which of course predicts a fall) that a writer, even at the stage of production, already thinks high of his work, wills it to win an award, and indulges in all forms of manipulation and high-profile public relation in order to win the award. Perhaps the age of literary awards thrusts itself upon us. Perhaps it is hard for us, especially given the level of poverty in Nigeria, to resist the lure of money-tagged awards, such as 50-thousand-dollar NLNG Prize. While the awards, such as the NLNG Prize, only enrich individuals without promoting literature, Nigerian writers, it is clear now, have put so much hope and faith in the awards that the judges’ seeming blunder so devastatingly shook the psyche of the new writers. Everyone should have known: as there are many literary prizes today, so also there are many strange, even irrational, ways of awarding them. What can be more irrational than awarding Barack Obama the Nobel Prize for Peace because he has the INTENTION of bringing peace to the world?
Some of the responses of the long listed poets sound anguished and neurotic; they draw attention to themselves as worthy of but denied the huge money. Strictly speaking, a worthy poet after completing a volume returns to his writing desk for the next volume, not to a public arena to contest a panel’s refusal to award his volume an award. Any quarrel ought to be between analysts, commentators, critics and the panel of judges. If a poet thinks he is denied fifty thousand dollars, such a poet in my view is a hack. The noisy and noisome responses that follow the panel’s judgement are a sure pointer to the ethical and psychic failure of the literati in Nigeria, and, more importantly, a mirror that reveals in full the pseudo-writers of our time. In recent times, Nigerian writers, even ANA, are not known for standing up in protest against the establishment. Instead of protesting the hypocrisy of rebranding Nigeria, ANA dined with the Minister of rebranding. But when a fifty-thousand prize is denied, writers suddenly jumped up in protest.
I do not undermine the benefits and perks of winning a literary award. In fact, my volume, What the Sea Told Me, was entered for the prize. But entering a literary award should be like throwing a valued object into the dustbin. Once you have entered the contest, turn your back (you can pray, though) and do not even think of it until such a time that you are told your work has won the prize. I do not think a literary prize has a direct link with the making of a great literature; a work of art does not need to win a literary prize to become great. Literary prize is the least of the factors surrounding the greatness of Okigbo’s Labyrinths or Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood or Osundare’s Moonsong. Award winners from ANA conventions have swaggered about, deluding themselves as great writers only to be forgotten or kicked off the path of the canon which has a way of unfolding by itself. The over-indulgence of the pseudo-poets in their perceived greatness, their shameless craving for awards, and their self-projection as great poets/writers have resulted in the picture, indeed a false one, of the kind of poetry written in our time. Listening to these award-mongers, one is convinced that there is nothing serious going on in the literary domain in Nigeria today.
Conclusion: the Way Forward
So, let those who want to be real poets return to their desks, to their privacy, to their consciences, where the only prize is the rigour of writing, the quest to touch humanity, the desire to surpass the self. It is hard to accept: paradoxically, literary prizes, in Nigeria and abroad, have reduced the worth of our literature! Along with this is the phenomenon of hyper-publicity, where worthless works produced by those who have the power of the media and technology have been given undue praise. The overall effect on Nigerian literature is that the progress tends to be backward. While the technology of praise singing increases, while the pressure of the media is exacting because the entire world, afraid of metaphors, is growing towards laziness and feeble-mindedness, while poverty and hardship and the hypocrisy of Nigeria’s self-styled new publishing houses (sorry, we don’t publish poetry!) are waxing stronger against the new Nigerian poets, the only hope for Nigerian poetry and, indeed, creative writing is the revival of the critical tradition. Here, even the poets are implicated. It is hard to understand why the new poets who have made considerable progress such as Uche Nduka, Ogaga Ifowodo, Remi Raji, Chiedu Ezeanah, Obi Nwakanma, Afam Akeh, Maik Nwosu, etc, do not have consistent critical or theoretical formulations about one another’s works, or theorise their own creative processes. Why are these poets so timidly silent, so complacent, not given to critical debates that can define their own time? Take a look at any serious literary epoch and you will see that the writers are also the great critics of their time. Like Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, for their time; like Osundare, Osofisan, Ojaide, for their time. It is also hard to understand why Kraft Books and others, which pride themselves as printers (sorry, publishers) of poetry in Nigeria today, cannot commission scholars to produce critical readers for their poetry books, especially those by poets that have shown considerable maturity. Is that not how Heinemann consolidates the critical tradition for its writers?
The greatest mistake, misconception, of our time is that we think literary prizes will be beneficial to our literature as a body of intellectual and critical tradition. Prizes thus seem to replace what ought to be a vibrant critical tradition. Increasingly, but sad enough, many writers’ organisations are emerging with literary prizes, other organisations, governmental and non-governmental, think they are helping to build Nigerian, African, literature by instituting prizes. It is certainly the wrong direction. NLNG’s 50 thousand dollars, for instance, only makes one lucky person rich and perhaps keeps him/her out of writing for the rest of his/her life. No huge amount of money can make someone become a better writer if that person is not instinctively, congenitally, cut out to be a great writer. No literary prize can make any poet or novelist of our time greater than Okigbo or Ayi Kwei Armah who did not consider prizes as important.
What I suggest, therefore, is that organisations instead of instituting awards should institute bodies that will be beneficial to the entire literary and intellectual sphere, such as creating writer’s fund that can be accessed by writers that have shown considerable maturity. Such writers can use such fund for research, for residency, and for travelling. A Nigerian writer based outside Nigeria, for instance, can use such fund to spend some months in Nigeria researching his/her next novel or play or poetry collection. For a direct effect on upcoming Nigerian writers, a body of professional editors and literary discussants should be established, funded, to read and assess the works of new writers and consequently recommend them to publishers. It is even more important to use such money to buy good books for public and school libraries (a writer is usually conceived in the library) for people to read inspiring works. These measures are certainly far useful than raising the ego of any pseudo-writer with award money, with the pretence that Nigerian literature is being promoted, while indeed Nigerian literature seems to be dying in our universities. And if awards are to recognise the literary output of an individual writer, the monetary attachment should be inconsequential; the money a writer receives does not give him/her any fame, what gives him/her fame is the degree of public acceptance of his/her work and the capacity of the work to attract critical responses. One of the greatest problems confronting literature today the world over, the reason for the diminishing quality of literature globally, is that things, such as prizes, which ought to be free of monetary bondage, are being tied to the vainglory of money. If you disagree, compare this age with the age when there were no prizes, or when prizes were not tied to money (when a poet laureate was determined by name and fame), when literature was far, far superior to money!
------------------
E. E. Sule is the pen name for Dr. Sule E. Egya, a lecturer in Department of English & Literary Studies, University of Abuja. He is currently a Georg Forster Fellow, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.