Other novels from the United States like Sefi Ata?s Everything Good Will Come and Unoma Azuah?s Sky-High Flames have followed the tradition of the girl?s life story with little or no craft in the language.

            Back home we have writers like Wale Okediran and Chim Newton who have had achievements as prolific novelists who write actively with stories that are quite intriguing. But beyond the intrigues of the stories, which are often draped in excessive, unwanted sensationalism, their language is so stark, barren of figures, images and symbols and a reader can hardly learn anything new from the flowing sentences.

            Such is the language you encounter in most of the short stories collected in Beyond Gold and Other Stories edited by David Ker and Cramped Rooms and Open Spaces edited by Ibrahim Sheme. The language is so banal, unexciting with few or no fresh expressions to hold a conscious reader?s interest. Of what striking edge are the stories? The stories ? like most stories today ? cannot hold much originality and thus need to be dressed in outstanding, experimental literary language to make a conscious reader go through them with some interest.

            Is it not worrying that we belittle the language of literature with reasons that betray our mediocrity? ?A story has to be an easy read? or ?The language of your work should be simple so that you get wider audience.? I ask, How wide is the wider audience that writers yearn for? To what extent do we continue to lower literary language to accommodate the mediocrity of the audience since we are all aware of the devaluation in language skills that is a common ache with Nigerian intellectualism today? Is it not pitiable that the prose you encounter in some newsmagazine in Nigeria today is better than what you see in Nigerian fiction which is wrongly tilted toward the simplicity of the masses / audience? How damaging it is to semanticize ?complex? and ?experimental? as derogatory and thus dismiss writers who attempt to move out of the mainstream as too complex and experimental?

            But our best works in African literature (which may not even carry the kind of literary language you see in the novels of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy) are works that are not written in language that is simplistic in the disguise of being simple and audience-friendly. Where do the novels (to begin with the worst) of Cyprian Ekwensi, Flora Nwapa, T. M. Aluko, Elechi Amadi, Abubakar Gimba, Chukwuemeka Ike, Kole Omotoso, Festus Iyayi, Buchi Emecheta, and the post-military pamphleteers who see themselves as novelists end today? They are novels of culture and ideology with no language and styles. Except for Helon Habila?s Waiting for An Angel and Okey Ndibe?s Arrows of Rain, post-military political novels in Nigeria are critiques of oppression by the military dictators without craft. For lack of style and tautened literary language, a novel can perish. Which is why apart from the excess of themes we have for studying in African literature, there are hardly stylistic studies of the formal properties of the language in African literature. Lewis Nkosi, after accusing South Africans of grinding out ?third-rate novels? because of their unimaginative stories (as is also the case with post-military Nigerian fiction) of the apartheid, predicted that after the apartheid, the South African novelist would possibly have nothing to write about. What is the fate of the South African fiction today? We enslave our literature too readily in the enclave of theme and do forget that it is the literary language that is in fact literature.

            There are few hopes, however, in this stagnant age for literary language. Maik Nwosu, Okey Ndibe, Helon Habila (Toni Kan, as his Ballad of Rage has shown, is yet to be totally weaned of the Hints magazine cheap prose) and Akachi-Adimora Ezeigbo. I read Alpha Song by Nwosu some months ago and yet such clever phrases and expressions as ?life is a terminal disease?, ?the burden of being and memories?, ?Taneba the spirit who descanted [night?s] mysteries? and many more others especially from the highly philosophical utterances of Bantu, continue to surface on my mind. The imaginative strength that Nwosu puts in his language certainly makes him the best literary language ??vaganza? (to use one of his recurrent words in Alpha Song) that the recent Nigerian fiction has produced. These are expressions that you want to jot down because of their freshness and beauty.

            Such expressions can also be seen in Ndibe?s political novel, Arrows of Rain: ?the dead don?t envy the living? and ?speech is the mouth?s debt to a story.? They are profound expressions without carrying jaw-breaking words. How many of such expressions do we see in most of our works of fiction?

            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. Why must a work of literature be understood at the first reading? Is it because the modern reader is so lazy (and has no time) that he cannot attempt to go between the lines or behind the words in search of meanings which is the normal literary activity of the conscious readers? Must we follow the steps of the Americans and demean the literary language of our literature which ought to be evolved from the language of wisdom used by our forefathers?