Selection of literary prize winners is a cryptic puzzle

The prize season is over for now, and it is time to look ahead to next year and beyond.

We didn’t do too badly in East Africa, considering that our sisters, Okwiri Oduor from Kenya and Nansubuga Makumbi from Uganda brought home the Caine and the Commonwealth short story trophies.

The Nobel eluded us, again, and I don’t even know if any of our pen-armed warriors made the short list for the Man Booker. Maybe we should try and send out bigger squads in the future, instead of basing all our hopes on only one man.

Locally, I was delighted to learn that our beloved Dr Yusuf K. Dawood won the Wahome Mutahi prize, very soon after I had been rapping about him and our literary escapades of the late 1970s.

You know, recalling the past is not so much about self-glorification as about intimate sharing of what we think mattered in our experiences and might matter to sensitive and sensible readers of the present generations.

MANY EXPERIENCES

Otherwise, what is the use of living long if it is only about kula chumvi (consuming lots of salt, Kiswahili phrase for longevity) and not about significant sharing of the many experiences to which the years and decades have made us witnesses?

Even in the theoretical field, the “production of knowledge” that the young literary scholars seem to be earnestly agonising about today, my take is that good theory is no more than the systematisation and articulation of concrete lived experience.

So, tempting as it is to talk about the current movers and shakers of the literary scene, cautious old men might prefer to stick to what they have lived and experienced rather than pretend to speak for or about those who are quite capable of speaking for themselves.

Back to the Wahome Mutahi Prize, much as I rejoiced with my friend and fellow elder Dawood, I couldn’t suppress the feeling that I would have been just as glad at the outcome if either of the other short-listed authors, Waigwa Wachira or Ng’ang’a Mbugua, had won.

My friend Waigwa Wachira is an exceptionally multi-talented artist, who deserves a much higher profile than he is generally accorded on our creative scene.

Since the 1970s, he has appeared in numerous memorable stage and film roles, including the electrifying one, opposite Oluoch Obura, as Styles in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi Is Dead.

Then there were his musical recordings, which introduced a distinct and inimitable streak into the pop sounds of the time.

Seeing his tragi-comical and cautionary play, A Gift from a Stranger, make the final shortlist of three was a welcome development to those familiar with the resourcefulness of this artist. Though not an outright winner, its nomination was a significant achievement.

MOVING POWER

As for Ng’ang’a Mbugua, his win would have been a great inspiration for writers, readers, teachers and students of verse, a much-misunderstood and much-maligned genre. Incidentally, my belief is that the genre is verse, not poetry.

Poetry is an internal quality, the “moving power”, of a text that the author shares with the reader if he or she succeeds in connecting with the reader’s feelings.

Strong feelings are often expressed in verse because the technique of this form enables the writer to concentrate and compress feelings for maximum impact on the reader.

The main characteristics of verse that enable it to “pressurise” sentiment for powerful impact are: shape, both visual and aural, economy, verbal inventiveness and impressionistic (mind-picture) figurativeness.

The endless laments we hear about poetry being “difficult” result, I think, from our failure to understand how the verse technique works and how good verse writers deploy it to communicate strong feeling.

Anyway, Mbugua’s This Land Is Our Land being nominated for the prestigious prize is a good sign that verse still holds its fascination, and maybe what we need is more exposure to samples of it that are also relevant to our experiences.

So, to Mbugua, my friend Anthony Oduori of Jam On Our Faces and all the new generation of verse writers I say, shime, keep up the good work. Give us more good verse and help us make it a natural part of our reading activities.

Back to the prizes, it is certainly a wonderful feeling winning a prize, being recognized among one’s peers as a worthy performer. But it’s a rather mysterious and almost unpredictable process. 

After all, the juries’ selection of winners depends on their personal tastes and responses, and de gustibus non (of taste, no argument), as the Romans used to say.

My most vivid memories of being on a literary prize jury are of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

REAL AGONY

In 1987 in Harare, with Ama Ata Aidoo as our chair, Njabulo Ndebele and I chose Tsitsi Dangaremgba’s Nervous Conditions as the Africa Region winner.

I hadn’t thought much of Dangaremgba’s feminist and anti-colonial text, but the book’s subsequent success on the international scene made me feel glad that I had been persuaded by my colleagues to select it.

Six years later, in Toronto, I found myself in a real agony at the international jury, when Ama Ata Aidoo’s own Choices: A Love Story was competing on the final two-text shortlist with Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey.

I had myself chaired the panel in Nairobi, comprising eminent writers and literary scholars, that had selected Choices as the best entry from Africa.

But even more subtly, Aidoo is a long-time friend, a “fellow Nairobian”, dating from her teaching days at the then-Kenyatta College (now Kenyatta University), her sisterly love for the late Jonathan Kariara and her motherhood of Kina.

To avoid bias, I had to restrict myself to purely technical literary criteria in presenting and defending her book before the international jury.

As it turned out, Mistry narrowly edged Aidoo out in a tie-breaking vote, but my final feeling was that the best had been done and I had no complaint against the verdict.