So many responses but not an answer to my questions

I think that good literary debates are usually known for the ‘outbursts’ that one encounters; such debates should be confrontational in the sense in which good writers confront issues in society, the same way that knowledgeable critics confront their representation in texts.

With utmost disbelief, I have read the word ‘outburst’ used to describe my opinions published in these pages last month, and wondered why those who were horrified with my views could not get a worse expletive, if that was their intention.

If what I wrote in good faith was an ‘outburst’, something must have driven the flair-up, possibly questions that had lingered for so long somewhere in me that I thought, what the heck, get answers from those who know!

Sadly, those who took issue with my outburst still had no answers, I guess because they share in my views.

Let’s face it. “The world is like a mask dancing,” so said Achebe, “if you want to see it well you do not stand in one place.” Is this not what I said we need to do? To look elsewhere for literary leadership other than the University of Nairobi?

Even if we stick there, we still have seen the world of Chris Wanjala’s The Season of Harvest and For Home and Freedom for 40 good years, can’t we shift our ground and see something like Kenya’s Literature in the Era of Facebook by the same Chris

Wanjala (2016), for instance? Is there not a way we can inject new perspectives to oral literature studies and go beyond the anthropological collections?

I directed these and other questions to Chris Wanjala and the Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi because there is something of a grudging acceptance in this country that they, at UoN, are the ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers’ of literature in Kenya.

At least, that is the impression they give by dominating these pages. As Achebe again says, ‘as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him!’ The Department of Literature at UoN set the pace, it should keep up!

DEPARTMENT OF IMPOTENT ASH

It is unacceptable that a department which was known for stoking intellectual fires all over the world in years gone by is now made of impotent ash that lives by some old glory.

I think it should draw lessons from Achebe’s good novel, Things Fall Apart. When other people were foregoing early morning pleasures to conquer laziness and turn up virgin soils far afield, Unoka would lie in wait for the real season of harvest whence he

would loiter all over the place peddling the petty amusements of his musical flute. A little slumber, a little folding of the arms, and poverty struck Unoka like a bandit.

By sleeping a little more, and seeking a little more praise from hangers on, our ‘leading critics’ in this country have been struck by a poverty of ideas that now forces us to look back to 1970s for something to quote.

And now, to nurse wounded feelings, their former students come to their defence without much, but prosaic summaries of their old CVs.

Looking at what one Remmy Shiundu wrote after me, did he not simply download Wanjala’s CV and present it here? I was not moved or impressed by Shiundu’s response, which did more to confirm what I had said than rebut it.

By claiming that “Wanjala had moved from orthodox Marxism to a Hegelian view that literature and the history of a nation were closely connected,” Shiundu gave himself and his protégé away. But again, where is the evidence that indeed Wanjala had transformed this way?

Maybe Wanjala, as Shiundu says, “was heavily influenced by Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht and Erich Fremm.” I wonder, how has this influence impacted on Wanjala’s writings?

Where are they? I suppose the irony was lost on Shiundu that, after reeling Wanjala’s CV for us in prose, he came to a stop soon after 1978, simply confirming my earlier worries that the lightning rod of the 70s was out of breath, literally.

It would help, I think, for the likes of Shiundu and Collins Odhiambo to admit that in Kenya today, there are no heroes in literary criticism because those who can have abdicated, while the intellectually hamstrung like themselves cannot engage beyond their apprentice attempts and descriptive criticism that creates more darkness than light.

Of all the responses to my article, interestingly, I think Prof Wanjala’s ‘East African Literary Critics Should Learn to Live and Let Live’ did the most to concede the problem I had identified as facing our criticism now.

I agree absolutely with Wanjala that “the gaps in the knowledge of literature are immense,” but add that such gaps can be found in earlier works, including his own.

To complement Wanjala and the entire department of literature at UoN is alright, but it cannot be done with good conscience. I would pay them better homage by reminding them about what they can do but are not doing.

Older scholars including Ngugi wa Thiong’o still write works of personal and critical essays that give the Kenyan narrative a particular bent.

Why then should we be content to read Wanjala’s The Season of Harvest when we know that he has the strength and the aptitude to do more?

If he took the worst of my rebuke last month, it is because in his past record and potential he is like that tree which brings forth juicy fruits, and such a tree is more likely to be stoned by passersby than the others, which may only be good for funeral rituals.

The change in scholarship that Wanjala acknowledges imposes upon him and the rest in the department the responsibility of adaptation, because that is the way that intellectual renewal can occur.

My plain advice to Wanjala and his contemporaries is to ignore the polite commendations that come their way from their defenders-cum-praise singers in this and other pages, and continue to work on their calling. Be like eneke the bird which, on observing

that men had learnt to shoot without missing, vowed to fly without perching, thereby becoming an embodiment of adaptation.

To concede, as Wanjala does, that change has come in the academy is not enough; he needs to go beyond the conventions that he is a part of and see what lies on the wild side of imaginative thinking. There, he will discover to his intense joy that the missionary position of doing anything, though acknowledged as the proper and guilt-free formula of doing things, offers rather ephemeral satisfaction.

It is imagination, variety and experimentation that render our intimacy with literary knowledge more fulfilling. Looking backwards will not do, dismissing critics will not do either and, more so, pleading for sympathy will not do.

We should look out for ‘cheap’, ‘conceited’, ‘confrontational’ ‘outbursts’ that some of us spew here in order to have a clearer sense of our performance because our ‘outbursts’ are a fair barometer of popular thinking out there.