Young writers have to ‘eat’ peacefully with the elders

Left- Nducu wa Ngugi with his new book, City Murders and right, Tony Mochama signing an autograph for one of his books. PHOTO| FILE

What you need to know:

  • There are plenty of young writers in the country, but in which direction do they want to take our literature?
  • In this third instalment on East Africa’s literary greats, Bukenya looks at Tanzania’s men and women of letters

Since I wrote that Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child is the one novel that confronts the problem of land in Kenya, I have lived with the disappointment of fellow literary scholars who, for various reasons, felt let down by whatever message they gleaned from the sub-text of my piece.

My view that the current crop of Kenyan writers has not centralised the question of land may have been mistaken, by some, to mean that these writers do not concern themselves with issues that matter.

For other critics, I lost a good chance to give a clear position on the outstanding matter of land-related injustices in Kenya, instead hiding behind "a flowery language" — whatever that means — to posture towards (in)action.

Other colleagues have noted a pattern that was completely unintended, which is, that I am preoccupied with the literature of the ‘oldies’, and do not seem to have any interest in emerging literatures, both written and oral.

It is possible that I have muted my interest in popular literatures and cultures, but I believe these are important barometers of emerging thoughts on the contemporary experiences, especially in the urban spaces in Kenya.

CHANCE TO APPRECIATE CREATIVES WORKS

Indeed, I do not know of any literary critic in Kenya who would have problems with the fact that popular literatures and cultures offer us a chance to appreciate creative works from the spatial, social, generational margins.

As the likes of Tony Mochama, Ng’ang’a Mbugua, Stephen Partington, J.K.S Makokha and Parselelo Kantai write, their works receive rigorous critical appreciation from literary scholars within and beyond literature departments.

For instance, I have recently finished reading Karin Barber and Onookome Okome’s Popular Culture in Africa: The Episteme of the Everyday, in which Kenyan scholars Miriam Maranga-Musonye, Grace Musila and Peter Simatei grapple with various aspects of popular cultural artifacts in Kenya.

What emerges is the fact that producers of popular literatures and cultures are somewhat concerned with real challenges that afflict contemporary Kenya.

UPSURGE OF LITERARY WORKS

The upsurge of literary works in Kenya, especially in Nairobi and other urban centres, have completely transformed the literary and other art scenes.

With dominant anxiety and uncertainty that characterise city spaces in Kenya, Maranga-Musonye argues, the youth on the fringes of urban (in)conveniences fashion new forms of an old oral literary genre, mchongoano,

using humour to alleviate the impact of ‘the ambiguity, absurdity, and incongruity which they experience in their urban existence.’
For Simatei, the emergence of ‘local language radio’ and mobile telephony have created opportunities where hitherto marginalised people re-insert themselves into the central spaces in the making of ethnic nationalism and discourse, often creating literary ‘texts’, a la Barber, through the ‘performance of fan culture’ that then becomes a "popular oral text".

By this, the concerned players narrate pasts that activate the nostalgia necessary to precipitate sentiments of shared experiences.

ARCHIVES OF THE PRESENT

Musila’s chapter, focusing on Parselelo Kantai’s writing, appropriately captures the significance of popular literatures as preoccupied with the wider project of ‘creating archives of the present’, itself a significant ideal on a continent whose backwater status in a world witnessing massive production of new knowledge is attributed to the lack of an established, authentic archive.

Clearly, leading scholars, whose work I deeply respect, have paid due attention to popular literatures and cultures in Kenya.

What emerges is that popular literature practitioners and producers play important roles in helping us apprehend the realities that prescribe the directions of our lives.

I have been fascinated by Tony Mochama’s innovative use of words and pushing of generic boundaries in The Road to Eldoret and Other Stories, just as I have admired the sensitivity with which Binyavanga Wainaina has written, illuminating issues such as queerness that has for long been considered by earlier canonical writers and their critics as private parts of knowledge, which should be clothed and overlooked for more ‘decent’ engagements.

HARD QUESTIONS

Such concerns, wherever they are dealt with, offer critics a chance to ransack them for possible meanings hidden in what would otherwise be considered mundane or taboo.

This, in fact, is what Evan Mwangi has done with his Queer Agency in Kenya’s Digital Media, appearing in the latest issue of African Studies Review, where he sees potential pitfalls of expanded democratic spaces, for instance, as spawning more opportunities for people to express their intolerance of others.

But again, scholars have not embraced the emerging works and trends in popular literary and cultural works uncritically.

In fact, it is possible that the hard questions asked by critics, especially within the university literature departments, have been misconstrued to be attempts to put down or belittle the contribution of such popular literary writers, who in turn have adopted an adversarial tone when commenting on what scholars do or say.

Yet, we still must ask these questions because they also contribute towards the production of better, even profound literatures within the popular mode.

Is the innovative use of language, for instance, a deliberate manipulation within the post-modern mode, or does it happen out of outright linguistic incompetence?

DO THEY PAY HOMAGE?

Do these new writers pay homage to what their literary forebears did? If these writers in the popular literary category have little time for the rural folks, why should the same ruralites find their works relevant, or even see it as literature at all?

If earlier writers like Ngugi had been propelled in their creative projects by ideologies of class or race, what motivates the new crop of writers?

Then there is the question of audience, beyond which I am concerned with the issue of patronage in the sense of whether there are some unseen audiences targeted, and who expect to celebrate the emergence of new works that fit in Patrick Chabal’s notorious template of disorder as political instrument, or the politics of suffering and smiling.

Assuming this to be the case, how then do we bridge the gap between the expectations of local audiences, presumably whose experiences are captured in such works, and the foreign patrons who already know what to expect?

I believe that a good start is for our writers of the popular inclination to appreciate the experiences of other writers who were at some point considered "young" or "emerging", but who have grown to earn international repute.

TAKING ON ELDERS
One such writer is Nigerian Ben Okri. Slogging from 1980, Okri went on to win the Booker Prize in 1991 with The Famished Road, a novel patterned along the magical realist mode borrowed from Latin America, and therefore ‘new’ in Africa.

Later, Okri would sum up the vocation of his contemporaries thus:

“There was a sense that we had to take on the Achebe, Soyinka and Ngugi generation; not in a bad way, not in the way of killing your father.

We wanted to take the story and run away with it. (…) There was, for us, a double challenge: the challenge of the older generation of African writers and the challenge of world literature…

We had to face the challenge and still be ourselves.”

Can the current popular literature writers and critics in Kenya be said to have a similar objective of taking on their elders without wanting to ‘kill’ them?

After reading the popular literatures we have currently, what is the take-home message?

As we answer these questions in private, we can have a sense of the enduring contribution, whatever it is, of popular literatures and cultures to the wider corpus of Kenyan literature.