Okojie’s AKO Caine Prize feat and some lingering questions on African writing

Nigerian-British author Irenosen Okojie is the 2020 winner of the AKO Caine prize for African writing. The writer won the £10,000 award. PHOTO | POOL

What you need to know:

  • Okojie’s winning story, Grace Jones, is many stories in one, with meanings arranged one upon another in the mold of a palimpsest, but all pointing to the ever troublesome questions of the meaning of life, its joys and sorrows, and the reality of pain and emptiness pitted against the illusions of success.
  • Okojie’s other writings, as Murua further implies, circulate in spaces that are ordinarily beyond the reach of continental Africans; “New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post”, save for an odd appearance in Kwani?.

The announcement on July 27 that Irenosen Okojie is this year’s winner of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing was a flash of exciting news at a time when Covid-19 has dominated thought and practice globally.

Okojie’s winning story, Grace Jones, is many stories in one, with meanings arranged one upon another in the mold of a palimpsest, but all pointing to the ever troublesome questions of the meaning of life, its joys and sorrows, and the reality of pain and emptiness pitted against the illusions of success.

Couched in a broadly postmodernist mode, Grace Jones tells the stories of Sidra, a protagonist whose search for her life’s meaning in adulthood is overshadowed by a childhood trauma of loss of family through an unexplained fire that engulfs the whole apartment block in Europe.

The pain of loss for Sidra is aggravated by a sense of guilt, given that on the evening that her family dies, she had locked them in their flat, for their security, as she dashed out to replenish some cooking ingredients for their dinner.

It is the trauma of loss, and the guilt of possible culpability in the death of her family that frames Sidra’s encounters with the world, which she does through a misleading demeanor where the outward calm conceals internal turmoil.

Sidra’s story in Grace Jones is, in a truly postmodern sense, punctuated and completed by meaningful silences between and among characters; “…they were like that, so many things constantly left unsaid”, or “the silence was a shared language.”

UNSPOKEN EXPERIENCES

The silences, and the unspoken experiences of Sidra and other characters hint at the loneliness – and its illusions of freedom – that trap the characters involved, most of whom negotiate their lives in metropolises that value individual success, or appearances of the same, over everything else.

This could be why the story is also structured around the impostor motif, similar to Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector or Molière’s Tartuffe, only that in Grace Jones, the impostors ape the leading figures in film and the wider creative industry. Thus we have many “look alikes”; a “Rod Stewart”, a “Pee Wee Herman”, a Marilyn Munro, and Sidra herself who passes of as Grace Jones, the Jamaican model, record producer and actress who could be the subject of the story’s title.

This impostor tendency is both a survival technique and a strategy of evasion for the characters involved; it shows the distance between aspiration and achievement, the former given to most of us, while the latter attained by only a handful. It is also a stark reminder of the limits of our ability, emotionally and materially, to fit in a world of normalised indifference.

To that extent, the story Grace Jones speaks of us and for us.

Yet, reading the story in the larger scheme of ‘African’ literature, one wonders just how far this story can pass for anything African. I recall that one of the old debates in African literature relates to the subject of who is or is not an African writer, and that birth and ancestry of an author are some of the markers of belonging to Africa.

So, on that basis, the Nigerian-born Okojie is African and, by extension her award winning story, Grace Jones, and other writings, are also African. But, as anyone with interest would notice, there is something about the aura of the whole story that is un-African, if we take the totality of the imagery used, the sheer absence of referents to the continental mass – it appears as a place that was and should be left – and overwhelming adoration of a celebrity culture that is steeped in western modes of success; material, social, or otherwise.

In any case, Okojie herself has already been claimed as English. Literary blogger James Murua, whose tremendous work in growing publicity for African literature should be commended and supported by all, rightly notes that Okojie “was named at the London Short Story Festival by Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri OBE as a dynamic writing talent to watch and featured in the Evening Standard Magazine as one of London’s exciting new authors.”

THE OBSERVER

Okojie’s other writings, as Murua further implies, circulate in spaces that are ordinarily beyond the reach of continental Africans; “New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post”, save for an odd appearance in Kwani?.

Clearly, Okojie’s identity as an African is only biological, not literary. Yet she has deservedly won a prize for what should be African literature.

Why this should be so can be attributed to at least two immediate developments in recent intellectual and ideological positioning. One has been the growing fascination with the possibilities of transcending the limits of geographical boundaries of nationhood, and embracing or becoming a global citizen, a cosmopolitan, a planetary being, an Afropolitan, or any other variant of unbounded citizenship as theorised by our leading thinkers, including Kwame Anthony Appiah, Achille Mbembe, and Taiye Selasi.

Granted, these ideas are persuasive, perhaps more so among the people of colour who for some reason find themselves in the metropolises of Europe and North America, or those whose call of duty or high socio-economic standing allows them occasional or regular excursions to these places.

But for the bulk of continental Africans who still need regular writing and rewriting of their stories outside the frames of colonial and precolonial experiences, and who are not yet taken in by the allures of global citizenship, stories such as Grace Janes hardly speak for them.

It is a simple matter where blackness has been equated to Africanness, with the risky consequence that continental Africa and its writings, those that rise and fall with what may be called the pulse of the continent, will continue to fall farther down the radar of global visibility.

GLOBAL LITERARY MENUS

Increasingly, our stories that arrive at the table of global literary menus will have been delivered there by our kith and kin whose idea of Africa is limited to some nostalgic or traumatic memories of a place they or their parents left years back.

This prognosis alludes to the second development that has shaped the nature of African literature as is known to the rest of the world: the role of mediating structures such as publishing firms and literary prizes in determining the scale and scope of appreciation of our literature.

For long, literary prizes and publishing firms have tended to influence directly the degree of patronage of our literature.

And, given that these institutions are themselves involved in their own politics and driven by their own interests, chances are that future celebration of African literatures will be overwritten by black literatures, and thus extend the historical marginalisation of true, authentic, African voices from global conversations.

This is why I have tempered my celebration of Okojie’s AKO Caine Prize which was awarded for a well-written story, yet whose outlook that is anything but African.

By priming experiences that are only marginally African as our representative narratives, the end game is to silence the real Africa by overlooking stories that voice the perspectives of the majority.

The writer teaches at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]