AMUKA: There’s more than meets eye in post-modernism

On December 2, a respected member of the literary fraternity in Kenya declared: “Even if Prof Amuka and Dr Siundu were to threaten me with the worst form of torture — like walking barefoot on burning coal — I would still not subscribe to this intellectual fraud that goes by the name Postmodernism”.

My reading of such an ominous statement is that Prof Henry Indangasi would rather die than embrace the postmodernist movement. I know that the movement does not prescribe death and would not let him go into martyrdom.

Let me also make my own declaration that postmodernism cannot possibly be fraudulent in Kenya where it was born well before the French gave it that name in the 1980s.

When they overhauled and revolutionised the English curriculum at the University of Nairobi in the late 1960s and created the Department of Literature with its Afrocentric bias, Owuor Anyumba, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Taban lo Liyong had not only modernised the teaching of Literature but had gone beyond that and created spaces for Literatures from within Kenya and all over the world.

To use common parlance, they globalised the study of the discipline and thus transcended modernity and landed Kenyan thinking into postmodernity. That meant the belief that British Literature was the only one had been busted. Another way of putting it is that this act of literary democratisation stopped the marginalisation of other literatures in Kenya and beyond.

The act by Ngugi and co meant that every Kenyan Literature had a right to be ‘worshipped’ and acknowledged like any other. As if responding, Prof Andrew Gurr who handed over the chairmanship of the Department of Literature to Ngugi in the early 1970s remarked in my first undergraduate Literature lecture that there were no such things as universal literatures and cultures.

Like the revolutionary troika, Gurr did not call himself postmodernist since the French were yet to conceive and deliver the name. But the absence of the name did not mean that the country was not postmodernising. For Gurr, the world consisted of myriads of varying cultures and whatever Shakespeare had created belonged first and foremost to Britain and could not reasonably represent the globe.

Very much in tune with Gurr and the three who wrecked the Englishness of Literature, Okot p’Bitek told me in a class that his own Acoli nationals shared one language and literature and practised the same culture but that there were variants from village to village and, at times, from homestead to homestead.

Thus whatever may have been touted as representative of the Nilotic nation was a “careless” aggregate to use his word. In other words, there are no, and there can never be, universal literary texts even within one culture.

Okot’s position was manifestly postmodern even if Lyotard, Baudrillard, Guattari and Deleuze were yet to hatch and package what was to bear that name. Prof Indangasi’s claim that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not comparable to what he calls a “cheap” play at the Kenya National Theatre or the Kenya National Drama Festival can only be described as premodern because modernity is democratic and all-inclusive and does not allow one cultural item to be superior to the other.

Postmodernity is the spirited attempt to actualise that (modernity) by being artistic in drama, film, fiction, poetry, fashion, architecture, music and other forms without a care that the British have their own Hamlet, Macbeth, Shakespeare’s sonnets and DH Lawrence’s novels.

Nothing – no art form – is cheaper or greater than the other in the post that modernity gives birth to and calls postmodernity. A good Kenyan student of oral literature can, for example, elevate Hamlet to the artistic world of the riddle and investigate the oracy of “to be or not to be”.

That would make it a Kenyan literary text. That also means numerous other versions of the play can be replicated all over the world. A postmodernistic reading therefore transforms Hamlet into a world and not British text. Postmodernity stands for a multiplicity of artforms, cultures and therefore multiple identities and values because this is humanistic and overarching.

Typical postmodernist thinking does not operate on one fixed theory and method of study. There is no single centre from which theoretical and practical knowledge emanates. The world has as many knowledges as the uncountable cultures it carries. Everything is open-ended and depends on what a particular research project requires as implied by its topic and other components. I don’t know where and how the identification of a theory before stating the research problem is postmodernist and postcolonial.

I am aware that the Aristotelian position that a story requires a beginning, a middle and an end has long been joined by other possibilities like flashbacks, time-shifts and the postmodernist murder of one monolithic centre. I therefore join many others in insisting that theory is basically speculative and helps a researcher reflect on a possible topic, method, research problems and others. There is certainly no single direction for conducting research just as there are no eternal unbending standards for judging texts.

I need not to delve into the details of how texts may be evaluated but it is certainly not true that postmodernists ‘don’t believe there are standards by which literary works are judged”. Every line of textual assessment taken by a postmodernist entails the onerous task of reasoning and arguing and not simply a belief that a priest or monk explicates in church.

The judgement of any text is based on pure logic and not fundamentalist religious articles of faith. Belief comes with a finality that intrinsically leads to going on one’s knees and worshipping unthinkingly rather than intellectual discoursing. Associating postmodernism with belief as professor does is equal to reducing it to a cult that it is not.

Prof Amuka teaches Literature at Moi University.