We are obsessed with finding the next big writer

This ‘Ngugi week’ reminds me of some write-ups and comments I’ve read. “You are the next Ngugi.” “You are the next Chimamanda …

#TheMakingOfAnotherNgugi

And so on. You get to hear so many similar comments to ‘young/new writers’. Whereas there isn’t anything wrong in benchmarking on the great writers the continent has produced, I find it very unfair to upcoming writers struggling to create a voice for themselves and their writing.

To be fair, to be the next ‘Ngugi’ is a challenge to push new writers to write well (or even better); to be more acclaimed. But is that the only way we can be better? By being the next so and so? Can we allow contemporary writers to be their own persons without necessarily pitting them against established writers? “I don’t want to be the next Ngugi, I want to be Kinyanjui Kombani.” That should be enough because there can be only one Ngugi; only one Chinua Achebe.

Why, then, do we feel the need to find the ‘next Achebe?

Can a work from a non-famous author be good enough without it being vetted on the yardstick of ‘popular author’s works?’

Why must young writers be pitted against Meja Mwangi?

From these established writers, we learn more than we could ever learn in a literature classroom. That, too, should be enough. Writers are different. Living in different times. It’s suffocating and unnecessary pressure to fit into the shoes of the writers who came before us. It’s something we should not kill ourselves trying to accomplish because they were their own men and women; and we are our own men and women writers, even if just in the making.

I wonder if during their time; Meja Mwangi, David Mulwa and Ngugi wa Thiong’o aspired to be the next James Baldwin, or Sidney Sheldon, or Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ngugi was, and still is Ngugi. Period. So should we.

Might we have closed our senses to upcoming good writing because we are caught up searching for the next Ngugi? We might be captives of the past to create the here and now — and the future of literature in Kenya.

Perhaps we don’t see good romance writing, like Ida Nyakoni’s Sins of my Father (launched recently at the Nairobi National Library) because we are stuck at the Sidney Sheldon effect.

So, young writers, here’s to being our next and better ‘us’; here’s to finding our own voices. Here’s to not buying into being the next Ngugi. Because we can learn without being second versions.

Vera Omwocha is an editor with Writers Guild Kenya. She blogs at veraomwocha.com