Olayinka Oyegbile
Honour is a fool’s prize. Glory is of no use to the dead – Drew Karpyshyn
For the literary minded, last week was hair raising; it was a week like no other. On April 18, I had written about literary prizes; well, specifically about the Booker. This was because our own Chigozie Obioma, for the second time running, had been shortlisted. I had made my choice clear about all the other five on the list. Obioma I know, and his two books for me have been hugely successful and so he deserves the prize for An Orchestra of Minorities. All the others on the Booker list, especially Salman Rushdie and Margret Atwood, I observed, also deserved their listing.
So last Monday when the jury announced its decision to break a three decade-long tradition of awarding the prize to a lone winner, by jointly awarding it to the duo of Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo, I felt deflated. Atwood for The Testaments and Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. As I wrote in my April 18 column (https://staging.thenationonlineng.net/thinking-about-literary-prizes/), I have not read any of the other three writers on the list apart from Obioma, Rushdie and Atwood. I may not be able to comment much on their artistry. I am, however, disappointed that my choice (Obioma) didn’t win the prize last week.
In explaining why the three decade-long tradition had to be broken after a long debate, the chairman of the panel of judges, Peter Florence, was quoted as saying: “Our consensus was that it was our decision to flout the rules and divide this year’s prize to celebrate two winners. These are two books we started not wanting to give up and the more we talked about them the more we treasured both of them and wanted them both as winners … We couldn’t separate them.” This, to me, is a strong endorsement of the two books to readers and also a very good one for the others on the list. It has no doubt whetted my appetite and thus make me be on the lookout for them to put on my essential reading list.
This, however, does not rule out my conclusion in my April postulation that sometimes a book winning a prize may not necessarily mean it is better than the one that lost. Most judgements, especially literary ones, I have come to find out are value-laden. There is no way you can put a book above another because taste and appreciation differ. But this is not to say there are no good books or bad books. Contradictory? Perhaps. Life itself is, isn’t it?
Apart from the chair of the judges, Afua Hirsch, who was also a member of the panel in an article published in The Guardian (UK) had rhetorically asked: “How do you pit the quichotte Salman Rushdie against the quality and consistency of Bernardine Evaristo, who was in my view hitherto hugely underrated? You can’t compare them. But you can recognise them both. I’m proud of our decision.” That is the decision to split the prize.
This is the first time I am taking note of the “underrated” Evaristo who has a link with Nigeria because her father is from here! My check online shows that she is not a new author; it tells me I have to look for this her winning entry and perhaps her other books too. To the winners, I say congrats and to our own Obioma, this is just the beginning as I agree with the chair that what has transpired this year at the Booker Prize is “a celebration of great literature.”
However, “great literature” or not, the decision to split the prize has particularly not gone down well with some literary critics who feel that doing so was particularly bad for Evaristo. Robin Millen, the literary editor of The Times (UK), quoted a former Booker judge as saying, “It’s a terrible choice – or non-choice. Particularly unfortunate for Bernardine Evaristo who now has to live with a question mark over her ‘win’”.
Evaristo being the first black British writer to win the prize in 50 years would have stood a better chance to be celebrated. This decision to split the prize and the 2013 monumental step of opening the Booker prize space to American writers have also become a point of controversy for the prize. So, where does it go from here?
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