[Outline of a Preface to a collection of tributes and memorials published in this column]
Apostrophes to friendship, socialism and democracy”? It is the title of a book of essays that collects in one volume tributes and memorials most of which were published in this column over the last six years, though a few of the essays date back to the period when the column was published in The Guardian. Altogether, there are about sixty essays, poems, prose-poems and haikus in the collection. Some former teachers and mentors of mine are in the volume: Wole Soyinka, Professors Ayo Banjo, Dan Izevbaye, Dapo Adelugba and Abiola Irele; and Mr. Modupe Oduyoye. There are essays on Chinua Achebe, J.P. Clark and Nadine Gordimer among writers older than my generation of the Nigerian/African literati. Akin Isola, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Festus Iyayi, Esiaba Irobi and Chimamanda Adichie feature as writers straddling both my generation and a generational cohort younger than ours. Two very special categories featured in the collection are personal friends and classmates of many years and decades and comrades in the progressive and revolutionary working class and mass movements of the last five decades. Not surprisingly, there are many overlaps between these two categories of intimate personal friends and comrades. In a nutshell, that’s the complement of persons and perspectives contained in this book titled Apostrophes to Friendship, Socialism and Democracy.
Apostrophes? And to friendship, socialism and democracy? Frankly, I have no rational explanation why, once my mind settled on the word, I knew instantly that “apostrophe” is the word that perfectly communicates the sentiment that I wished to express in bringing all the essays in this book together in one volume. Apostrophe here of course refers to the literary or poetic form, not the punctuation mark. This is the form or technique of textual composition that uses direct address to a speaker or an interlocutor that may be present or absent at the moment of address or enunciation. Indeed sometimes, the person addressed in or through the form of the apostrophe may in fact be dead or be an inanimate object. In nearly all cases, the person or object is addressed as if she, he or it is not only present but can understand and absorb the content, the emotion of address: “Oh, thou howling winds of Kilimanjaro!”; “Death, where is thy sting?”; “Lord… thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies and my cup runneth over!”
In my primary schooldays very early in my encounter with the English poetic heritage, the apostrophe had been one of the favorite forms or techniques of poetic expression for me and many of my fellow pupils. This was partly because the King James Bible was full of apostrophes, especially in the Book of Psalms and the Book of Songs. And much later in secondary school, I discovered that Shakespeare delighted a lot in the use of apostrophes. In both the Bible and Shakespeare, apostrophes constantly enabled the expressions of emotions of great sorrow and anguish, but also of nearly inexpressible joy and wonder. Thus, it was definitely the memory of my encounters with the form of the apostrophe in all these sources that as soon as I began to think of a title for this volume, the term “apostrophe” came to mind as the appropriate designative term for this book on mourning and celebration, on great sorrow and equally great inspiration and hope in the lives and deaths of many men and women that I have, in the course of my life, known or encountered. But if that is the case, why does the title of the volume say apostrophes to friendship, socialism and democracy and not apostrophes to the named individual women and men whose lives, accomplishments and, in some cases, deaths, constitute the contents of this book?
I swear that I did not know the answer to this question before setting out to write this preface to the volume. But now that this is happening, the explanation is so simple as to be banal in its obviousness: I had absolutely no inkling, no intimation that these mourning or celebratory essays would ever be collected in one volume; and I wrote each essay, each tribute or memorial singly, absolutely without a thought to its connection or relationship to any other essay. There is only one exception to this fact and that is the second of the two tributes to Abiola Irele in this volume: I wrote it very conscious of the first tribute written a year earlier precisely because the work of mourning Irele’s transition seemed still uncompleted. But in all the other essays, all the other celebrations or lamentations in the volume, my emotions, my intuitions were totally focused on the individual I was apostrophizing.
This is perfectly understandable: when you are writing about most of the men and women whose lives, transitions or accomplishments grace the pages of this volume – Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Nadine Gordimer, John La Rose, Pope Francis, Bill Gates among others – you know you are writing about individuals whose uniqueness cannot or should not be buried under generalizing abstractions or symbolizing tropes. In other words, Achebe is far more engaging than the writer everyone knows as the author of the most popular novel in modern African literature, Things Fall Apart; Soyinka is infinitely more important than the writer many lazy critics and teachers erroneously see as a writer of difficult, obscure or impenetrable poetry and prose; and Nadine Gordimer is more than white and South African only because she was a very early prophet of the end of apartheid; if you don’t get past these clichés in writing about them and about all writers, you have simply failed in getting to the essence of the person and the writer. This is as much a matter of the demands of good, effective biographical writing as it is also an ethical principle that pertains to one’s credibility as a witness to history and truth.
Of course, I do acknowledge the fact that over the years in which the essays collected in this volume were published and before then the decades in which I published tributes and memorials in other newspapers, I gradually developed an awareness that without ever planning it, I had become a consummate writer of tributes, memorials and reflections on, principally, members of my own generation, but also members of the generation before mine. In vain have I struggled to know and understand why and how this came to be. Of course, I am not completely bereft of some explanatory ideas. For instance, although the great majority of the writing that I have done are professional academic writings for other academics, for as long as I can remember I have also been powerfully drawn to journalistic writing with the aim of reaching a much wider readership than I can access through my academic writing. In that context, it stands to reason that one of the forms of journalistic writing toward which I would drift would be “social biography” through tributes, memorials and essayistic obituaries. But then, not all journalists, cultural journalists included, develop the habit of writing the kind of testamentary essays collected in this book. For that, something extra, something acting as a motive force was needed.
The closest that I have come to an explanation or understanding of this motive force that pushed me to become a producer of “apostrophes” to my contemporaries is the sense of a great challenge that I have felt in writing every single one of the essays, poems and prose-poems collected in this book. This is a challenge like no other that I have faced in all the other forms and modes of writing that I have done both professionally and avocationally. What was/is this challenge? Let me put the matter simply: it is the challenge of writing modern, present-day apostrophes in conditions that no longer make it easy to do so when the conventions authorizing both the production and the reception of apostrophes are no longer what they used to be. I have stated that in an apostrophe, you act as if the person or object addressed will hear you or respond to you or, at the very least will not ignore you. In its classical form, the apostrophe was praise or lamentation, wonder or dread, expressed in a mostly formulaic idiom. It is not that I could not have written of the passing of Achebe or Irele in elegantly formulaic essayistic apostrophes. But would that have pleased or satisfied anyone among the survivors and friends of the two departed giants of Nigerian and African letters? And Achebe and Irele themselves, would they have thought that what I wrote about them revealed true and illuminating aspects of their lives and works?
At bottom, that is what writing apostrophes in the modern context implies and demands: that you will strike a chord of truth and insight that all will recognize, accept and perhaps even cherish, especially those about or of whom you write. Truth not flattery; insight, not superficiality; sympathy, not sentimentality. Who doubts that Femi Osofisan or Niyi Osundare, Eddie Madunagu or Seinde Arigbede, Dipo Fasina or Ropo Sekoni would not instantly know and separate truth from flattery in a tribute written about them? And if it is the case that though departed, Achebe, Irele, John La Rose or Akin Isola can somehow read and take a measure of what you have written as memorials to them, does that not all the more impose very stringent demands on your writing testaments about their lives and works? Yes, of course, this is a convention of writing and enunciation, but it is a greatly revered convention and I am not one jot coy in admitting that in writing all the tributes and testimonies in this book, I was very mindful, very respectful of this convention that some about whom I wrote, though dead and gone, could read and judge what I wrote about them.
By a very long shot, deaths and birthday anniversaries dominate the occasions that provided the impetus for the production of the tributes, memorials and testimonies in this collection. Why then did I not have deaths or birthdays or mourning and celebration in the title of the book? Why friendship, socialism and democracy as the key terms, the frames of reference for the contents of the book? I confess that socialism provided the axis for the decision of what title, what point of departure to select for organizing the contents of the book into a whole that is not reducible to any of its parts. Why so? Because both in the sheer number of persons written about and in the intellectual rigor entailed in the writing, socialism provided my toughest challenge and, at the same time the most satisfying results. This was/is because I could write far more easily about friendship and my personal friends than I could write about my comrades in the struggles for socialism in our country, our continent and our world. Does this also mean that I found it relatively easier to write about writers, artist and performers than I did about my comrades in the revolutionary struggles? The answer is yes. Permit me to bring this Preface to a close by briefly reflecting on this assertion.
There are only four persons in this book whom I never personally met: Pope Francis, Bill Gates, Adah Igonoh and Amayo Adadevoh. All the others I not only met but had significant encounters of one kind or another with them. The word encounter here has diverse connotations: fleeting, sustained, personal, literary, intellectual, mentorship, and political. To put this observation in concrete terms, I met Chinua Achebe only about three or four times but because I have not only written substantially about him but also taught him extensively in my classes, it is almost as if my encounters with him were as many and as weighty as those with Wole Soyinka who was not only my teacher but who I have met in a simply uncountable number of times. Think therefore of this fact: my encounters with the comrades in the struggles for socialism do not have the temporal weight of my encounters with Soyinka or Achebe, but seen in terms of investment of body and soul, of both material and non-material, spiritual resources, encounters with my comrades have been far more consequential and far more ethically self-forming. However, please note that although the group of those I call “comrades” in this book does not include many of my close personal friends, most of such friends do think of themselves as, broadly speaking, socialists. Note in particular that without exception, all about whom I have written in the book consider themselves democrats of one kind or another. Hence the triad of friendship, socialism and democracy.
In conclusion, it remains for me to acknowledge that for a historical materialist, the ever-present reality of death lies perhaps too heavily on the contents of the book. But is not the most effective encounter of all that between now and eternity?
- Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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