Text of a valedictory lecture delivered by Chairman, The Nation’s Editorial Board Sam Omatseye in honour of retired Prof Chima Anyadike of the English Department, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State. The lecture was also to mark Anyadike’s 70th birthday.
I want to thank Professor Chima Anyadike for this opportunity to deliver this lecture. But first I want to congratulate him for a marvel of a career as a teacher and scholar. I also thank God Almighty for the gift of long life, for roaring through the decades to what the Bible, in its inimitable style, calls three scores and ten. A fruitful, engaged, but quiescent life.
He is known for a number of things. He is a mainstay of the Literature Department at the Obafemi Awolowo University, an exponent of African literature, an international consultant on literary matters. He is also a model of institutional longevity and loyalty. He has been here, like an unshaken and immovable Iroko tree, while others fled. He is a well-known Achebe scholar, dissecting the bard like few intellectuals can. People know him for these qualities and more. Of course, I did not know that in my lifetime, I would ever call him the Odenigbo of Ekwulobia. So when he became a chief around the time he became a professor, I quipped at this diptych virtue, and I was at a loss whether to call him Chief Professor Anyadike or Professor Chief Anyadike, and I knew as a literary person I was inadvertently launching into a miry clay about linearity in a story. Should we start from the beginning, or the end, and then there is the question as to what is the beginning, the middle or the end. I might be waking up the eternal theorist of deconstruction known as Jacques Derrida, who confused reality and fiction because he thought reality is the most dangerous thing to take for granted because structure, in the last reality, is probably not structure at all.
Some see Professor Anyadike also a vineyard of beauty queens. But for me, each time I think of him, I remember that he was the great and imperturbable simplifier as a pedagogist. As a student, once there was a complex novel, play, poem, or theory, I counted on Professor Anyadike to give the snapshot line, the clear and simple words that tore through mesh. He did it in his quintessential laconic manner and the few words and sentences lingered through the semester like a constant meteor of illumination. He reminded me of another professor, also here at Ife then and one of my favorites, Professor Olatunji Oloruntimehin, who always warned us in our history classes to first “grab the tap root. And others would fall into place.” Professor Oloruntimehin, who turned 80 a few weeks ago, urged us to grab the taproot. But Professor Anyadike grabbed it for us. Brevity, as we learned from the great English playwright William Shakespeare, is the soul of wit.
The other way I remember him was the gift we gave him. We of the Class of 1980 came with many beauties. We learned at his table. But he ogled one of us, a princess among beauties. And we obliged him without prejudice. I refer to his wife and fellow vineyard of beauty queens and my friend Bisi Anyadike.
Now some realities. When I chose the subject, “The Rebellion of Reality, the contest between fact and fiction,” I told myself I might even have reversed it, and called it the rebellion of fiction. But it is convenient for us to say it is the rebellion of reality because we tend to think that reality came before fiction. That, I think, is one of the greatest unrealities or fiction in history, or shall I say one of the rebellions of realities in history. Did you hear what the scientist and the master of relativity, Albert Einstein, say? He did not always traffic in reality if everyone thinks he was the ultimate icon of science in the past century. “Reality,” he said “is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
We know that societies begin with a sense of illusion we call myths. We have seen societies that believe that the world began on the back of elephants, or that they were birthed by snakes, or that they have no story except with cows. In my mother’s home village, Orogun in Delta State, the Monitor lizard, with the ominous grace of its glides, is a totem tied to the origins of the people. Here in Ife, the story is about human beings as it is about a gourd of palm wine, a piece of earth, water and cockerel, et al.
So, was it reality that was the rebel or the myth, the audacious unreality of adopted reality? But one thing is clear, fiction or reality depends on where and how you are standing, what shade of eye glasses you are wearing, whether it is coloured by a certain faith, or vanity, whether you love a tribe or kiss a totem. So the origin of reality is really fraught from the beginning. Even something we take for granted as reality may be disputed and projected as fiction.
Let’s examine a comical – some may say farcical – thing that happened in the country recently. Professor Wole Soyinka boarded a plane for an international flight. He reportedly sat in the wrong seat when a young man who claimed ownership of it asked the octogenarian Nobel Laureate and elder to move away. The reporter of that rare episode was none other than an oil man and politician Tonye Cole and he described the seat owner with the Conradian eye of a novelist, or like even a Wole Soyinka would. He frescoed the fellow as “This young man, baseball cap, t-shirt to show his muscled chest and tattooed biceps…” It set off a social media maelstrom. No one was sure who the young fellow was. Some said he belonged to a university. Somebody tweeted a message claiming to be the fellow, but many thought the claim was apocryphal. No one was sure the fellow ever saw the Tonye Cole’s tweet. But then came Soyinka’s long-awaited response. Let me read out his words with all the haloes and horrors of a Soyinka syntax:
“Those who permit themselves to be persuaded, even for one second that I, Wole Soyinka, has wrongly identified a seat number like millions of travellers all the time, and all over the world, would then attempt to consolidate the error in any form, through act, word, or gesture, qualify to be the first beneficiaries of this vastly improved humanitarian policy,” he said. “I don’t know how much airlines succeed in raising for their charity drives through those envelopes they distribute to passengers into which their captive donors are exhorted to deposit their loose change before disembarking. Such monies are then distributed to worthy causes all over the world, especially in the pursuit of health,” he wrote. “What I am convinced of is that they would generate a hundred times more if they were more creative. For instance, they could impose a fine on passengers who take the wrong seat on boarding, even for a second. One can only rejoice in the thought of such benefits to humanity in its efforts to eradicate all kinds of diseases, especially malnutrition, and ensure the supply of nutrients that prevent the premature onset of brain impairment.”
What did the playwright mean by “Those who permit themselves to be persuaded, even for one second that I, Wole Soyinka, has wrongly identified a seat”? Was it tongue-in-cheek, or did the event not happen? Did he say he did not occupy the wrong seat? Who was he accusing of brain impairment? Was it brain impairment for conflating fiction with reality? Ironically, Soyinka is officially Nigeria’s supreme man of fiction, but he is problematizing the business. It reminds one of what the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote when defining philosophy and reality. He wanted to interrogate a table. He noted that if you looked at a table from a certain angle, it could be square. It may not be square if you looked from another angle, and light may alter the view from yet another angle. So, the different angles show different realities. And the philosopher concluded that perhaps there is no table at all.
Also here in Nigeria years ago in the days of the social critic the late Tai Solarin, Nigerians somehow believed that our government had committed a fraud, and it was attributed to the American Ebony magazine. It set the streets on fire, with Solarin leading a protest himself. It turned out there was no such report, the editor of the magazine was on NTA to soothe the temper in the land.
I am a journalist and no trade simultaneously craves facts and holds them in contempt like journalism. I am one of a few journalists who never believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. We are always sure of facts until we are no longer sure. Sometimes facts are so sacred that we pooh-pooh the truth. That is why libel lawsuits, retractions and apologies have become part of the journalistic narrative. That’s in spite of the inbuilt securities with editors and copy editors. We call them gate keepers.
But one of the problems of reality is that we want to turn them into our own realities and that provides fiction for those who look at the world from a different lens. Do we remember the story of our beloved Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was alleged to have died? As a reporter then, I was one of those who visited his close friend and associate, Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya, at his Surulere home. The big man, in tears, was crumbling in his settee when I arrived with a few colleagues of mine. I asked if he had confirmed the story. He replied, “what other confirmation do you need?” Someone who wanted to appropriate reality, one R.B.K. Okafor went on air to report that he was indeed at his bedside and the statesman had handed over the leadership to him, his son.
Okafor who eventually did not outlive the great Zik, gave off a grand and funereal air across the nation like a subdued perfume, when suddenly the dead came alive. Meanwhile Zik, ever the fellow with an antenna for theatre and colourful showboat, did nothing, denied nothing, probably coiled up in his Nnewi redoubt, savouring the joy of witnessing his obituary, read and heard the tributes. He watched the apparitions of prominent citizens pay him tributes. He had a taste of men of power who were jockeying to succeed him. When he appeared over twenty four hours later, he was his radiant best, clad like the Owelle of Onitsha and remarked with a sort of proprietary air over the destiny of his soul. He said, “I am not in a hurry to leave this planet.”
It calls to mind a famous quote by another peddler of fiction, the American Mark twain, who said “stories of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Certainly Twain was embarrassed by stories of his passing, and in his autobiography, he said a certain newspaper editor had asked a reporter to confirm the story. If the story was true, he should write a thousand words. If he found Twain alive, he should write a hundred words. So, you see, even in a newspaper, a region of facts, fiction overpowered reality.
Mark Twain himself, always a wit, once said, “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
If we have a story about Zik, what of his southwest colleague, rival, sometimes collaborator, the great Obafemi Awolowo. I was at home one evening in Lagos, when I was jolted to the streets be what began as a hum and later buzz and ultimately faces overwhelmed by the majesty of the figure they were looking at in the moon. They said it was Awo. The man was not just gone to heaven. He had reappeared maybe in the secular replay of the transfiguration of Christ in the Holy Bible. Now, I might either have been blind, or maybe, as in the case of the transfiguration, the vision was meant for only the initiated, that is those who loved and bowed to him like a sort of divine being. We know that fellow had a lot of enemies while he lived, just like Jesus, and when Jesus came back from the dead, he appeared only to his disciples. Perhaps that was why I was one of the few who lacked an eye of understanding, apologies to Apostle Paul.
Sometimes reality can be experienced by two people and see different things. So whoever writes the fiction will write from their own reality. For instance, the Danish author of a masterpiece of a memoir My Struggle was astounded by what some his relatives said about his offering. Some of them denied what he wrote, discounting the facts as he saw and wrote them. The author, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was distressed by that what he took for granted as facts could be disputed by people who inhabited the same experience.
The most extreme for me is when some mistake reality for fiction and fiction for reality. For those who have heard of the author Dan Brown, they cannot fail to note the paradox. His novel The Da Vinci Code, was what it was: fiction. He himself called it so. Yet that best seller provoked so much interest around the world that some persons were reading it as reality. They loved the intrigues, the crimes, the investigations, the pious thrill of a certain cult of the Roman Catholic Church. And it created a burst of tourism in France as many trooped from around the world to the Musee Du Louvre to see some of the scenes the author crafted.
The most dangerous part of fiction are the ones that entrap generations, groups or castes. They are the fictions that lead to war, collapse marriages, turn brothers into fraternal feuds like the duel in Chigozie Obioma’s The fisherman, build castles in the air, foment oedipal battles to the death, burn cities, justify poverty, sanctify hate among persons who are desperate for love like the Hutus and Tutsis; they are the ones that turn generations into carcasses that fall in a wilderness.
But reality sometimes turns fiction into jelly fish. Look for instance at the farce about how Nigeria dug itself into $9.6 billion debt in what is now called the Process and Industrial Development or P&ID scandal. It is like looking at one’s foot rot by instalment from day to day, month to month, and see it generate ulcerous sores and ooze odours that first distract and later paralyze. You do nothing until you find out you can do nothing about it except to die.
But what intrigues me is that a general and vocal critic of state failures admitted he gave a certain character called Michael Quinn $40 million, and for sure he did not show evidence that he set a machine of men and government on the trail of this man. A general of coups and political upheaval only folded his arms at a sum that would build great schools and hospitals? More frightening is that the fellow called Quinn, is an Irish man who set a company that has no address, no website, no known staff, elusive transactions, elusive bank accounts, etc. This man has a pedigree of doing business with our elite despots in the military era and knows the big wigs we call statesmen from the Ota farmer to the men in agbada. In fact, the deal was signed when former president Yar’ Adua was being denied the right to go “gentle into that good night,” when the man knew neither earth nor heaven, but was in the danger of leaving one to the other. It was a cynical tragedy. Quinn makes me think of that great American novel, The Great Gatsby.
Yet, the story is true. It has the capacity, if written as fiction, to be disputed as plausible. Do we remember the story where a snake ate millions of naira, thirty-six million, to be precise? And it is not only claims such as that that challenge the imagination of fiction. If one playwright wrote character that addressed his fellow women “my fellow widows,” or if a president would visit the most prominent woman on earth, Angela Merkel of Germany, in her country and refer to his wife as belonging to the other room, we might have said it was a stretch.
Because of this entanglement of fiction and reality, a genre came into play called faction. Some have looked at it in another way and highlighted a genre called creative non-fiction. What this means is that you tincture with the facts, by retelling what you witnessed in the style of a novelist. This is tricky. It is a license to lie without admitting it. But above all, it is fact yielding to the weapon of the novelist, which is civilised lie telling. When we started literature 101 here at Ife, teachers like Professor Anyadike urged us to describe what was going on as “fictive or fictional reality.”
Because of the flourishing of facts, and the need to sustain fiction, the novel has had to reinvent itself. Hence we have magical realism, a genre that serves up fiction within fiction, throwing up fantastical tales. Novelists like Marquez and Rushdie are the masters.
The Nigerian Civil War, or what some call the Nigeria – Biafran War is one of the far-reaching resources of the contest between fact and fiction. I recall reading Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of A yellow Sun, and observing the stereotyping of other ethnic groups. The Igbo protagonist has a Hausa boyfriend she dumps for an Igbo because Odenigbo is a sexual tiger – my own words. The Hausa fellow was portrayed as a lily between the thighs – also my own words. The Yorubas are lickspittle. Yet, Adichie goes on a global stage to condemn what she calls a single story. Even when the Hausa fellow plays the rescuer in the novel, he still comes across as mummy’s boy.
Until the whole story of Nnamdi Kanu the ethnic entrepreneur and his Biafra revival is fully written, we shall not know how much of fiction drove young men to believe that Biafra would just happen under the force of a desperate hustler. What must be a frustration to many is that the master story teller himself was unable to do a great project of fiction out of Biafra. Was it because reality overwhelmed the bard? Was it that Chinua Achebe preferred it inviolate? His short story, Girls At War, did not carry anything resembling the heft that Adichie, for all her imperfections, brings to the civil story, especially from the Igbo point of view.
That takes us to the civil war stories. On the level of fiction, the Igbo novel takes the lead. Few so-called federal perspectives exist in comparison. The Igbo point of view both in fiction and non-fiction would persuade one, on the surface, that the Igbo narrative takes dominion in the people’s consciousness about that fraught era both among the Igbo and non-Igbo. Yet, it is the sorry state of manufactured reality that non-Igbos are not willing to admit the Igbo voice, some condemning it as victimhood. My favorite of the civil war narratives, however, is actually a non-fiction account, The Tragedy of Victory, by General Alabi Isama. It is story of rigour, evidence and contempt for spin.
The civil war saga is perhaps Nigeria’s most enduring narrative. Adichie was not alive when it happened. I barely knew about it although I have written a novel, My Name Is Okoro, about it. It is like the civil war account in the United States. It has grown into a cottage industry. Books looking at various perspectives pop up each year and they continue to fascinate.
At the bottom of the fight between reality and fiction is the struggle for power and domination, a hegemonic tension that goes back to the beginning of time. It is what fuels Donald trump’s fake news hysteria. The man who has been accused of lying as many times a person urinates a day is the most powerful man on earth. Shall we say it is a triumph of fiction? I say no. His is the sort of quotidian lie that puts men like Shakespeare, and Achebe, and Dickens in trouble. Trump won an election on a lie, and hangs on to it as a formula for survival and even dominance.
Trump wants to take over the narrative, and dominate what Michel Foucault and other philosophers of power call the rhetoric of discourse. Look for instance at the word xenophobia to characterise the killings in south Africa and the recent retaliations in Nigeria. It is classic diversion. The South Africans are killing Nigerians, but it highlights a deeper failure of both states to confront mass poverty in their countries. The elites have failed, but rather than face this reality, the embattled poor will have to eat their own flesh, and become more evil than they are. It is, strangely, elite victory through diversion of youth energy that seems to exculpate them. The same happened when the discrimination was called apartheid, literally meaning separate development. But only one race had the power to develop. Alan Paton with his novel Cry the Beloved Country, tells the lie of it all.
With a control of the rhetoric of discourse, a tribe, a faith, a big man, a politician, a lover can own a story. Facts become tools, even for the fiction writer. Russian literary theorist Victor Shklovsky coined a phrase defamiliarisation in which he noted that it was the best way to distinguish highbrow writer from low and practical writing. You defamiliarise by introducing features that could raise the narrative stakes and make a story higher than the others. That is what trump is doing, unfortunately. He uses language, a wizardry of coinages that amuse as they confuse as they discomfit his critics. Because of that, mass killers have erupted. He, like his Brexiteer followers, are modern day demagogues and the more so by not being classics of the past like Hitler or Franco. They have appropriated demagoguery for this age. The followers have decoded their fiction authors and owned them. This is how fiction has taken over reality. It is a backdoor victory, and this is not the sort of garlands the masters of fiction from Jane Austen to Tolstoy hoped to win.
They have made the grand theories of literary consumption difficult to advance. Two such lights are Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and he noted that the text is a product of communities. The author writes and is subsumed. Foucault sees the author as a function of the work, a part of the work, whose role must be weighed in the full appreciation of its impact.
At least, these authors problematize or humble the authors. Trump and Boris Johnson claim the narrative but no one begrudges them. Mass murderers acknowledge them. Priests anoint them. Teachers celebrate their ideas. White supremacists hail them.
No one demonstrates how fiction tries to use power as the author of Bound to Violence, Yambo Ouologuem, who does violence to all received history and styles of portraying them. At least the Trump saga like Kanu here and many politicians in our midst show the world enjoys fiction over reality, and they use it to gain power – in the United states, Britain, Italy, Russia and the Philipines. Some may say Nigeria, and they have their points.
The solution is simple. Fiction lovers should get back their stories from impostors. Fiction has a way of elevating reality. Both are partners. We don’t need those who use it to kill, because the ultimate rebellion of reality is to fight the flourish of lies and distortion of reality.
The point is to marry both fact and fiction and we should follow the philosopher Blaise Paschal’s solution: To shut reason out, and to let nothing else in.