When writers don’t get it right, they get it wrong. Apart from a failure of craft and art, it was a poor outing for 109 writers who had their eyes on the 2015 Nigeria Prize for Literature (NPL) sponsored by Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG). None of them was considered worthy of the $100,000 prize money for children’s literature, the focus of the contest this year.
According to the jury at a September 25 press conference in Lagos, “Language plays a major role in literary production. Creative writers are normally expected to pay special attention to the use of language and aesthetics. The Prize demands stylistic excellence as manifested through an original and authoritative voice, narrative coherence and technically accurate writing.”
The judgement: “Unfortunately, the entries this year fall short of this expectation as each book was found to manifest incompetence in the use of language. Many of them showed very little or no evidence of good editing.” The event proved to be a non-event.
The head of the panel of judges, Prof. Uwemedimo Enobong Iwoketok, said 89 entries failed from the beginning of the assessment process. According to her, “A disturbingly large number of entries were dropped at the initial stage of short-listing because of grave editing and publishing errors.”
The international consultant for the prize, Prof. Kim Reynolds of the Newcastle University, United Kingdom, said: “The entries lack the lyricism, vision, and authority to become classics that will be handed down from generation to generation and that have the potential to reach out across cultures.”
It is interesting that the organisers interpreted the anticlimax as the result of what may be described as a knowledge issue. In other words, Nigerian writers of children’s literature who participated in the literary competition were perceived as literary illiterates who don’t understand the particular form and don’t know how to create it.
Also interesting is the response by the organisers. The General Manager, External Relations, Nigeria LNG, Dr. Kudo Eresia-Eke, reportedly spoke about the organisation’s plans to invest in a capacity-building workshop on children’s literature. He said: “NLNG is determined to promote excellence by investing the prize money, which would have been won, back into the process for a creative writing workshop for Nigerian writers of children’s literature. The proceedings would be collated, published for reference and guidance.”
It sounds simplistic. The magic bullet is not magical. In the circumstances, a workshop may be useful and helpful, but the work required is wider. In Unless It Moves the Human Heart, an eye-opening 2011 book about teaching writing and learning writing, Roger Rosenblatt made a striking observation about writing programmes in America. Rosenblatt said: “Since 1975, the number of creative writing programs has increased 800 percent. It is amazing… all over America, students ranging in age from their early twenties to their eighties hunker down at seminar tables like this one in Iowa, California, Texas, Massachusetts, New York, and hundreds of places, avid to join a profession that practically guarantees them rejection, poverty and failure.”
How many creative writing programmes are available in Nigeria? How many would-be writers in the country would be interested in such programmes? What about the cost of learning? What about the cost of teaching? These costs may not necessarily be monetary, though money may be a factor.
Talking of money, a report quoted an “Enugu-based literary activist,” Adaobi Nwoye: “We have been complaining about the dearth of qualitative writing in Nigeria for a while now. This is the result. Nowadays many people are not writing because they are passionate about literature. Instead, they are writing because they want to make money. I think this is one of the reasons why none of the entries for the 2015 Nigeria Prize for Literature failed to win.” Her observation deserves contemplation.
A thought-provoking excerpt is relevant, especially considering the context of children’s literature. It is from a 2015 book by Brian Grazer, A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. The writer in focus: Theodor Seuss Geisel, an American writer and illustrator who authored popular children’s books under the pen name Dr. Seuss. Dramatically, his first book was published after 27 publishers had rejected the manuscript.
Grazer wrote: ”Being determined in the face of obstacles is vital. Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss, is a great example of that himself. Many of his forty-four books remain wild bestsellers. In 2013, Green Eggs and Ham sold more than 700,000 copies in the United States (more than Goodnight Moon); The Cat in the Hat sold more than 500,000 copies, as did Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. And five more Dr. Seuss books each sold more than 250,000 copies. That’s eight books, with total sales of more than 3.5 million copies, in one year (another eight Seuss titles sold 100,000 copies or more). Theodor Geisel is selling 11,000 Dr. Seuss books every day of the year, in the United States alone, twenty-four years after he died. He has sold 600 million books worldwide since his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was published in 1937. And as inevitable as Dr. Seuss’s appeal seems now, Mulberry Street was rejected by twenty-seven publishers before being accepted by Vanguard Press…”
He continued:”The story of Geisel being rejected twenty-seven times before his first book was published is often repeated, but the details are worth relating. Geisel says he was walking home, stinging from the book’s twenty-seventh rejection, with the manuscript and drawings for Mulberry Street under his arm, when an acquaintance from his student days at Dartmouth College bumped into him on the sidewalk on Madison Avenue in New York City. Mike McClintock asked what Geisel was carrying. ‘That’s a book no one will publish,’ said Geisel. ‘I’m lugging it home to burn.’ McClintock had just that morning been made editor of children’s books at Vanguard; he invited Geisel up to his office, and McClintock and his publisher bought Mulberry Street that day. When the book came out, the legendary book reviewer for the New Yorker, Clifton Fadiman, captured it in a single sentence: ‘They say it’s for children, but better get a copy for yourself and marvel at the good Dr. Seuss’s impossible pictures and the moral tale of the little boy who exaggerated not wisely but too well.’ Geisel would later say of meeting McClintock on the street, ‘[I]f I’d been going down the other side of Madison Avenue, I’d be in the dry-cleaning business today…’
This is not only a story of literary success but also of literary failure. Twenty-seven rejections cannot be a laughing matter. Twenty-seven rejections must be a mirthless matter. Concerning the writers who suffered rejection in the NLNG 2015 literary contest, isn’t it possible that their rejected books may be redeemed elsewhere? Or are these rejected books irredeemably defective?
