Nigeria: Language, Literature And Culture - a Synthesis

[Harold Schiffman]

Language, Literature And Culture - a Synthesis

Daily Champion (Lagos)


OPINION
28 November 2007
Posted to the web 28 November 2007

By Olusegun Adekoya


Government itself approaches the problem in a lackadaisical manner
that does not suggest any serious commitment to its policy. At best,
the policy is aimed not at achieving rapid technological development
but at reducing the divisive force of ethnicity in the country.
So the poor implementation of the policy implies that English should
continue to serve as Nigeria's linqua franca, while the indigenous
languages, numbering more than 500 serve the communication needs of
the liberate, who constitute a huge proportion of the population. By
not confronting the problem of language head-on, the government evades
the mayhem that is likely to accompany an imposition of any of the
indigenous languages on other ethnic groups as a national language and
simultaneously delays the process of cultural transformation of the
society. The country's enormous potential for development are
consequently kept in abeyance.


The language issue in African literature is as relevant today as it
was in 1963 when Obiajunwa Wali proclaimed the dead end of African
literature written in a non-African language. Some of the major Africa
writers who saw a safety valve in the Africanization or domestication
of European languages for literary creativity on the black continent
have since realized that only indigenous African languages would put
an indubitable stamp of authentically on their works and give fullest
expression to the mind of Africa. It is not enough for African writes
to translate African cultures into whatever European languages they
happen to write in. Every language has an internal structure, which
resists translation. Gabriel Okara's linguistic experiment to graft
the structure and tone of Izon on English is risqué but ultimately a
failure. It is too mechanistic and jars on the ear. Basically, poetry
is untranslatable. Besides, as we have argued elsewhere, a language
that is not used is on its way to oblivion.

Defenders of literary studies have made many exaggerated claims about
its usefulness. It helps humans to be more knowledgeable about life
gives hope; widens mental horizons; brings unknown worlds into
people's bedrooms; and fills them with visions of immense if not
endless, possibilities. It fights for freedom from oppression and
tyranny; conscientizes people; protects and promotes rights; enhances
relationships; makes human beings wiser; improves their moral being;
softens hardened hearts; and makes people more sensitive to beauty.
Literature may not do any of these marvelous things, but nobody would
deny its entertainment value.

Until a society is written about in an imaginative manner, it seems it
does not really exist. Literature makes reality real. Its absence in
some pre-colonial African societies led European colonialists to the
hasty conclusion that Africans had neither culture nor history of
which they could be proud. The raw reality that confronted European
colonialists, imperialists and missionaries appeared unreal and so
they sought for something more credible and more palpable; the
literary text. In "A Sad Heart at the Supermarket". Randall Jarrell
poses a question that clinches the argument that illusion is more
concrete and more plausible than reality.

[ .] if what you see in Life [magazine] is different from what you see
in life, which of the two are you to believe? For many people it is
what you see in Life (and in the movies, over television, on the
radio) that is real life; and everyday existence, mere local or
personal variation, is not real in the same sense.

The film of family of familiarity makes mundane reality imperceptible,
and so writes colour it with streaks of imagination in order to frame
and idealize it.

A culture, too appears not to be clearly delineated until it is
scripted and read by people. Fictional reconstructions of pre-colonial
and colonial African societies such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall
Apart and Arrow of God performed the magic that African cultures had
failed to accomplish by convincing European skeptics that there was
something worthy of attention and study in the dark jungle something
as intellectually engaging as Hampshire or Wessex.

Answering the question why people are not satisfied with life alone
and demand literature, despite the fact that social life is not only
source of literature. Mao Tse-Tung provides the following perceptive
answer:

Because, while both are beautiful, life as reflected in works of
literature and art can and ought to be a higher plane, more intense,
more concentrated, more universal than actual everyday life

Through image inversion, Negritude writing idealizes and romanticizes
black Africa, past and present, purposely to help Africans who have
been educated away from their social reality and mentally deracinated
to have confidence in themselves and be proud of their cultural
heritage. It is psychotherapy; an imaginative escape from the horrors
of history and the damaging slights and slurs of white racists who see
nothing good in African cultures. But its technique of binary
opposition between black and white (the former symbolizing life, and
the latter signifying death) obliterates the grey zone, where life
takes on a complex, mixed somber hue, and culture is striated and
variegated.

Unfettered by laws of nature and unhindered by trammels of reality,
literature explores boundless resources of the imagination and sets
goals and challenges for science and technology. Its bird flies
swifter than the fastest spacecraft. Iearus had flown before the
Wright Brothers ever did. Many astounding discoveries in science were
first presented in fictional works as fantastic dreams. It is the duty
of scientists to trap elusive birds of imagination, such as John
Keats' nightingale and the ravens that fed prophet Elijah, and
translate dreams into concrete realities. A hybrid literary genre that
continually creates work for scientific researches by pushing forward
borders of the human imagination science fiction, taxes the brains of
scientists by teasing them with wild fantastic and flights of fancy
with the sole aim that the quality of life will be improved
tremendously, if its cues are followed and their meanings realize.

Utopian literature, such as Revelation, the last book of the Bible,
probably influences the vision of World Commission portrayed in
Manifesto of the Communist Party. Christainity and socicalism are not
strange bedfellows and share many things in come . Art and science
should likewise be seen not as contraries but as complements, for they
work together to sustain culture and civilization. Even extremes meet,
and contraries carry on the work of historical progression.

Unfortunately, some philosophers of moral -Plato and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau are good examples -denigrate the arts and contemn them as
useless because they are beguiling sensuous, and seductive. To them,
reason would guarantee a happy and holy life, while emotion and
reason, they then concentrate on the negative side of emotion, which
of a truth is inseparable from its positive affects. Literature, like
the Ten Commandments, teaches mostly by the negative and holds up ills
of society for ridicule. Alas, its detractors mistake its
significations as an orientation towards promotion of vice.



 http://allafrica.com/stories/200711281169.html


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