i read funmi's piece quickly; didn't think much about it. someone who is glossing baraka as was done in the article is skimming over surfaces. i read it as a piece of light journalism, nothing more.
i haven't dug into abani's awards, just his prose, which i have taught and greatly enjoyed. i still do; i still believe his work is pretty great.
i don't connect whatever speeches he might have made over 10 years to this oeuvre, mostly because i haven't seen or heard those speeches. i believe you and ikhide that he has created this public persona, and am not at all resistant to the idea that it is a fabrication. i admit, it is news to me.
if the way this has played out is that he is concocting victimhood in order to garner greater rewards, i agree that is reprehensible, and if ikhide wants to do the forensic work of exposure, then let abani take the heat.
i don't really know if it is the case that he never spent any time in prison. all the refutations posted on the list--which is really all i know about this--are suppositional. maybe he failed to bribe someone, or maybe he got into a fight with the wrong person, or maybe he committed some criminal act that he isn't admitting, that accounts for his having been imprisoned, if indeed he was. what can we say? that he has now spun that experience into an entire fabrication, and people are swallowing it hook line and sinker? perhaps it's true; i don't have a dog in this fight since i teach his novels, not his biography, and if he were the first writer to lie about his life, then the sun would have stopped rising. after all, thieves can make great writers, as genet has taught us. as desade has taught us. as many a liar who turned to the pen has taught us.
if he received a Freedom to Write award based on lies, we can all cluck our tongues, to be sure. but also, we should also admit that those who were victimized by abacha might not have always been truthful about their actions, though their opposition was still justifiable.
this is not an issue of "death of the author" whatsoever. the simple words, taken literally, actually mean something other than that literal meaning, as barthes and foucault were discussing discourse and how we read texts, and the simple reduction of expressive classical realism into mimetic truths. let that go, i am not arguing that point here.
you are pointing to awards, public deception, a fabricated past--all of which any public figure must answer to if he is willing to put his biography out there.
ikhide stated i was glib and patronizing in dismissing his posting on this; i sincerely apologize for that.
africa as the site of trauma? white liberal salvationism? right, that is there. but who among us has not lent our voices to condemning abacha, to weeping over the death of the ogoni 8? we can't mobilize opinion against such oppressive figures without reaping the equation that turns sympathy into the western "suffisance"--complacent self-superiority. that is our trap; afro-pessimism versus what? silence over repression? and if he is profiting by playing on the former, then i agree he should bear the heat from exposure.
ken
On 11/27/11 10:42 AM, Pius Adesanmi wrote:
--Hey Ken:
I must plead guilty to your charge of reductionism with my right hand while accusing you of also being reductionist with my left hand! It is not about blurbs!!! It is not just blurbs! It is about more than a decade of sorrowful tellings and retellings of those tales to gullible American audiences and Universities. You have read about the rewards reaped from those stories and not necessarily from his art, starting with the article that Funmi posted here about some fools in California beating their chest about the saving and the making of a Nigerian genius. Ken, what is the Freedom to Write Award for? Do writers get that award for their artistic genius? Ogaga Ifowodo did not get it for his poetry. He got it after his release from Abacha's gulag. There is an entire enterprise of deceit here that you can no longer reduce to the puritanical politics of separating the text from the author and such other postmodernist intimations. There is no death of the author going on here. We are saying that the messianic complex of the West has been so successfully preyed upon here - the great white hope saving another persecuted genius from those cannibals in the Heart of Darkness - that one doesn't even know who to be mad at - the spinner of the fiction or his foolish believers in America. And we are saying that they believe him - even Harold Pinter in Britain shed some tears! - because of a subconscious racist inclination to equate trauma with Africa.
Pius
From: kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, 27 November 2011, 8:36
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Trials of Chris Abani and the Power of Empty Words
thanks moses. sorry about being too thin-skinned. i never quite got abani's blurbs about prison, and as i stated, a google search come up with nothing. i think ikhide has clarified what pius called the best kept secret in nigerian letters, and what you call abani's juvenile lies.--
it is mostly that my approach to literary texts is that what matters, apart from the text itself, in the narrow sense, is its context, and biographical details are not what inform a text with its secret meanings, as if they were romans-a-cle. and by context, i am more interested in discourse, not "history" or "sociology"--and in fact, by text i really mean it in that larger sense in which both text and context are accessible to us only through processes of discursive constructions.
if abani had gone to prison, indeed there are facts to be ascertained. at the same time, we have to fit those facts into language if we are to make sense of them, and language comes already loaded with its discursive framings.
we had a discussion on this list earlier about the necessity of a novel to accurately reflect reality, that is, to be judged by its mimetic function. abani's work is at an angle to reality, like that of so many others. okri. oyeyemi. going back to twins 77 and faguna etc. so if his blurbs are also fabulations, well, that's marketing.
but the minute he puts out a claim about the past, the minute a jacket cover includes a blurb about the author, he is fair game for investigative reporting, and ikhide was right to challenge his claims. i don't think the wiki blurb was something that could have been necessarily attributed to him. but the cover blurbs are something he can be held to account for. and ikhide is correct in saying that he can legitimately challenge the credibility of a blurb on the face of it. we are not in a court of law here, but a court of public statements where the issues at stake are not simply facts but the framing of truthfulness
in the end, i don't know how much mileage we get out of trying to get proofs against him, as with emeagwali, whose fraud had to do with credentials, not with his past. the quality of abani's writing will not be judged by the accuracy of his cover blurbs.
as for my own thin-skin, i think it is because i agree with your lambasting of white liberal condescension, with which i would be dismayed to be associated
ken
On 11/26/11 9:45 PM, Moses Ochonu wrote:Ken,
I didn't accuse you of racism. I was speaking generally about white liberals who are willing to believe fantastic fabrications about Africa because of their own predisposition to believe the worst about Africa. I was in fact referring to those white liberals who have patronized, rewarded, and festooned Abani and his lies. You clearly are not one of those. You probably missed Fumi's post outlining the largess that came to Abani partly on the account of his fabrications. I only pointed out what I saw as credulity towards Abani's claims on your part. I was surprised that, as someone who works and teaches on Africa, you couldn't figure out what was plausible and what was not. Pointing that out is a long way from accusing you of racism or liberal racism. I merely used my commentary on your credulity to transition to the larger issue in which I locate Abani's palaver: white liberals who consume, defend, and reward fabrications and vice associated with non-whites because they feel a paternal (racist) need to protect and project non-white achievement. If you find my reference to your credulity offensive, I apologize.
Sent from my iPad--moses
i wonder why you feel compelled to insult me publicly? credulous about abani's statements concerning his past? are we sure he actually never spent a night in prison? is that really the issue? that i didn't dig deeper into the affair before opining that his own facebook claims are far from the wiki statement? why would you turn that into an accusation of racism? or even liberal racism? or white liberal racism? do you realize how offensive you are being, publicly, as if it were of little matter? why is that?
ken
On 11/26/11 3:57 PM, Moses Ochonu wrote:Pius, thanks for this. I didn't know how to react to Ken's post, which displays a credulity that is at once befuddling and revealing. Like Ikhide, I blame the whole palaver on unconscious (abi na subconscious?) white liberal (reverse) racism. The dangerous thing about white liberal racism is that you can't call it racism and you can't call the racists out because they know and profess all the hifalutin ecumenical and humanistic values you can imagine. I'd rather deal, sometimes, with an unabashed right wing racist. At least you can shame him out of it or into silence. Not white liberal do-good racists who do not even realize their racism. Or who, in a more sinister twist, actually use their liberalism as cover to espouse racist views or make racist gestures, knowing full well that their public political and intellectual commitments insulate them from charges of racism.
Sent from my iPad----Ken, Chidi:
What the heck do you think you are both doing here? Pretending not to be aware of the most open secret in Nigerian letters as far as my generation goes? The two of you should stop disturbing Ikhide and go and pick up Abani's own preface to his collection of poems, Kalakuta Republic, in which he makes all the claims Ikhide catalogues here. When Chris Dunton first stumbled on that collection sometime in 2003 or 2004, he was so disturbed that a Nigerian writer of my generation could ever have had those experiences and he, Chris Dunton, wouldn't be aware of it. He phoned me at my Penn State base and I told him I never ever heard of a 15-year-old Nigerian writer arrested, jailed, and sentenced to death because his manuscript was held responsible for the Vatsa coup. And this precocious writer subsequently shared a cell room in Kirikiri with Fela who taught him to play the sax! Chris Dunton and I were then in the process of guest-editing a special issue of English in Africa on third generation Nigerian writing. I told Dunton that he shouldn't even have phoned me. He should know better. No Nigerian writer has ever been persecuted because of a novel or a poem or any such thing. Not even Ken Saro Wiwa or Wole Soyinka have that history. Writers have been persecuted by the Nigerian state because of their political praxis. Never because of literature. The Nigerian state is an illiterate state. She does not read novels. She would be happier if Soyinka concentrated on writing plays and poems. He would be free to write those to his heart's content. She reacts to writers only when they make political noise, not when they write novels, as was the case recently with Chinua Achebe. Anyway sha, a year after Chris Dunton and I caught wind of Chris Abani's story, Remi Raji, who was attending Poetry Africa in Durban, calls me with tales of a Nigerian writer he had previously never heard of who shared the stage with him in Durban and told the sort of stories that white people love to hear, the sort of stories that would make a white audience take out their handkerchiefs and sob quietly in a filled amphitheater- stories of a fifteen-year old arrested and put on death row in Nigeria because he wrote a novel, etc etc etc. The audience at the Elizabeth Sneddon theatre were so sorrowful that they forgot about Remi Raji, the co-performer. Raji was of course hearing of this writer and his stories for the first time in his life and he, like Dunton, felt it was absolutely unlikely that he wouldn't have heard about it if we had any such thing in Nigerian letters - in our generation to boot! At the time, I spent every weekend in Ithaca with the writers Akin Adesokan and Ogaga Ifowodo. I took that story to them and we were amazed. The first weekend I ever spent in Maryland with Victor Ehikhamenor, I finally saw a copy of Kalakuta Republic in Victor's study, read Chris Abani's preface and my eyes nearly popped out. Victor told me he'd also been shell-shocked. We went to Deopka Ikhide's house for beer and peppersoup and probably forgot to raise the issue there. But it had gained traction in my generation and eventually spilled over to krazitivity. Of course, the racist Americans bought that story hook, Graceland, and Elvis. If it is Africa it is believable. It has to be believable. It must be believable. And so, like the empathetic, sobbing white audience in Durban, they too have been dabbing for a decade now at Abani's readings and performances. The Americans and their complicit universities have amply rewarded those yarns with grants, fame, and the rest. Sefi Atta also once told me of her frustration with the whole situation. She had gone to read somewhere but had the misfortune of reading before an audience that had been treated to Chris Abani's tales of his woes in Nigeria a week before her own reading. Instead of reacting to Sefi's reading, the audience kept asking her about the imprisonment of teenage writers in Nigeria. How many under-aged writers are still on death row in your country of Africa and such other nonsensical Americanese.
And now Ken is writing like he doesn't know any of this. How is that possible? How is that conceivable?
Pius
From: Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi.opara@yahoo.com>
To: "usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, 26 November 2011, 9:57
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Trials of Chris Abani and the Power of Empty Words
--Ikhide,In the concluding part of your Exposé(?), you promised to apologies to Abani if he shows proofs of his claims(you even listed what you think are proofs), not holding brief for him(No need for that), I think the reverse should be the case. It is not for Abani in this circumstance to prove the validity of his claims, rather, you are to show sufficient proofs of the man's "false" claims. That in my opinion have not yet been done.
....Chidi
From: Ikhide <xokigbo@yahoo.com>
To: "USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com" <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>; "Ederi@yahoogroups.com" <Ederi@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 8:46 PM
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Trials of Chris Abani and the Power of Empty Words
--So the other day, I was doing some research on the acclaimed Nigerian writer Chris Abani and I came across these comic howlers on his Wikipedia page:"Christopher Abani (or Chris Abani) (born December 27, 1966) is a Nigerian author. Abani's first novel, Masters of the Board, was about a Neo-Nazi takeover of Nigeria. The book earned one reviewer to praise Abani as "Africa's answer to Frederick Forsyth." The Nigerian government, however, believed the book to be a blueprint for an actual coup, and sent the 18-year-old Abani to prison in 1985. After serving six months in jail, he was released, but he went on to perform in a guerilla theatre group. This action led to his arrest and imprisonment at Kiri Kiri, a notorious prison. He was released again, but after writing his play Song of a Broken Flute he was arrested for a third time, sentenced to death, and sent to the Kalakuta Prison, where he was jailed with other political prisoners and inmates on death row. His father is Igbo, while his mother was English born.""He spent some of his prison time in solitary confinement, but was freed in 1991. He lived in exile in London until a friend was murdered there in 1999; he then fled to the United States."Kalakuta prison! Who knows of such a prison?- Ikhideps: I am on Twitter as myself @ikhide, stalk me, follow me ;-) And feel free to subscribe to my blog www.xokigbo.com.
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-- kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu--
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