Most recently, writers, especially those with African origins have been facing backlash from critics and the media. Jason, who is now late, was the latest addition to this shelf of extreme misfortune and literary terrorism posed by those who present themselves as academic guardians and protectors. Often pushed by zealous jingoism, they swoop on their victims, as eagles will do and leave them at the mercies of fate. Shortly after Jason was infested on, he resigned from his career and was later found dead, leaving the scene unvindicated.
The practice of criticism has come to mean different things, much unlike what it was at its inception. For some readers, it is the courtesy visit to the writer’s world, a brief look at its interior and exterior before asserting their preferences. To others, it is the policing of some internal tags and tacit philosophical ideas in a work, dismissing or approving them accordingly. Still to some, criticism is sitting the writer down and dictating what the piece must be. The weariness of this practice is in fact evident in how writers are mostly less interested in pursuing the issue in other body of works as those who nitpick others’ works often face more criticism.
While these three facets of modern criticism exist, the most pronounced is the second which gives critics the ultimate leverage to rend literary pieces. Bad or ugly, this overtly evaluation took the center stage for centuries, creating an endless feud between a theory or philosophy and those who disagree with it. We can draw examples of the Capitalists feud with Socialists, and talk about how feminism is pitched against by the highly dominating patriarchal system. Racial criticism exists in the same light.
Racial criticism came into the scene after slave trade migrated blacks from Africa to Europe and America. Back on the continent, colonialism subjected its subjects. At this time, criticism wasn’t literary but extrajudicial, taking a lynching approach to win debates of who is above who. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach developed a five-race classification and coined/used categories such as “Caucasian” after studying human skulls and physical variation. This helped to cement this skirmish which led to a disgruntled tribe, called the negroes against the whites.
However, this strays away from the main point. Back on the continent, white supremacy took over everything, and after independence, when the colonial masters had a clue that they will no longer be in domination, their paranoia effect caused them to attack the sectors available then, one of which is the literary scene.
African literature has faced backlash from white critics, and is still facing more outrageous flak. In the 1940s, Amos Tutuola, a Nigerian writer from the Western region of Nigeria, was accused of adopting too much European folklore into his Palm Wine Drinkard. This is not to say that it is bad for him to be influenced by external places and cultures. Moreover, other Nigerian writers such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ola Rotimi, Titus Nwosu amongst others have their works strewn from foreign literature. Considering that they’re the first generation writers, the only available resources were the Greek, Latin, British literature.
Before the coming of the written text, oral literature existed. Ernest Emenyonu, in his piece in African Literature Today, spoke expressively on the evolution of literature from its oral form, aided by civilization in French or English, to its written form. To him, African literature was progressive, not transformative. The publication of Things Fall Apart affirmed his hypothesis, and by the 60s, when Achebe wrote his third novel, Arrow of God, he was certain that before the coming of Europeanistic literature, Africa already has its.
The old time philosophical feud took over the main objective of assessment. Racial criticism, as one may be tempted to describe it, handed guns and sabers to white reviewers against blacks. The media and the literary space, as one long antagonistic vanguard, launched missiles on African literature. It was in this jingoistic skirmish that a British Critic called pre-indepedence novels “quaint”, and Bernith Lindfor declared Cyprian Ekpwensi a ‘practice…never meets perfection’ writer who produces ‘amateurish blots and blunders’. Then goes on to describe how Cyprian’s works reflects creative publications that are third and fourth-rates.
Achebe, noticing all of these, wrote in Nigeria New Magazine that “[w]e are not opposed to criticism but we are getting a little weary of all the special types of criticism which have been designed for us by people whose knowledge of us is very limited.” This quoted text began a mantra, a catchphrase in ardent writers who desire a fairer critics of their works. However, it only got worse.
Sometimes, the criticisms were not about the book at all, but about the person and their skin color. In 1987, Benjamin Zephaniah faced this extrajudicial criticism. Zephaniah was a poet and got invited by Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Visiting Fellow Commonership in the Creative Arts. There is some inconsistency in secondary accounts, which is why you may see it called the Rossi Fellowship. However, contemporary/academic descriptions identify the position as a Visiting Fellow Commonership in the Creative Arts. Trinity’s scheme was designed to bring artists into residence so that they could pursue creative work within the College. Later holders have included composers, writers and other artists.
The remarkable thing about Zephaniah’s candidacy was that the absence of conventional academic qualifications was not necessarily a defect. He had left school at about 13, struggled with dyslexia and had not followed the university route. Yet by the 1980s he had established himself as a major performance poet. Then came the press storm. Once news of the proposed appointment reached the British tabloids, things became ugly. The most infamous intervention came from The Sun. It published a photograph of Zephaniah accompanied by the headline: “Would you let this man near your daughter?”
The implication was unmistakable: the paper was presenting this Black Rastafarian poet as somebody from whom respectable families ought to protect their daughters. Multiple scholarly accounts identify this headline and the resulting controversy as central to the collapse of the proposed appointment. But the accompanying editorial went even further. It described Zephaniah essentially by reducing him to three characteristics: “He is black. He is a Rastafarian. He has tasted approved schools and Borstals.”
With the turn of the 21h century, it hasn’t been better. Blacks are marginalised in Europe, America, and in Africa, their continent. Technology, specially AI, sets a new standard of evaluation of works. About some weeks ago, a writer, Jerry Falade, lost a publishing deal of his novel, Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, due to allegations of AI. There is this persistent Afrophobic disposition toward a ‘too good’ piece of work from an African. It is almost an impossibility to them. Gerald Moore had done something similar, around 60s, where he charged Dr Sarif’s (a Guinean writer) of producing a novel that “suffers… a certain diagrammatic inevitability of plot.” But how is that flaw? All literary works have a plot. So how is it a flaw?
Criticism is good if it is constructive and not destructive, with the aim of nursing the writer to his feet. Consider it as a daycare. The pen of the writer is blind and it is the duty of the critic to guide him through. The highest cruelty is to mislead, and that is what is happening as the media and the white literati come together to fire fusillades at black writers.
The death of Jason is a catastrophic explosion that the media should learn from. Criticism should be about the text and not about the writer. Jack Moore once advised in African Literature Today that “the writer will go his way. The critic must follow and know what the writer is doing before reporting.” Criticism should be beyond identities or philosophies. It should be about understanding the text, evaluating, then going beyond the limitations of bigotry, bettering the writer and the society. With more chaos comes chaos. The media should learn from this awful experience and readjust its lenses towards black writers.
