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Kalamu ya Salaam's information blog

 

Why does Nigeria dominate

the Caine Prize

for African Writing?

 

by Chika Oduah

 

Caine cover [660x300]

When Tope Folarin was announced as the latest winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, it made him the fifth Nigerian writer in 14 years to win what is arguably the most high-profile literary award for the African short story. There are 55 countries in Africa, and even before the win, some commentators had dubbed the Caine Prize “a Nigerian affair”. Is there any truth in this? And if there is, how do we account for Nigeria’s dominance of the prize?

Tope’s story, Miracle, about a boy who receives healing from a blind Nigerian prophet ministering at a predominantly Nigerian U.S.–based evangelical church, beat out Chinelo Okparanta’sAmericaThe Whispering Trees by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Elnathan John’s Bayan Layi and Foreign Aid by Pede Hollist. All the shortlisted authors, excluding Hollist, are of Nigerian descent.  

Tope Folarin, the 2013 Caine Prize winner

Tope Folarin, the 2013 Caine Prize winner

The arts and culture reporter for a leading Nigerian news outlet examined the dominance of Nigerians in the literary award. Quoting Aj Dagga Tolar, a member of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), the reporter writes “…it shows the outside world how much our [Nigerian] literature is valued.”  

Is that the reason, or are Nigerian writers simply an especially determined bunch? As Rastafarian poet and reggae musicianTolar says, “It is really impossible to silence or disrupt the resilient spirit of an average Nigerian who is determined to prove himself.”

Since the first award in 2000, 16 shortlisted writers and 5 winners have been Nigerian. We’re talking about a cross-section of Nigeria’s acclaimed storytellers: Uwem AkpanChimamanda AdichieSefi AttaE.C. Osondu and Helon Habila. If these names are unfamiliar, you might nonetheless have heard the buzz around their works. Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, a passionate collection of humanizing portrayals of childhood in modern-day Africa made it to the New York Times list of bestsellers after an endorsement from Oprah Winfrey. Chimamanda Adichie’s critically acclaimed novels, Half of a Yellow SunPurple Hibiscus and Americanah have placed her on an international platform as the face of contemporary African literature. 

Could it merely be a question of numbers? Nigeria is the most populous black nation in the world. No one is sure of the exact figure, but estimates put it somewhere between 166 and 170 million. Thus one in six Africans is Nigerian. With that kind of ratio, the country is surely at an advantage, and it would explain why African music awards are also almost always dominated by Nigerians. If sheer numbers explains the dominance, then what is the problem, one might ask? Well, it could be a problem if the prize demands a particular kind of story, the kind Nigerian writers might be good at supplying. As previous Caine winner Helon Habila writes in The Guardian, “Writing is an incestuous business: style feeds on style, especially if that particular style has proven itself capable of winning prizes and book deals and celebrity.”

“It’s just one prize whose winners are chosen by judges with a specific taste,” says Nnedi Okorafor. The Nigerian-American Okorafor, an award-winning novelist and Chicago State University creative writing professor, said this year’s shortlist of four out of the five Nigerians made her smile, but revealed that she has not paid much attention to The Caine Prize. 

“It doesn’t take the pulse of Nigerian culture. It’s too small a sampling,” she remarked.

Her perspective is in line with the widely held notion that the prize does not reflect the diversity of African literature. 

If The Caine Prize stands by its aim to focus on “the contemporary development of the African story-telling tradition,” then we should be seeing more than the same handful of themes that Nigerians seems to be good at exploring.

One of this year’s judges, 2000 Caine Prize winner Leila Aboulela, commented after reading the submitted stories,“Nearly every submitted story reflected the economic, political and social difficulties of life in Africa.” 

Religion, transnational identity or cultural assimilation in Western societies reoccur thematically as conceptual frameworks in the stories that make it to the shortlist of the prize’s yearly editions, especially from a youthful, unassuming point-of-view.  This year was no exception. 

Folarin’s winning story takes a familiar theme of religious zeal through the eyes of a young Nigerian guy, places it in America, where diaspora communities often maintain and even strengthen their spiritual traditions – Christian Pentecostalism in this case – and personifies well-publicized stats quantifying the religiosity of Nigerians (a 2012 Win-Gallup poll placed Nigeria as the second most religious country in the world).

Elnathan John’s Bayan Layi drew comparisons with the 2010 Caine Prize-winning Stickfighting Days by Olufemi Terry – born in Sierra Leone, raised in Nigeria, among other places. The two hapless tales of drug-using pity-arousing street urchins (the kind of kids NGOs often look for) left to fend for themselves, survive in volatile, fragile societies and wander in a cycle of violence apparently impressed the judges.

Ibrahim takes the reader on a journey through the childhood memories of a young Nigerian who nearly lost his life in a car accident, in his shortlisted entry, Whispering Trees. Hues of spirituality also feature in this story with lines like “My mind climbed up to the gates of heaven once more, seeking admittance,” and “All these souls glowed like mild, white lights.” 

The protagonist lost his eyesight, whereas the prophet in Folarin’s Miracles is blind. Both stories drive the reader to the intersection of faith and human frailty where humility and gratitude often lie ahead.  

The travel theme looms heavily in America, where a Nigerian teacher hopes to gain a visa to visit her lover who has moved to the U.S., and in Foreign Aid, a story of an expat named Logan who returns to Sierra Leone bogged down by a do-good, “I’m here to save Africa” mentality. 

Childhood, religion, conflict have become variables in what has been referred to as The Caine Prize formula, not much different from clichéd portrayals of Africa often seen in documentaries, magazines, textbooks, etc. 

“…a formula that determined what and how Africans should write,” writes Tee Ngugi, a writer and social critic, in an editorial published on Africa Review online. 

Perhaps in the desire to win the Caine Prize, African writers are being influenced by stories that have won in the past, and since 4 of the 13 (now 4 of the 14 have come from Nigeria, well … 

Literary critic Ikhide Ikheola explains the Nigerian dominance on The Caine Prize this way: “It is a commentary of who applies for these award. Anglophone Africans do and most of them are Nigerians…I wouldn’t put too much into the heavily skewed outcome of The Caine Prize shortlist.”

If most applicants are indeed Nigerian, that could be down to sheer numbers, raising the chances of a Nigerian winning the prize. In general, though, African writers still grapple with the African short story concept, managing what Habila describes as a “reductionist view of African writers.” 

African writers do tend to produce the literary staples of inhumane crime and suffering in their works. Take Hitting Budapest for example.

The story about kids from a shanty town called ‘Paradise’ searching for guavas in a more affluent neighborhood earned its Zimbabwean author, NoViolet Bulawayo, the 2011 Caine Prize.

“I feel like I’ve read it before. If you were so inclined, in fact, the thing you could say about it would be that it traffics in the familiar genre of Africa-poverty-pornography,” writes Aaron Bady, an African-literature scholar. 

On his popular literary blog, Nana Fredua-Agyeman says ofHitting Budapest,  “Like most of the winning stories in the Caine Prize for African Writing there was defilement, poverty, extreme hunger, dejection, and many more.” 

Meanwhile, Ikheola criticized the entire 2011 Caine Prize shortlist as a celebration of “orthodoxy and mediocrity.” 

“They are a riot of exhausted clichés even as ancient conflicts and anxieties fade into the past tense: Huts, moons, rapes, wars, and poverty,” he asserts in his seminal critique, How Not To Write About Africa. Ikheola says he has grown to respect The Caine Prize, but his concerns remain. “The creation of a Prize for ‘African writing’ may have created the unintended effect of breeding writers willing to stereotype Africa for glory.”

The reality of hardship has a worthy place in literature, but the fixation with it, especially when framed in the context of Africa as a land of war and poverty, does nothing but contribute to a narrow view that has defined Africa through much of modern history.

“The world is a dark and ugly place, a lot of that ugliness and injustice is present in Africa, but we don’t turn to literature to confirm that. The news is enough. What we turn to literature for is its ability to transport us beyond the headlines,” writes Habila.

Can the Caine Prize maintain its credibility while there’s a lingering perception that the award feeds the world a particular kind of African story? Could this be an issue of supply and demand taking precedence in the literary world, i.e. this is what readers demand – and have come to expect – from African literature, so this is what gets supplied and rewarded? And if so, why are authors acquiescing to the demand for the single story? I have no conclusive answers to these questions, but the dominance of Nigerians and the narrow range of themes is without question. 

Victor Ehikhamenor, a Nigerian writer and visual artist, comments that he was surprised at the number of Nigerians in this year’s shortlist. 

“There has been an explosion of writing and writers in Nigeria since Helon Habila first won it. Another reason is the availability of more publishing outlets, especially on the Internet. Now our writers have access to quality editing of their stories and the awareness of the Prize in Nigeria make more writers go for it,”he explains in an interview with This Is Africa

His collection of essays, Excuse Me!, was published by Parrésia Publishers Ltd in Nigeria. Parrésia’s chief operating officer, Richard Ali, believes Nigerians write the best fiction in Africa. 

“…Nigerian writers equally belong, as of right, to the most robust literary tradition on the continent,” says Ali. 

“Nigerian writers write in a tradition comprising Africa’s Greats—the recently late Chinua Achebe is a specific father figure. And Wole Soyinka, the continent’s first Nobel laureate, a Nigerian as well.”

He values the role of The Caine Prize, commenting that it comprises a “fairly representative sample of writing in Africa…”Parresia published Ibrahim’s Whispering Trees, an excerpt of which was one of this year’s shortlisted stories. The company also published Helon Habila’s lastest novel, Oil on Water

At a recent book reading hosted in Nigeria’s capital city by the Abuja Literary Society, the MC recognized only three publishing companies in Nigeria: “Parresia, Cassava Repulic and Farafina,”he said. 

At the event, two writers read excerpts from their recently published books, one a collection of short stories entitled Bring Our Casket Home, and the other, a character analysis of Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan called My Phlegmatic President. After the reading, people in the crowd discussed the publishing industry and how the literary space needs more African voices in the international realm.

“We just have to publish,” someone remarks. 

If this crowd of Nigerians is anyhow representative of the sizeable community of African writers looking for recognition, then Caine Prizes judges – as long as they keep rewarding narratives of African suffering or displacement – will continue to receive stories that sound like ones you have read before. 

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The anthology of the shortlisted stories, A Memory This Size and other stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2013, is available at all the major online bookstores, but we suggest you buy your copy from one that’s not just about maximising profits, such as the Amnesty International shop or New Internationalist Books.

 

 

>via: http://www.thisisafrica.me/opinion/detail/19930/why-does-nigeria-dominate-the-caine-prize-for-african-writing