aFRica

it, only to discover that those letters
themselves are now being discoursed and
critiqued as art forms on their own terms?
Where the 419 letter now stakes a
vigorous claim to an ontological identity as
art, does a novel which ventures into its
territory even merit the description of
simulacrum? Which is the art representing
what? It is almost now possible to claim
that the 419 letter waiting in your mailbox
as you listen to my lecture here is art
representing the reality that is Nwaubani‘s
novel. If your head is not spinning yet,
please remember that some actors in
Africanist scholarship here in North
America have been very active in making a
case for 419 emails as an art form worthy
of critical reflection. I have received at least
one solicitation in the past to help evaluate
submissions to a planned special issue of a
scholarly journal on 419 letters as a literary
genre.
As I speak, the same argument is being
made for the literary quality and generic
integrity of tweets. In Canada, where I am
based, the literary establishment seems to
have made up its mind that the tweet is a
literary work. Now, that‘s tricky because it
makes every tweeter a potential writer just
as a collection of somebody‘s Facebook
status updates or 419 letters could give us
a Nobel Prize for Literature down the road.
If you look at the website of Canada Writes
where the CBC organizes the prestigious
CBC Literary Prizes, you‘ll be able to assess
the considerable energy devoted to tweets
and tweet challenges. Tweet is literature as
far as Canada Writes is concerned.
The Nigerian writer, fiery critic, columnist,
and cultural commentator, Ikhide Ikheloa,
has been screaming himself hoarse about
the need for African writing to face these
new realities. Like Obi Wali, decades ago,
Mr Ikheloa has been making very weighty
pronouncements on the future of African
writing. And he is arguing, among many
pro-social media arguments that tweets,
Facebook updates, and the associated
genres of the social media age, would
leave African writers behind if we don‘t
come up with imaginative ways to engage
the forms of continental agency which they
throw up. The way he sees it, social media
is a significant part of the future of African
writing and he has been warning that
writers in my generation, especially those
who remain social media stone agers, are
in danger of extinction.
I take Mr. Ikhide‘s work extremely seriously
and follow him religiously online. You
should google him, follow him on Twitter,
and add his blog to your daily reading.
When he is not upbraiding African writers
in the new generation for not taking the full
measure of the possibilities of the social
media revolution for our work, he is
making very valid points in terms of the
contributions of social media to even our
own agency as writers.
Let me explain my understanding of
Ikhide‘s position. Errors of interpretation
would be mine. I think the debate about
which audience the African writer
ultimately writes for is further complicated
for my generation by the mediators who
stand between our work and our
audiences. A measure of that is how much
of Africa we still literally translate or
italicize in the actual process of writing. Go
to any Nigerian novel and see what
happens with registers and diction
depicting the actualities of youth
experience, counterculture, and
postmodern citiness for instance.
Paraga, mugu, maga, yahoozee, aristo,
shepe, etc, all capture experiences which
the Nigerian writer in my generation
italicizes to mark their strangeness and
otherness. Yet, Western writers using other
Englishes in Britain, Canada, New Zealand,
Australia, and the United States, don‘t
always feel compelled to capture local
experiences in italics. Just last month,
Elizabeth Renzetti, a Canadian columnist
writing for the Globe and Mail, had this to
Saraba | Issue 13 | Africa 66