A report by Lekan OyegokeProfessor of Literature in EnglishPreambleTHIS critical exercise is informed by my experience on the panel of adjudicators of entries for the 2011 Nigeria LNG Limited's the Nigeria Prize for Literature (Children's Literature). It is motivated by a requirement to submit a written report to the sponsors of the prize as a part of the agreement for adjudication.Remarkably, the sponsors attached no conditions to writing the report regarding which direction it should take or which materials could be included or excluded from its contents. Each judge was allowed to write on whatever aspect that appealed to himher. This policy of theirs of neutrality and refusal to interfere in the selection of this year's winning entry actually characterised every stage of the dealings by the sponsors with the panel of judges throughout the exercise. This is commendable.Co-panellists in this year's edition of the Nigeria Prize for Literature are literature enthusiasts and seasoned academics and literary critics who were a delight to work with. It was a pleasant and reassuring experience to see that Nigerians were still writing: there were one hundred and twenty six new works submitted for the prize this year. No doubt, the Nigeria LNG Ltd's decision to start the prize in 2004 was a welcome development in the intellectual history of the country that would continue to impact positively not only on creative writing but also the critical tradition in African literature. The slant of this report is towards the wider implication of the prize for critical tradition in the country.When the Nigeria LNG Ltd's Prize for Literature was instituted the attempt by its first panel of judges to find a winner for it in that year lapsed into controversy. Each rendering of the award since then has been trailed by a fair amount of critical acrimony. As a panellist in this year's edition of the award, I am privileged to confirm what I had suspected: the Nigeria LNG Ltd's Prize is still in search of self-definition, still trying to formulate its own peculiar durable criteria and standards of evaluation of works of literature, without which it cannot stabilize and consolidate its own notions of excellence and taste in the literary arts. Eight years of a prize is not a long time. It is perhaps this - a tradition of aesthetic values - rather than the size of the prize-money that lends credence and respectability to a literary prize.Prize-money is useful, but I think that the money value of the Nigeria LNG's Nigeria Prize for Literature has excessively engaged the attention of various interest groups in the literary circle to the detriment of aesthetic values and other points of creative and critical import. Successive panels of adjudicators, by their decisions, have also presented themselves as rather susceptible to the distracting and debilitating confusion which obsession with the money aspect of the prize engenders. But the prize continues to look to the judges and the critical traditions for assistance to lay for it a solid foundation of informed and cultured literary taste and respectable aesthetic standards of adjudication that would endure. It is instructive that the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom (going back to 1707) (held at different times by such greats of English poetry as John Dryden and William Wordsworth) is traditionally rewarded with 'a butt of sack', which in the modern day is approximately equivalent to 477 litres (105 gallons) of sherry. The Poet Laureate also receives an annual honorarium, currently set at GB 5,750 (US $ 9,250). (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org)Basic AssumptionsEach judge in a literary competition would normally assume that everyone else knew: what literature was; what children's literature was not; what the condition of reading culture was in the country; what the expectations were of the sponsors of the prize; what we, as literary critics and professors of literature, were expected to do; how what we did was going to affect and shape literary taste now and in the future; how what we decided was going to affect an ailing reading culture, a battered writing tradition, an emasculated publishing industry and other related ill-served interest groups, not the least of which were individual or joint authors who had entered their works for the 2011 literary prize in the children's category.With over 120 titles in the main genres of literature in competition for the Nigeria LNG Prize, it was exciting to note that creative writing was still vibrant in the country the general academic decline and disappearing reading culture notwithstanding. The panel of judges didn't fuss over whether the works were self-published or conventionally vicariously published. This was a relief, given the furore that this point had precipitated during the very first instalment of the Nigeria LNG Prize. In my opinion, Nigeria surely needs all the literature it can get, whether self-published or otherwise. The suggestion that self-published works can't be good is bereft of logic. Moreover, assuming that self-published works are bad, even bad literature has its uses: it can teach how not to write bad literature. But the assumption is also false that bad literature cannot be produced by established conventional publishers!From some one hundred and twenty titles two thirds of the number were disqualified on technical grounds such as date of publication if the book fell outside the age-brackets advertised in the call for entries, or were blatantly adult rather than children's literature, or had a howling poor and unacceptable technical finish. Not a few fell on account of careless and unsatisfactory finish. The pruning down of the number of entries was a joint exercise by the panellists and decisions were virtually unanimous throughout. But that was because this phase of the adjudication was essentially a mechanical exercise.Short listingPanellists went away with the forty-four or so surviving entries with a scheduled requirement to halve the number within a specified period and forward an individual short list of entries. Panellists agreed, in carrying out the short listing, to score for publishing quality, language use, characterisation, plot, editorial accuracy, relevance/moral values, and illustration, among others. An elaborate scale of technical points could foster a mechanical response to the literary works, so it was important that a judge keep in view the fact that the entire exercise was about a search for great literature, and that, regardless, it wasn't that difficult to make out great literature if there was one.My strategy was to begin with the books that, from the blurb and other obvious parameters, promised to be the best story. I began the reading exercise with I Have Miles to Walk before I Sleep by Hyginus Ekwuazi and I found it was an engaging story whose characterisation and structure of actions were carefully thought out and skilfully drawn. As I read the book I knew I was reading a good story-teller; but there were editorial faults ' bad spelling especially ' that served to diminish the overall quality of the book. I wondered why the author gave the publisher the go-ahead to produce without cleaning out those errors first ' there was a technical error on about every other page of the book.I encountered a few other readable extended prose works such as Red Nest by Thelma Nwokeji and Aunty Felicia Goes to School by Philip Begho; but these fall, in my opinion, in the class of thrillers that should be a commercial success if there was still a reading culture worth talking about. A prestigious literary prize is usually reserved for serious literature, not thrillers. I was relieved when I came to My Salad Days: The Primary School Years by Adelola Adeloye. Though biographical literature, it has pace, is enlightening, well-spiced with humour and not spiked by errors. The next good story that I found was The Missing Clock by Mai Nasara in that its characterization is credible, being well-realised; its plot is skilfully drawn out, and its language use accurate and confident.An encounter with a good many of the entries raised important questions for literary theory and criticism: can what appeals to a fifteen or sixteen year-old reader, and has a character or two in that age-bracket amongst older characters, be classified as children's literature' Answer is. It depends on what is done with the creative material. How difficult is it to separate art from journalese' Answer: It shouldn't be difficult at all. Where does children's literature end and juvenilia begin'Does an inert prose anecdote qualify as good children's literature just because its characters are children and all they do is ask questions while an old clichd folktale is re-told them by their parent' Is a work good children's literature simply because it is illustrated and the protagonist is a young girl who is ill-treated and wrongfully accused of witchcraft in the pamphlet tradition of the lachrymose The Story of Ayo, an African School Girl of the 1960s'Primer or Literature'Panellists had a consistently positive attitude to the central requirements to identify and select for excellence, and that way to encourage the many budding, and some of them more experienced, creative writers to strive for quality. But many of the entries came with undeveloped plots and unexplored characterization.Nigeria LNG Ltd, the sponsors of this acclaimed prize for literature, could not have assembled five literary critics and professors, some of them creative writers to boot, for the purpose of selecting a primer for the teaching of beginner's literature to kindergarten. A cub editor in the publishing industry would perform that task easily if all (s)he is expected to see is glossy paper, colourful illustrations and graphics, and a few moral lessons drawn from jejune prose and effete dialogue. Otiose though some of these works may be technically, they would still do well in a different context; for example, in the fertile and delightful nursery bed of a good reading culture the type that sustained the unforgettable Onitsha pamphlet literature of yesteryear, these works would attract a fair amount of readership.There must be better reasons than mere sentiments to arrive at important decisions in an exercise such as this. An enthronement of mediocre literature just because the call for entries specifies children's literature would be tantamount to saying to authors, 'Why bother about art' For the next literary award to children's literature, just take out the first early chapter on the protagonist's childhood experience, make it out in book form that is amply illustrated, and you have a winner!' Some of the longer works that were not short listed for one reason or another would have a chapter or two that could have been taken out and published separately as 'children's literature' according to a hypothetical opportunistic strategy. That's how unfair an uncritical position can be on those who strive for art.So then, what is art'This is vast territory; but we may start with Joseph Conrad's observation in his famous 'Preface to 'The Nigger of the 'Narcissus''':A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.The above quotation is apt enough to work with: art is the infallible imprint of the creative faculty on a subject, and it is deliberate. Again, this is just so we can have something to work with however simplistically. Three seals of the creative imagination which bear the imprimatur of art, according to the above observation, are justice, truth and complexity.The sense in which 'art' is being used here is different from that of a general classificatory denotation when it may be said that literature is one of the arts subjects, for example. Art in this context is to be understood rather as some kind of invisible lodestone that organises around itself the visible materials that it attracts to itself on the basis of justice, truth and complexity ' the latter being a natural consequence of living in a complex multi-dimensional world. Art is what separates literature from other kinds of writing, and within literature itself art is the factor that enables a separation into serious and unserious varieties of literature. Art is responsible for making Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland a classic; art is the reason for the universal appeal of Animal Farm by George Orwell, an animal fable and satire enjoyed by young readers and trained literary critics alike.'Longinus on the Sublime', a critical treatise sometimes credited to Longinus of Palmyra (third century AD) defines 'great literature' as one that excites not only the same reader repeatedly but several readers from different cultural backgrounds and who differ in age and in pursuits. Art is what great literature is made of; and it is the basis of a separation between serious children's literature and juvenilia.'TO BE CONTINUED
Click here to read full news..
