.

 

Q: You were also very busy as a teacher but you never missed your classes. Why are you making excuses for Soyinka?

A: I didn’t miss my classes and I don’t mean to make any excuses for Soyinka, but you see, the only one full length play I ever wrote was Haba, Director!, an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Herr Puntilla and his Man Matti. I wasn’t busy writing the best plays of my writing career which was what was happening to Soyinka. I place great value on that. Of course my classmates hated it because they wanted to have the great man teach them himself and not have other teachers standing in for him. Moreover, perhaps without doing so deliberately, Soyinka tended to “segregate” the best students from the rest and he had a tendency of addressing himself to the “select” group. He could be very dismissive, though I don’t think he did it deliberately. The students that weren’t self-confident, that didn’t think they were “smart” enough, they were terrified of speaking in Soyinka’s classes and they would be saying that he was speaking only to Sawyer, BJ, Somoye; he would be looking mostly at us. I was never cut out to be that kind of teacher whose work as a creative writer of the highest order was, when all is said and done, his main tools for teaching. It was in my last year at U.I. that Soyinka became my official supervisor before I went to NYU. Frankly, he was not your regular kind of teacher, but he gave a lot if you knew how to make room for his special way of teaching.

I read widely in other traditions of thought – comparative religion; structuralism and poststructuralism; Pan Africanism; Eastern philosophies and religion. That period was probably the most idyllic period of my whole life when I had the motivation, the drive and the opportunity to read as widely and as ecumenically as I wanted to or could. So with this sort of background, how could I ever be a dogmatic Marxist?

Q: You also acted in his play?

A: Yes, I did. I was in both the stage play and the film version of Kongi’s Harvest. I appear for only 15 to 30 seconds in the film as a member of the Carpenter’s Brigade because Soyinka used the members of the Pyrates Confraternity for the Carpenters’ Brigade in the film. In the stage version, I was the Camp Superintendent, and at the celebrations at the Arts Theatre, U.I. two weeks ago, I narrated something that turned out to be nearly a disaster in my participation in the staging of the play when I was drunk and very nearly missed my cue for coming onstage to perform my role in the production. WS was scandalized by this, as he should have been! This happened in my last year. Soyinka came to UI in 1969. It was the beginning of my last term as an undergraduate. When I then went to Tafawa Balewa Hall as a postgraduate student and Soyinka became my supervisor, I wanted to play a part in his Madmen and Specialists. He had not forgotten or forgiven me for that near disaster of the staging of Kongi’s Harvest. When I showed up for the casting of the new play, Madmen and Specialists, Soyinka said to me, “you, out!” Except again, irony upon irony, after the last night of the production, I sat down, analysed both the play and stage production and showed my review to Soyinka. He apparently liked it very much. He said to me, “You should go and publish it”. But it was enough for me that I had written an analysis of the play and the production and that he liked what I had written; I didn’t send it anywhere for publication. Soyinka was sending for me asking if I had sent the review for publication and this went on until he finally grabbed a copy and had it published it in Daily Sketch. This is the man that had thrown me out of the casting rehearsal for the production! He liked my review so much that he sent it to Daily Sketch to be published. I was later told by Niyi Osundare that that review of Madmen and Specialists became one of the standard texts of the dramatic criticism class taught by Professor Joel Adedeji. Niyi Osundare was two years behind me and that review of Madmen and Specialists that I wrote was used as one of the required reading texts for his class when they were taught by the late Joel Adedeji. Up till today, Niyi still teases me by quoting some embarrassing lines of highfalutin English from that review. 

Q: Talking of the complexity of renderings of your own interpretation of Wole Soyinka’s works, Odia Ofeimun in his presentation celebrated you as a denizen of the fourth stage but Professor Femi Osofisan said in jest,‘’One day I will have to translate your book on Soyinka into simple English’’. In other words, it appears that when you enter the forest of Wole Soyinka’s books you are taken over by the thick forest as you too become so complex. In contrast when you enter Chinua Achebe’s savannah, you are the most lucid. What do you say to that?

A: People conveniently choose the aspect of my work that pleases them and ignore others. I dare anybody to say that any single essay in The Truthful Lie is difficult, convoluted, and they are no less powerful essays for that reason. I must admit, if I were to rewrite the book on Soyinka, Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism, if I were to write it again, I would be writing in a different kind of critical idiom. Since that book came out, I have generally striven to write, without compromising intellectual depth and rigour, in a more lucid style. It is a gift, the ability to write lucidly without sacrificing intellectual depth. It doesn’t come to you naturally to use language well and you use it with lucidity but also with depth – as Chinua Achebe consistently did. I strive for it, it doesn’t come easily. The Truthful Lie was my second book. I didn’t discover lucidity with Achebe, it was something that came with an attitude to language usage and the burden of language with regards to social activism depending on the occasion because all the essays without exception in The Truthful Lie derived from positions taken on an ideological terrain and I needed clarity to establish those grounds. They were driven by that and they were all polemical pieces. 

It was John La Rose, who came to Nigeria and said oh my God, we must publish these essays. I just wrote those essays in the book, delivered them as fighting, polemical pieces at different places including Ife, Zaria, Ibadan, Ilorin and Nsukka. To cut a long story short, I think people miss that. When Osofisan was saying jocularly that he is going to translate the book on Wole Soyinka from English to English, I could have shouted, well you can get some help in accomplishing that task by going back to read The Truthful Lie!

 
Q: Professor Tejumola Olaniyan, one of your former students, both at Ife and in Cornell University, in his tribute to you described you as Professor “O le gan ni o” (It is tough and challenging beyond measure!) And many people in the audience laughed to that. Why are you such a tough teacher, a task master, an “O le ganni o’’ teacher?

A: As I don’t want to be self-justifying or self-aggrandizing about this, let me treat this question carefully. You see, for me, it doesn’t matter the surface complexity or on the other hand, surface lucidity of a text, of any text, I take its interpretation and analysis very seriously. Let me illustrate what I have in mind here by using the example of classical Greek drama. Nothing could be simpler in form, language, and content than the plays in this tradition of dramatic writing. The plays are extraordinarily simple in content, form, style, and language but what about the consistency of intellectual depth that we encounter in them?  A student approaches that and mistakes the lucidity for simplicity, or even simple mindedness. He or she can’t see the depth beneath the surface lucidity. In one form or the other, what I always tell my graduate students, which may explain this “o le gan ni” phenomenon is this: “In order for you not to be intellectually slack as you write your term paper or even your dissertation, pose to yourself the strongest possible objections that anyone who doesn’t take your position can make to your paper”. Quite often, the response that I get from most students, even those at a fairly advanced stage of writing is that they think and thinkand they can’t come up with what could be the strongest possible objection to their work. To this non-response to my challenge, I ask, “what about somebody who hates Marxism, the theoretical and ideological framework of your dissertation; what if somebody who is anti-feminist slyly uses that antagonism to feminism to undercut the analyses and claims that you make in your dissertation that draw their inspiration from feminism? What if somebody who is a poststructuralist says this glorification of realism in your dissertation is naïve and simplistic and dismisses everything that you say in the dissertation? If you have not anticipated that objection, you are cornered and probably finished in your defence of your dissertation or the talk that you give for consideration for a post in the job market.

If you anticipate the possible strongest objections, well, that puts you in a position to at least deal quite easily with weaker objections to the analyses, the claims that you make in what you write as a budding academic, critic or theorist. If you are focused exclusively on the things that you find fulfilling in what you write, the things that come to you easily and you have found pleasurable in writing your dissertation and you don’t anticipate the things that other scholars, for whatever reasons, may find objectionable in your writing, you may have a problem defending what you have written when the critiques, the reviews come. I suppose this method of training advanced graduate students and younger or junior colleagues is partly the product of the kind of training I myself went through in graduate school in advanced graduate seminars.

But more fundamentally, I think it is also a question of sensibility because I remember even back to my Ibadan Boys High School days, there was always a Friday afternoon session with the school principal at the end of the week, you know question and answer time between us, students and the school principal. From form three to my last year in form five, everybody in the school waited for my questions at these sessions because the principal always found my questions intriguing, perhaps even challenging. At any rate, the principal always waited for me to ask my question or questions and if on any occasion I was silent, he would call out, “Jeyifous, have you no questions this week?” I confess that even this far removed from that experience that happened more than five decades ago, I remember distinctly the pleasure that this weekly verbal dalliance with the principal gave me, especially since it was the same principal that eventually expelled me from the school in 1964! That’s why I think that this matter of “O le gan ni” must also be a matter of sensibility, a matter of a certain disposition to language, to critical intellection.

At any rate, all I know is that when I became a serious student, I cultivated this intellectual habit of not taking things for granted, of not thinking that maybe because your cause is just, politically or intellectually, then you must not pay attention to the intricacies of your arguments,to the underlying premises of your reasoning. If you do pay attention to these things, you are saving yourself from a fall or an intellectual embarrassment because people who hate your politics or your ideology or the things you are fighting for will find ways to pick holes in your argument and then they will use that to go after you, which is their real purpose in mounting arguments against your intellectual and ideological positions. They will fault you for sloppy reasoning, your inattention to the necessity of supporting your claims with sound reasoning. That is the background to the “O le gan ni” phenomenon. I must say that Teju wasn’t using it pejoratively. 

Q: Not at all. Indeed, Teju proposed that our country will be a lot better if we use the “O le gan ni” idea, if we apprehend our realities, in an “O le gan ni o” way. Do you also see it that way?

A:  I do. The theme of this two-day event in Ife, The Complexity of Freedom, which comes from the title of one of my collections of essays on Soyinka, is precisely that if you have a passion for justice, for human freedom and human emancipation, you must arm yourself with sound intellectual arguments to defend them. This is because the justness of your cause doesn’t mean that it will automatically prevail. You have to prepare the ground. Again, I learnt some of these lessons or truths from ASUU when I was its National President. I had to do thorough work to make sure that in our memos, our position papers, we trumped the federal government’s positionsin our agitations, our activism for better conditions of funding and academic freedom on our campuses. During our many encounters with them, the Federal Government would bring the Committee of Vice Chancellors against us, but we floored them because we had done our homework thoroughly. We never lost a single contention with the Federal Government, never. We were so well prepared, we baffled them. It wasn’t magic; we just set out to do a very thorough job.  That is the dimension of the complexity of freedom that I am interested in. 

There probably was a period in my young adulthood when I absolutely insisted on being seen as a Marxist – perhaps the Ibadan and Ife years. But since then, I have shifted tactics: my absolute insistence now is that I be taken, I be judged on how consistent I am with my passion for redistributive justice in our country and our world. So don’t say to me, “Are you a Marxist?” Say to me, “Are you true to your professed belief in justice and dignity for the dispossessed of our country, our continent and our world?” On that basis, I must say that the question whether socialism is dead or not does not really interest me; what interests me is: what is the state of social justice in our country and our world?

Q: What is your take on what Sam Omatseye described as the crisis and anxiety of post-Marxist world reflected in your journalism?

A: Sam Omatseye is correct, but only in a very abstract and generalised sense; he is not correct in any kind of concrete, demonstrable sense that I find applicable to my work, especially my political and cultural journalism. The crisis for me is not that of being a Marxist in a post-Marxist world. Omatseye was for the most part speaking about what I write in my column in The Nation, the Talakawa Liberation Herald series. In that column, I write in a way that I hardly ever directly mention socialism, I hardly ever talk about capitalism, but only a fool would not know that that is what I am writing about. You see, for me there is no need to breast beat that I am a Marxist or that I am a socialist or to throw theoretical and ideological jargon around. So, I say loudly that I have no crisis or anxiety of being a Marxist in a putatively post-Marxist world. No, no, no. Once they label you as this or that, that is the end of the discussion, the end of the road. If they label you a communist, that is the worst. They will say, look at all the communist regimes, haven’t they failed, haven’t they done terrible things and haven’t they, in one way or another, turned away from communism? With that calculated tactic, my attempts to make my country, my society better will be delegitimized by the intellectual laziness and ideological fraudulence of saying that we want to bring North Korea here, we want to bring Stalinism here. Absolute rubbish.