Prof Biodun Jeyifo

Omatseye does not of course belong to this order of virulent anti-Marxism. But that order does exist and in reaction to it, it is a tactic on my part not to talk about socialism but everybody on the left knows that I am speaking for them. The second aspect of my response to this question of being Marxist in a post-Marxist world is the one that I tried to speak about during the Ibadan celebrations on January 5. I don’t think I was clear enough about this aspect when I spoke about it on that occasion when I said I wanted to tell a secret about the Talakawa series in The Nation. You see, the secret is this: part of the time, I am actually writing for self-clarification in the Talakawa Liberation series. In other words, I don’t write that series with the attitude, the perspective of one who knows and is providing the answers. I am very serious about this, to the extent that I do declare here and now that it is in the process of writing that I actually make some discoveries, that I think through some tough questions, think through on how best to present my positions. How do I break down complex ideas, complex issues and make them understandable? That is the general task that I set myself in The Nation column. I think I have gotten better at doing this in The Nation than when I wrote the series in The Guardian. At any rate, that is my own general sense. Sometimes, I am frustrated by a feeling that I have not done enough work to clarify an issue that I set out to engage. But for the most part, I am content, though not in a self-satisfied, smug manner. In a very generalised sense, this profile of what I am trying to achieve in the Talakawa Liberation series in The Nation is applicable to the so-called post-Marxist conundrum. This is because nowadays in most parts of the world, leftists, socialists, radicals see it as a sort of liability to label themselves Marxists.

Let me illustrate what I am saying here by alluding to something that happened personally to me in connection with this thing about being Marxist in a so-called post-Marxist world. When I was going to Harvard from Cornell University, the President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, got the Dean of the Faculty of Arts to ask me to explain my Marxism. You know, “Isn’t this a contamination that this man is bringing to Harvard?” He didn’t literally say that but that was the implication: we must keep Marxism out of here or keep it policed, watched. I narrated this experience to some colleagues at Harvard as recently as about six months ago at a social gathering for the young scholars of the department. I told them that I was made to write something about my Marxism when I was coming to Harvard from Cornell. I told them that I wrote a tongue-in-cheek memo which I titled, “Who is afraid of BJ’s Marxism?”  And I sent it to the Dean at Harvard. Obviously, the demand for me to offer an explanation for my Marxism came from a feeling that Marxism is some kind of strange and foreign invasion from a past that has collapsed and vanished forever. In my tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic memo titled “Who is afraid of BJ’s Marxism” I said, wait a minute, Marxism has a long, more than 200-year history that is still evolving and there are many schools of Marxism – Western Marxism; Non-Western Marxism; other schools of thought or ideological orientation that are not Marxist but are in dialogue with Marxism. In my memo to the Dean of the Arts and Sciences Faculty at Harvard, I said that in my classes, I explore all of these traditions within and outside Marxism. Altogether then, Marxism influences ideas that power my conception, my tactics of how to go about the struggles that we wage as Nigerians and human beings for justice and opportunities for the dispossessed. But Marxism is not the only tradition of thought and inquiry that influences me. And I am not a dogmatic Marxist. And most important of all, I don’t think Marxism ever belonged exclusively or even predominantly to the Eastern bloc that collapsed after the end of the Cold War; neither does it belong exclusively to the past.

So in response to your question, Omatseye is wrong in projecting to me crises and anxieties that I do not in the least have. Marxism is an approach and a philosophical view of human society and history that has had a profound influence on me, but not in a dogmatic sense.

In the combined panel on my work as a theorist and critic and as a public intellectual, there were at least four or five presentations that, were I not the object of discussion, I would have interrogated strongly and robustly…Doing so will make it seem as if I do not appreciate them and that I have begun to pick holes in their presentations. There they were making critical assessments of my work and as the person honoured I had to take it all in. Although on the whole there was not a single person on the panel who didn’t express admiration and respect but the respect was also critically articulated and this generated in me an impulse to engage critically with them! But you will agree with me that it would have been an act of a lack of grace on my part to have said to any of the panellists: “what are you saying”?

Q: At what point in your life did you discover Marxism? And what is your response to those who say, Socialism is dead. Long live Capitalism?

A: Interestingly, it was in America, when I was a graduate student in my early to mid-20s that I discovered Marxism and read very, very widely in both its Western and Non-Western schools or traditions and in all subjects and disciplines – philosophy; politics; social theory; psychoanalysis; art and criticism; revolutions and revolutionary movements. I read enough to last two lifetimes! At the same time, 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?

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? As for those who say, “long live capitalism”, I say, have you taken a recent look at the state, the ill-health, the severe crises in and of global, regional, national and local capitalisms recently?

Q: You have also been quite interested, even excited about the need for an inter-generational conversation between younger and older Nigerians in all areas of our public life, literature and the arts; politics; popular culture; and present conditions and future prospects for everybody, young and old. Do you want to speak to that?

A: Yes. You notice that one thing I do, one special category of articles I publish in my column, both when I was in The Guardian and now in The Nation, is that every time that a major intellectual, artistic or political figure dies, I write about him or her; and also, I write an appreciation when he or she celebrates a major birthday milestone. There is a reason for that and the reason speaks to this inter- generational conversation. You see, I am trying in such writings to re-introduce to our younger compatriots Nigerians of exceptional achievement in all areas among the older generation, especially those that came before my generation. I write to make them known to the new generation by writing about them. One thing that progressive forces all over the world always face is the temptation to see the historic task before them as if they have to reinvent the wheel. They don’t know what has gone before they arrived on the scene. They don’t have intimate knowledge of the great people and inspiring things that happened in the past, even the recent past.

Indeed, Kunle, I see your own persistent plea to me: “Write your memoir, BJ;please write this memoir, BJ” in light of this same imperative of an intergenerational conversation. I will write the memoir, Kunle, but meanwhile, I am writing about figures and trends that went before my own generation arrived on the scene. I especially like the piece that I wrote on Professor Omafume Onoge when he died. It was a three-part series. And I very carefully wrote on trends and moments of transition in the evolution of the Left in Nigeria so that the younger people can become aware of that history. Because any generation, especially present and future generations of young people, if they have no point of reference from the past, points of reference aboutthose who came before them, problems which should not scare them will scare them; problems which are simple, they will blow out of proportion; and”problems” that are not really problems at all, they will say they are problems. That is one.

Prof Biodun Jeyifo

Number two, which is far more critical for me in this issue of an inter-generational dialogue, there is what I would call the coeval connection between all the generations that are alive at any particular historical moment. By the way, the intuition for this came from the bible not from Marx. (I was General Secretary of Students Christian Movement of all the secondary schools in Ibadan in the last two years of my secondary school days. Indeed, I have a long history with Christianity which I have since abandoned, or more appropriately, it abandoned me because it stopped making meaning and sense to me, in trying to understand my world, our world) But concerning this aspect of inter-generational challenge, Christ said that before the present generation shall have passed away, the son of man shall come again. By this Christ meant that the second coming was not in some distant future, it was liberation from Roman and local oppressors. Judea was a part of Roman Empire and the people were oppressed by Rome and also by the Pharisees and local landlords. This revolutionary, this historical figure, Christ, took a whip to the temple to chase out the money changers, the capitalists.

So what I want to extract, when he said, “Before this living generation shall have passed away”, is this: any living generation is composed of many inter-generational components who are in dialogue with one another or should be. In other words, a living generation is composed of many generational cohorts, about four or five at any one time and we should all be in a dialogue with one another. It is not as if I am calling for something which is not part of the social fabric in human experience. What I am calling for should be made more conscious, it should be made more critical. I got irritated when people started talking about first generation, second generation, third generation in Nigerian literature, as if they are just discreet segmentsthat are totally isolated from one another – which is completely false. When Christ said “before the present generation shall pass away”, he was talking of everybody alive and if you look at any society at any point in time, the living generation runs the whole gamut from the youngest to the oldest. It is usually about three to four normally segmented generations who are always involved in one form or another of inter-generational conversationamong themselves.

At any rate, that for me is a critical factor in that it is not as if one generation has completely died and another one is alive; no, we are all still coeval, alive at the same time and responsible for what we leave to the future. Especially since we have just emerged, that is relatively speaking from orality. As rich and powerful as oral cultures can be in many acts of recording, chanting and performing memory and imagination, they are very fragile in one sense: they don’t keep records well. They only kept records among specialists, those who can memorise 2000 lines of poetry, the bards, and they were always jealous about maintaining control over this art, this function. It wasn’t something that was widely and culturally distributed. Now that we have written cultures, we ought tomake the most of this intergenerational dimension. The last thing I will say – and this as a sort of auto-critique or self-criticism – is that I am not doing enough of reading and commentary on the younger writers. I hope to be doing a lot of that when I retire in a couple of years from now – very actively reading, sensitive and supportive, but also critical reading of the younger writers because it suddenly dawned on me not too long ago that most of my critical commentaries have been on the so called first and second generations writers, very little on the third. I teach many of these generational cohortsof the “third” wave in my classes. In fact, in one course I am currently teaching at Harvard,”Film, Fiction and Diaspora”, I teach a greater number of contemporary writers than the older writers. So I need to correct this. I need to put my money where my mouth is. I need to actually back up the demands and obligations I am making on others, on all of us with what I do in my own work in furtherance of this vital intergenerational conversation. Indeed, one of the best sessions at the Ife celebrations, in my opinion, was the one in which Eddie Madunagu and myself had that deep and wide-ranging conversation at the CORA roundtable with the two much younger intellectual compatriots that posed very sharp, searching questions to us.