It took place on a Saturday afternoon. Well, it was 4:00 pm and thus the time of day stood on the cusp of being renamed a Saturday evening. At any rate, it was the first day of the month of a February that was a day late and a dollar short of having saved us from the fiscal Sahara of January.
Anyway, some of us survived this brokenness and repaired to the Uganda Museum Library to listen to “The Yard” discussion blandly titled, “The Role of Literature in Society.” The Yard is a sort of creatives’ congress of ideas canvassed to shape the future of the creative, performance and liberal arts in Uganda and beyond.
To sex up what was an unappealing title were the panel discussants Mr. Amooti Kangere, who is the CEO of IBUA publishing, a writer & poet with Lantern Meet of Poets. And Mr. Deus Kansiime, a Graduate student of Literature at Makerere University, a teacher at Uganda Martyrs Secondary School, a writer, and poet.
The two were moderated by Mrs. Karungi Kwatampora, a demure lady who speaks softly without wielding a big stick. Still, she came charging out of the blocks when the first question she asked was: “What is literature?”
Amooti termed literature as the “written word worth preserving” while Kansiime broadened this definition to include oral literature. And, he added, such literature should be “imaginative, with distinct value and permanent worth.” Although both agreed that literature must employ the creative use of language, they parted ways at the presumed disjunction of the oral and written incarnations of literature. Kansiime pointed out Homer, the blind poet, didn’t write the epics “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” however these works made their way into text and so evolved from the oral to the written.
Notwithstanding, does form shape substance? Should creative communication be defined, in and of itself, as having the intrinsic value of literature? Is the form that literature takes to be communicated what defines it as literature? Written or spoken, literature reflects a human need to transfer thoughts and feelings from one entity to another. That entity might be singular or plural. It is essentially a medium of communication and so the form this medium takes, written or oral, cannot deprive it of its being a medium. So I tend to agree with Kansiime that literature is broader than what is written.
That said, the neologism “Orature” sounds a little too contrived and gratuitous for my literary palate. By coining such a portmanteau (a Katogo of words, no less), isn’t one merely reemphasizing the emphasized? The word “Orature”, which is favored by Kansiime and Makerere University literature dons, is redundant given the substance that oral literature is a thing. It is like saying Ugandan Football exists and thus, to remove any shadow of doubt about this, you call it “UgaBall.” Oral literature is literature and so there’s no need to contract these words into a sum of their parts to prove that the part represents the whole.
Further, Amooti and Kansiime agreed that literature is creative work that is “worth preserving.” And so the moderator asked who determines what is worth preserving. To which Amooti replied that society determines this because for literature to be enduring, it must be relevant. Kansiime agreed, however, with one proviso: preservation must be guided by the themes of such literature and this must speak to higher values which may not be a product of what society wants but what it needs. Such literature shapes societal consciousness, from which a literary tradition then takes seed. According to him, the process of human growth goes through the same stages of barbarism, civilization and then decadence. Stages which literature is then able to record.
I found this view curious in the sense that such a human trajectory might be linear or circular. Could decadence thus lead back to barbarism and civilization? Or could human growth skip a stage? Oscar Wilde famously said, “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
The discussion then veered towards what is grandly dubbed the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” And, in this context, the role of technology was examined concerning literature.
Amooti noted that a book is in itself “a technology” in the way it responds to the inherent human need to tell a story; while allaying our subconscious fear of forgetting. On the subject of technologies which have cut a wide swathe for new communication platforms found in social and other media, he noted that far from being a threat to literature, these platforms have democratized access to literature. However, such access is a threat to the book production industry; he conceded. Kansiime pointed out, the Guttenberg printing press that gave rise to book production ironically, was once considered a threat to the sociopolitical order in the fifteenth century and thereabouts.
Ipso facto, the impact of the Guttenberg printing press led to a European Renaissance through the widespread dissemination of printed works in the form of books, tracts, posters, and papers which led to questions about and critical examinations of the status quo and status quo ante.
A clash of ideological orientations was inevitable when the panelists duked it out regarding the role of the State in the growth of literature in society. Amooti said The State could play a signal role in ensuring that literature becomes a potent social force. In the Elizabethan era, he posited, The State availed Shakespeare the infrastructure he required in the shape of theaters and the material facilitation to vault his works over the Goliaths of heightening financial limitations. This also sharpened Shakespeare’s satirical skills when it came to criticizing his benefactor (The State) without anyone sensing that his oeuvres were ‘no holds barred’, so to say.
In more contemporary times, The State builds schools that are seedbeds for literacy and, by turns, springboards for the appreciation of literature. The US Library of Congress, for example, is the biggest literary repository in the world. And no private individual could’ve built such a monument to the enduring value of literature. It had to be the state, Amooti concluded.
Kansiime agreed that the state plays a critical role in promoting literature. However his misgivings about such a role issue from the saying, “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” And so there is a risk of literature being patronized in ways that blunt the sharpness of critiques on misrule, corruption, and other wrongs often perpetrated and perpetuated by The State. What The State prefers is the ideology of form over the form of ideology through which literature may speak to the human spirit. The best writings in the Amin era, Kansiime said, were criticisms of Amin’s misrule. These criticisms flowered to mirror the Petals of Blood, so to speak, which grew out of a bouquet of murderous decrees. If Amin had underwritten these criticisms, they would’ve have been plucked of their potency.
On the question of the genre African literature, Amooti felt this classification to be “a misnomer.” He expounded on this by saying, “writers of African descent who write works that fit into many genres never get the exposure they need” because they are pigeonholed by and restricted to the African literature genre. So these writers are seen as African writers, instead of writers who happen to be African. Possibly this is why Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s book “Manchester Happened” carried the blurb by the Britain-based Guardian newspaper which read: “Makumbi does for Ugandan literature what Chinua Achebe did for Nigerian writing” (it didn’t even have a full stop). Clearly, Makumbi’s book was being measured against and limited to her own kind: her fellow Africans. Yet her literature transcends Africa, the title itself shows this.
This transcendent quality might be missed if we are talking about Manchester in Kamwokya, however. Which, at any rate, is pronounced and written as “Manny Chester.”
As expected, Kansiime took a different view. African literature, to him, is any work that is about Africa and the African experience. This includes the works of white men like Joseph Conrad or other “expatriate literature.” These works are essentially Afropolitan in the way they led to contrary anti-colonial literature by authors such as Achebe. And this reaction, in turn, led to post-colonial literature as the evolution of African literature mirrored a changing African milieu. Indeed, all literature can be Africanized. And this Africanizing is not out of joint with what it means to be African when what it means to be African is what it means to be human.
As an upshot of this discussion, the panelists looked at the role of language in literature and agreed that African writers must not be restricted to their own dialects. How would a Ugandan have enjoyed Achebe if he had written in his native Igbo? Multilingualism is key and besides, the use of African languages doesn’t preclude the use of foreign languages. For literature is not a binary reality, but is a conveyor belt towards making the world safer for diversity. Besides, one might write in English according to their own dialectical tradition. This creates different literary aesthetics in the way, say, “Uglish” was born. Uglish, as an urban Ugandan colloquialism, cannot be understood by any typical John Bull (read Englishman).
Still, it could be elevated to a formal means of expression, since language is not static. Italian and French, the panelists agreed, were originally ‘pidgin Latin’ and yet are now on the ascendant while Latin is on the lexical downswing.
“Fiction is a lie that tells the truth,” Amooti said when asked about the cleavage between fiction and non-fiction. Fiction, it has been noted, is not fact but is a work of art based upon the writer’s imagination.
However, Kansiime disagreed with Amooti’s clever turn of phrase by saying that truth is elusive. To elaborate, he spoke of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Here, different blind men felt different parts of the elephant’s body and they ended up describing the elephant based on their limited experience concerning the part they each touch. Hence, their descriptions of the elephant were different from one other. And so their “truths” took on a multiplicity of meanings based upon their different experiences. Again, Poetry is often classified as fiction. Yet Alan Seeger’s war poems weren’t based on fiction but concrete experiences that speak to truth.
Naturally, literary debates such as these are characterized by their means instead of their ends. And so disagreement largely took the place of agreement, as the panelists remained agreeable to each other. Oh yes, it was a vibrantly intellectual day at the Uganda Museum library and this year’s first edition of “The Yard” left everyone with one question on their lips: when is the next one??
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