The Nobel Prize is largely a European and American affair. And this is logical. Europe and America are leading the world in science and technology and most of the prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine often go to researchers and developers in Europe and America. Asian scientists sometimes break this tradition and receive prizes for their scientific discoveries. On the other hand, Africa and Latin America usually receive the Nobel Prizes in literature and in peace making. Nobel Prize candidate do not always come from big countries or continents. Otherwise India and China or Africa would have led the list of Nobel laureates.
Big continents or countries on the other hand tend to win the literature and peace prizes. Latin America seems to lead the pack in literary prizes with writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Colombia and, Pablo Neruda from Chile are only two of them worth mentioning. In Africa Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer and Naguib Mahfouz have been honored in the past. India won it through the eminent poet Rabindrath Tagore.
This is the book season in Europe when readers are offered plenty of works to choose from and enjoy the art of writing if not reading. Perhaps Germany is leading in the size and importance of its book fair, with the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. There are also similar fairs in other parts of Europe where writers are celebrated and the reading public offered with diverse titles mainly in the leading genre which is the novel.
This is also the awards season and Britain and Germany seem to lead the pack of award giver for writers. It all started with the Booker Award in Britain with Margaret Atwood. Atwood won the prize for The Testaments which is the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale which was published 36 years ago. According to a recent Newsweek article on Atwood’s literary achievements, The Housemaid’s Tale was a 1985 tale about “a totalitarian theocracy that has taken the US in the midst of the fertility crisis. Offred, one of the few women who can still bear children, is forced to participate in reproductive-slavery ceremonies in the fictional Republic of Gilead. Offred’s story ends with a notoriously ambiguous cliff-hanger: she steps into a van that will take her either to fresh hell or to freedom.”
Bernardine Evaristo shared this year’s Booker for her work entitled Girl, Woman, Others. This is not only unusual title for a novel. The award is also unusual in many ways. First, it is shared between Atwood and Evaristo. Booker awards are usually given for one author and one book at a time. Second thing, Evaristo is a black woman Booker award winner, perhaps the first in the long history of the award, sharing it between them. The best six books of the year were selected and shortlisted for the honor among
which was Salman Rushdie’s “Quixotte”, a modern day version of Cervantes’s “Don Quixotre”. Rushdie failed to win the prize although he won it in the past. His classic tale of India about the children born on the eve of India’s independence in 1948 called “Midnight’s Children” earned him what was called “the Booker of all Bookers”. Six prominent books of the year were also shortlisted for the prestigious prize. This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature went to a Polish writer whose award was highly controversial because the author’s political views and past political activities.
The Nobel Prize for literature is obvious, the biggest and most prestigious book awards in the world. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has come to Africa but African writers have been ignored when it comes to the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel committee has turned its eyes to less known European writers with controversial political backgrounds.
What is surprising about these prizes is that no African writer has won any one of them. This was rather a year of mourning for African- American writers with the death of one of its literary heroes of the black experience. Tony Morrison who won the Nobel Prize earlier in her literary career and died a few months ago after winning all the literary awards in America, including the Pulitzer Prize for best fiction.
Speaking of African or black writers, one of the best known winners of this most prestigious was Egyptian author Najib Mahfouz. There was also Wole Soyinka who won it for his plays and poetry. The other winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was South African Nadine Gordimer, a white South African who wrote extensively about the black and white experiences under Apartheid. There were also potential winners of the prize such as the late Chinua Achebe most remembered for his classic Things Fall Apart.
Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Tiongo was another possible candidate for the prize and had many times expected to win it in the last few years. Achebe not winning the prize for his classic Things Fall Apart may be understandable as the book is a kind of literary portrayal of colonialism who impact was to undermine local traditions and impose European domination. The Nobel Committee is sometimes criticized for its curious if not bizarre choice of authors. The late Graham Green was one of the best British writers believed to be deserving of the Nobel Prize. Yet, one member of the Nobel committee was quoted as saying that Green would take the prize ‘on his dead body”. Why? It still remains a puzzle.
Salman Rushdie wrote his controversial The Satanic Verses three decades ago and endured countless persecutions because of it. He has also written a Nobel Prize worthy novel entitled The Children of Midnight, about the generation of Indians born on the eve of India’s independence back in 1948. However, Rushdie has never been chosen for the award.
Coming back to Africa, the Kenyan Ngugi wa Tiongo’s Wizard of the Crow is considered his magnum opus and his best work in a long literary career in Kenya and America where he had recently become a university professor of African literature and literary criticism. Wa Tiongo is an author whose political activism had brought him many troubles in his home country and forced him into exile. His criticism of dictatorial leaders that governed Kenya and Africa and the post-colonial African political experience in the 1960s and 1970’s had single him out as a target of official hate and vilification within Kenya while boosting his literary stature in the world.
Africa has never been short of potential Nobel Prize winners in literature. Among the new generation of African writers, Ben Okri stands tall with his classic, “The Famished Road” that has won the Booker prize in Britain more than two decades ago. This year, Ben Okri has published The Freedom Artist, a nightmarish account of a he protagonist who is suffering from the torments unleashed upon him by modern invisible powers. It is a powerful, absurdist and surrealist tale of suffering and persecution in the modern world.
The blurb page on the book says that, “The Freedom Artist is an impassioned plea for justice and a penetrating examination of how freedom is threatened in a post-truth society. In Ben Okri’s most significant novel since the Booker-Prize-winning The Famished Road, he delivers a powerful and haunting call to arms.” Commenting on The Famished Road, Linda Grant wrote in the Independence on Sunday that “Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence. As one startling image follows the next, The Famished Road begins to read like an epic poem that happens to touch down just this side of prose…”
Ben Okri may be a younger writer who has not yet produced his Nobel prize winning masterpiece but, he is no doubt a potential Nobel winner in the coming few years. He is not only a novelist but also a poet, essayist and an excellent short story writer. The other potential candidate is of course Ngugi wa Tyongo who must be still writing after more than half a century of literary production as a novelist, essayist and playwright.
Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt have produced some of the outstanding writers of the last century who have won the Nobel Prize for their works. It appears that literary output in these countries and the level of development of literature follow their social and economic development as well as their history. Naguib Mhafouz has written classics of modern Egyptian life set against the background of social changes and revolutions as well as tales set in ancient Egyptian societies. Nadine Gordimer of South Africa has written classics about life of blacks and whites under the Apartheid system. Chinua Achebe has written about Nigeria’s colonial experience.
There are many African countries with rich cultures and history but they have failed to produce writers worth winning the Nobel Prize. Despite its long history and complex social lives, Ethiopia has never produced a writer even remotely comparable to the Nigerians, Egyptians or South Africans. Ethiopian writers work in Amharic and are not translated into other languages or they have not yet produced works worthy of translation into foreign languages. As the literary market is poorly developed in Ethiopia and that illiteracy still runs high, foreign publishers are not interested to invest in the country’s literary development. Where English is a second or third or tenth language.
The economics of printing books remains one of the most frustrating in Ethiopia and government does not subsidize publishing companies that are unable to import print paper at high price. Lack of talent, government neglect and the poverty of the publishing industry have conspired to frustrate writers, publishers and distributors in Ethiopia. The advent of the electronics media has also discouraged many young readers to develop the reading culture, resorting to visual medium instead where stories are told in pictures.
Other African countries face better prospects for producing future authors with talents worthy of Noble prize winners. Nigeria still takes the lead in this. The young Nigerian female writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of the latest novel on the African immigrant experience is one among many aspiring writers who might win the Nobel Prize one day in the future. Her recent novel entitled Americanah has won her fame and followers making her one of the few upcoming writers on the African continent.
There are also many writers in Africa who are working on total anonymity and try to convey the African experience to the rest of the world. Maybe one day some of them might produce works worthy of the Nobel prizes. As things stand now most of them are ignored by Western publishing houses and the literary.
The Ethiopian Herald Sunday Edition 3 November 2019
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
