Art is a Debt We Owe

by Tolu Ogunlesi

No writer could possibly exist in isolation. Even if she succeeded in engineering a spatial isolation (think of the farthest reaches of outer space), psychic isolation from the rest of humanity would be impossible. At the very least a writer is also a citizen—with all the requisite responsibilities: paying tax, participating in local politics, and obeying the rules and regulations established by the state. She is a mélange of family ties, societal status, religious beliefs (or lack of them), biases, memories, romantic impulses, political affiliation and imaginative capacity. A writer is a human being first, and then a creative force, and therefore far more than the sum of his writing.

This applies everywhere, and in times of peace and conflict. Having established this, let us proceed to the all-important question: What is the role of the writer in a conflict zone?

Perhaps one should start by considering the options available to a writer in a conflict zone. (For the purposes of this article, I have chosen “war” as synonym for conflict). A writer’s choice of role(s) in conflict is admittedly limited. Aloofness is one possibility; this would mean an artistic disconnection from the conflict (“I will not / cannot write”). The other choice would be to “engage,” which would manifest as an artistic engagement (writing) or a militaristic one (taking up arms), or both.

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The Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, was a watershed moment in the history of the Nigerian republic. Erupting only seven years after independence from Britain, it was merely the final breakdown at the end of a series of smaller (but progressively worsening) failures—widespread violence in the Western region, necessitating the declaration of a state of emergency; two violent, bloody coups that overthrew the central government; and the massacre of Eastern Nigerians living in the predominantly Muslim North. It is interesting to observe the responses of Nigerian writers to the war, and to try to draw patterns from the actions of five of them:

Wole Soyinka, who, two decades later would win the Nobel Prize in Literature; Chinua Achebe, who has come to be referred to (against his will by the way) as the Father of African Literature; Christopher Okigbo, arguably the most influential and most famous poet to come out of Nigeria; John Pepper (J. P.) Clark, poet, playwright and dramatist; and Ken Saro Wiwa, who would go on to become a world-famous environmental rights activist, and who, three decades later, would be hanged by Nigeria’s military dictatorship on the basis of unsubstantiated charges (of inciting murder).

A background to the war is necessary here. The killings of Igbos (the predominant ethnic group in Eastern Nigeria) living in Northern Nigeria compelled the military governor of the Eastern region to declare independence from Nigeria, and proclaim the breakaway nation the Republic of Biafra. The Government of Nigeria (headed by a Northerner) would have none of the declaration. Efforts at dialogue and negotiations of a peaceful settlement failed; in May 1967 war was declared. The war therefore pitched Nigeria (the Western and Northern regions) against Biafra (the Eastern region). It lasted for 30 months, ending in 1970 with the surrender of Biafra. For his attempts to negotiate with the Biafran authorities, the Nigerian government arrested and jailed Soyinka.

In a 2006 interview, Wole Soyinka (whose ethnic group, the Yorubas, are from Western Nigeria) said: “I didn’t believe in that war. I felt it was an unjust war on the part of the Federal Government, because the Biafrans had suffered a great deal… and while their action was politically unwise, I did not find it morally reprehensible, and they certainly did not deserve that they should be clobbered anew by the full Federal might when they were the immediate past victims.”¹ Being Igbo, Chinua Achebe had the path of his allegiance clearly cut out. “I cannot possibly leave Biafra while [the war] goes on. I have to be here and do whatever little I can to help this terribly wronged country,” he wrote in a reply to an invitation from the Africa Studies Program at Northwestern University, Illinois.² He spent the war years as a spokesperson for the government of Biafra, traveling to America and Europe to seek understanding allies for the Biafran war effort.

Achebe, pained by bosom friend J.P. Clark’s decision to join the Nigerian side (he saw it as nothing short of a betrayal), cut all ties with him. For years afterwards the two men were not on speaking terms.

Christopher Okigbo (also Igbo) sketched, in poetry full of an unnerving urgency and startling symbolism, the descent into anarchy (these poems were written before the war started):

Now that laughter, broken in two, hangs tremulous between the teeth, / … The smell of blood already floats in the lavender-mist of the afternoon. / The death sentence lies in ambush along the corridors of power; / and a great fearful thing already tugs at the cables of the open air…³

Eventually, it seems Okigbo decided that poetry was not enough, and he threw himself into the war. Down went the pen, and in its place emerged the gun. He was killed in 1967 in battle at the beginning of the war. There are those who will never forgive him for sacrificing his life and talent for the cause of war. Ali Mazrui’s novel,The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (Third Press, 1972), is essentially a posthumous denunciation of the poet.

Ken Saro Wiwa was from the minority Ogoni tribe, which fell into the Eastern region, and was thus forcefully co-opted into the breakaway republic. Feeling no solidarity with the Biafran cause —which he saw as another man’s war — Wiwa escaped to the Federal side and was appointed administrator of one of the regions in the liberated areas.

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All of the writers mentioned above wrote extensively about their wartime experiences. From Soyinka’s sojourn in prison came “The Man Died” (Africa Book Centre, 1972). Achebe turned to short story, and poetry, and wrote the poems that would be published, after the war, in the collection “Beware Soul Brother”(Heinemann Educational Books, 1972), and some of the stories that would be collected as “Girls at War and Other Stories” (Doubleday, 1973). J.P. Clark published, in the final year of the war, a collection of poems titled “Casualties: Poems 1966-68”(Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1970). Ken Saro-Wiwa also wrote a novel, “On a Darkling Plain” (African Books Collective, 1998), detailing his war experiences.

Two threads, therefore, run commonly through the wartime experiences of these writers: the losses they suffered (of friendships, of homes, of personal freedom and, in Okigbo’s case, of life) and the books they wrote. The Loss and the Art.

The Loss is a given. The Art ought to be as well. The act of turning to the written word, in a bid to make sense of tumultuous political circumstances is—for me—what should be the primary role of any writer in a conflict zone. In war, Art is a debt we owe, over and above everything else. It is the gilded mirror in our possession that should be turned both inward and outward, at ourselves and at the society. It is the most important weapon we wield, to inform, reform, un-form and transform. The Loss turns us into “Bearers of Scars;” with the Art we turn ourselves into “Bearers of Witness.”⁴ War turns us to prey, we can fight this by seeking to turn ourselves into Priest, Prophet and Plea. But it is also important for me to speak of my strong belief in the fact that a writer has a responsibility to write from what I call a “Platform of Conscience,” which recognizes that the particularities of war notwithstanding, certain truths remain sacred:

• That war is Evil.
• That nothing can justify the pain and suffering that war brings.
• That (quoting Wole Soyinka) “Justice is the first condition of humanity.”
• That Peace and Justice should not have to be sacrificed for each other.
• That in war, there are no neutral forces. Objectivity can exist only as a fictional construct. The fence offers no space for sitting. There is no life to be lived atop the Berlin Wall; every individual must (by choice or the compulsion of circumstances) occupy a position on either side of the wall.
• That there is no such thing as “non-political” art. In their introduction to the book, “Writers, Writing On Conflicts And Wars In Africa” (Adonis & Abbey Publishers, 2009), editors Okey Ndibe and Chenjerai Hove write: “The idea of pure art, an art uninfected or uninflected by the surrounds of political upheavals and pervasive social misery, is a myth.”

Within this framework, different writers will definitely have different artistic approaches. And in truth that is how it should be. Writers are typically individualistic personalities, or at least like to think that they are. In a conflict zone every writer should be free to evolve their own response. But whatever we do, or say, or write, silence is a luxury that we cannot afford. In “The Man Died”, Wole Soyinka declared that “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”

And in the words of one of the characters in Okey Ndibe’s novel, Arrows of Rain (Heinemann, 2000), “Speech is the mouth’s debt to a story.” In truth, art is the artist’s debt to conflict. We write—in and out of conflict—therefore we are. But I will also be the first to publicly resist any attempt to be simplistic. In attempting to answer the question: “What is the role of the writer in a conflict zone?” it is inevitable that new questions will arise, that will demand their own answers. For example, at what point does art become impotent in conflict? At what stage will blood have to displace ink as the lubricating fluid of peace / justice / struggle? And what should our response be to a writer who has come to believe that blood is thicker than ink?

For these new questions I have no answers.

1. Amy Goodman. Interview with Wole Soyinka: “Legendary Nigerian Writer Wole Soyinka on Oil in the Niger Delta, the Effect of Iraq on Africa and His New Memoir,” Democracy Now! (April 19, 2006):http://www.democracynow.org/2006/4/19/legendary_nigerian_writer_wole_soy….

2. Ezenwa-Oheato. Chinua Achebe: A Biography (Oxford: James Currey Ltd, 1997): 132.

3. Christopher Okigbo. Labyrinths with Path of Thunder (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1971).

4. From the introduction to Writers, Writing On Conflicts and Wars In Africa, Okey Ndibe and Chenjerai Hove, eds (Adonis & Abbey Publishers, 2009).

‘Art is a Debt We Owe’ was first published in The Mantle (January 2010) and has been reproduced with the author’s permission.

BIO: Tolu Ogunlesi is features editor with NEXT Newspaper. He is the author of a collection of poetry, Listen to the Geckos Singing from a Balcony (Bewrite Books, 2004) and a novella, Conquest & Conviviality (Hodder Murray, 2008). In 2007 he was awarded a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg poetry prize, in 2008 the Nordic Africa Institute Guest Writer Fellowship, and in 2009 a Cadbury Visiting Fellowship by the University of Birmingham, England. He won the Arts and Culture Prize in the 2009 CNN Multichoice African Journalism Awards. His fiction and poetry have been published in The London Magazine, Wasafiri, Farafina, PEN Anthology of New Nigerian Writing, Stanford’s Black Arts Quarterly and World Literature Today, among others.