The Common Tongue

A conversation with Kofi Awoonor

From Transition 41 (1972)

By John Goldblatt

Edited by V. L. K. Djokoto.

John Goldblatt: Kofi, there is an immensely broad spectrum of writing in English today, ranging from the work of English-born writers deeply steeped in the English literary and historical tradition, to the work of those to whom even the English language itself may not be native, but who express their creativity through it. Where in this spectrum does your writing appear?

Kofi Awoonor: I see the English literary tradition as bridging the gap between my own language, which is Ewe, and the very stylized, cool, institutionalized kind of English I learned at school. Somewhere in the middle is the vital language we Africans use: it is a synthesis of two literary experiences. Our native language is highly active; its tradition is oral. Through our universities and yours we have absorbed the English literary tradition like a transfusion of blood of a different but compatible type. It flows through the body of our native linguistic ethos, and we grow strong on it.

JG: To continue your analogy, do you feel that this transfusion has had nothing but a beneficial effect? Doesn't it hamper your creative expression in any way? It's a massive dose that you've had to take into your system.

KA: Not at all. We have no burden to fear. Everyone selects (it may be subconsciously) those aspects of English literature that are nearest and dearest to him. I was particularly interested in, and probably much influenced by, one poet in particular, Gerard Manley Hopkins. His energetic, innovative, highly revolutionary use of the language, his wonderful concatenations of rhythmic patterns, strike strong sympathetic vibrations within me. Yeats, too, affected me, but purely for political and ideological reasons.

What his generation did in Ireland represented a ploughing back to the roots. They looked for their roots, and talked about them.

Other writers — other exemplars.

Chinua Achebe, I believe to have been strongly influenced by Conrad and Cary, both “colonial” writers, if you like. Wole Soyinka was influenced by the Irish theatre, the Edwardian theatre. And all of his plays ring with the buffoonery of Ben Jonson — the extended joke that becomes the whole play without diminishing its content. And none of us, if we are good writers, are in any way diminished by being influenced. We have achieved what we have done through English writers, not with them. My conscious literary hero is James Joyce, but I don't think I've been influenced by him.

JG: And yet in a way, Joyce's position in the spectrum is near to yours. He was a native of another land. And also like you, he was a voluntary exile.

KA: Yes, there is a strong correspondence between Irish writing and what has happened in Africa: the modifying of English by new rhythms and new sensibilities. And some of the fascination that Joyce holds for me is that like Beckett, Shaw, and Wilde, he could only write from exile. This is a very important historical development in African writing today, one I can see in my own work. Living outside Africa, removed from first-hand experience, imposes a certain burden of sorrow on my writing. I cannot escape it, but I know, too, that it sharpens my articulation in many ways.

JG: But how long can you continue to write from exile? Your new novel contains a great deal of what Wole Soyinka calls “visceral contact” with Ghana. Soyinka says that he couldn't continue writing from exile for more than two years without going back home for a recharge of visceral contact.

KA: I don't subscribe to that. What Soyinka is talking about is an ephemeral experience. Beyond a certain age, itis no longer necessary. I carry enough experience with me. I may need to absorb and rethink and perhaps restate that experience, but I carry my roots, my Africa, within me. I have this concept of an umbilical cord stretching across the Atlantic to supply me with experiential feeling.

News from Ghana acts upon me psychosomatically. I don't have to go there to feel it. Each of us has his own Africa. Mine is different from Soyinka's. I don't need to make this visceral contact; indeed, it might even deaden the awareness that is springing up in me now for the Africa that is within me.

JG: How do you regard the valuation that is placed on African writing in England?

KA: I feel that African writing is undervalued. It's maybe a kind of understandable backlash. In the beginning there was Dylan Thomas's reception of Amos Tutuola's Palm Wine Drinkard in I952: “This is a grisly, haunting tale in young English. It is the beginning of a whole new Anglo-African tradition.”

This viewpoint was echoed by others. And about Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel, it was said: “He has torn the English language into shreds, and is giving it back to us reassembled with the cement of vitality”.

From that rave-type critique they arrived rather quickly at the blase stage: “It's so freakish. They need a long time to develop. These Africans are rushing into print too quickly. All the stories are the same.” These were legitimate and fair-minded criticisms in the sense that we had been taken too seriously as writers. I think that we took ourselves hopelessly seriously.

We believed that we were on the verge of great things, if we were not already doing them. We made incredibly vainglorious statements, and a lot of bad writing was published. Heinemann were very guilty of this, but theirs was a glorious guilt. It supported and carried us over the stage of adolescent intimations of immortality, into an age where African writers are holding their own in the world by virtue of their talents. Not just because “those clever savages can string three words together, let's publish them.”

That phase is over, thank God. We’re more aware of the basic problems, of the craftsmanship of writing. We are commenting now on man’s universal world, not just on tribal comings and goings. Chinua Achebe went through the lot. He was a very young man just out of university. Because he was attempting to repudiate what the “colonial” novelists wrote about Africa, he turned inward, saying, “I want to set the score to rights. I’m going to write in homage to my ancestors”. And so he did. But that phase, too, is over now. It was over when the first independence flags were hoisted. And Achebe and the others might not have been aware of it, but when you move into the realm of his A Man of the People, they are beginning to write real literature. Not as a response or challenge to another kind of writing, but purely for its own sake.

That old kind of writing, the setting up of a false myth in response to another false myth was, of course, false. Our ancestors were as barbarous and as cruel and as devious as anybody else's ancestors. And there was no Golden Age in Africa any more than there was anywhere else. The corruption of Africa is an aspect of its humanity. To deny that corruption — that we sold people into slavery and did all the usual horrible human things — is to suggest in a way that we are not human. It's a lot of bullshit, the way that some Europeans have lionized Africans as saints, as black faces with hearts of gold. That concept, of lovely Africans, noble savages, with tall spears gleaming in the blazing African sun, turned Africa into the Central Park of the world. And just as we are humans and deserve to be treated as such, our writing, too, deserves the same respect. The time has come to recognise that we are not outside the mainstream of English writing.

We’re all part of the same broad flood. America has long been showing that the language has the capacity for growth and diversification and adaptation. Even in tiny Papua the same thing is now happening. And it will happen in all places where English is the common tongue.

JG: How does this diversification apply in England?

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KA: On the literary level, the immigrant population of England has not yet been very much part of what is happening in writing, in theatre, in publishing. I have yet to read an Anglo-Indian or Anglo-Pakistani novel about England or about the experience of coming to England. The West Indians have done it a bit: George Lamming, Andrew Salkey, and a few others have been able to comment upon it in their work. But only in the context of the intellectual class, the bourgeois class, Oxford and Cambridge products who didn't come off the banana boats at Liverpool with just a few bits of clothing tucked under their arms.

Unfortunately, these West Indian writers came from respectable homes, insulated from visceral contact with the people. And no African writer has made that kind of comment yet, because we Africans have always been temporary sojourners in England. We don't grow roots there as easily as the Asians and West Indians seem to.

JG: Have you put down roots in the United States?

KA: Yes. America is a much more vibrant society than England. Its basic rhythmic sense of violence is so atavistic that it's like home in a peculiar way. Even East Africa hasn't got this affinity. When I travelled there, I used to ask myself why everything seemed so bland. I found East Africans so gentle, so quiet. Covert violence occurs, of course, but not on the streets.

In West Africa, the colours themselves are violent, the sounds are violent, the market is a violent place. I've found the same thing in America, but not in England. There's something rather cerebral and sedate about England.

JG: What are you working on now, in New York?

KA: I'm writing a book on the history, the early development of African writing, starting in those days when Wole Soyinka had just had three plays published by the Mbari Writers Club. I'd had a few poems published, and Chinua Achebe had Things Fall Apart. James Ngugi was still an undergraduate then, at Makerere. Lewis Nkosi had just escaped from South Africa. Zeke Mphahlele had just moved out from Lagos to Paris. And there we were, these bright, very clearheaded young men lunatics all, in our own way.

Chris Okigbo and I shared a room, with John Pepper Clark next door. We were all talking and thinking and talking more, still trying to find out what writing was: what it meant to write. I'm trying to recapture that era now, ten years later. Trying to see what has happened to that energy, those dreams. I have to see what has happened from my own point of view, by my own light.

Wole Soyinka went to jail. Chris Okigbo died in the uniform of a Biafran major. John Pepper Clark is still at the University of Lagos. Chinua Achebe became homeless and wandered around for a season. And so on. But we must go back, we must all go back to literature and articulate our observations about that early period. This is what I'm trying to do. I don't have any clear thesis yet. I'm not making any prophecies. At the moment it's just a lot of stories and gossip. It needs to be welded into a structural whole.

JG: Amamu, the protagonist of your new novel, This Earth, My Brother, is a displaced person. He has his roots in Ghana, but he has also drunk deeply from the cup of English legal education, and from London life as it is lived in a London bedsit. When he returns to Ghana, he finds that he is not at home in either place, either society. His palate is jaded with objectivity. Only Adisa, married to the earth, sensual and accepting, seems to satisfy any part of his yearnings toward the true Africa.

What is your concept of Amamu?

KA: All artists, all creative people are displaced persons by virtue of the burden of suffering they carry. This burden enables Amamu to stand aside and make a clear statement about his society. He is a little demented, but his madness is an aspect of this burden. He's like a priest, in the traditional African sense, taking upon himself all the burdens of his people.

The priest runs with a herbal pot on his head, fire coming out of it. He runs himself into a state of trance, and then, in the clear-eyed singular moment, the god of sense descends and communion takes place. I see Amamu as performing this function. He can do no other. All that goes into the making of his persona is authentic, historical, autobiographical, if you like. Scraps of a life, but they all go to make a total statement.

 JG: Alice, Adisa, and the mermaid are three different women. And yet they seem to form some kind of trinity.

 KA: They are aspects of Amamu's consciousness. Alice least, because she is almost wholly outside of him. Adisa is a warm, womanly woman, the essence of womanhood. The essence of Africa in a way: or one aspect of Africa.

 Adisa is like Africa, like the little girl who is raped and dies before she has even been initiated into the puberty rites. All that lives on is her tiny mite of woman's wisdom. And so, we see her again as the mermaid, the woman of the sea. Extended imagery, maybe, but she is real in West African folklore. In my hometown right now, there are stories of men this woman has taken into the sea with her. They fall in love and follow her. And sometimes, after seven years, they come back with a knowledge of life, a complete awareness.

 They then exist beyond the purely bodily level. And in the mermaid, I was trying to incorporate the imagery of that myth into another symbol of Africa.

 Somewhere she does exist as the final repository of wisdom. She knows the answers. She knows what I must do, what Amamu must do, what we all must do. And I must go with her in order to acquire this knowledge and survive the truncation of the soul that society imposes. Unless we follow this path to wisdom, the Dance of Death will continue, onward and onward.

 JG: Much of African imagery doesn't dwell easily within the European mind, but although your book is intensely African, there is a universality about the spirit of it.

 KA: We are all humans, and in my fury of conception I wrote myself, my spirit, into this book. And this is where we began: talking about the language we use as the synthesis of two cultural experiences. Though our oral tradition is the warp, we need the weft of our education to complete the weaving of the tapestry. But though we may speak with clearer voices to the world, our roots are deep within us, within our Africa.

 Chris Okigbo once said: “I don't write the poems; I only hear the voices. I am the medium that the spiritual forces use.”