THROWBACK:Calls for Chinua Achebe Nobel prize 'obscene', says Wole Soyinka

Soyinka, a Nobel laureate himself, also dismisses claims that Achebe was 'father of African literature'

Wole Soyinka (left) and Chinua Achebe: 'It has gone beyond "sickening".' Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Craig Ruttle/AP

Calls for the late Chinua Achebe to be awarded a posthumous Nobel prize for literature have "gone beyond 'sickening'" and become "obscene and irreverent", Achebe's fellow Nigerian author – and 1986 Nobel laureate – Wole Soyinka has said.
In a wide-ranging and passionate interview with SaharaReporters, ahead of Achebe's funeral this week, Soyinka urged Achebe's "cohorts" to cease in their attempts "to confine Chinua's achievement space into a bunker over which hangs an unlit lamp labelled 'Nobel'". As a winner of the prize, Soyinka can nominate future laureates to the Swedish Academy, and said he had been receiving a series of letters begging him to put Achebe forward.

"Let us quit this indecent exercise of fatuous plaints, including raising hopes, even now, with talk of 'posthumous' conferment, when you know damned well that the Nobel committee does not indulge in such tradition. It has gone beyond 'sickening'. It is obscene and irreverent. It desecrates memory," Soyinka told Sahara Reporters. "This conduct is gross disservice to Chinua Achebe and disrespectful of the life-engrossing occupation known as literature. How did creative valuation descend to such banality? Do these people know what they're doing – they are inscribing Chinua's epitaph in the negative mode of thwarted expectations. I find that disgusting."
Soyinka, whose own Nobel citation praises him as an author "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence", asked if the award was really "what the literary enterprise is about? Was it the Nobel that spurred a young writer, stung by Eurocentric portrayal of African reality, to put pen to paper and produce Things Fall Apart?"
He added: "Chinua is entitled to better than being escorted to his grave with that monotonous, hypocritical aria of deprivation's lament, orchestrated by those who, as we say in my part of the world, 'dye their mourning weeds a deeper indigo than those of the bereaved'. He deserves his peace. Me too! And right now, not posthumously."
Soyinka also rejected Achebe's often-repeated description as the father of African literature – a label Achebe himself had vehemently resisted. Soyinka said that "those who seriously believe or promote this must be asked: have you the sheerest acquaintance with the literatures of other African nations, in both indigenous and adopted colonial languages? What must the francophone, lusophone, Zulu, Xhosa, Ewe etc etc literary scholars and consumers think of those who persist in such a historic absurdity? It's as ridiculous as calling WS [Wole Soyinka] father of contemporary African drama! Or Mazisi Kunene father of African epic poetry. Or Kofi Awoonor father of African poetry. Education is lacking in most of those who pontificate."
Soyinka said he regretted that he had never had the chance to challenge Achebe over his final book, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, which had been criticised in some quarters as "unduly divisive". "It is … a book I wish he had never written – that is, not in the way it was. There are statements in that work that I wish he had never made," he said.
His parting tribute to the Things Fall Apart author, said Soyinka, would be the poem he wrote to Achebe when he turned 70. "I plan for it to be published on the day of his funeral – my way of taunting death, by pursuing that cultural, creative, even political communion that unites all writers with a decided vision of the possible – and even beyond the grave," he told Sahara Reporters.

THEGUARDIAN.