Sanya Osha

Another point: The jamborees associated with winning international writing prizes create a false impression about the labour of the writer. Writers by some quirk of the public imagination ought to acquire the glamour usually reserved for movie stars. And so the media circus events, well-publicised book launches, TV appearances and so on are made out to be most of what a writer does. In other words, winning international writing prizes in Africa falsely glamourises the back-breaking labour writing normally entails. So it is thought that when writers are not junketing from one cultural capital to another, they are conducting reality TV-type writing workshops for aspiring writers. The part of writing that involves countless hours of solitary vigil in front of a computer screen is carefully air-brushed out of public perception. The life-numbing pain of innumerable rejection slips is never mentioned as being generally the lot of the average writer. Also, the fact that there are simply too many writers in existence as Milan Kundera once famously remarked is ignored. These are some of the false impressions winning international writing prizes have created among aspiring African writers.

Perhaps the most damaging one is the one that associates the act of writing with glamour, with star quality. But the simple truth is writing is usually extremely unglamorous. Sad but true in spite of the high public profiles of the likes of Wole Soyinka who is an exception to the rule of writing being a drab preoccupation.

 Colm Toibin, the Irish writer, maintains it is healthy for a writer to have written four books before he or she wins a prize. In this way, a writer can go through the painstaking process of developing a distinctive voice. In Africa, this is usually not the case as the push and shove to win international writing prizes take their toll. A writer wins one international prize and then decides to live like a reality TV personality offering earth-shaking advice on the basis of having published a single book. Yes, this is but one specie of the African writer but we need more for the general health of our cultural landscape. We mustn’t be constantly pampered by what those who are more or less lackeys of global publishing circuits are doing in the public eye. Every now and again we need to be shaken out of complacency and this can only be accomplished when our writers manage to challenge pre-existing jaded cultural establishments and produce work that destroy social media age illusions about what writing really is.

Pages: 1 2