Everything Is Criticism—Why I Started Afapinen

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“All great literature is either of two stories,” said Leo Tolstoy, “a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” There is no way to fit, mechanically, some of the greatest stories we’ve read into this frame. But using Structuralism, Tolstoy’s analogy becomes adaptable into almost any interpretation. Take his magnum opus short story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” for example: it is a story of a man going on a journey because the protagonist, Ivan Ilyich, psychologically leaves his familiar surroundings and embarks on a spiritual journey when he reviews the circumstances that led to his ill health and counts down to his death. Or is it Somerset’s “Sanatorium”—stranger comes to town—where the dying come together, living with their handlers, nurses, and physicians who attend to them, before death takes them one after the other? Chekhov’s “The Kiss”: a man goes on a journey. Babatunde’s “Bombay’s Republic”: journey. Arimah’s “Skinned”: stranger comes to town. Adichie’s “Birdsong”: stranger comes to town. Nat Newman’s “The Death of Margaret Roe”: a combination of both. And so on.

This exercise of trying to understand stories or what they mean to us, of what freedom or not they give us—whether they’re in service of helping us better understand our humanity, or not, the joy they give or pain they cause, the ideas they erect or dismantle, their celebration of language or their burial of it—is the duty of literary criticism. It is the character of aliveness; the perpetuity of criticism keeps literature alive. Its response to art is a response to life: whether it is the 4-year-old watching Moana, the garage boy engrossed in a K-drama epic, the mother who must lock her front shop in time to catch the latest Super Story episode or ZEE WORLD, or the sadist who only enjoys movies like Malcolm and Marie, the English literature lecturer trying to land a dissertation in some new school of thought or theory—everything is criticism.

I graduated as the science and lab prefect in my secondary school. Writing or literature was a very tangential experience to me. I was a science man in and out; I’d once solved a chemistry question that the teacher had to leave the staff room and peek from the window of the classroom to ask who the student was. Literature or writing was never in my purview; I was going to be an engineer. But after leaving school and not getting into university for up to four years (no thanks to JAMB and the schools I applied to) I found myself spending a lot of time reading—everything changed.

Back then reading meant reading the New York Times bestsellers: Clancy, Coben, Archer, Ted Dekker, Lisa Jackson, Dan Brown, Ken Follett (so good!), and Grisham. One very weird book never leaves my memory: David Lippincott’s Unholy Mourning: the chills it gave me. Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood rescued me, at last, from this misdirection. It was so challenging and paradigm-shifting from the rather formulaic escape stories I erstwhile enjoyed. It changed my understanding of reading and was my introduction to interpretive literature. This was followed by CA’s Things Fall Apart. Coincidentally—and this was before I had any interest in the humanities or studying for a BA; I’d only read a few books, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; an anthology titled African Humanities edited by J. Okoro Ijoma (UNN, 1992); and Donatus Nwoga’s West African Verse, all out of curiosity or accident—it was about the same time I’d begun to think about knowledge differently; knowledge a man acquires to arm and liberate himself; even moreso, the knowledge that fuels the zest for life.

I remember how enamoured I felt when I read Irele Abiola’s lengthy critique on TFA, “The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” particularly where he accuses Achebe of also wielding a foreigner’s gaze in exoticising the Igbos:

The omnipresence of the drum in Achebe’s image of Igbo tribal life seems at times on the verge of betraying him into the kind of unmediated stereotyping of the African by Western writers to which he himself has vehemently objected. The intrusion into his own writing of the demeaning idiom of colonial discourse is recognizable in a sentence like this: “Drums beat violently, and men leaped up and down in a frenzy.”

I would also read Achebe’s “An Image of Africa.” Then, Mpalive-Hangson Msiska’s introduction to, once again, TFA. I’d by the time become interested in reading introductions to texts, especially if they were critiques in their own way. I was intrigued by the ability to write about written literature than reading the literature itself. (You must know I was more of an outsider, thus the charm for me.) For someone to sit and excavate written text and even expand it beyond what the creator imagined it to be, was all a thrill. This is how my love for criticism began, I now believe. Years piled as I became more aware of this passion, reading continually, eventually becoming a literature man. But in doing so, one thing was clear and troubling to me, especially in my days of bingeing on New Yorker articles: I was consuming too much American literature, too much of its literary history, learning about what was going on in the American canon than in my backyard. There wasn’t a few of the magazines in the country today trying to fill that gap; not very much to look back on. (I do not know what NEXT was like; it wasn’t my generation.) The few magazines and journals preferred publishing the usual stuff: prose, poetry, CNF, and the regular issues publication. But there was no magazine to give me constant Nigerian criticism. This is where the idea was born for Afapinen.

I fondled with the thought a lot. I was still trying to get my finances together. I thought about the risks of underfunding. How much of a pipe dream it could be, giving the philistine atmosphere of the country to the department of critical thought, most especially in the lettered art. And the idea would have gone to sleep if not for the words of the author of Prince of Monkeys Nnamdi Erihim I read in The Republic First Draft interviews. Daring:

…many people think they are not ready enough to write the next great Nigerian novel or not ready enough to launch the next great magazine. Also, every year, there’s one or two new novels and magazines but then there are many people who believe they are unready to critically review these books or unready to submit to these magazines. I can agree that a lot of these writers are imperfect, but imperfection is not unreadiness. Everybody comes into literature imperfect; most writers leave imperfect. What is really crucial is that we keep creating and sharing in spite of these imperfections and trust growth to find us along the way.

So there I was turning 30 after the lockdown year. What better gift for the new decade than to dare, to follow one’s passion? Afapinen: a magazine of Nigerian criticism. Dah!

The magazine is in its third year run, launched July 2021. Joshua Tyovenda, my very good man with a brain for words, started as my first-ever Assistant Editor for a few months, but he is now a banker. It has sometimes been kamikaze at the shop, but still with an eye on the vision, to keep it running. I panicked last year when the website switched to wordpress dot com for failure to renew a premium WordPress subscription, which made us suspend publishing for a while. Not entirely our fault: the naira debit card had limited all foreign currency payments to $20. I was only able to renew premium when I finally got a USD debit card.

The idea of great writing is elusive. Political even. I have to caution myself that it isn’t the ultimate thing, but language. The message has to also be the foremost of all requirements in good writing. How do you pursue or achieve this editing a magazine, especially one of criticism? Because to me, criticism, or the book review, is the form of writing that must shine and attain the most clarity, as it seeks to edify. This is an underlying principle Afapinen must answer, I said, aside curating a college of criticism to be called “Nigerian criticism.” Or maybe New Nigerian Criticism. The literary scene is now picking up for good and Afapinen is glad to be a documentarian, picking up the challenge of correcting the atrophy of mainstream literary criticism.

I challenge myself that more needs to be done; I cannot stop now. Afapinen has become a home for writers and readers. The stats for Google searches show regular interest. I am happy that others after me have a platform to read good critical writing by Nigerian authors writing well, and not resort solely to foreign magazines. I have received good feedback about Afapinen, and I have also been challenged to make it more. As the pilot I know the turbulence, I know what needs to be done, and it all boils down to funding, the setback bedeviling African litmags, causing some to go defunct. But that’s not the story here. For now, I have decided, Afapinen shall operate more as a projects-based magazine for sustenance—and there’s a lot lined up for the remainder of the year—than in being a regular publication. (Please, sign up here to receive updates on these projects and more.) Nevertheless, the magazine will still publish stories from time to time. One aspect of writing we are interested in is reviewing of indie films by Nigerian directors, which are not so documented as mainstream and box office movies.

Thank you for reading us all this time. We are not putting up a paywall soon but we may be heading in the direction of that Rubicon.

How do I end this? Let’s recall Tolstoy once more: “All great literature is either of two stories, a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”♦

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Also, you can reach the editor for partnerships or advertisement, or in what special capacity you wish to support the work we do. Thank you. 

Carl Terver is the founding editor of Afapinen.