Two tenacious writers, Ernest Ogunyemi and Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera, had a small debate on 𝕏, in March last year, on whether Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was a great novelist or not. It was an offshoot of a main argument they’d been on about. That digital footprint is sadly now incomplete or lost because Ernest deleted the account he used during their exchange. And how convenient that I had written a 400-word response which I lost too, as I clicked to share the final tweet in the thread, only for the page to display a “something-went-wrong” error text. So, was CNA a great novelist or not? Ernest said no, as may be expected; Chukwudera, affirmative. Their discussion brought up many references and points. And my observation—which I poured into the response I wrote but lost—was that, once again, the contemporaries or dead writers used to judge what was great writing or novels were the usual canonised writers of the west.
I had a simple argument: there is a politics of aesthetic and literary taste many of us are unconsciously loyal to, from the influence of largely consuming Euro-American literature, which we love and praise a little too much. And my thinking was that, how is the latter behaviour not a continuum of the culture of high praise bestowed on their canon by their critics; criticisms we equally read, and love, because, no doubt, they’re written in the best language, which we love too? We have joined in that celebration for a long time that, invariably, their literary culture has also become ours. And don’t get me wrong here: I understand universalism in art, and that, by all means, we all are entitled to being citizens of the world (hello, Bach!); so I’m not against the agency or ability of anyone to appreciate whatever art or literature they choose to. But in discourses of “centre versus margin,” when talking the west and Africa, one does not simply brush off the empire’s already favoured position.
Because the Euro-American literary culture has become ours, and perhaps even more favoured—even if unconsciously—we devote time to it in ways that distract us from ours, which then assumes a secondary place, existing at the margins of what we consider literary-worthy. The fact that to mention a great writer, the victim thinks first of VS Naipaul or Garcia Marquez (these names came up in the duo’s sparring), even when he knows a good number of indigenous greats, is a symptom of this problem. The programming is that great writing does not belong to us yet, even when we do it. We simply can’t see it, or see us do it. Not just in others or our peers, but even in ourselves: the idea doesn’t exist in our palates. Here, writers are not great, nor are very good young writers bestowed with the adjective “prodigious.” You mostly hear the oft-abused, clichéd “masterpiece” attached to our writing. Or you hear: he’s a good writer, a wonderful writer, he writes well, or his essays are critical; the adjective “great” somehow feared or tacitly forbidden. But it does not escape me how easily, during conversations, we call writers from other places great, as long as they’re not Nigerian writers.
Maybe we don’t celebrate our literature as much or have its greatness repeated into our ears as the west has succeeded in doing so for theirs. Because in truth—all arguments allowed—our acceptance of writing that is great (read: fiction) is simply a result of canon indoctrination. What, to probe our literary backgrounds, is the typical rite of passage for many of us who came into writing in the last five decades? From novels, essays, philosophical thought, theory, and so on? I mention no names, but whether you have read them or not, you always encounter them namedropped, critically acclaimed, adored, everyone eager to affiliate with them. It is how you join the cult; how what you know about writing and which you tend to gravitate to belong to this school, yes, you know it. And I’m not against this; perhaps only to the extent in which it, especially, shapes the ideas of taste this essay discusses. There is no doubt the wealth acquired in learning from this school of dead, white male writers; it is such that Paul Lynch, Booker winner and author of Prophet Song, confessed: “great writing still sits there, and it calls you back.” It definitely also influences taste.
There’s nothing bad in this, or to be ashamed of. Good thinking and epistemology are great things in life. And any culture that gives us these is our friend. Because of such enrichment, we are able to guard ourselves from what is retrogressive. But even artistic expression, a result of culture (and our focus here) forever remains a universal language that should enrich, rather than be subsuming, or reductive—which brings me to the nucleus of this essay: just how much of our celebration of what we think of as great writing, which I have critiqued above, leads to an under-appreciation of a style that may not resemble the former?
For lack of a suitable word, let’s use “poetics.” This means the metrics that inform the methods of a particular writing or writing style, and its theory thereof. And by theory, I mean the framework or lens through which the writing may be interpreted.
From different cultures and traditions of the world, thus are different poetics of art, of literature, and of writing, that evolve in their peculiar ways, according to the traditions they belong to. I have always imagined—andthis is merely a hypothesis I’m thinking with, nevertheless with ample empiricism—that this is how our own prose writing style evolved. And I shall use the basics of traditional poetry and drama as frameworks to contextualise my argument for what I see as a “homegrown poetics,” which, by and large, accounts for what might be termed “aesthetics” or an approach of creative literary production. I use this to demonstrate how the character of the oral modes of our literary production transitioned to written text and the style of our prose. A Tiv playwright today writes in the borrowed Greco-Roman-English tradition; he considers elements as acts and scenes, the style of dialogue suitable to the form, and other technical qualities as structure, denouement, and rising action. But he has not written an original Tiv play, which has its own poetics rooted in the ritual of music and dance—in the case of kwagh hir theatre, puppetry—or its poetry, which is a more kinetic form, as sung or oral; thus, freeing itself from the technical rigours of “writing”; such technical rigours, which stretched, have the affordance of even more technical possibilities. (I shall return to this.)
This aspect of the art form freeing itself from the technical rigours of writing is what happens in our storytelling tradition of the “griot and audience,” where telling a story takes precedence over technical elements of text, or maybe even style, this condition being a poetics in itself. This griot-esque tradition has passed down and is, more or less, the template many of our writers adopt. In this tradition, stories move from point A to B, with barely any detours or ornamentation. Maybe there’s a sprinkle of figurative technique once or twice, or a twist in the narration, but always staying the course: to tell a story, so much so that it makes no room for experimentation or deviation (divergence) unsuitable to oral storytelling.
This style of writing is accused of being uniform or having less joy (to sound colloquial), or of being without nuance; if not tired, or average. It is such sentiments or thinking about our writing that results in such debates—one of them by Sule E. Egya in this essay—as Chinua Achebe’s storytelling prose (sorry to bring up this old name again) being simple or less nuanced, the whole griot-esque school as basic: writing without ornamentation, technical heft, or sophistication. It is based on this thinking that for a more textual-leaning reader, Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah has been a preference of the author’s more accomplished novel compared to Things Fall Apart. Remarkably, is Chinua Achebe’s obvious detour from a griot-esque style to something technical or an attempt at sophistication.
As stated earlier, this latter style is what comes with or is presumed to have technical rigour, with the affordance or room for experimentation and divergence. Or what my friend Afrika—to slight we textual sophistication snobs—describes as “the flamboyance of English which follows a tired routine of 20th century American writers.” The writer engaged in this expression focuses not only on the meat of story, but, by being able to manipulate his way through words and the field of the page, ploughs a terrain of individual talent. And what’s a greater indulgence than a writer who makes his writing all about individual talent?
Permit me to quote a series of tweets by the writer Chimezie Chika, from 12 January 2025, which was the stimulus for this essay and which led me to organise the first Afapinen Panoptic Sessions, whose theme was “the politics of literary and aesthetic taste”:
1. Why have we not produced the kind of prose stylists that define generations? Why have we not produced a Borges, a Calvino, a Joyce, a Bolano, a Wallace? Because our writers are not bold. Simple. Also, we need widely read editors that understand the idiosyncrasies of prose. (Emphasis mine.)
2. There is a danger to downgrading everything into clipped uniformity. Sometimes, you read some magazines and the writing in there all sounds like one person wrote it. In the hands of some editors, a [Binyavanga] Wainaina’s distinct language would never have seen the light of day. (Emphasis mine again.)
3. There’s a problem with comprehension here, but let me be more specific. My reference is not to “style” in the general sense. I’m referring to maximalist prose. To also clarify: this is not exactly my style, but I will love to see it take up a niche in our literature. [Refer to the tweet to see responses that demanded this reply from Chika. “Maximalist prose,” he says here, agrees to the idea of the technical rigour that allows for manipulation, rather than focusing on just telling a story in the griot-esque style.]
4. Let us push this literature into the regions of the epic. Let us venture, with clarity and self-assuredness, beyond the borders of language and fashion a new way of seeing and thinking out of it.
The last tweet, of course, recalls the discourse of the basic, simple writing tradition our storytelling prose is guilty of. Note, however, that Chika’s cry for prose technicians are writers like Borges, Calvino, and Joyce. It is pointless to ask why he didn’t mention an African writer. There’s Dambudzo Marechera, for example. And although he mentions Binyavanga Wainaina later, they may not be the “generation-defining” writers his first tweet proclaims. This is not even my problem. As I have already critiqued, there is a politics of literary-aesthetic taste many of us are unconsciously loyal to and celebrate, and which is a product of a greater consumption of Euro-American literature, or literature beyond our borders. Great literature is out there. And this, invariably, informs how we judge what is better writing.
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Usually, the debate of Cyprian Ekwensi’s writing prowess—pitted against the twain, Achebe and Soyinka—often comes up once in a while, following the logic of prose strength or stylishness I have pursued in this essay. In September 2023, we had it again on 𝕏. And in the next month, Chika had written an essay with his thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of Ekwensi’s prose. But this is of little importance here. If you read his essay, and now read mine, you can see that Chika’s judgement is heavy on the politics of literary-aesthetic taste I suggest.
What came out of that Ekwensi debate that year, which I brought up in the January 2025 Afapinen Panoptic Sessions, was Oris Aigbokhaevbolo’s idea of “the tech of text,” simple words which even him, I believe, wouldn’t have thought would become such an apposite framework (or theory) I adopted for this discourse. “Ekwensi: Great storyteller; mediocre writer. Achebe: Great storyteller, great writer. Soyinka: Good storyteller, Almighty writer,” he tweeted. “Summary: In oral tradition’s good old days, Ekwensi would be king. His work is vivid and rolls off the tongue. In a modern world led by the tech of text, he had absolutely no chance against Achebe & Soyinka, peers who also had stories but knew how to make better sentences.”
Aigbokhaevbolo’s submission is a well-debated topic in the arts, of the possibilities of both the oral and written form—which now finally helps in closing my argument. I understand that I am judging his words not as a final critical take, even as it appears so, bearing in mind the spontaneity verdicts of such kind are made on social media. So here goes: Aigbokhaevbolo does not deny the place of orality in his theory, and by extension the griot-esque: in fact, his words say “Ekwensi would be king” (focus: “king”), and that Ekwensi’s prose is indeed “vivid and rolls off the tongue.” So, there is merit. I would like to include that it is this quality that makes the griot animate the story he is telling, lest it comes off flat. Thus, in that same western tradition in which “show don’t tell” is gospel, one wonders how putting this form on page disqualifies it or fails to induct it as an acceptable style, or as living up to the standard of the tech of text. Or does it simply not “make better sentences”? That’s up for debate.
I shall make a caveat here as I imagine my submissions in this brief essay liable to oversimplistic interpretations. What I term griot-esque is a spectrum in itself and not a direct antithesis of the so-called tech of text, and vice versa. Better sentences seem to be the charge here, which I agree more to as a basis for judging excellent prose or the kind of fiction we expect to read. And this is a question of the calibre of a writer, irrespective of whatever mangled tradition he adopts, and also a question of individual talent. Yet, this has its own problems too, for what is the primary thing we look for in fiction? Is it story, style, or the tech of text?
We all have our imaginations of what we expect, what moves us; and I do not think this is different for the writer too, for which I believe that the “artistic unconscious” at work is superior, in that Jungian idea, which I prefer to call The Cave; and that it is what implicitly dictates the mythopoeic, the environment, magic, dream logic, truth, believability, and such other elements as language, tone, pacing, and even the so-called tech of text, all which we always know when we experience them in harmony. And if I am to choose between a story with technical flexes and one where the artistic unconscious shines, I will always be found where the cave is.♦
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Carl Terver was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2024, and in 2023, contributed to the Olongo Africa Multilingual Anthology as a translator. Terver is an editor and critic and has been published in Goethe Institut Nigeria, The Stockholm Review, The Republic, Olongo Africa, and Iskanchi. He is the author of the photobook Glory to the Sky.