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KWENU! Our culture, our future |
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Literature and the Advancement of World Peace Paper presented at the 2007 Annual International Convention the Association of Nigerian Authors.
Chidozie Chukwubuike
Calvary International Secondary School, Orji - Uratta, Owerri Imo State
Sunday 20 April 2008
ABSTRACT: Over the years, the concept of world peace has remained speculative. This paper simply tries to draw the attention of the public to the role of literature in identifying the indices for measuring world peace. I have isolated corruption and lack of consideration for other peoples' world views as the causes of bad governance, religious and cultural intolerance, crime, colonialism, terrorism, discrimination and war. These in turn are factors that lead to anarchy and chaos in the world. And I have used few literary texts to show how certain literatures can propagate anarchy while others advance peace. Finally, I have attempted to suggest the type of literatures the world needs if the desire for the advancement of world peace is sincere.
INTRODUCTION: The great Jamaican reggae legend, the late Robert Nester Marley (Bob Marley) once told the world through the lyrics of his music that there can be no peace until the day the philosophy that holds one race superior and another inferior is permanently discredited and destroyed. However, this paper can not concern itself with the questions of either correctness or incorrectness of the different ideologies being advocated in different parts of the world. No. It is not in my place to judge. May be, I am not spiritually equipped to go into that type of debate. Let us leave that to the World Teachers (God men) that traversed this world and the disciples they left behind. Peace is like truth. There is a saying among ndi Igbo that goes thus: “The man lays claim to truth, the woman lays claim to truth, everybody claims to have truth but it is only truth that knows its custodian”. Relatively, every ideology can afford to claim to hold the key to world peace but peace is like good economy; no sane person preaches a sermon to convince anybody that the economy has improved. The price of salt and palm oil in the market and the income rate of the buyer tell the story. These are the traditional indices, and if you ask me, the most effective for measuring economic growth, every other thing is mere academic exercise. So also does the war in Iraq, the guerilla fighting in Dafur, the continued attacks in the middle East, the refuge situation in Africa, etc stand out as festering sores challenging worlds ideologies' claims to peace. Even a child knows when an environment is peaceful because peace derives from a harmonious co-existence of people. Can two people who feel offended by each other's life style co-exist harmoniously? You can see that talking about peace always boils down to how people perceive and tolerate others' life style, ideology, philosophy, cosmology, etc. So when first I saw this topic Literature and the Advancement of World Peace, I could not help but wonder like Chinua Achebe, “What has literature got to do with it?” We shall return to this question later, for now let us consider another curious question.
WHAT LITERATURE? The decision to talk about literature in a gathering of writers was not an easy one. I am not unaware that my subject matter is the major pre-occupation of my, would-be, audience. I must confess that I suffered a momentary bout of apprehension. No! Not an Obowu man! I had to shake it off because our people do say that 'the fear of death does not prevent one from going to war'. I am not going to approach this topic like the conventional critic theorizing on literature and peace. Rather, I am like an unobtrusive house cleaner opening windows to let in more light and fresh air without interfering with the arrangement of the furniture. By asking what type of literature, it inferentially follows that there is not just one perception of literature. The word literature etymologically embraces every written material ranging from text books to pornographic writing. However, I am concerned with the type of literature that qualifies a person to become a member of the Association of Nigerian Authors. That is to say that I am talking about the literature of prose, play, poetry and their sub-genres. This is literature as an art form, as opposed to literature as cold facts, abstract philosophy and pure reason. And according to Nnolim (2006:5) we need this art form (literature) “to invent another world expressive of our emotions and feelings to complete our world and develop fulfilled, satisfying, and balanced personalities”. Literature as art uses cold facts, abstract philosophy and pure reason as raw materials to create a pleasurable new world; a world which according to Emeka Nwabueze (2003:5) “is a creation which represents neither ideal life, nor real life, but the illusion of life”. I am not by any means saying that the literatures of cold facts, abstract philosophy, and pure reason do not play a role in the advancement or otherwise of world peace. On the contrary, history books, religious documents, newspaper articles, etc had at one time or another in world history either contributed to the advancement of peace, or become a tool for anarchy. This is because as cold facts their impact is instantaneous but ephemeral. They lack the power to appeal to the people's sense of aesthetics. A newspaper article shall simply exhort people to either revolt or embrace dialogue. They present the society with harsh realities, even exaggerated versions at times, as in the case of civil war propaganda. The difference is that while literature as art is also pursuing an ideology, it manages to make its propaganda content very subtle and emphasize the aesthetic content. That is what some scholars call imaginative literature. I am rather saying that the literature being discussed today is that which is so “embellished with artistic ornaments” (to borrow Aristotle's expression) that it does not hurt. And the major difference between it and reality is that while reality lives an experience, the literary arts recreate an experience with the intention to instruct, entertain, and make beautiful. This type of literature is a specialized area where only those with the approved tools operate. Writers of this brand of literature produce works that are eternal, surviving when every other thing has disappeared. Such writers alone can speak for the people because they are the only ones with the linguistic resources, literary devices and techniques to evoke any type of emotion they so desire from their readers.
According to George Thomson (1946:65), “The poet speaks not for himself only but for his fellow men. His cry is their cry, which only he can utter. That is what gives it its depth”. The poet as used by George Thomson is representative of writers of our type of literature, imaginative literature. It is only such a writer that has the capacity to cry on behalf of the people if that cry must assume immortality (have depth). Chinua Achebe elaborated on writers of imaginative literature and their art when he said; “The matter is really quite simple. Literature, whether handed down by word of mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality; enabling us to encounter in the safe, manageable dimensions of make-believe the very same threats to integrity that may assail the psyche in real life, and at the same time providing through the self-discovery which it imparts a veritable weapon for coping with these threats whether they are found within problematic and incoherent selves or in the world around us” (1989:np). In other words, it is the imaginative writer who has the license to speak the unspeakable because he is the one endowed with the art, or what I may, in a lighter mood, describe as the right shape of lips to say it. The imaginative writer must be one who has an exceptional command of trope to weave around a story and, according to Nnolim (2006: 4) “And to invest the story with meaning, there must be some meaning about life, something to chew over, some theme, some philosophy of life, and some metaphor of life that tugs at the edges of a symbol”. That is the literature!
THE NATURE OF OUR WORLD: I think we need to reflect a little on the nature of our world to be able to appreciate better what literature can do in advancing peace in the world. Generations upon generations of humanity have speculated on concepts such as world government, world currency, globalization, world peace, etc. Some of these expressions are, to say the least, utopian. The idea of world peace seems to be coming loudest from the religious quarters and ironically, the greatest threat to the attainment of peace is ideological intolerance among religious sects; the Islamic fundamentalists versus Christian Zealots, the Christian proselytizers versus adherents of native religions, etc. The concept of world peace came into vogue after the First World War with the formation of the League of Nations, which after the Second World War metamorphosed into the United Nations Organization. There had been visible efforts made over time at securing world peace. At the end of the First World War, the victors in order to forestall any further occurrence broke up the economic unit which had been the Austrian Empire. There was also the Versailles Peace Treaty which led to the formation of the league of Nations with headquarter at Geneva made up of nations which promised to renounce war as an instrument of policy and to settle their disputes by conference table methods. (George West, 1979:191) The bewildering aspect of all this is that despite the whole efforts at peace which culminated in the formation of the league of Nations, less than three decades after the end of the first world war, the world experienced a more devastating world war (the 2nd world war).
The end of the Second World War again witnessed a fresh effort at peace with the formation of the United Nations Organization (UNO) to replace the League of Nations. These efforts notwithstanding, many other wars had taken place all over the world since after the Second World War; the Vietnam War, the Rwandan War, the Nigerian Civil War, the Gulf War, the recent war in Iraq, etc. The worrisome question remains; why does peace seem so unattainable? The point I want to make here is that if there were no world wars the question of world peace would not have arisen. And world wars do not just happen! The first world war, for an instance, began as a remote quarrel between Austria and Serbia over the assassination on June 28, 1914 of Archduke Ferdinand (the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne), where Austria accused Serbia of murder and declared war. That problem that should have, more or less, been an inter tribal war assumed an unprecedented dimension as the two sides gained external support and began to form alliances; with Germany, the Austrian Empire, Bulgaria, and Turkey on the one side and the British Empire, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, and the United States of America on the other side. Africans also fought in that war as colonial subjects. The Second World War, when it happened, also followed the same pattern. It is obvious that the world did not just accidentally encounter any rootless warfare known as world war. The development of the wars followed a generic pattern. They began as every other misunderstanding between two individuals or communities. Mind you, on two occasions the world had carelessly underestimated the capacity of such isolated conflicts and paid dearly with wars of global proportion. It can always happen again. The antithesis of peace is chaos and war is an extreme form of chaos. Global peace can only be advanced following the same pattern as the world wars. In other words, any remote attempt at cultivating peace among individuals and communities will invariably result in the advancement of world peace.
Investigation has shown that certain social factors are particularly inimical to the advancement of peace. I have broadly categorized corruption and lack of consideration for other people's world views as the main impediments to the advancement of world peace. Literature has often been described as the mirror of society. And the global society which literature is supposed to mirror is, to say the least, terribly treacherous. Sometimes, I toy with the idea of using the word hypocrisy to replace world. Our world is very hypocritical. Literatures across centuries have lived up to that primary function of mirroring society. That is why most literatures are jaded with themes of corruption, imperialism, bad government, crime, terrorism, religious bigotry, discrimination, cultural intolerance, war, etc. One can easily identify whether a people are at peace or not by looking at thematic preoccupation of the literatures that originate from such a people. In the abstract I submitted for this paper, I ended with this hint of skepticism “…if the desire for the advancement of world peace is sincere”. I had to include that conditional clause because in the course of the research for this paper, I came across alarming documentary evidences that suggest that most of the world's uprisings (the two world wars inclusive) might have been orchestrated by the same people masquerading as champions of world peace. In one of the books I read …and the truth shall set you free, David Icke, an American writer, reveals how a chain of individuals he referred to as the global elite, through some multi-national corporations, manipulate people and events of the world (Bridge of love, 1995). This shows that even at the peak of pretension to equality, our world is still confronted by that cancerous human complex most beautifully captured in George Orwell's Animal Farm thus; “…All animals are equal but some are more equal than the others.”
The nature of our world is a complex one and imaginative literature has assumed an important position in the interpretation of this complex world. Different societies have their peculiar problems, which form the thematic focus of world's literatures. While Chinua Achebe was expressing worry over the consequence of military dictatorship through his novel ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNA, Athol Fugard was somewhere talking about the fears, discrimination and oppression being suffered by his own people, the black South Africans, under the oppressive apartheid government. In Fugard's dramatic monologue, SIZWE BANSI IS DEAD, we see a pathetic character, Styles, whose struggles to change his situation almost assumed a personality of its own. And the nature of our world is that which is mirrored in all these literatures of the different societies of the world; societies that have no respect for other people's world views, societies immersed in corruption and other related vices. The indices, therefore, by which the advancement or otherwise of world peace can be measured is the frequency with which imaginative literatures either dwell on those social conditions that favour the advancement of peace or those that promote chaos.
Our society needs imaginative literatures because; according to A. E. Afigbo (2001:27) we need “a re-conquest of the right to think …the right to think our own thoughts”. As imaginative literatures encourage people to think their own thoughts, the world shall continue to inch towards emancipation from mental slavery (to borrow from Bob Marley once again), which is a conditio sine qua non for the advancement of world peace.
THE ROLE OF LITERATURE: We have already established the type of literature we are here concerned with. It is the imaginative literature. It is that literature that thrives on subtlety; a literature that must coat its propaganda with a good deal of artistic and aesthetic decoration. Our interest at this stage, therefore, is to identify the role of this type of literature in the task of advancing world peace. I have earlier shown that every world conflict is only but an explosion of ethnic conflicts; hence, if ethnic conflicts are properly addressed and managed, the issue of world peace should not even arise in the first place. Our imaginative literatures should therefore take up the noble responsibility of attacking, without appearing confrontational, those obnoxious ideologies that plague isolated communities all over the world. Writers have the onerous task of providing 21st Century readers (especially children) with literatures that promote equality of humanity. Writers of imaginative literatures must clothe the propaganda content of their works with images, symbols, and all other literary nuances that make works to endure and assume global relevance. It is that global relevance which the works of William Shakespeare have attained that makes us rely till today on literatures he wrote in a remote English community in the 16th century to address 21st century situations. I mean that one can today in Nigeria warn an inordinately materialistic person of the consequence of greed by making reference to the character of Shylock, a Shakespearean character in The Merchant of Venice that has become a universal metaphor for materialism. Again, Things Fall Apart, written by Chinua Achebe seemingly to address the colonial injustice done locally to the Igbo of Southern Nigeria, according to M.J.C Echeruo, “is not that local an event; that implicated in that example is the tension between globalizing systems (including religious imperialism) and their need to bring about world order on their own terms” (2003:16).
What I am saying is that imaginative literatures should commit themselves to the advancement of peace first in the communities of their origin and that is the basis for their global relevance in the advancement of world peace. On a wider scale, imaginative literature needs to address the issue of hypocrisy. The Roman playwright, Seneca is credited to have written, that “He who gains most advantage from a crime is the one likely to have committed it”. May be, imaginative writers (especially satirists) should begin to look out for those who benefit most whenever a local misunderstanding is being blown out of proportion. In the project of advancing world peace, imaginative literatures have to expose the hypocrisy bedeviling humanity, but in doing so, writers must borrow wisdom from the Igbo proverb; “Ebe a na-agwo ogwu anya, anaghi etinye ya ose” (literally translated to mean; where medicine for eye ailments is prepared nobody brings pepper there). This brings my attention to an issue I had always wanted to talk about. Writers of imaginative literature should be sensitive to the feelings and world views of readers of their literatures. No matter how obnoxious you might think the ideology of another is, it is no justification for insult. Is it not a popular cliché that “two wrongs do not make a right?” When on February 14, 1989 Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by the former Iranian spiritual leader, Ayotollah Ruhollah Komeini for publishing the novel SATANIC VERSES, Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the 1988 Nobel prize in literature criticized Khomeini for what he described as “intellectual terrorism”, but sooner changed his view and said that Rushdie did not have the right to insult anything, especially a prophet or anything considered holy. The publication of SATANIC VERSES provoked violent protests in India, Pakistan, and Egypt and caused several deaths. (INTERNET-http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rushdie.htm)
Permit me to cite one more example of such literatures that offend the sensibility of their readers and I shall be done with that. Recently, Darl Brown, an American novelist published a novel with the title, DA VINCI CODE. That novel is classified heretical among Christians. In the novel, the identity of Jesus is unconventionally treated and it provoked angry protests from the Christian world. It is important that writers of imaginative literature identify the dividing line between constructive presentation of events and unwarranted insult. Even Salman Rushdie, as experienced as he might seem in the filed of literature, with several laurels to his credit, confessed his ignorance of that dividing line when he wrote in one of his later novels that;
“Insults are mysteries. What seems to the bystander to be the crudest, most destructive sledgehammer of an assault, whore! Slut! Tart! Can leave its target undamaged, while an apparently lesser gibe, thank god you're nothing to me, you're less than the dirt on the soles of my shoes, can strike directly at the heart” (The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999).It is therefore important that when literature concerns itself with the job of destroying philosophies that are deemed barbaric, it should exercise care to neither insult the proponents of such philosophies nor sound offensive in any way. Imaginative literature does not hurt. I can agree with Ngugi Wa Thiong'o on the issue that a writer must take a side in politics (1982: iiv) only to the point where taking side does not imply being judgmental. As an interested party, the writer can not also be the judge. Let the characters be allowed to present to the reader the two sides of the conflict so that the reader can make value judgment without undue authorial interference. For imaginative writers to achieve this, they must be very conversant with their theme, and creative in handling language. According to Chinua Achebe (Hopes and Impediments pg 34) “when it (language) is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and this leads to violence “.On the question of theme, writers of imaginative literature can identify the high points in the efforts made towards the advancement of world peace and highlight them in their works, thereby, persuading global readership to begin to appreciate the need for peace in the world. Furthermore, the world needs the interplay of world views to advance world peace. That is to say that, African writers must package African cosmology in their literatures; European writers should also bring forth theirs, likewise, writers from America and every other continent. The convergence of all these isolated ideologies on the world literary scene can help make people begin to appreciate one another and their various cultures better. By way of summary, I have itemized the role of literature in the advancement of world peace, thus;
-To expose all the minor conflicts in isolated communities of the world in order to nip them in the bud and save the world from the possibility of such conflicts exacerbating, -To wage propaganda against obnoxious ideologies without doing violence to the psyche of the proponents of such ideologies, -To propagate civilized ideologies such as the equality of the human race, thus promoting peace in the world, -To present the two sides of every conflict through the normal interplay of characters with the ultimate aim of letting the reader identify with the forces that advance peace and expose the forces inimical to peace, -To expose those negative factors such as corruption, crime, terrorism, etc. that inexorably lead to anarchy and pre-warn the society of the consequence of permitting such vices, -To create a new pleasurable world that presents the reader with an alternative to a violent society.
CONCLUSION: In concluding this presentation, I have decided to suggest the type of literatures the world needs if the desire for the advancement of world peace is sincere. But before I do that, I must not fail to say few things that border on personal reflections. The first is that I strongly believe that Nigeria has in recent times been twice saved from experiencing another civil war because of imaginative literatures like Chinua Achebe's A MAN OF THE PEOPLE, and others.
The first time was in 2003 after the general election that caused civilized people of the world to doubt the sanity of Nigerians. The situation in 2003, as I was meant to understand, was a replay of what happened in 1966 but there was no military coup d'etat because the Army boys must have learnt, albeit the hard way, not to ignore the warning of literary artists. In the novel published a few days before the first ever military coup d'etat in Nigeria, Chinua Achebe predicted the unfortunate debacle Nigeria experienced afterwards, thus “…and wait for the blow up. It's bound to come. You simply can not have this stagnation and corruption going on indefinitely'' (page 90). Towards the end of the novel the prediction is made clearer; “the rampaging bands of election thugs had caused so much unrest and dislocation that our young Army officers seized the opportunity to take over”. And down the same page we see this tart parenthesized rhetorical question; “a coup might be followed by a counter coup and then where would we be? “(Page 165)
In a recent lecture delivered by Chidi Osuagwu on the occasion of the year 2006 ANA Imo Annual Convention, he declared, “Instead the thinker will die in war, let the warrior die; if the warrior dies, the thinker will think out what to do!” The lecturer went further to identify writers as thinkers when he said, “thinkers such as writers should be cultivated, like a precious crop, by modern Africa for the betterment of all, as is the very profitable practice in other lands'' (page 9). Earlier, Chidi Osuagwu had warned; “And modern Africa should stop ignoring her thinkers…” (Page 2) Chinua Achebe and other imaginative writers have distinguished themselves as thinkers. He was ignored in 1966 and all his predictions came to pass and led to the final 'blow up'', the civil war. But Achebe's warning lingers on till today, and in 2003, even though the politicians repeated the same mistakes of 1966, Army officers, I think, might have considered the consequence of another 'blow up'' and decided to remain in the barracks. It was the same in 2007 when another general election brought Nigeria to the brink of collapse but we escaped. Let me quickly point out, however, that Nigeria is currently suffering for neglecting the prediction of yet, another writer. The play, Hang men also die written by Esiaba Irobi almost two decades ago, predicted with frightening vividness the crisis that today rocks the Niger-Delta region of Nigeria. Sadly enough, because nobody listened to him then, the situation has so escalated that the world is now on red alert.
I know that substantial volumes of literatures have emerged from the Niger-Delta and focus on the different aspects of the issue. We know that Greats like Pa Gabriel Okara and J.P. Clark have written. We also know that younger writer's liker Bina Nengi Ilagha and others have also written. What I am saying is that, no volume of literature is enough. The second situation I have had to reflect on is world peace and the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). I have argued in this paper that world peace is only an aggregate of peace in isolated communities, ethnicities, states, organizations, etc all over the world . In recent years, ANA has experienced so many conflicts from the center down to the different state branches. If it is not ANA Lagos, it is ANA Imo, etc. then I ask how can we be talking about literature and the advancement of world peace if as a microcosmic body we can hardly be in peace? And we are producers of literature! Could this be a situation of trying to give what one does not have? (Food for thought!)
Finally, for the sake of advancing peace, I suggest the world needs literatures that conform to the advice of one modern Nigerian proverb, which says, “Shut up is not a curse; it all depends on the manner by which it is said.” The world therefore needs imaginative literatures that have discovered the most inoffensive way to say “Shut up!”
Thank you.
################################### REFERENCE
Achebe, Chinua. ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNA
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