True. Is there an obligation for the writer to be an activist, especially when you consider the criticisms that have trailed Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize win?
It’s definitely not an obligation. There is a pressure, there is always that idea that the writer is what the French call Ecrivain Phares. Ecrivain is writer and phares is headlight. So if you put the two together you have the writer as headlight,showing the way, the path. So there is the expectation. But there are writers who resist that. There are so many writers who are for what we call arts for arts sake. But ultimately, I’ve found out that one way or the other, development sucks them in. Look at Christopher Okigbo for instance. He spent his life basically disavowing the necessity for the writer to be anything other than a writer, pure, creative writer. In fact, he carried his to a puritanical level when he was asked why his poetry wasn’t accessible he said, I write only for fellow poets. He wanted a life devoted purely to the arts but he ended up leading a very political life and he went to the trenches and died in the trenches. It is not compulsory for the writer to be an activist but down the road somewhere, because arts is essentially humanistic, it is humanising, so long as you are the vector of that fundamental humanism, it is a privilege to be a deliverer of art, the transmitter of art. It chooses you. It is difficult to choose to be a writer, it chooses you. As long as that vocation is there, the social concern part of it is inescapable, no matter whether the writer wants it or not.
So essentially, the writer has to be a social commentator?
Not has to be, but the question is, is there anything a writer says or does that isn’t taken as social commentary or political commentary because the vocation of the writer has something of an unavoidable aspect of the French Ecrivain Phares, you know, the leading light of the society? The writer may say, I am just doing my thing, I am just doing art. But society values codes, what writers do in a way that makes it difficult to claim any form of neutrality.
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Professor Pius Adesanmi is a writer, critic and academic. The first class graduate of French and Francophone Studies of the University of Ilorin won the Penguin Prize for African writing in 2010 with his book You are Not a Country, Africa. He teaches African Studies at Carleton University, Canada.
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