South Korean author Han Kang, the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.
I was just about to mail a billet-doux (love letter) to you, via our Editor, when the news came. South Korean Han Kang had won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. I had never heard of her. I had to drop everything and set about researching our new Laureate and her work.
What I found was not bad. Han Kang is a 53-year-old South Korean writer whose work is appreciated for highlighting the challenges of modern life, especially for the underprivileged, and espousing the woman’s cause. The Nobel citation also credits her for her “intense poetic prose” that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. Quite sublime-sounding, although I could not help wondering how the “intense poetic prose” criterion was determined.
Ms Kang writes in Korean, and not many of us possess sufficient fluency in that language to pronounce on the poetic intensity of a text. Fortunately for me, my friend and colleague, the Kiswahili guru, Prof Kineene wa Mutiso, is a certified user of Korean, and I will certainly be consulting him about Ms Han Kang’s use of language.
But I should declare a personal interest in the matter. I am not an impartial, objective “literato” academic commenting on the august Prize. You and I, for example, know that we have a long-standing candidate for this prize. We also fairly recently interacted in Nairobi with our own most gracious Prof Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 winner of the Prize. Other Nobel Literature Laureates I have seen up close are the late V.S. Naipaul and Wole Soyinka.
More specifically, you may remember my promising you in these pages (jocularly of course) that I would win the Literature Nobel in 2024 when I turned 80. Well, 2024 is here and I have turned 80, but the Nobel has gone to a Korean sister, barely over half my age, for her books, which, I understand, include titles like Greek Lessons, The White Book, Human Acts and the much-acclaimed The Vegeterian.
I apologise for not bringing the Prize home this year. But we should not despair (tusikate tamaa). Eighty years is quite a youthful age by Nobel standards, especially for writers, and my Mwalimu is still in line ahead of me, although regional balance considerations may prejudice our chances.
On a more serious note, however, triumphs like that of Han Kang show us that we, too, can and should put our writers and our literature on the world stage. But recognition like the Nobel and other international awards will not come our way through wishful thinking or complaints about the “unfairness” or “prejudices” of the awarding bodies. After all, as Chinua Achebe observed, those are their awards and they give them to anyone they want. But that does not mean that we should just “sour grape” them and keep muddling in our characteristic, philistine indifference to our creative industry.
In order to get our Kenyan, East African and African literature confidently on the world stage, we must collaboratively and consistently do at least four things. Write, unite, promote, support. We will win, not necessarily the Nobel, but certainly respect and recognition for our literature and orature, in our languages and other languages to which we have access.
Literature that wins starts with us writers. Let us write and write. For the truly committed writer, there is no such thing as “enough”, and there is no retirement. I said long ago that Africa was full of one-book “celebrities”. A writer pens one slim volume, and his or her friends and cronies praise her or him to the skies, spending the rest of their lives celebrating that flash in the pan. I might as well have been prophesying against myself.
Write and write as much as you can, and tackle the major global issues and experiences of our times. “Quantum potes, tantum aude (dare as much as you can),” advises Aquinas, the medieval Latin poet. Let us go beyond the boozing and philandering “mubabas” and frivolous slay-queens of Nairobi and create tales of African conquerors of space, founding galactic empires and returning here to rescue their people stranded on an irredeemably polluted planet.
About unity, I do not mean sheepish herd instincts. Rather, we are talking about the realisation that our literature is a project that requires and demands collaborative effort from every intelligent and well-intentioned member of society for optimal outcomes. While writers are believed to be loners, they can and do benefit from interacting with fellow writers, hence the importance of active and well-organised writers’ associations, clubs and guilds.
For non-writers, our cooperation and unity with our writers lies primarily in reading them. I was tempted to put that “reading” bit in block capitals. There are no successful writers without devoted readers. This directly leads us to promotion and support. If you do not buy your writers’ books and read them, what promotion and support are you giving them?
More specifically, if you are a publisher and you keep rejecting young authors’ manuscripts, because they are not “big names”, what support are you lending to our literature? Or if you publish books and you do not publicise them, enter them for the various prizes, local and international, how do you expect them to win? If you delay or indefinitely withhold your authors’ royalties, until they are literally starving, how do you expect them to keep writing and winning the coveted prizes?
Finally, to the “Waheshimiwa” (honourable) leaders of our nations, what support have you given to our writers and other creative workers? In many countries, there are National Arts Councils, well-endowed and with funds to support deserving creative workers. I am yet to learn of the activities of such in our times and climes.
Imagine what would have happened if Ngugi wa Thiong’o had not been detained, sacked from his university job “by an act of state” and hounded into exile, in “recognition” of his writing!
Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and literature. [email protected]
