The Turning Point, The New Journalist
“The fear of the situation of Nigerian to a journalist who is gifted enough to run with the best in the world, who wants to be seen as a writer and thinker of note, the fear of burning out one’s talent and spending the rest of one’s life running against oneself is devastating.”
Gail Sheehy, an American writer of a perculiarly American literary genre called The New Journalism, Chronicled “Passages,” which is a trip through her mid-life crisis, the time in her life, and typically the time in the life of a man (and woman) of substance, when he must face the remainder of his and ask himself the unpleasant questions about the future. After publishing the book, something of an autobiography, a strong style in the New Journalism and a sort of 20th century narcissism, a spate of such books flooded the American literary public, as though Sheehy blew the lid off the tinder box that had been smoldering in the fragile psyche of all the 35-to-40 year-old men and women. The travails are many for the people of purpose at turning 35, and the next five years or so, in many, the next 10 years or so, are not supposed to be years of quite, except possibly years of quiet (but often turbulent) contemplation of the fears of growing up, growing old and growing, a nice little euphemism for saying: the fear of facing the ultimate denouement: growing to death. Those whose psyches are brittle may just perish with the fear of these troubling years.
Matters are not helped if you have chosen to be a journalist, a calling that gets the adrenalin boiling, if you know what I mean, a calling that is more like a determined journey towards the apocalypse in which security is the most brittle of the job’s hazards. The security has little to do with keeping your job, that’s another matter, really, it has to do more with the fear of burning out your talent, just the sort of fear that haunts the novelist who may have written his best book as his first book, and having to spending the rest of his running against himself. The question for the serious minded journalist, one who has always wanted to be a journalist because he has long detected in himself the power to think and put his thoughts down coherently in good prose, the question for him is how much a journalist is he? The current understanding of who a journalist is in Nigeria doesn’t help the fear gnawing at a journalist who is gifted enough to run with the best in the world. He wants to be seen as a writer and thinker of note and when he looks around him and can’t see enough of the manifestation of the proper atmosphere for literate journalism, he may despair. But one should thank God that things are not so bad that some Nigerian journalists cannot be called writers. Ray Ekpo, Stanley Macebuh, Sina Adedipe, Lewis Obi, Sonala Olumhense and Innocent Oparadike, to mention just a few, will easily get work in best newspapers anywhere in the world.
Then, what is the need for this reflection, something akin to the fear of the situation of Nigerian journalism, and the perception of the Nigerian journalist as a writer. Kole Omotoso who teaches at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) and who is a writer dropped by sometime ago on his way to the Goethe Institute here in Lagos to read some of his works. He joked that he was a writer, and looking at my expressionless face, said: and you aren’t. So I went out to buy all the books that Kole has put out and they are called novels. I read them all, and at the end, I couldn’t grasp Kole’s meaning of seeing himself as a writer and saying that I wasn’t. Then the other day I ran into a splendid anthology of fair-length nonfiction pieces by American writers most of whom you might not have heard of, and o read the introductory essay to the 430-page book by Tom Wolfe which could be summed up as Death of The Novel and Birth of the New Journalism. By the time I finished reading the 27-pieces in the anthology, I began to see Kole Omotoso’s point of view, as it were, that you are a writer only if you write poetry and the novel. If tell you what Tom Wolfe says about the relationship between the Novel and New Journalism, you will begin to understand my argument that Kole Omotoso is ignoring what is happening to the Novel, and the turn to the New Journalism in contemporary literature.
Now Tom Wolfe: “I don’t really expect any of the current fiction writers to take serious note of the death of the Novel and the birth of the New Journalism. In a way, I suppose, I am even banking on their obtuseness. Fiction writers, currently, are running backwards, skipping and screaming, into a begonia patch that I call Neo-Fabulism … I must confess that the retrograde state of contemporary fiction has made it easier to make the main point: that the most important literature being written today is in nonfiction, in the form that has been tagged, however ungracefully, the New Journalism …” Kole has done some writing for the Sunday Concord, short stories and travelogues. His short stories are really little social commentaries with a spattering of something that Wolfe calls the point of view, but which I call stream of consciousness in which a writer subjects his reader to his (the writer’s) objectivity. But Kole qualifies to be called a writer for both his fiction and nonfiction. In fact, he comes across as a stronger writer in nonfiction than in fiction. His travelogues expose his sharp wit, expressed in rapier-thrust prose.
The fact is that the Novel, even here in Nigeria, is giving place to the New Journalism. Wole Soyinka’s most compelling work, according to a number of perceptive readers, is his nonfiction prose called “The Man Died,” a book that Truman Capote and Norman Mailer will describe as a nonfiction novel in the spirit of their In Cold Blood – Capote, and The Executioner’s Song – Mailer, if for no other reason than that Soyinka takes the reader deep into his (Soyinka’s) mind to see his thinking and share his fear from moment to moment, a good example of the stream of consciousness. The Man Died, make no mistake about it, is a good example of the New Journalism. Soyinka’s Ake, his early life autobiography, is also New Journalism, precisely because the author uses what academics will call the Novel form to write a nonfiction. All this is in a way of saying that the literary activities in Nigeria have already turned to nonfiction and that Kole Omotoso and other academics should begin to accept this and condition their minds to the fact.
It is also a way of saying that the legitimate worry of a journalist at the turning point of making 35 should be that of his status as a writer, if he is working on my book, that being the only path of honour for him to tread. It is, as well a way to give notice that this column, after three years (one year in the Daily Times, and two here in the Sunday Concord) now comes into its own and will simply carry the name of its writer. Bye-bye PARALLAX SNAPS.
©Sunday Concord, March 14, 1982
Still on the Vagaries of the Mid-life Turmoil
Every night since I wrote the above column, Parallax Snaps had visited me in my dreams asking why I dropped it from my column. Perhaps it is one of the vagaries of the mid-life turmoil, but I want to sleep in peace, and I just have to let Parallax Snaps have its way, so here again is Parallax Snaps.
©Sunday Concord, March 21, 1982
(Pp.153-156)
