Zambezia (1987), XIV (li).THE AFRICAN WRITER'S EXPERIENCEOF EUROPEAN LITERATURED. MARECHERAMy first contact with English Literature was at school, and later at university. Ienjoyed it but detested having to work at it. The choice of texts Š ranging fromChaucer to D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce Š was unimaginative, especially toa student who was inclined to disagree with everything and everybody. I would,with Jorge Louis Borges, have written a dissertation on the refutation of Timeitself. I wrote my essays and tried to insult (privately) English Literature bycrossing the Channel on a translation ferry to continental Europe.Translators have served me well. I refer to such as Christopher Middletonwho did a good translation of Holderlin; to Kenneth Northcott who translatedGotthold Lessing's Von Bamhelm; to P. K. Stone who rendered Laclos intoEnglish; to H. Sloman who did Guy de Maupassant; to J. M. Cohen who didRabelais; to Stephen Heath at Cambridge who has done singular service toRoland Barthes. This is to name only a few of those translators I have had todepend on. Though I was taught French and Latin at school, I have beenanglicized enough to stubbornly insist that a foreigner is somebody who does notknow English and whose language is not worth knowing.From early in my life I have viewed literature as a unique universe that has nointernal divisions. I do not pigeon-hole it by race or language or nation. It is anideal cosmos co-existing with this crude one. I had a rather grim upbringing in theghetto and have ever since tried to deny the painful reality of concrete history. If,as it is said, we all have something to hide, then my whole life has been an attemptto make myself the skeleton in my own cupboard. If brightness can fall from theair, then, as with Heinrich Heine, poetry is the art of making invisibility visible.Translating the literary imagination into fact may perhaps make writersacknowledged legislators. It becomes a question of perspective, almost of optics.If I am looking at something, and I am conscious of myself looking, does thataffect what I see? Can I learn to experience the world from that quality in uswhich is the source of dreams?It is Pirandello whose plays torture out of us the shadowline between illusionand reality, in particular his Henry IVa,nd Six Characters in Search of an Author.Eugene lonesco, especially in his play Rhinoceros, sets himself the same task. Hegoes beyond Pirandello in that for him internal corruption leads to actual physicaltransformation. Here we are in Ovid's territory of 'metamorphosis', whichcenturies later Franz Kafka was to depict as a literal fact.. Such transformationsoccur again and again in the work of the Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, whose99100THE AFRICAN WRITER'S EXPERIENCEPalmwine Drinkard the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, quite justly acclaimed as amasterpiece. To see takes time; and within time are countless transmutations.Therefore, the evidence of our own eyes is always provisional; therefore, theelement of fantasy, in terms of metamorphosis, becomes the only fact we are trulycapable of. To know that one can be anything at any instant is to liberate oneself.Motive no longer matters; the only thing is to be or not to be. Hamlet's dilemmabecomes existential. It leads to Albert Camus's rediscovery of Sisyphus, toSamuel Becket's two tramps waiting for Godot. But in the meantime somethinghas changed metamorphosis as myth into metamorphosis as a historicalnightmare. We are caught in the very act of changing into some other form; weare frozen in that monstrous midway, as in the film The Fly, when an experimentgoes wrong and the scientist is changed into a grotesque shape that is neither flynor human being but something in between. The Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka,tackles this theme in his novel The Interpreters. Albert Camus, very conscious ofthe drastic transformation of Europe under the Nazi machine, had attempted sucha task in his novel The Plague. Ngugi wa Thiongo, in his A Grain of Wheat,struggles with the same beast. Though the heat may differ in temperature, the heatis everywhere the same. The degree of pain may differ but the torturer's techniqueis the same. We are not at the beginning, we are not at the end Š we are at themid-point of the scream, the eye of the storm. That, for me, is the unifying factor inthe scenario of contemporary literature in Europe and in Africa.There is a healthy interchange of technique and themes. That Europe had, tosay the least, a head start in written literature is an advantage for the Africanwriter: he does not have to solve many problems of structure Š they have alreadybeen solved. I do not consider influences pernicious: they are a type ofapprenticeship. When I started writing, D. H. Lawrence was the skeleton in mycupboard. After that it was James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, AllenGinsberg, Charles Bukowsky, etc., until I began to doubt the existence of anyoriginality in myself. This naturally switched me off writers; I turned to Dr Freudand his counterpart Dr Jung. Some would say the expansion of psychology hashad a disastrous effect on twentieth-century literature. I disagree. That part of theEuropean novel which is descended from Petronius's Satyricon, Boccaccio'sDecameron, Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, has in fact gained in depth,especially in the novels of John Fowles, Anthony Burgess, and Giinter Grass.John Fowles's The Magus and Giinter Grass's The Tin Drum are formidableworks whose expanse is covered with psychology and the anatomy of violence.Because of the numerous and incredible conflicts of the twentieth century, aknowledge of animal aggression is indispensable. It is in this area that I findAfrican literature rather shallow. How can Africa write as if that BlackFrenchman, Franz Fanon, never existed Š I refer to the Fanon of Black Skin,White Mask.DAMBUDZO MARECHERA101The critic and lecturer Neil McEwan, in his book Africa and Novel, arguesthat, far from imitating the practice of past generations of European writers,African novelists have extended the possibilities and uses of fiction. He notes thatthe Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin has offered a category of narrative whoseunifying factor is a 'carnival' attitude to the world. This category includes writersfrom different backgrounds. They range from Aristophanes, Lucian and Apuleius(the first African novelist, perhaps) to Dostoevsky by way of Rabelais and DeanSwift. I add John Fowles and Giinter Grass, and the Nigerian, Wole Soyinka, inThe Interpreters. Don Quixote is quite at home. The world of such novels, saysMcEwan, is complex, unstable, comic, satirical, fantastic, poetical and committedto the pursuit of truth. The hero can travel anywhere in this world and beyond.Fantasy and symbolism are combined with low-life naturalism. Odd vantagepoints offer changes of scale. Heaven and hell are close and may be visited.Madness, dreams and day-dreams, abnormal states of mind and all kinds oferratic inclinations are explored. Scandalous and eccentric behaviour disrupts 'theseemly course of human affairs' and provides a new view of'the integrity of theworld'. Society is unpredictable; roles can quickly change. Current affairs aretreated with a satirical, journalistic interest. Genres are mixed. Stories, speeches,dramatic sketches, poetry and parody exist side by side. This category of novel iscalled the menippean. It is no longer necessary to speak of the African novel or theEuropean novel: there is only the menippean novel. At this point I wish to pay myrespect (or silence) to the latest addition to those writers of the menippean novel:John Kennedy Toole, a young United States' citizen who, after obtaining hisMaster's degree at Columbia University, committed suicide because he could notfind a publisher for his only novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. He wrote this bookin the early 1960s, the time of'flower power', the era of psychedelic mysteries, animplosion of brain into soul. But his novel is anything but effete: it is a gigantic'NO' to everything the twentieth century stands for.I do not like this century. I do not like any other century, past or future. I donot like to live under the backside of a medieval god or a nuclear bomb, whichamounts to the same thing. I am no mystic, yet no materialist either. I believe innature but refuse to live with it in the same room. What Thoreau and WaltWhitman did for letters in the United States Š a stubborn individual sensibilitywhich by its excessive ness actually mirrored a national dilemma Š had actuallybegun much earlier with the German philosopher-writer, Goethe, in his portrayalof what Colin Wilson calls the 'Romantic Outsider' in the Sorrows of YoungWerther. What Sir John Suckling had earlier derided:Will, when looking well can't move her,Looking ill prevail?was transformed into the type of the high, idealistic young poet, pale, but manly.Schiller's Robbers and Don Carlos followed. Other writers within this particular102THE AFRICAN WRITER'S EXPERIENCEtradition are Novalis, Coleridge (in his translation of Schiller), Byron (in 'ChildeHarold's Pilgrimage*) and Shelley. More recently we have Thomas Mann's TonioKroger, Sartre's Roquentin and Albert Camus's Meursault. I have been anoutsider in my own biography, in my country's history, in the world's terrifyingpossibilities. It is, therefore, quite natural for me to respond with the pleasure offamiliar horror to that section of European literature which reflects this. Theinquisitor who resides in the human heart and refuses to believe in God onhumanitarian grounds is familiar to all who have experienced warfare.To quote Albert Camus from his book, The Rebel: 'On the day when crimeputs on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, itis innocence that is called on to justify itself.' In Holland, the novelist HarryMulisch in his recent book, The Assault, tears off post-war scar tissue protectinghis society: the story begins with the assassination of a Nazi collaborator in 1945.In Holland, also, there was recently discovered The Diaries of Etty Hillesum,1941-43; a young Jewish woman whose resilience, until she is taken toAuschwitz, shines because of her 'thinking heart'. The concept of the thinkingheart is close to T. S. Eliot's idea of thought at the tips of the senses. It is not a giantstep from these writers to the world of another writer in Holland, CeesNooteboom, in his novel Rituals where he explores different styles of living intoday's world surrounded by the loose trapdoors of the hideous past. We arerefugees fleeing from the excesses of our parents. I have no respect for those whopresume to be parents. Tradition, on closer examination, always reveals secretswe prefer to flush down the toilet. As taxpayers to the imagination, we expect theCity Council to quietly get rid of the shit. In this sense, the German novelistHeinrich Boll psychoanalyses the sanity out of the insanity of the Nazi andpost-Nazi era. We have become ruthless enough to judge while cynicallyknowing that judgement is useless, beside the point. The judge and the accusedknow that both of them are guilty and the trial a farce. This is the world not ofSimone de Beauvoir, but of Celini and Jean Genet.With Genet, I find myself next door to the House of Hunger, mydoppelgdnger, in fact the ghost which, until the Kenyan novelist Meja Mwangiarrived, African literature had refused to greet: the life of blind poverty, blindimpulse. It is not far from the material of the Argentinian novelist, Marta TrabaŠ she was killed at Madrid airport in 1983 Š in her book Mothers and Shadows,on the plight of people who are now called 'the disappeared'. This is the realm inwhich the South African novelist Alex La Guma takes A Walk in the Night. Hedied on 11 October 1985, in Havana, Cuba. The inquisitor in the mind controlsthe sources of the imagination: the imagination is seated within a body which anassassin can destroy at any moment. In other words, eternity contained within thefinite, the permanent within the temporal. We are provisional yet have the seedsof limitlessness. Which is more glorious: to live in minute detail, or to live within aDAMBUDZO MARECHERA103timeless design? The Booker Prize winner, Thomas Keneally, in his bookSchindler's Ark, provides us with perhaps an answer. Human life may be just aminor detail, but it is all we have, and therefore all means are permissible to saveit. His book is about a German industrialist who used cunning, deceit and briberyto save the lives of thousands of Jews during the Nazi era.Typically, the English have failed to produce a great novel based on the eventsof the Second World War. But let's touch on the Norwegian novelist, KnutHamsun: his books, especially Hunger, are remarkable. The commitment tonature as opposed to sophistication is abundantly clear, disturbing, mindboggling,especially in Hunger where he explores the connection between extreme physicalstarvation and reverie. Like the American, Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun was a Nazicollaborator and his own country still does not know what to do with him. He isat one with Celini. The behaviour of writers in times of conflict will always bedubious.This was the case with the Nigerian poet, Christopher Okigbo, who foughtand died for secessionist Biafra. Okigbo's poetry is unique in African literature.What the Soviet writer Andrei Sinyavsky said of Yevtushenko, I think applies toOkigbo:For all his proneness to self display, he lacks the stamp of an exclusive personality, the ideaof a vocation, or of a great and terrible fate which would allow him to develop his ownbiography like a legend, in which personal life is raised to the level of a unique saga, half real,half invented, and created day by day before an astonished public.This is part of the Russian tradition, the nineteenth-century greats like Nikolai Gogol,Turgenev, Pushkin, Goncharov, Lermontov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and those ofthis century like Mayakovsky, Yesenin and Tsvetaeva.Beneath reality, there is always fantasy: the writer's task is to reveal it, to open itout, to feel it, to experience it. La Guma's walk into the night becomes a jump into theunknown. Sinyavsky, forced into exile by his own need to write, exclaims: 'A writer'slife is a journey, it has to be a journey, it has a fate.' The writer is no longer a person: hehas to die in order to become a writer. People never find their appearance quiteconvincing Š they are constantly amazed at their own ghastly reflection in themirror. For the writer, looking at himself in the mirror, the most important thing is hiswriting; he looks down from above at his own person and despises it. His whole life islived in the expectation of what is going to be written. The writer is a vampire,drinking blood Š his own blood Š a winged creature who flies by night, writing hisbooks. The writer has no duty, no responsibilities, other than to his art. Art is higherthan reality.In spite of the moralizing in Gogol, Leo Tolstoy and Pasternak, Russia had onewriter Š Pushkin Š who was completely outside this framework. His work is art,not sermons. Speaking of his technique of 'fantastic realism', Sinyavsky says:104THE AFRICAN WRITER'S EXPERIENCEI don't think of modernism as some kind of device. It is no more so than realism whichis itself a convention, an artificial form. Realism pretends to be able to say the truth aboutlife. I'm not against truth, but it can be sought by different routes. In the nineteenth centuryrealism was very productive as a form, but in this century Š it's impossible.What happened in Russia was that at the beginning of this century poetry was highlydeveloped, while prose somehow lagged behind Š with some exceptions: Bely, Bulgakov,Babel. My task as a writer was to take the veins of modernism, symbolism, futurism thathad developed in poetry and transfer them to the language of prose.I find myself in the same position as Sinyavsky. In that quotation he wasreplying to the question why he saw himself as a modernist Š the sameaccusation directed at me by the censorship board when they banned BlackSunlight. Sinyavsky is now dying in the environs of Paris Š an exile, like I was. Ittakes only an instant to become a person without titles, without a label, to becomethe raw person, the point at which low-life naturalism meets its doppelgdnger, theexistentialist. Tragedy peers over everyone's shoulder. There are those who writewhile working in the service of the State, or some religion or ideology. There arewriters who can only write while they are free to develop their own personality, tobe true to themselves. What is the answer? Sinyavsky replies:A writer who is a fanatic can be a great writer. There are many examples of fine writerswho have written within the framework of a state ideology or religion ŠDerzhavin,Mayakovsky, for example. But their greatness comes not from the fact that they served anideology but from the fact that they believed in it. If a writer has lost that faith, then he willnot be able to produce real art by trying to adapt himself in the service of the state. That iswhere freedom becomes absolutely essential. But then, people still argue about whethergenuine art requires absolute political freedom. For instance, the poet Brodsky defendedcensorship on the grounds that it helped to develop metaphorical language, yet it wascensorship that killed Brodsky's fellow poets, especially Mandelshtam, I will never givemy blessing to censorship on those grounds Š any more than I would to war, or prison, or,for that matter, death.It is not unworthy to now mention the so-called absurdist writers of Leningrad.These are Dmitry Prigov, Kharms, Vvedensky and Zabolotsky. Prigov is stillalive. His poems have a disarming lightness, his characteristic tone of mildgrievance and bewilderment, which is underlined by a nihilistic view of a world inwhich modest and inoffensive souls find themselves inexplicably thwarted,inexplicably guilty, and unable to make sense of the grand notions Š conscience,freedom, dignity Š whose names nevertheless invade their day-to-day vocabu-lary. I quote:You've put four walls around yourselfAnd hung a ceiling overheadLocked yourself inside your roomTo do shameful things aloneDAMBUDZO MARECHERA105And do not see, and do not hearThat you are visible in thereAs if they'd lifted off the roofAnd fixed their gaze upon your shameYou raise your eyes Š and Oh, just Lord!Either the criminal must runOr do his trousers up at leastOr at least remove the corpse.The Czechoslovak novelist, exiled, of course, Jan Pelc, in his first novel It'sGonna Get Worse Š he is only 29 years old Š follows this absurdism or fantasticrealism, or menippean manner, to produce a work which is still making headsshake among emigre Czech communities and the readers of samizdat literature. Itis in fact the ugly twin to John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. This isthe same territory as that of the English Liverpool Poets, their articulate chagrinagainst the pigs, the fascists, social injustice and English racism. But these wererather a late reflection of the American Beat Generation with its gurus like AllenGinsberg, Allan Watts, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg's words, 'I sawthe best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical nakeddragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix',were echoing in my ears when I was writing The House of Hunger.Editor's note: Dambudzo Marechera's talks, 'The African Writers's Experience of EuropeanLiterature' and 'Soyinka, Dostoevsky: The Writer on Trial for his Time', were originally part of aseries of lectures organized by the Zimbabwe German Society, the Alliance Franchise, and the BritishCouncil, and were delivered in Harare on 15 and 29 October 1986.Zambezia (1987), XIV (ii).SOYINKA, DOSTOEVSKY:THE WRITER ON TRIAL FOR HIS TIMED. MARECHERADostoevsky, when his brother and his wife died in the 1860s and his journalEpoch collapsed, said:I find myself alone and simply terrified. My entire life at one stroke broke into two. In onehalf which I had lived through was everything I had lived through, was everything I hadlived for; and in the other still unknown half everything was strange and new. There wasnot a single heart that could replace those two.What remains from all the reserve of strength and energy in my soul is somethingtroubled and disturbed, something close to despair. Worry, bitterness, a completely coldindustrialness, the most abnormal state for me to be in, and in addition loneliness.And yet it seems to me that I am just now preparing to live. Funny isn't it? The vitalityof a cat.The tiger in Soyinka is a restless active intelligence, a magnetic personality. Ilast met him at a writers' conference in West Berlin in 1979. His talent is unique.Nigeria, and Africa, should be grateful: Soyinka is a voice of vision in his owntime. This links him very much with the great Russian novelists of the nineteenthcentury who, though steeped in European literature, saw themselves as voices ofvision in Russia's political and spiritual evolution. The passion to rehearse thefuture in one's monumental works exacts a heavy price. Nikolai Gogol, whileworking on his astonishing novel, Dead Souls, became a fanatical believer in anesoteric fringe cult guided by a weird monk. Soyinka, like Dostoevsky, hasalready been in prison. Within the writer's limits, Nigeria, like Dostoevsky'sRussia, seeks an identity that has so far eluded it. Inevitably, the margin betweenliterature and politics is breached. This has happened to Ngugi in Kenya, whosesources are now those of Soviet socialist realism. It is one thing to cut one's literaryteeth on the Communist Manifesto, as Ngugi is now doing; it is another torecognize the distance between self-exploration and self-mystification, which iswhat Soyinka does. There is a level at which the imagination subsumes alldifferences of thought and feeling and creates that staggering miracle for whichSoyinka has recently received the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature. His is anachievement of the calibre of the Greek, Seferis, of Elias Canetti, and perhapsPablo Neruda.There are those who find in memory the evidence of their identity; indeed,some say each individual is himself the microcosm of all that mankind has beenfrom the beginning of time. But perhaps this is to be seduced by metaphors Š an106DAMBUDZO MARECHERA107act of self-mystification which beguiles those writers and readers for whom everynovel or poem is seen as autobiography. A lot is said about Soyinka's use of myth,especially religious mythology. Such myths are understood to belong not to theindividual but to his race, even to all mankind. This is a mistake. It is to reduceSoyinka's vision to the level of a dictionary of mythology. Myths are a type ofmemory, and there is no certainty in memory Š as when people talk about roots:no evidence of identity in memory. Where memories disagree there is often noway to settle the argument. Also we remember what we wish to recall, and forgetthe rest. Besides, memory tends to colour the things it holds. Then, there isamnesia, complete loss of one's past. Identity is an act of faith, impossible toverify.It is at this point of the impossibility of verification that Soyinka Š andperhaps Okara in The Voice Š leaps into the dark of The Intepreters and thenightmare of Season ofAnomy. It is the point of death, Tennyson's 'Crossing theBar'; and at once Soyinka himself becomes Abiku, a spirit child who is fated to acycle of early death and rebirth to the same mother. Christopher Okigbo isanother. Gadflies on their nation's leaping flanks. At this point the writer ceases tobe African or European. He has become the exploding atoms of his searing vision,become Soyinka the Nobel Prize Winner, become Dostoevsky of the great novelsthat began with Crime and Punishment.This is the area where the irrational is the only true condition of man. Thistruth inflicts first-degree burns on the body of both the individual and the State. Itaffronts our complacency and all we take for granted. It is the area of Soyinka'spoems and ranges from the pure comedy of 'Telephone Conversation' throughthe carnage of Lagos roads and the Biafran war to the spirited anguish andcelebrations of the psyche in Idanre and Other Poems. He is no longer a mererecorder of his society's mores and experience. Soyinka is a case in point in theargument for the expansion of the writer's freedom in Africa. He is more talkedabout than read. He has, in Zimbabwe, been dismissed as an art-for-art's-sakebourgeois reactionary writer; he has been labelled a buttonhole flower for theelite. But his attackers have barely read his work. Africa's Nobel Prize winner hasrarely been welcomed by Africa itself. Students shun him for being difficult. Thepublic shun him for being a student's novelist, a writer for writers with nothing tosay for the masses because he is difficult. It is a paradox that modernism has fromthe start been identified with difficultness, and, on a continent still barely literate,modernism has, therefore, been condemned as being irrelevant on African soil.It is not too long ago that Achebe invoked the apocalyptic vision of the Irishpoet, W. B. Yeats, of Western civilization in crisis; not too long ago that T. S. Eliotstumbled on the Wasteland; not too long ago that Okigbo in his last poems sawthe monstrosity of this century Š a century in which we no longer fool ourselvesabout man's inherent goodness. The only permanent values left us by our108SOYINKA, DOSTOEVSKYatrocities against each other have the vibration of horror. This is at the heart ofSoyinka's Season of Anomy. It is the weather of The Man Died, Soyinka'spersonal record of his harrowing time in prison. It is akin to Ngugi's own record ofdetention; the awful possibilities a writer invokes against himself when he daresexpose his vision to the light of Africa. I hope Soyinka's Nobel Prize for Literaturewill mean less censorship, less harrassment of writers. As Professor David Cooksays in his critical work, African Literature, 'When the wheels catch fire, the poetdissolves all boundaries and makes distinctions unimportant'.In the last resort, distinctions among writers of different nations are not at allof importance. The Latin American writer Jorge Louis Borges has said, 'It is notnecessary to say that the idea of a literature must define itself in terms of itsnational traits; or that writers musi seek themes from their own countries.' Racinewould not have understood a person who denied him his right to the title of poetof France because he cultivated Greek and Roman themes. Shakespeare wouldhave been amazed if people had tried to limit him to English themes (Hamlet isScandinavian, Macbeth is Scottish). What is truly native can and does dispensewith local colour. I found this in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of The RomanEmpire: Gibbon observes that in the whole of the Koran there is no mention ofcamels. After all, the Middle East takes the existence of camels for granted.The emphasis, therefore, is not that Soyinka the Nobel Prize winner isNigerian or African, but is, as it were, on the acquisition of immortality. That he isof this continent vicariously confers honour upon us all Š but it is not necessaryto emphasize it. What is important is the challenge his Prize has thrust upon theyounger generation of writers. Otherwise his achievement is a mere flash in thepan. This is why I call for freedom of expression Š no censorship.The record of atrocities against writers in Africa is a grisly one Š onlyrecently in Nigeria itself a newspaper editor died of his injuries when he was sent aparcel bomb. In Cameroon, 'journalism is synonymous with detention andharrassment'. Charles Ndi-Chia, editor of the Cameroon Times, has beendetained seven times since 1983. Paul Nkemayang, a journalist for the samenewspaper, and another, Pius Kwendi, have also been picked up. In the 1960s,there were, in Cameroon, fifteen independent newspapers; of these, only theCameroon Times is still publishing. In the Congo, the People's Republic 'hastaken over the censorship practices of the former colonial administration'; rightnow the work of novelist Makouta-Mbouka is banned and he lives in exile. InLiberia, one of the two last independent newspapers had its offices burned down.In Burkina Faso about eighteen months ago, there was one small newspaper runby an independent journalist. When he came to work one morning, he found theoffices burned down. As he had no money to buy new printing presses, that wasthe end of the independent press in'Burkina Faso. The result of all this is that thebest African writers and journalists live in exile in London or Paris, or simply liveDAMBUDZO MARECHERA109out of a suitcase, shuttling between countries. Soyinka and Ngugi have indeedlived out of the academic and conference suitcase for some time now. You pick upinvitations to lecture; you accept any invitation to a conference. Since expensesare paid, it means you do not starve. Though we share in his honour of winningthe Nobel Prize for Literature, I do not think many governments in Africa deservesuch a grace.Political pressure on writers has existed for a long time, indeed from the timewhen Plato, in his Republic, recommended that the poet must be banned intoexile from the ideal State; from the time when Socrates was condemned to deathby poison in Athens; from the time when the poet and novelist, Petronius, had hisveins opened and was left to bleed to death at the orders of Emperor Nero, hiserstwhile comrade in pleasure. Financial measures can also force writers out ofbusiness. They can be indirect, as in the case of publishers, who, afraid of theirrovernment, continually reject a particular writer's work: I have had threenanuscript novels rejected this year alone. The measures can be direct: theTanzania News Agency, SHIHATA, began licensing all local and foreignjournalists from. 1 July 1985, with the full authority of a 1967 law that empowersthe Agency to issue press cards to newsmen. The card costs 40,000 Tanzaniashillings (about 250 American dollars). On top of this, foreign journalists have topay an additional 400 shillings, normal press-card charges, while local journalistshave to pay 200 shillings. This means that independent journalists who cannotafford to pay the high fees will be forced out of business, rendering the Agency thesole source of news in the country.In such conditions, the writer in Africa who has courage is fast becomingsomething like Dostoevsky's underground man, in Notes from Underground,veering between idealism and paranoia, between honourable principles andgrossly humiliating circumstances. I submit that Ngugi and Soyinka are the newunderground writers, sniping away from their nuclear bomb shelter of higheducation and astonishing imagination. They strike with novels, they mug us withbrilliant essays, they destroy our illusions by the penetrating insolence of theirplays. Their X-ray poems and articles expose the corruption in the marrow of ourbones. Even the dead are not exempt from this autopsy and inquest: there is anironic connection between Soyinka's A Dance in the Forest and Nikolai Gogol'sDead Souls. I cannot say whether in Soyinka the dead are sacred or profane, ormerely co-existent with the living, but Chichikov, the hero of Gogol's novel, istravelling all over Russia buying up dead souls at bargain prices. He approacheseach landowner, finds out how many servants of the landowner have died sincethe last census, and offers to buy these dead souls right on the spot. Meanwhile, wein Africa are talking about ancestors, and Soyinka is deftly conjuring them out ofthe ground to mingle with their descendents. It is a weird and comic conjunctionbetween these two writers. Soyinka and Gogol are also at one in their use of satire110SOYINKA, DOSTOEVSKYto indict their fellows, There are scenes in Soyinka's TheIntepreters not unworthyof the writer of the Diary of a Madman or of Dostoevsky's Notes fromUnderground.We must remember that these writers, Nigerian and Russian, are and were incountries in a violent search for identity. The Russia of the great novels ischaracterized by a proletariat of undergraduates (Dostoevsky's phrase). Theundergraduates, until the end of the nineteenth century, were never more than afew thousand. However, entirely on their own, and in defiance of the mostcompact tyranny of that time, they claimed and contributed to the liberation of 40million serfs. Almost all of them paid for this liberation by suicide, execution,prison, madness. The entire history of Russian terrorism can be summed up in thestruggle of a handful of intellectuals to abolish tyranny, against a background of asilent populace. In independent Africa it is the university students who are in theforefront of the fight for the maintenance of liberty. Of course, when Dostoevskycoined the phrase *a proletariat of undergraduates' he was not thinking of thestudents who get shot or detained or assaulted as in Liberia, Kenya, Nigeria; hewas actually insulting them. Dostoevsky started as something of a left-wingradical but gradually joined the extreme right-wing even to the point ofdenouncing his fellow writers to the secret police. He and Turgenev, at first thebest of friends, had a long acrimonious hatred, a state of war, in which they woulddenounce each other to the secret police. The officers who detained Soyinka wereprobably his ex-schoolmates. I myself feel strange when I realize that Zimbabweis being ruled by people some of whom were with me at high school anduniversity. I suggest here that the writer, whether poet or journalist or novelist orplaywright is, in Africa, in the same situation the Russian writer was under theCzar,It is interesting to note that the widely recognized father of Russian Literature,Pushkin himself, was Black. He was born in 1799 at a time when the Czar hadclosed down all private printing presses in Russia and prohibited, among otherthings, the importation of foreign literature, travel by Russians abroad, and evenFrench fashions. Before he was 21, he wrote the Ode to Liberty and he wasarrested and banished to south Russia. From then until his death he was a virtualprisoner, and the Emperor Nicholas ordered him to 'send me all your writingsfrom now on: it is I who shall be your censor'. In a letter to his wife, Pushkinlaments, 'It was a devil's trick to let me be born with a soul and talent in Russia'. Ibelieve a lot of writers in Africa have at one time or another echoed Pushkin's cry.However, Pushkin is closer to Ngugi than to Soyinka in that for him the novelmeans a historicM, epoch developed in the form of an imaginative story. Hebrought history nearer to himself and his readers by giving it biographical interest.Ngugi uses the same technique in A Grain of Wheat, in The Black Hermit and inother plays such as The Trial ofDedan Kimathi. But with writers like Soyinka,DAMBUDZO MARECHERA111Gogol and Dostoevsky, history is not a well-ordered path leading from cause toeffect as with Chinua Achebe; it is rather a psychological condition in which oursenses are constantly bombarded by unresolved or provisional images. Soyinka'suse of time and space, which actually is a rejection of those linear and spacialconcepts, coincides with the temperament of the modern twentieth-centurynovel. This is what makes Dostoevsky's and Gogol's work contemporary with us.It connects with the psychodrama of the intellectual trapped in a superficiallyrational world, the scenario of Auto da Fe, the novel by the Bulgarian-bornwinner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Elias Canetti.Soyinka began to blossom at the time colonialism died in Nigeria. He felt noneed to look back, as Achebe did; he was minutely examining the Nigeria that hadbeen born, a witness of the turmoil of Independence. Dostoevsky, Gogol, werewriting while their Russia still slumbered under absolutist rule, a time when thefights and arguments for liberation were raging in the drawing rooms and in thestudent cafes. The terrorism was real; the secret police answered it with equallygrisly realism. In December 1825, the terrorist group known as the Decembristswere arrested and arranged in lines, and were then blown up by cannon fire in thesquare in front of the Senate in St Petersburg. Dostoevsky, in the 1870s, waswriting his Author's Diary, his novel The Devils, and the monumental TheBrothers Karamazov Š- he was writing this while, in 1878, a very young girl, VeraZassulich, was shooting down the governor of St Petersburg. At the same time,the Emperor of Germany, the King of Italy, the King of Spain, were also killed, Inthe same year, Czar Alexander II created the Okhrana, the most efficient weaponof state terrorism the world has ever seen. In 1879, another King of Spain is killedand there is an abortive attempt on the life of the Czar. In 1881, soon afterDostoevsky published The Brothers Karamazov, the Czar is murdered. SofiaPerovskaya and her group are hanged. In 1888, the Emperor of Germany ismurdered and the murderer is beheaded with an axe. In the same year, after a longillness, Turgenev dies in Paris, and is buried in Russia. In the year 1892, therewere more than a thousand dynamite bombings in Europe. In 1898, theEmpress Elisabeth of Austria is murdered. In 1901, President McKinley of theUnited States is assassinated. Tolstoy is plodding on with his work, as is MaximGorky. Nihilism, which Turgenev had deflowered in Fathers and Sons, finallyculminates in revolutionary terrorism.I need not paint the condition of Africa while Wole Soyinka continues hiswork. Military regimes, corrupt civilian regimes, murders, civil war, apparitionslike Bokassa and Idi Amin, the struggles for liberation in Southern Africa, thehorrors of famine, etc.And now the murder of President Samora Machel within a few days of theNobel Prize for Literature being awarded to Wole Soyinka. I salute the one andoffer only silence to the other.