How I completed a 21-book project – Udenta O. Udenta

Udenta O. Udenta was a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Igbo Studies and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at Abia State University, Uturu, in 1998. He was forced to abandon his career on account of his 5th detention by the late General Sani Abacha’s military junta. In 1993, he published […]

Udenta O. Udenta was a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Igbo Studies and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at Abia State University, Uturu, in 1998. He was forced to abandon his career on account of his 5th detention by the late General Sani Abacha’s military junta. In 1993, he published ‘Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process’, to global acclaim. He has been silent in the literary scene for over two decades. He now returns with the release of 21 books he has either written or edited. Arts & Ideas cornered him for a chat.

You recently completed a 21-book project. What was the process like?

Did I set out to write and publish 21 books as an organic intellectual and artistic endeavour? No. Did I end up publishing them, all of which will be publicly presented at the same time? Yes. Yet, it is in the history of the project that its essence and structure are unconcealed. In the ‘Guide to the 21-Book Project’ which I produced to situate my effort in the context of intellectual production and the genealogy of knowledge, I determined four streams of thought, and a fifth stream which answers to the question of my being relieved by accomplishing what I did. Stream one defines my six-volume boyhood textual productions of aesthetic, moral and philosophical materials written between 1977 and 1979 when I was in high school. I wrote them when I was between ages 13 and 14 plus.

The texts are extant and are available for forensic examination in terms of the presence of editorial contamination of a boyhood imagination. Stream two contains my intellectual and scholarly productions written between 1986 and 2018. While a few, like ‘Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process’ and ‘Art, Ideology and Social Commitment in African Poetry’ had been previously published in the 1990s. Stream three is all about democracy, peace practice, cultural studies and the linear temporality but sometimes ruptured flow of my movement from the site of intellectual conscience to the domain of social practice. The fourth stream contains my father’s works written from the late 1950s to the early 1990s.

This, in essence, speaks to what went into the project but a fuller picture will emerge if you add a well staffed office, five secretaries working at various times, a complete V-Sat internet connection that functioned non-stop for many years and downloads that yielded over one hundred book length research materials over an 8-year research period and several trips to Blackwell’s and Foyles bookstores.

The historic import of this endeavour will be determined over time. As ground-breaking as the project is, not in terms of sheer output over staggered time but in comprising the effort in a three-year publishing cycle, it is but the first phase in the evolution of my lifework. The fifth stream of works in the guide to the project is actually devoted to ongoing researches that will culminate in the production of five books.

For example, ‘Crisis of Theory in Contemporary Nigerian Literature’ is premised on the construction of not only a new materialist thesis adequate for the interrogation of Nigerian aesthetic ontology but also in the theoretical production of ideological and cultural structures that undergird the concrete universal relationship between materialist dialectics and material transcendence.

By violently yoking and subordinating the latter to the former, I intend to specify a periodising movement from the radicalisation of the spirit of Nigerian postcoloniality to the emergence of a national counterhegemonic consciousness in the spheres of culture, aesthetics, political production and social practice. While contemporary Nigerian literature and select Nollywood films, like ‘The Figurine’, ‘Iyore’ and Ernest Obi’s ‘Idemili’, ‘Seven Rivers and Storm’, will provide the aesthetic sites of testing out this theory in volumes two and three of the study, its philosophical and intellectual inheritance is underpinned by the Hegelian influences in the works of such neo-Marxist scholars as Slavoj Zizek, Gianni Vattimo, Santiago Zabala and Adrain Johnson as well as a deconstructive reading of the postcolonial scholarship of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Aijaz Ahmed and E Juan San.

What basically inspired your boyhood works?

I cannot explain every particular moment or context of inspiration, even as the works are dense with dangerous echoes of African and English writers, as well as open, unabashed borrowings from Greek mythology and the universe of African magical realism. In more material, historical, cultural and family environmental circumstances, the sources of my inspiration are fully laid out in the general introduction to the Boyhood Series which appears at the beginning of each volume. I encourage readers to examine what I believe to be a stimulating account of my formative years, aesthetic influences and modes and patterns of creative productions.

You also reissued your father’s oeuvre comprising religious, historical and sociological books. What kind of man was he, and what prompted this move?

My late father, Chief B.I. Udenta, was an incredible man who was born posthumously. His intellectual power was profound, scorching and deeply infectious. He tapped and sold palm wine with his elder brothers during school holidays, completed his Teacher’s Training programme at the famous St. Charles College, Onitsha, and went on to earn his Teacher’s Grade One certificate in record time. He also graduated with a BSc degree from the University of London School of Economics as an external candidate, contested for the Greater Awgu Federal House of Representatives constituency under the DPNC; the Dr K.O. Mbadiwe-led breakaway faction of the NCNC in 1959, wrote and published over ten books before 1962, constructed a twelve-bedroom storey building in 1963 and bought a new Volkswagen Beetle convertible same year. All these before he was 33 years of age. He was an intellectual in the purest sense of the term with an astonishing liberal disposition that defied categorisation. He was a community historiographer, wrote on African and West African history, Ancient History and English Economic and Social History, the 8th Century BC prophets, the Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, on physical education and English and Igbo languages. I think his inspiring history and body of intellectual productions more than justify my decision to reissue his work for appreciation by a wider, contemporary audience and readership.

In novels like ‘Before They Came’ and ‘The Wrath of the Gods’, among others, you presented bucolic narratives favoured by Achebe and Elechi Amadi. Is there a cultural explanation?

I freely admitted to have read virtually all the novels and short story collections published under the African Writers Series imprint, with Achebe’s novels top on the list of the four or five books I was to be found reading simultaneously from when I was in form three in 1977. Richer details of the influences that conditioned my boyhood creations are to be found in the general introduction to the collection.

But to evaluate the degree of my coherent absorption and logical rendition of the cultural, especially pre-colonial cultural universe constructed by Achebe, John Munonye and Elechi Amadi in their novels, as a 13-year-old, will be a task beyond me. I no doubt read far beyond my age.

The second edition of ‘Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process’ looks bulky, compared to the first edition. Has the discourse dovetailed into the 21st Century?

Yes. I will not say much regarding the degree of reconstruction that went into the new, expanded text; readers will make their individual assessment about the text’s responsiveness to the contemporary aesthetic environment, as well as the discursive and narrative strategies that undergird the cultural and ideological logic and forces that drive the African literary process. What I can add, without hesitation, was the surprise that awaited me when I clicked on Google in 2006 to measure the degree to which the work was mentioned in scholarly articles, and that was over 13 years after its total abandonment and complete lack of promotion by the author after its publication, to witness an explosion of mostly positive comments about a work that was viciously attacked by conservative scholars when it initially came out. I detailed this journey to global recognition and acclaim in a long and, I believe, well researched author’s note in lieu of a preface to the second edition. That inspiring account is worth reading to ascertain its journey towards canonisation and, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, helped in influencing and shaping so many scholarly careers from MA and PhD researches to inspiration in writing peer reviewed and well regarded essays.

Another book with a second edition is ‘Heroism and Critical Consciousness in African Literature’, which is an offshoot of an earlier work, ‘Ideological Sanction and Social Action in African Literature’. Why the change of title?

In re-working the text for the purpose of its second edition, I felt that the original title did not fully and elegantly capture its textual spirit. The work is composed of two theoretical parts. The Positive Hero in African Literature and Critical Realism and the African Literary Process. Upon re-reading the text and incorporating new materials into it, I decided that, while the force of ideology and social action can adequately explain the sites of heroism and critical realism in African literature, the notion of heroism and critical consciousness is constructively more aligned to the progressive unfolding of the contours of historical, cultural and ideological density in the African literary process.

Eighteen years have elapsed since the first edition of ‘Art, Ideology and Social Commitment in African Poetry’. How did it address the aesthetic and ideological formations of the years in between?

The book was originally published in 1996 as a scholarly response to the socioaesthetic imperatives that undergirded the poetic constructions of African cultural producers from the colonial period to the intense historical contradictions and ideological disputations in the bi-polar universe of the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. As in the case of Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process which examined prose fiction works and drama texts, the authorial ideological perspective in the work was consistently the domesticated variant of Marxist aesthetics that I conceived as revolutionary aesthetics. In preparing the work for a second edition outing, I noted three gaps that needed to be plugged: a well researched preface to the second edition that will provide more grounded insight into the work’s origin and affinity with my other scholarly works of that period, thereby giving the context of its production added breadth and perspicacity of vision; an encounter with and analysis of the poetic creations of the mid-1990s and the 21st Century in the Nigerian aesthetic domain; and addressing the postmodernist debate in South Africa’s postcolonial/post-apartheid aesthetic landscape. I believe that a measure of effort went into plugging these gaps in such a way to have addressed your concern with regard to the aesthetic and ideological formations of the years in between.

‘Art, Society and Identity’ is a collection of essays on African literature presented in the 1980s and early 1990s. How relevant would you say the essays are today?

I overhauled the entire text by utilising new, 21st Century scholarly materials in textual explication as well as recasting it in a manner that demonstrates great familiarity with and understanding of the narrative and discursive strategies of the scholarship in currency in the contemporary age. There are a few other surprises that await the reader in the text which, though was originally written in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is being published for the first time now.

The first volume of ‘Crisis of Theory in Contemporary Nigerian Literature’ and ‘The Possibilities of New Materialist Direction’ is one of the most thought-provoking and latest works among the 21 books. To what extent is it a departure from the postmodernist debate? What’s your idea of the new materialist direction?

Actually, ‘Crisis of Theory in Contemporary Nigerian Literature’ is a sustained deconstruction of the disjunctive presence of postmodernist critical thinking in the examination of Nigerian aesthetic productions. I initially titled the essay that steadily grew into a book length study, ‘Postcolonial Aesthetic Impulses and the Postmodern Debate in Contemporary Nigerian Literature’, in which I tried to map the interpenetration of postmodernist-flavoured poststructuralist theoretical assumptions into the domain of postcolonial scholarship.

I felt convinced that the crisis of theory in contemporary Nigerian literature is a consequence of the displacement of that literature’s historical materiality that is periodised in nature but also contains synchronous ruptural flow; the foisting on that aesthetic site an ontological and epistemic indeterminacy not borne out of cultural experience; and the valorisation of globalisation by successfully hiding and deideologising its antinomies and discontents. My idea of the new materialist direction of Nigerian literature operates at two theoretical elevations: the first, primary elevation, deals with re-directing scholarly investigation of texts towards the probing of the materiality of the nation state’s metanarrative historical and cultural order; that locates material forces and material relations at the base of the postcolonial formation; that ontologises the Nigerian condition and circumstances through the heightening and radicalisation of the spirit of critical realism; and that is alert to the representable totality of a rapidly transforming social and cultural order. The secondary theoretical elevation merges, or rather violently yokes and subordinates the ideology of material transcendence to this new state of revolutionary aesthetics to produce a concrete universal counterhegemonic thesis capable of reanimating a decadent Nigerian postcoloniality beyond the spheres of culture and aesthetics.

You consider ‘Autonomy of Values’ a more mature work intellectually than the works you did earlier. To what extent are you influenced by Nietzsche?

A few decades ago, precisely before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Sovietised Euro-communism, it would have been the height of ideological and moral heresy, not to say of apostasy, for a Marxist scholar to admit that he was unabashedly influenced by Nietzsche, of all philosophers. But that was the condition of the Left in the early and mid-1990s, at least from the perspective of a Third World intellectual weaned on the Stalinist regidification of Marxism in the direction of economic determinism and pervasive interpenetration of ideological loyalty and commitment in all life’s spheres. The emergence of Gorbachev and his poorly theorized and ultimately calamitous perestroika and glasnost constructs delinked the developing world from the world revolutionary process and disentangled her scholars from participation in mainstream global intellectual processes and movements, especially intellectuals like myself who were sound on Soviet Marxism but were wary and, thus, unaware of the procreative possibilities of Western Marxism.

So, aside the works of Antonio Gramsci, some Lukacsian texts, and the writings of Christopher Caudwell, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton, as well as the tens of Soviet and East European intellectuals whose critical productions lay at the base of my own scholarship, I was in the mood to rebel, to explode in strange intellectual directions. I found succour in the philosophy of Nietzsche and began to devour his works.

What I found enchanting about Nietzsche is his rejection of both Schopenhauer’s excess of moral determinism and infinitude of the tragic state and Emanuel Kant’s universal moral order construct. The measure of Nietzsche’s influence on ‘Autonomy of Values’ is located in my attempt, in Nietzsche’s fashion, not only to account for the genealogy of morals or even the revaluation of values but in their liberation from the confines of convention and crippling orthodox assumptions, from the region of production and affirmation, to the domains of determination and reinvention. However, Nietzsche is not the only pervasive influence in a work I truly believe is intellectually stronger than my other works.

‘37 Seasons Before the Tornado’ was written during the heydays of military dictatorship in Nigeria and could pass for a prophetic offering because of the tragic deaths of Abacha and Abiola. Okigbo also was a prophetic poet. What does a poet like you have in common with a seer?

I do  not know if there is a transcendent quality in the process of poetic composition, not in terms of overcoming the limitations of the imagination that derive from realms of material consciousness to project a future possibility, but in penetrating extra-terrestrial regions that can account for the future in present time. Whatever the case might be, I wrote the poems in the collection that was originally published in 1997, between 1987 and 1989, including the title poem, ‘37 Seasons Before the Tornado’, a clear ten years before the deaths of Abacha and Abiola and the convulsive political events that ushered the Fourth Bourgeois Republic in Nigeria.

Aside creative works and critical works, you also have books on democratic process, like ‘Illumination’ and ‘Democratic Transformation and Social Change in Nigeria’ where you captured Nigeria’s struggles in politics. How would you say the country has fared so far?

While the realm of cultural production, particularly the creative and critical sites of aesthetics, has overwhelmed in performance from the 1930s to 2018, without a let up in intensity, output and global quality of texts, the realm of politics has tragically underwhelmed with the exit of the nation’s founding fathers and mothers, thus placing society at the precarious crossroads of perdition and clear and present existential danger. This situation has led to the exhaustion of the sense of nationness and nationhood and the historicist spirit that undergirds it, buffeted as the state is by an imperious wind of moral infamy, economic profiteering by a primitive buccaneering class and an insolently intolerant and spiritually repugnant illiberal political order.

I wonder how many people have paused to ponder about the miracle of Nigeria’s aesthetic realm from the generation of D O Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, Herbert Ogunde, Pita Nwana, Abubakar Imam and James Ene Henshaw through the triumphal presence of the likes of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, Chris Okigbo and second generation writers like Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, Denja Abdullahi, Ben Okri and many more. If you look at the critical frontier, the picture is the same.

You come across as a restless spirit having an endless intercourse with the universe, even outside the academia where you flourished. What’s the driving force?

There is a fair amount of restlessness in every soul, no matter your material, financial, political, social, cultural or even intellectual station in life. The quest to master the contours of existence, at both rudimentary and sublime levels, evokes constancy of efforts and spirited attempts to overcome odds, nurture dreams to reality, and translate promise into possibility. This is not unique to me as an individual; it’s a trait that defines humanity as a whole.