‘Why I am passionate about women in literature’

Professor Vicky Sylvester is a writer who has been teaching at the Department of English, University of Abuja for the past 17 years rising to be the Head of the department. Currently working on a novel documenting the Tiv and Fulani crises, in her native Benue State, Prof. Sylvester sat down with Sunday Trust to […]

Professor Vicky Sylvester is a writer who has been teaching at the Department of English, University of Abuja for the past 17 years rising to be the Head of the department. Currently working on a novel documenting the Tiv and Fulani crises, in her native Benue State, Prof. Sylvester sat down with Sunday Trust to discuss Nigerian literature its many merits and headaches and criticisms that the academia is not keeping abreast with contemporary literature.

You have an interesting profile, professor and you look so young. What more can you tell us about your background?
I went to school throughout my life in Jos. Then I went to London and started a programme at the International University but didn’t stay long and then I came back. I started working with a newspaper, The Standard in Kano. But my mind had always been on teaching so I left and went back to BUK for my masters and after that I went for my Ph.D. and moved back to Jos and registered for my research with the School of African and Oriental Studies. When I came back I went back to teach and then moved to Abuja. I have been here for 17 years at the University of Abuja.

What happened in London that made you abandon your studies initially?
I was expecting then and my mother wasn’t very comfortable with the idea of me being away by myself. She kept thinking something might happen so I abandoned the programme and came back just to give her peace of mind.

That is very considerate. You have always wanted to be an academic. What is it about teaching that fascinates you?
Yes. I was doing very well as the state editor of the Nigerian Standard in Kano and I know anywhere I find myself I put in my best and leave my footprints on the sands of time. Whenever I talk to journalists now I always think, this is not what we used to do back then. Things have changed a lot. I remember then I would pursue stories to the conclusion no matter where it took me. I remember doing a story on stolen government vehicles. Suddenly ministries would report that government vehicles had been stolen and I got a hint and decided to pursue the story. I pursued two cars to Niger Republic and found them being driven by some government people there with their numbers still on because they had just been sold by some government officials. I took some photos, returned and did my story which I sent to my editor in Jos. He got in touch with the governor then. That night I got a call and the story was not published. The press secretary to the governor came to inform me that the governor wanted to see me. When the governor saw me he was surprised and asked if I had finished secondary school. I was in my pair of jeans and shirt. I told him I had finished from the university. He invited me to sit down and told me he had been reading me and had been impressed by what I had been writing. He said they would discipline the people concerned in the scam and asked me to let him know about such things especially when they concerned his staff. I said this is what has been happening and I decided to investigate. He said he wasn’t blaming me and appreciated that I did my job but he thought we should be careful because if the news had gone out, a lot of people would assume, without knowing all the facts, that this was something that was happening all the time. There were certain things that were better handled in-house. I knew that when I left Kano to go for my masters, I had done a lot already such that when I asked to resign, because I knew when I was through, I wouldn’t go back, but they said no and insisted that I went on a leave of absence instead. I left and have never gone back.

So where did you end up eventually?
Well, immediately I started my masters, I started teaching. I taught in several schools in Kano. And by the time I finished my masters I moved to Jos and started my Ph.D. and from there I moved between Jos and London doing research and writing my PhD and as soon as a I submitted it in 1995, I moved to Abuja. So I got back to where I wanted to be. I enjoy teaching and writing because the writer expresses the fear that people are afraid to express and the struggles of writers are social. When I teach and write, I started writing way before I started teaching, I had been writing short stories in the press, I was interested in women because I lived with an aunt and other women around her who were going through situations that I didn’t think were normal and I started writing and publishing in The Nigerian Standard. And every time I went there, people would say, You mean it is a small girl like you that has been writing these stories. That was how I got the job after my NYSC. So I was I little concerned with the way women went through difficulties in marriage and childbearing without appreciation and at the time, you got a job with difficulties. There were things one was qualified for but some people would think otherwise. I would go for certain jobs which ordinarily I was qualified for and some men wondered why I went for these positions. I recently went for a job interview and they looked at me and thought I was rather young, then they expressed surprise that I had a doctorate. Then someone later said, well, you’ve all told us about yourselves but when it comes to the real interview, it’s not going to be about whether you have a doctorate or not, and in the whole room I was the only one with a doctorate and I ended up not getting the job. So I have had these experiences and have read and written about them and that was why I started off by doing a literary history for my PhD because it exposes one to the old and the new and whether there is an improvement now from when Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart or when Elechi Amadi wrote The Concubine and what we are having now with Kaine Agary’s Yellow Yellow and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. I went to a conference and we had 92 women in attendance. Some people may say that is not a huge enough number but compared to what we had in the 1980s, there has been a lot of improvements.

You are of the opinion that writers are public intellectuals. Do you feel that sometimes some of their works read like a manifesto or an extensive criticism of society rather than a work of art?
A work of art very often is about something. Soyinka wrote The Trial of Brother Jero some 50 years ago and now the society is grappling with these issues. He could see 50 years ahead and now we are seeing what the religious institutions are doing in the country. Writers are witnesses to all the social issues we have, such as corruption, decaying infrastructure and so on. Suppose I am writing a novel about love now and there is an outage just when the muse is on, when the power returns, I may just chip in something to reflect the frustration I felt and you would recognise the situation because you have had similar experiences. You can call it a critique.

Being passionate about women literature and the depiction of women in literature, looking at the works of Achebe for instance, you will see that the women were more or less props in the background, hardly playing major roles as opposed to what obtains in contemporary writing, especially by women, where female characters often play the lead. What does that say about the progress that has been made over the years?
If we look at the history, historicism plays a great role in literature. Achebe was writing pre-colonial and he was writing about the society he knew even when he was growing up and so he knew this is the role women played. So you find Okwonkwo beating his wife during  the peace period and people take offence because he did it at a particular time, not because he did it at all. You would see that the same Achebe when he was writing Anthills of the Savannah, he had moved from Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart and criticism had started. In Anthills, he tried to make a difference even though there were still difficulties because the female character came across to me as a hermaphrodite but at least he made the effort. There are men who call themselves feminist now, men who recognise that women should be treated justly and so you see that in Tanure Ojaide’s novel there is that presentation of strong women who are doing things that normally you could see any woman do even though sometimes there is a tendency for a community to think that for a man to be strong, he has to put down women. Kaine Agary in Yellow Yellow is not happy with prostitution into which women have to move when faced with unemployment. Of course you still have a lot of rape cases which women need to take very seriously in their writing because when you go to some state and see babies being raped, you wonder if the perpetrators are human beings. And in Akachi Ezeigbo’s novels you see also the presentation of strong women, women who are kept away from meetings where important decisions are made and yet you have these women overcoming these situations. So even though the condition of women has improved, the challenges have not been completely wiped out.

You spoke about the role of criticism in making Achebe think of writing stronger women. But when you look at contemporary Nigerian writing, criticism is in serious short supply. What is happening? Why don’t we have enough criticism of contemporary literature?
I don’t think there isn’t criticism because in the last three years I have organised three conferences, one for Odia Ofeimun, one for Abubakar Gimba and one on Chinua Achebe and there were criticism from younger writers, there is someone who wrote on Achebe’s children and Achebe’s children, most of them are women. These people are looking at Achebe from a different perspective.
When we are talking of criticism, I know there is a lot being said about younger people neglecting their culture. You can’t neglect your culture and be successful as a writer because you start from your base. Writers in Diaspora who think culture is insignificant will sooner or later realise they can’t go far because the West won’t give them as much praise as they would get from home.

But isn’t this as a result of the cosmopolitan nature of the cities these writers grew up in?
Well, if you read a lot regardless of whether you were born and bred in the town, you still have your parents and elders around you, the culture is never too far. TS Elliot emphasized the importance of tradition and the individual talent. You have to look around you and read and never neglect your roots because that is what builds your identity. I grew up in Jos but that doesn’t mean I should forget where I am coming from or where my parents came from because every now and again I go back even though I have never lived there. A writer reads a lot and writing is a lonely profession. You read when you are alone and write when you are alone. And talk to people a lot. The earlier these writers learn their tradition and incorporate it in their works, the better they would be as writers and the more they will be accepted by people around them.

When you look at the academia, you find lecturers who write novels and plays and force them on their students without these books being subjected to any proper production process. And the irony is that outside the school, you don’t see these books anywhere. What are your thoughts on that?
It would be wrong for me to say these things don’t happen but there are laws on ground that say what books students should read. For example it is not every book you can use for comprehension. When a teacher brings a book, there is a committee in every department that is supposed to look at the book and decide if it should be adopted as study text. There are some teachers who hide some books from the department, some of them are not brought up. There are categories of lecturers whose books cannot be accepted for promotion. That tells you how serious the university takes the situation. So if you are an assistant lecturer or a lecturer II or I, you can’t bring books that a senior lecturer will bring because they are not accepted at your level. So why would the department accept that these same books be given to students. Sometimes people just say these things without knowing what is involved.

What I have noticed is that the students are often afraid to give honest critiques of these books because the author is the one teaching it and he may decide to fail them on account of this…
I don’t think so. Every writer wants good criticism to improve on his writing and that is what most people are complaining about. Students seem to think that because this book is written by so and so person, if I make a negative comment about it, this might be the situation. The teachers meanwhile are complaining that students are not doing proper critiques because they don’t know how to do a critique. Two, they are wrongly afraid because the writer wants you to say something because he wants the book to go far. Every book needs a second reader at least before going to press. When you finish a book, put it away for a long time and when you come back to it, you will read it more objectively and see what it really needs, if it is the language that needs to be done better. Students now are not bold enough. When I was a student, we read ahead of our teachers. Now when you give students books to read for next semester, 90 per cent of the class will tell you they couldn’t find the books. And then they are looking around for some hand out that says something about the book so they won’t have to read it at all. This is also about the reading culture. In a particular course, I read over 17 books. Now you give students seven books and they scream. They prefer you give them hand outs or some kind of book like you just mentioned, believing that if I buy this book, I may not fail.
Sometimes you have people who didn’t go to the university working and reaching a level beyond which they can’t be promoted because of their qualification. You have such people coming to the university and they tell you, I didn’t come here to get knowledge but to get a certificate. They find younger students whose assignments and tests they copy from.

When you look at prizes being awarded for literature in Nigeria, most of the judges are from the academia and there have been criticisms that these intellectuals live in the closed environment that the university is and hardly read beyond the first generation of Nigerian writers and so find it difficult to relate with contemporary writers and the works they are doing. Is this the case, you think?
I can’t see how anybody could say that teachers don’t relate to those writing. In fact, I think they help to lift the work. They create a lot of criticism and awareness for the works and most times the conferences the universities hold all over the place, it is these writers works they are teaching and encouraging people to read. You hardly go into a lecturer’s home or office and not find the works of upcoming writers. And lots of them are writing. Remi Raji is writing, Tanure Ojaide is writing and they are winning awards here and there. It’s wrong to think the academia is not interested in what is going on around them.