Inside Niyi Osundare’s book of truth as trouble

We have this understanding that he let me know whenever he arrives the country from his United States base, for a chance to hold conversations on literature, the arts and invariably the state of the nation he loves so passionately.

It is a self-serving proposition on my part that has enabled me to scoop fellow reporters on the latest news about the renowned literary scholar’s career and his critical views on Nigeria.

So, I was understandably excited to receive his text informing me he was in town shortly after Christmas and New Year festivities.

But I didn’t get to see Prof Niyi Osundare, poet laureate, until Easter weekend, the eve of his departure in March!

Save for his appearances at Lola Soneyin’s 50th birthday in Ilishan, Ogun State, and at a colloquium organised in his honour in his Ekiti home state, the eminent writer-intellectual kept out of public view and also out of reach on phone for most part of the first quarter of the year… until he began to pack his luggage to return to America.

“I’m sorry, Yinka”, he apologised when I eventually met him at his Ibadan home. He explained that he had been preoccupied writing two books for which he came home to do the necessary research.

He had just signed the contract for Bookcraft Ibadan to publish one he completed the day before, he announced with glee and triumphant sense of accomplishment.

We both laughed heartily as I congratulated him at being freed at last from Muse’s purdah – temporararily as that may be.

“Truth is Trouble!” That’s the title of the book, a collection of essays consisting of new and selected articles from his previous writings.

He confessed that the intriguing title was not original to him, saying he borrowed it from an essay in famous American novelist and Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison’s book, “On Importance of Self Regard.”

The piece explored the concept of Truth as constituting a threat and menace to “those whose ideas of the world are negative – racists, bigots, political charlatans, economic saboteurs, those, generally, who want to keep the world away from progress because it hurts them.”

But it also views Truth as being trouble for those who speak it. “Why, for instance, it’s so difficult to speak the truth and at the same time why it’s so difficult not to speak it”, my host amplified, locating the dilemma in the paradoxical essence of truth as a bitter draught which however must be drunk in order to to heal!

“It takes a huge amount of courage to say the world is round when the political and ecclesiastical authorities that dictated conventional belief think and insist that it is otherwise. That’s why people were executed in the past for holding and espousing contrary views,” said Mr Osundare, in a veiled allusion to the killing of Galileo, the 16th century astronomer who, offended the church and the state and was sent to the gallows for daring to propound that the planet was spherical and had never been flat as it was thought!

Our conversation took place in the evening of Good Friday, the anniversary of the unjustified crucifixion and dastardly murder of Jesus Christ, the symbol of Truth, for the much-needed message of Truth He brought to save mankind more than 2000 years ago.

But it was vexatious to the clerical and political elite of the time and who persecuted Him for it.

I pointed out the apparent coincidence to the Professor sitting across me in his airy compound.

He paused for a brief moment and proclaimed me a sage. He regretted Pontius Pilate’s failure to follow through on his conviction and obvious truth of Jesus’ innocence, citing his cowardly prevarication at Christ’s trial as example of the disposition of many when confronted with the burden of dealing with the Truth.

“You saw how he spoke from both sides of the mouth like many do today for fear of losing power and their privileged position,” said Mr Osundare.

Despite the age-long war to kill it, the truth, the poet-scholar declared, remained elastic , resilient, mercurial and invincible with innate capacity to triumph over its opponents. “You hit it and think you ‘ve killed it, but it splits into various forms and protean verities”, he added.

The eminent writer said his new book was, in a way, building up on ‘Areopagitica’, a monogragraph written by John Milton, in defence of free speech and expression of the Truth.

The author of ‘Paradise Lost’, and undoubtedly the greatest intellectual of the 17th century England published the work in reaction to moves by the House of Lords and Commons to censor books and other forms of publication so as to, as they claimed, straighten the public.

Osundare described Areopagitica as one of the most powerful treatises on truth and the defence of it. In it, Milton argued that whoever hurt the book hurt the truth and that banning books or preventing the truth from coming out was useless as it was indomitable and would, like a sphinx, always rise again!

In ‘Truth is Trouble’, we see Prof Osundare historicising, analysing, intellectualising and also commonising the subject. The work examines Truth as a cultural, philosophical, and epistemological phenomenon.

Offering glimpses into the awaited book, Prof Osundare said it’s in five parts, each exploring different perspectives of the subject.

Part One, entitled ‘Troublesome Truth’ dwells on the author’s concerns about contemporary Africa and the world, relationship between African literature and body politic and global setting. It interrogates, among others, the notion of “When in Rome, act like a Roman,” which has recurrently featured in Osundare’s recent public engagements.

In the essay the New Orleans University’s Professor of English expressed his amazement that the government rather viewed the Diaspora debacle and continual brain flight from the continent in a positive light. “All they talk about is how much diasporan remittances come into the country in a year. Hardly do they talk about what we miss by the absence of some of our best brains . Why do they leave the home that needs them for Europe or America where they will rather be an appendage? It doesn’t make sense. I’m looking forward to when Africans can migrate on their own volition; but right now, we’re only being forced by unconducive environment foisted on us by our visionless rulers. People say it’s our diversity. No, our diversity is not the problem, it’s the management of it that is the problem. Our diversity should be a source of strength. It’s important that we’re different because in it lies our strength. Each of our various parts has something unique to contribute to the pot. What would an homogeneous world look like? Dull, drab, boring, uninteresting.

Section Two, entitled ‘Troublesome Muses’, profiles prominent poets, writers and others whose trade in words has earned them public envy and oftentimes, malice for their truth and social impact.

Listed in this hall of fame are the late Yoruba classic novelist, D. O. Fagunwa; romance writer, Amos Tutuola; literary icons – Prof. Chinua Achebe; Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka; Aloune Diop, Mariame Ba, the Senegalese novelist and first winner of the Noma Award; and Anthonio Jacinto, the Angolan poet who was the first poet to win the Noma Award.
One of the most interesting topics here, said Osundare, was an imaginary conversation he enacted between Tutuola and Bernth Lindsfors entitled ‘Telephone from Heaven’.

This section also contains a keynote address Prof Osundare gave at a conference in Lisbon, Portugal, marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, and two articles on Soyinka, one of which is his keynote speech when the Nobel laureate turned 80 some 10 years ago.

Troublesome Terrains – that is the title of Part Three of the book and is devoted to Osundare’s concerns for the physical environment as it relates to human beings placed in it, climate change and the ecology of knowledge.

Here, Osundare, in one of the articles, paid homage to the ‘book’ and offered a spectacular view of ‘Mountains’, raising appreciation of the issue beyond mere physicality to the realm of empathy in another lecture he gave at the University of Toulouse, France, where, years earlier, he had been conferred with an an honorary doctorate of the University

He depicted ‘Nature’ as the ultimate metaphor and tried to steer stakeholders towards the internationalist ideal of revering and protecting.

Asking “Where will writers be without nature?” he tried to show why every writer should be interested in nature and the arts.

Prof Osundare called Part Four “an unusual section” in a book of this type, consisting, as it were, of tributes to culture icons and artists. On the other hand, he remarked that it could not entirely be dismissed as an unusual entry because of its importance and the opportunity it afforded him to kill two birds with one stone – “speak critically and analytically about the works and their authors at the same time”.

He said this was critical as the stories of the icons are the same as those of the development of the African societies.
The roll call included Prof Achebe; Eldered Durosinmi -Jones (first Editor of ‘African Literature Today’; renowned literary critic, Profs Abiola Irele; Isidore Okpeho; Kofi Awonoor; Buchi Emecheta; Gabriel Okara; Garcia Marquez; Aduni Olorisa (Susan Wenger); and the historian Dr. Gabriel Akinola.

Others are Chukwunjidu Ihekaibeya; Moyo Ogundipe; Louis Armstrong; and Sir Victor Uwaifo, whom Osundare described as the ‘Ultimate Maestro!’ The last and most personal of the entries is a funeral tribute to his mother, the late Fasimia Osundare,, described by the poet as “The Mother Who Was Also My Muse”.

“The goal is to celebrate the contributions of these icons and highlight their virtues in a constructive way because they have made our lives richer and better”, Osundare explained

The conclusion composed of what Osundare described as five major interviews he had granted journals/media which he now adapted into prose.
In one of the interviews, published by The Nation in 2010, he dealt with how exile has not been kind to budding Nigerian writers, while in another with Dave Brink, a New Orleans poet, he spoke of time as the robe and at the same time, the wardrobe.

Others included ‘I am A Humanist’, published in an online newspaper; ‘Who begat African Literature?”, first published in The Guardian (Nigeria), and later online where he ran into a storm of controversy there is also a more recent interview with The Nation, which he entitled ‘Show, Don’t Tell”, that famous rule in the American writing workshop

I asked Prof Osundare why holding to truth is such a burden?

He replied: “Truth is feared – that’s what’s at the bottom of it all. The true word is the shortest distance between two minds. Truth doesn’t dissemble, it doesn’t pretend. It’s another word for boldness, for courage, for intrepidity. Though it’s often bitter to swallow, it’s desirable. Without Truth, the world can’t exist for one second. Fearsome and troublesome as it is, it’s the pillar on which the house of the universe rests!”

I had to interrupt my host at that point. If it is that significant, almost inevitable, why couldn’t all mankind embrace and live by truth, or is it merely an utopia? I asked the great teacher.

His response momentarily knocked me over before I saw the logic and with it the clear reality.

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“A world that’ll be the way you proposed will be impossible because it will not be human. At the bottom of our humanity is an indescribable complexity and imperfection. We can only leave a safe space between utopia and dystopia. To opt for Utopia is opting for a dreamer’s world. You have to wake up. On the other hand, to ask for dystopia is to sink into pessimism. In-between is the probable healthy interface of “We can!”, “Si puede!”, “Yes, we can!” Is Presidential Candidate Barack Obama listening?…..(Laugh).That was a solidly affirming statement that won a historic election. Yes, we can.

I bid my host a safe flight back to the United States and took my leave, cupping the tiny flame of hope his last words had just sparked in me from being extinguished by the howling wind of confusion in the dense darkness that enveloped the world.