The Book Of Counted Sorrows

This is not intellectual prozac

E.C. Osondu gave the first Nigerian reading from his new collection of stories, Voice of America, on Friday. He read slowly, in a gentle voice, sitting on a plush red and gold armchair, facing a packed audience. He must have known many of the faces, for he too had once belonged to the Lagos arts crowd, when he worked in the city as an advertising copyrighter several years ago.

Since then the man with the mysterious initials has put together an impressive haul of writerly achievements: an MFA at Syracuse University, New York, the 2009 Caine Prize for his story "Waiting", a teaching job at Providence College, Rhode Island, and this year the release of his first book, a collection of 18 stories that has had critics purring.

Not the warmest welcome

The reading felt like a homecoming, but it was hardly the warmest of welcomes. Instead, Osondu had barely looked up from the page he had been reading, when he was attacked by the writer Toyin Akinosho, Artsville columnist for the Sunday Guardian, whose pretty much good-natured feud with Osondu is long-standing.

Why, Akinosho demanded to know, did Osondu always return to stories of refugees, of hungry children in rags, of violence and misery in Lagos? And why were these the stories that were to be found among the early pages of the collection, while other tales, critical of Western culture, were only included towards the end? What an embarrassment for Nigeria, implied Akinosho, and how weak of Osondu to give in to the demands of Western publishers thirsty for the same old images of African dereliction.

It was an attack to which Nigerian writers, and African writers in general, have become accustomed over many years. The sense that, whatever his or her accomplishments as a stylist or thinker, the writer has failed catastrophically as a kind of brand ambassador for the nation by once again insisting on writing of sorrow, of violence, of desperation - and must be berated for this failing. This school of thought calls for writers who are nationalist in a narrow and very present tense, perhaps forgetting that the slow-burning patriotism of, say, a Soyinka, is borne out across decades.

A robust defence

Osondu's dismissal was laced with the scorn of someone who has fought this battle before. "To hell with you!" he said. "Don't tell me what to write about." And then: "Why would it be the writer's job to produce intellectual prozac?

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