National Mirror www.nationalmirroronline.net
report of colonialism and racism and we better be careful, because some of the people we have to seek reparations from are some of our own past leaders. The point I’m making is that two of them have very interesting audiences and they appeal to those audiences; but Fela is making people misunderstand us. Of course, Fela has issues with the mismanagement of Nigeria and that can be seen when he talked about the death of his mother. How did you get to meet the African first Nobel laureate, was it on professional or personal grounds? Well, he was a professor in University of Ife when I first got to Ife and I met him the first month when I was invited to his home by a woman who was also being invited there. I met him with some African writers but I didn’t have any extensive conversation with him. I came on a number of occasions and he knows who I am. We have always known each other because before I met him, I had studied some of his works. We are not friends, but he is someone I admire from a distance and I hope to, one day, have a conversation with him. Maybe I will hear a response to my lecture. From 1978 to 1985, you lectured at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), what major differences did you observe between the school system in Nigeria and that of the United States? There are lots of differences I had to get used to. One is that the Nigerian system is more rigorous. What I mean is that in the Nigerian system, the people get sorted out by the exams that would determine if the person is going to go forward or not. However, the students I had in Ife were the kind of students who were able to jump the hurdle; so they are well-educated. The main thing is that the educational system of this country is based on the British system which is different from our own, although when I was in Ife, it was moving towards the Americanised system. The students were very good; though it took them sometime to get used to my American accent and it took me awhile to kind of pronounce their names, but the students, in a whole, are excellent. The U.S. system is not all that different; you can go to a university where you can go as far as a PHD; we have also a research institution; we have also the institutions and the highest they offer will be a masters, there are colleges that are just four years schools and you get your degree, you graduate and you can move on. And we also have community colleges which are just two years school. Sometimes, you can go and get a certificate for a subject or you can transfer to a four year school for a full degree. All I can say is that the kind of respect that students give lecturers in the Nigerian university is different from the one in the United States, that’s a big difference. But, I can say again that the school system here is becoming more like what we have in the United States. As a teacher of African literature, is
Artman In The House
Friday, July 20, 2012
there an evolving style in contemporary African literary art? I think there probably is, but if you ask me to specify, I am not sure if I can do so. I have been teaching African literature for a number of years. In fact, the lecture I was commissioned to do, kind of called me back to the subject, but the teaching of Africa literature that I have done is more like on the classical writers such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and others, rather than the most recent writers. What is your impression of the entire Wole Soyinka lecture? I was very pleased actually; I didn’t know the kind of audience that I would have. I thought it would probably be academics, but it was a mixed audience. There were many young people there who seem to be quite interested in what I was doing and for me to have lots of people, it’s positive. I am grateful for that, just to think I spent a lot of time preparing for the lecture. I think I was well-received. Would you kindly assess Soyinka’s poetry works some more, because in a particular interview you said you were not a fan? I would actually because in the previous interview I think I gave a wrong im-
pression about his work, I said I wasn’t a big fan; but I need to clarify that I like quite a number of his poems like Ulysses for instance. Many of his poetry are highly-ranked like his plays. He is a genius. I think, what I mean is that what he does is very good, but all his works can never be of equal value. That means when you said you were not a fan of his poetry, you weren’t talking about all his poetry? Not at all, it’s his more recent poetry which I don’t think compares to his former poetry. I think his greatest investment has been on his prose, more especially and then his biography and essays. So, that is where I believe he put most of his energy. He writes his poetry from time to time; he is not known primarily as a poet, but it is true that the lot of his works that was taught in Ife, when I was there, were his poetry which the students complained was too difficult. I told a young woman who raised the question about language level after my lecture that there is nothing wrong with difficulty. One can never be so difficult that you can’t be understood. It’s a high level of discourse that a writer uses to raise the student up to the same level than for the artist to go to a lower level. What influenced your writing the two
books, The Black Post-modernist Fiction of Leroi Jones/ Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany and Masters of the Black Drum: Black Literature across the Continuum. I got that phrase from the title Aime Cesaire who was the founder of Negritude Movement and he is a poet from Martinique in the Caribbean region. When I started out to do my dissertations, I actually was going to write about the poet/novelist named Lawrence Durrell when I met some interesting black writers and I was excited by what they were doing so, that got me started on the road that led me here. What’s your latest literary work? The lecture is the most recent thing I have done, but I am actually working on a book called The Archeology of Soul, which is the study of African and African American statics. I, hopefully, should finish that by the end of this year. Also, I have been working on a couple of essays, one of which is about a Jamaican poet and novelist, Claude Mckay, who was associated with the Harlem renaissance in the United States. I am also working on an essay about my own love of literature- how I got involved with whole business of writing and studying literature, but the work is still in progress.
FACT FILE •
Robert Elliot Fox is Professor of English and Africana Studies at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, SIUC, USA
•
He holds a B.A. degree from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
•
From 1978 to 1985, he taught at the University of Ife in Nigeria, alongside Scholars Wole Soyinka, Biodun Jeyifo, Kole Omotoso and Akin Euba among others.
•
He joined SIUC faculty in 1991
•
In 1992, Fox was a resident scholar at Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for AfroAmerican Research.
•
Courses he has taught at SIUC include Black American Writers, Afrocentrism and Black Aesthetics, The African Novel, The Beat Generation, Science Fiction and graduate seminars on contemporary American fiction.
•
Fox has a collection of essays and interviews dealing with black writing and one of his pertinent recent essay is “Afrocentrism and the X Factor” in Transition (issue 57).
•
Fox’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Yardbird Reader, Okike, West Africa and elsewhere.
21
Prof. Fox delivering the lecture at the event to mark Wole Soyinka at 78.