ACADEMIC CRITICS, LEAVE ART ALONE
any voices to the contrary are dealt with strongly. If you are a man, how can you write about a woman? If you are an American, how can you write about an Indian; or the other way around? How can a Dalit’s pain be felt and penned by a non-Dalit? Identity has created more silos in art, and imposed greater limitations than the worst of people-dividing tactics of imperialism, racism or communalism - for its stifles people into ghettos in soul.
The accusation of appropriation is the death sentence. There is a conspiracy here: the need for the school of realism in art to establish a monopoly and deathspray the fields of romanticism. Stick to your own self, your own life, your own experience while writing, while dreaming… or else you will face charges of stealing a dream that legitimately belongs to someone else.
When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie dismissed post-colonial as a “scholarly section created by professors in need of jobs”; she made three mistakes. One, she underestimated the fury of our age: the 21st century love of realism is “…the rage of Caliban seeing his own face." Retaliation had to be swift. Second, she possibly did not read the beautiful line that explains many a paradox, including the purpose, and futility, of a loud cacophony called a television prime time debate - you cannot explain a point to a man whose job depends on not understanding it.
But most significantly, she makes the benevolent mistake of the artist, whose creative surplus initiates all art, the quest to create beautiful things, to find aesthetic meaning to life, contemplating the kindness of the universe that may otherwise be dark and empty that the impotence of the critic is dark, ugly, and hate-filled. The inability of those who can neither create like the artist, nor appreciate and enjoy it like the art lover, the reader, leads them to attribute ugly meanings to beautiful creations of art.
So Adichie has betrayed the aspirations of the tryst of Nigeria by daring to question a professor whose chair, and salary, is assured only as long as post-colonial studies are held in esteem and considered valuable in subsidized academic campuses across the world. When you try to tell a story of a little girl born in a Nigeria which has found Independence long ago, the academic will not let you just tell a story. Not for a second is it the argument of anyone that the barbaric cruelty and inhumanity of colonialism, the injustice of racism, or the sustained brutality of the caste system have no significant impact on people, society and nations: it is so humungous it cannot miss anyone; much less so an artist. In sculpting each sentence, reworking each phrase, choosing each word: the artist knows the value of every detail, every judgment: the impact of early morning sunlight on a lady’s face as tears roll down slowly across her cheek are clearly understood by a writer. To then miss the impact of a British empire on a nation of a billion people after centuries of subjugation is akin to accusing the sub-atomic physicist of been oblivious to the asteroid.
If we continue to take the academic critic too seriously, instead of dismissing them with disdain, we will soon believe that humanity is in grave error by not waiting for the space alien to write about their invasion of earth and accusing science fiction writers of portraying the Martian without sensitivity. Stories are stories, books are books; they are well written, or badly written. That is all. Sriram Karri, author of Autobiography of a Mad Nation, is a novelist and columnist.