Commitment in the era of alternative truths (1)
lead us out of the infamous woods. The cycle of waste of raised hopes and expectations and followed by a dash of optimism against the woods, has continued to torment the spirit of both the wayfarers and the bystanders. In spite of the profundity of the truth in his universally acclaimed novel Thingsfallapart and the other works in his pantheon, the Nobel sadly eluded him. I was personally not amused when the Nobel went to a songwriter two years ago. The import of these observations therefore is that even commitment at the highest level is not often rewarded by contemporary thinking. Commitment it would seem is its own reward. It is for the conscience which feels for others so that others may know and feel the strains of humanity that binds us all. As we honour his memory, we must observe that he was no less a committed writer than those for whom the world literary community sand the loudest hallelujahs.
Truth and Alternative Truth
Writing and writers have continued to draw from their immediate environment, from how they encounter reality and light the path to what ought to be. Of course reality functions at different levels just as our levels of perception of reality can be mitigated or obfuscated by external circumstances or loyalties or antecedents. History, that is the past, according to George Orwell is not located somewhere we can go visit and see and experience. It exists in books, in the mind and in other forms of storage. To the extent that that stored fact, that bank can be altered or manipulated, we must always learn to decipher between truth and lies. That ability to see the difference is what I may refer to as commitment within the ambit of this address. In interrogating the conflicting notions of truth which the colonial academy imposed on the empire, Achebe once observed that: it began to dawn on me that although fiction was undoubtedly fictitious it could also be true or false, not with the truthorfalsehood of a news item but as to its disinterestedness, its intention, its integrity. Needless to say id id not grasp all of this at one boundbutslowly overtime and experience of life and reading. and readingcameto mean reading with greater scrutiny and sometimes re reading with adult eyes whatih ad first read in the innocence ofmyliterary in fancy and adolescence ’..(34)
It was George Orwell’s rather enchanting novel 1984 which first drew my attention to the conflicting pictures of what truth could be and how truth can be manipulated. Forced on me by my Canadian Prose Fiction lectur- er then Ms. Barbara Turner while I was in my first year in the university, it opened my eyes to the inherent conflict which totalitarian states reinforce through manipulations and outright fabrications of reports. Orwell pointedly described the imposing structure of the four main Ministries which dominated the imaginary world of Bigbrother. According to Orwell, they were
the four homes of the four ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. the ministry of truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. the Ministry of peace which concerned itself with war. the Ministry of love, which maintained law and order… the Ministry of love was the really frightening one. there were no windows i nita tall’ .p.9.andl at erin the novel, orwell writes :‘ reality is not external. reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the party which is collective and immortal. Whatever the party holds to be the truth, is truth ’(214) In 1978 when we studied the novel, the historical date or year of 1984 was still a few years away; but its blinding truth had stared us in the face in the years of military misadventure into governance in Nigeria. It was in 1983 December that the real Gestapo seized the reins of governance in the country. By decree it became punishable if a newspaper published a truthful material that embarrassed the government of the day. Indeed the Orwellian 1984 had come to pass before our very eyes and there was and there was nothing we could do but to gnash our teeth in infant gums. While we were wringing our hands and wondering how we got into the mess of military brigandage of the extreme type, the same soldiers became our messiahs by terminating that extreme form in August 1985. For the next seven years, the new military dribbled the nation until it scored an own goal, bringing that wily administration to an inglorious end.
Alternative truth serves as a signpost for the other side of falsehood. It is ‘truth’ that is created to counter the truth as we know it. Often because there is no authentic medium of verification both forms of truths begin to jostle for space. Your truth is not my truth; their truth is not our truth. So, truth is not truth. Truth becomes subject to viewpoints. Truths begin to assume different dimensions not as a result of perspective; but because certain persons want the lie to compete for space with the truth of the narrative or the discourse. Truth therefore is dead; long live the power to confuse the reader or listener by infusing doubts into the information in the public space. To be sure the alternative truth could come from the most powerful source in the country, or in the polity.
One of the strengths of the voiceless people in society, in Nigeria is the attitude to government announcements. Perhaps that is the reason alternative truth has not taken hold completely of the nation. The people have become suspicious of government. Government is not trusted to tell the truth. This is particularly so when there is a great dissonance between what the government says and what the people feel and experience. So when the government announces the end of the recession, the people say ‘How? Or when the government says that herdsmen do not carry AK47 guns, the people then ask: who has been behind the brutal, genocidal killings in the land?
What has developed therefore is the critical faculty of the voiceless for whom the creative writer stands or ought to stand. This functions at two levels; the level of self criticism and the level of a professional holding the publicized statements of government to account. It also functions at the level of the professional critic evaluating the creative narrative against the objective realities of the day. So the writer himself, who may have become partisan and subjective as a result of ethnic or political affiliation, is not completely free from pandering to the doctrine of alternative truth.
We live in a climate where we remain uncertain about herdsmen in the field and herdsmen in beautifully adorned offices holding the reins of power, promoting alternative narratives to confuse the polity. Denial itself appears to be sufficient reason for us to believe that the scoundrels are renegades of the Libyan era, or politicallysponsored goons who cannot be prevented or arrested by the machinery of the State. We are yet to come to terms with the fact that Nigerians indeed voted for change but the current spirit of change destroys the commitment of the State to the security of life and property of the people.
The results of the elections of 2015 promised great hope, that a strongman would emerge who would show proper leadership, and that the trajectory of leadership would be altered radically in favour of the people.
All hands were on deck to rid the nation of the civilian administration that was reported to have stolen the nation blind. ‘Clueless’ became the mantra for change. Sadly, after three years of faithful patience, the Achebean question of knowing where the rain began to beat us has returned with blinding fury and we are once again compelled to enter our house through another man’s door. Some Clarifications
I have ambitiously added ‘commitment in the era of alternative truths’ to the topic of this discourse with the hope that I would have a platform to engage contemporary issues from the global arena which have implications on our national life. For in the real sense of it, we are too encumbered by cultural and political issues over which we have no control, or over which we have no say or in which or say is disrespected by a machinery well above our means. This is the real tragedy- not being able to engage our own challenges from the point of view of strength and knowledge.
Commitment in art is total involvement in all the possibilities of that form of expression, of literature and of the written word. It entails a definite acceptance of the responsibilities of writing of creating works which show that the author carries a social conscience that could make him ‘go to hell’ if he does not ‘keep his mouth shut’. It carries with it a moral obligation to be on the progressive side of an argument or an issue, not just for his artistic pleasure but with a view to engaging the hard issues of the day. But sometimes the writer can look beyond his time and his views may not be accepted or popular within his era or time or age. To see beyond one’s spatio-temporal time is to be isolated from contemporary current. It therefore means that as writers of committed literature we should look beyond the current configuration of things and how the political gladiators of the day have injured the sensibilities of the current generation. Let us pause for a while and do wishful thinking about the Nigerian-biafra Civil War of 1966 to 1970, let us assume that the separation of the political entity had taken place, what kind of literature would we have produced or would we be producing now?
The truth is that our nationhood is still being interrogated, still being questioned because of the absence of equity and justice and because of perceived notions of superiority and the mentality of ‘born to rule’. There is a grave distortion of the federal system that we operate which makes a section of the country hold back the rest in how they want to fulfill their dreams.