“Spring, summer and all that”: Conversation with Emmanuel Esomnofu

I converse with the culture journalist Emmanuel Esomnofu on tradition, culture, criticism, and our failure as a people.

“Everyone has to be consecrated by the fire of the discipline.” — Mark IX. 49.

“There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.” — Goethe.

“Spring, summer and all that. It meant nothing to me until I came over this way.” — J. P. Clark, from a conversation with Andrew Sankley, African Writers Talking.

This conversation happened over the span of about two months. I have known culture critic Emmanuel Esomnofu for over three years, we worked together at Open Country; I left in 2021, he much recently. We have shared, as Clark-Bekederemo writes in his poem ‘Song,’ “bath and bed.” He visited me last year, together with J., a friend I got to meet through him. We had a glorious time talking about art and life and taking walks. There is a moment, from that visit, which I documented thus: The three of us strolling, one of us high on whatusedtobemyfavouritecig. Emma says: Ernest, how many prizes have you won? I am like: Me, prize? I have never won any prize. Emma: You dey whine me, guy. Talk na. I read your bio. Okay: Which contests have you won? Ernest: I never win any contest. And we (J.) all burst out laughing. I haven’t laughed that hard in a while. Emma: You are doing well. Me: Everybody is doing well. I remember that night, I can still hear the sound of the road, and feel the darkness descending over Iba. Esomnofu writes on music and movies for Native Mag. He was recently listed as one of Turntable’s 30 under 30 Power Players in Nigerian Music.

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Ernest: Hello, Emmanuel. We should have started this conversation a while ago; I have been held down by a number of things: one of them being that I had not (and I have not) read or reread enough of your work. But I am catching up. I was reading an essay you wrote yesterday—fragments of which we will discuss later—and I thought to ask you: Why did you start writing, or why have you continued to write? What is it about “a life in culture” that you find worthwhile? I am interested in why we do what we do.

Emmanuel: Thank you, Ernest. Again, I have to reiterate how pleasant it is that we’re having this conversation, after knowing each other for a while now. Thank you for taking the time to read my work. In response to your question, I must say that writing is the wound I didn’t know I needed to scratch, not until I was done with secondary school. After reading those compulsory literary texts, I thought I could produce similar work. I was moved most by poetry, and so I started writing mine, mostly because I wanted to prove that possibility of creativity to myself. Before then, I used to draw, and it was like a natural extension. Imagery was still the motivation. 

But, in particular, the prospect of shaping a life in culture, as you put it, came from the details of my personal experiences. If you remember Lagos in the mid-2000s, it was the period when Nigerians were learning to reclaim their music culture, after America dominated the market throughout the nineties and early 2000s. So, I was a child of localized loves. Thus, when I began to take writing seriously, being a storyteller, I wanted to reflect the nuances of cultural works. Becoming a culture journalist was a means of honoring the lifeblood behind my art. Had I read books from the start of my knowledgeable life, and came into literature through that primary medium, I might have turned out a different writer. However, I came into literature as a means to express the culture I found around me, and in natural service of those details have I continued to write.

Ernest: Yes. I read your essay on hip-hop yesterday: “Hip-Hop Saved My Life: A Love Letter To The Genre & Culture At 50.” I particularly love and respect the fifth and the penultimate paragraphs of the essay. I was discussing with “Rxbel” yesterday, who is now my friend as well (thank you for introducing us: he is a serious gift), and he told me your writing started with music. You were writing rap or “tracks” (as you put it in the essay) and that shifted into writing on music at some point. Wonderful start. 

I have mentioned that I used to rap as well; I did two songs in the studio, one with Minus 2 (Minus 2 was featured on Olamide’s “Street Love”); had a small record label (DJ Kamzoo Entertainment). I was about 14. I had been rapping before my mom died, but it was when I moved to Lagos after her death in 2012 that I knew it was something I could do. I would rap for my dad’s friends, for people who came to drink at “Mama Agbor’s Joint” (I fictionalized Mama Agbor in my short story “Mercy”). It was one of those people who told me of a “Jump-Off” at Odunsi, downtown Bariga. We’d line up at the top of this small red-brick storey-building, five, six, seven rappers, and blast one another for about two hours. It was Friday evening, people were returning from work, there was always traffic. There were dancers as well. The dancers danced below us, moved between cars and maruwas and bikes—Terry G-style. DJ Kamzoo, whose artist I became, set up the whole thing. I got punched with bars each time, but I got better. There was a guy named White Man who said once that a particular rapper’s mother should have menstruated him (a bar I think is weak now, but that was sharp in the heat of the moment). White Man is still doing music, but not rap.

I love the phrase “localized loves.” I was thinking weeks ago about the kind of writer you are. I said, “Esomnofu is a more skeptical or open writer or essayist than I am.” And I admire that. I think often about your essay on Teju Cole. I have not read everything you have written, but I think it is perhaps the finest thing you have written and perhaps the finest book review by any Nigerian writing today (as far as my reading goes). It feels like taking a walk through the book, and you stop at each point to describe the artifacts that punctuate the museum that is the book. Thank you for writing that review. 

What are your thoughts on culture in this country, though? Do we even have a culture, other than popular culture? I am thinking of culture in the way that Matthew Arnold described it, culture as “the disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.” The emphases are mine. Arnold was talking about criticism, but as Roger Kimball noted in “The Fortunes of Permanence,” it was in the context of culture. Criticism itself—whether cultural or literary criticism—to borrow a word from you, is the “lifeblood” of culture. Ask me and I will say, there is no culture (high culture) in Nigeria. These are some reasons why I believe this: we don’t have a tradition (a collection of established reference points); we have no artistic or musical standards; we celebrate the average, not even the good. We are mostly driven by noise. Fela was a great cultural and social critic, a great inventor, can we say he was a great musician? Achebe was a great novelist, but how many of his novels can be called “great”?  But what are your thoughts—on culture?

Emmanuel: It is very heartwarming to hear about your history in rap, Ernest. Like I mentioned in that essay, regardless of our location in the continent, Hip-Hop is never far from our origin story. I think, for this particular art form, what makes it so enthralling is the totality of its experience. Through rap, its practitioner gets to fashion a reality for himself, one which most likely draws from mythos. I am reminded now of Musa Okwonga’s fine essay on The Score album by The Fugees, where he noted how rap allowed the three artists critique the world around them through an aware sociopolitical lens, even though they’re presented, in signature haughtiness, as being above those experiences. I am thinking about what happens when the artist becomes both a creator and a curator, merging their own experiences with the wider stories of the world. The art of choosing associative narratives becomes a deliberate act of showing—it is this cinematic quality, more than anything, that has made me a rap fan for the better part of my life. 

Talking about cinema, yesterday I was working on a review essay of Mami Wata by CJ Obasi, and to do that, I had to watch some of his interviews. In the most recent interview he speaks about the absence of a Nigerian archive, how upcoming filmmakers cannot access the country’s history of film practices. Mentioning the likes of Herbert Ogunde, Ade Love, Eddie Ugbomah, he stressed that “this is why we’re lost and our stories lack cohesion” and said he was “making films like Mami Wata to mend the fractured history and heritage of our stories”.  I liked the movie, its cinematic experience was quite lush, but consider here the phrase fractured history. We’re both History students, and we do know that the presence of history doesn’t necessarily mean the presence of culture, but there’s material in the possibilities of one being there. Through culture, we shape history. But sometimes history isn’t enough to shape culture. Nigeria suffers the lack of these “specific instances of sensitivity,” as Teju Cole wrote in Black Paper (thank you for your comments; I loved writing that essay). I think we’ve come to a crossroads in our relationship with our cultural practices. Is it enough to hint at their presence? What is the currency of excellence when there aren’t many contemporary precedents to draw from? I believe our culture hasn’t yet transcended into high culture, not in the gradual way Hip-Hop has been over the years. Whose failure is this? I don’t know. But what I do know is that there’s immense potential, and that’s where critics like yourself are important, to show the points where the demands of high culture and the work we’re putting out can connect. Our economic reality would also have to change, because there’s few struggling countries who care enough for art, let alone the encompassing nature of culture. 

But, to ask you now, why do you think Fela is not a great artist? And is there a chance that Achebe never wrote a great novel? I’m interested in your critical parameters for the word. 

Ernest: I admire how you talk about Hip-Hop. In 2020, my second suicide attempt got the Lagos state government to my house, and I had to visit the hospital. One of the songs that held me through those days, perhaps the only song, was Vinnie Paz’s “Is Happiness Just a Word?” A great piece on the experience of being depressed. Standing in the hall of the Yaba Neuropsychiatric Hospital, waiting to be attended to, in anguish, that kind of anguish that does not show on the face, Paz played: “I’m watching life as a spectator / I can’t help myself, even though I possess data . . . / Familiar scenes starting to look foreign, derealization . . . / I’ve had doctors tell me that my mind is fascinating / But they can’t tell me why the sickness has been activated.” He curates the experience and represents it precisely. 

Like you have said, CJ Obasi’s phrase gets to the bone of the problem. We’ve had excellence, or something close to it. The achievements, though, have not been deliberately cataloged and ranked. Our memory is thin. Nigerians only remember what they need to remember to wage war. I left, a while ago, a history class where the lecturer narrated the history of Lagos to make bigoted comments about Igbos. (I am thinking of your essay on Achebe and Nigeria.) Not only are we not deliberate about keeping, documenting, seriously engaging everything, we are quick to topple the past. In my little reading in early Nigerian literature, I have found that the direction before 1970 (in poetry) was incredible. Until the Marxists came and attacked every good poet because they were “closet poets.” The Marxists themselves being average, their followers were impoverished. I am not optimistic about our time either: young Nigerians who have read Foucault or have heard his idea that structures / ranks have to be disrupted are using that to defend a continued fracturing. We don’t have a tradition yet, we want to create a new one. Lastly, the best minds have not gone to work on the best works in this culture. When they have, they have not done their best work. 

In a new book, Nigeria’s Third-Generation Literature: Content and Form, Ode Ogede talks about giving readers of Nigerian literature “effective standards of judgment.” (He was quoting Martha Banta.) He continues, “Those aspiring to undertake literary analysis and commentary on Nigerian literature should find a way to reassert evaluation’s prominence. . . A meritocratic ranking of texts, authors, literary techniques, generations . . . should prevail. By the same token, it should not be too much to ask for unbiased assessment of the readers, the evaluators themselves, of every stripe, and their models of appreciation, interpretation, analysis, commentary, exegesis, and review.” 

This brings me to your question on my “parameters for great.” Of course, Achebe wrote a great novel—Things Fall Apart is great on a number of levels. I finished rereading No Longer at Ease recently, I can’t say that it is a good novel. (I am yet to read Anthills or A Man of the People, so I can’t comment on them.) Arnold, in “A Study of Poetry,” talked about a historical way of reading art. If we ask, “Were Achebe and Fela great historically?” There is no question, in the context of Nigeria and Africa, they are giants, and by extension, in the context of modern music and literature. Their influence is pervasive. However, if we engage each work and measure it by the best from around the world, without considering the historical stroke, I doubt Achebe’s writing will rank very highly. I cannot compare Achebe’s essays to Primo Levi’s or Updike’s or Joan Didion’s. I think that great art gives us a qualitative “conception” of life. It makes life present with a face we have never seen or looked at before, but that we recognize. The nature, fervency of that face depends on how serious the writer is with his tool, language, combined with his moral fiber. Achebe was considerably moral. Looking at some of his work, though, it appears to me that he was not interested in “life.” He was interested in ideas—political, tribal. His obsession with the Igbo worldview (in No Longer, in his poetry collection, and in his essays) may have closed him, I think, from what that worldview encoded: life. In JP Clark-Bekederemo’s poetry, there’s a vision intensely rooted in life, therefore more useful to the predicament of being human. Being human is a complex endeavor; great art elegantly peels back the layers of that complexity. (Note: I started reading Anthills of the Savannah. I must say that the comments above do not hold in regards to the book—based on what I’ve read, it is, by any mark, a highly successful novel, maybe even great.)

What are your views on the duty of a writer? Is the sentence more important than the point? Is the depth and coherence of the argument more important than the “flowery” language (I have mentioned my disagreement with your review of Romeo Oriogun’s Sacrament)? Why do you read literature? What should it do? What is great writing?

Emmanuel: Again, I offer apologies for how long it took to get to this. I wouldn’t wish the brooding heaviness of multiple deadlines on anyone. But coming back to the parameters for greatness and other nearby considerations, I do see the merit of your assessment on Achebe. Not long ago, Chiedoziem and I were discussing how much of a disservice to prime literary ideals that Achebe didn’t capture the idiosyncrasies of his life in America. Binyavanga Wainana once inferred that the tragedy of Biafra was too much pain for Achebe, and that in some sense, he had left the world even before he was dead. I guess that accounts for his disinterest in life, as you put it. For me, great writing can hold multiple parts of the writer—it’s a reflection of their ideas, but ideas don’t emerge from a vacuum. There’s an individual, social, and even sexual perspective that’s in line with the intellectual focus of every writer. 

“Our memory is thin,” you write. “Nigerians only remember what they need to remember to wage war”. Yes. Yes. I’m currently shuffling between several art books and one of them is an anthology on modern African art. It’s surprising that Nigeria has had major art movements—the Osogbo and Nsukka schools, among many others—but their success has been scraped almost from existence. I think this intrinsic contemporary disregard for knowledge hampers our chance to sit at the feet of great art. If we do sit, do we listen to her wise counsel? Perhaps it’s a pessimistic view, but I’ve spoken to too many artists who are ignorant of Tradition. For them, art exists in the temporal frame of their own bodies, unlinked to anything that has come before and therefore stands little chance at shaking the future. What does tradition offer? A stream of consciousness, I think. 

Which brings me to Oriogun. You called him “undisciplined” in your famous essay, but I know we can both agree he’s an important poet. He emerges a bit from the J.P Clark tradition of southern griots who document everyday lives, although he tends to be more dramatic in his application. Nomad is more non-fiction than poetry, but I’d say in terms of his poetic journey, and that of Nigeria on a grander scale, I stand by Sacrament of Bodies being an epochal body of work. It boils with deliberation and glimmers with language. It doesn’t slither into sentimentality, rather upholds the currency of life. If one looks at the available books on queer experience we’d find in Africa, alongside God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu, Sacrament stands on that podium. We need more journalistic books which incisively peel into several aspects of that experience, but Sacrament holds enough heft to be explored in such books. I’m thinking now of Susan Sontag’s analysis of Diane Arbus in her seminal On Photography. She doesn’t condemn the photographer just because she disagrees with her work; even while revealing her flaws of perspective, her importance is recognized, for that same flawed way of seeing reveals something about the right way to see things. 

And so, I think I’ve said something about what great writing—any great art—should do. On an individual level, it should be accomplished enough to stand on the podium of greats. And as a piece of anthropological and artistic achievement, it should consider and, if it can, advance the considerations of eras past. Very few artists have successfully stood out on their own since the start of their careers. I read literature to enrich the quality of my life, but also to partake in the trans-generational passage of knowledge across continents. If one has read widely and intently, it’s not so hard to know what is truly great, and what masks beneath the veneer of the word.  

What do you think? 

Ernest: I think of “Tradition” as “God.” Tradition is what remains of God in the civilisation of the West: and, of course, we belong to that civilisation. The primary literature at the heart of that civilization is the Bible, which is “the mind of God in print.” But let’s look at it simply as literature: it remains the source, along with the achievements of the Hellenistic period, of the literary West. In other words, God appears first as a single Book and then that Book moves out and descends into other books that now form “the Tradition.” It is the same process of God becoming flesh in Christ and Christ becoming bread in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a good symbol for “Tradition.” The absence of God has created an instability, so that nothing seems permanent. When we lost eternity, we began to lose Tradition also.

I wrote this note down last month, I think, “Reinterpreting Eliot’s “heretic”—a la Blackmur—precondition for becoming a poet: Tradition / culture as a resource, not necessarily to be modified but tapped from. A poet cannot become great alone. The cloud of witnesses. Culture not only as standard but as usable standard.” We need tradition, then, not only as a standard but as a resource. This is what I think it offers. 

I would call that essay “infamous.” About Oriogun: the problem is that Oriogun does not “think” in poetry. He seriously has nothing to say, and he thinks he does. Or, let me rephrase, he has not yet found the courage or the patience to think, so as to say what he really has to say. He is hiding behind labels: “queer,” “African,” “slavery,” “oppression,” etc. He uses these words a lot in his poems and assumes that by using them he is being profound. It is like a man who writes bread on a piece of paper and gives it to his child, believing he has put food on the table. He has a gift, but he overestimates his knowledge. If Oriogun decides to write about a leaf and says to himself, “I am going to write about this leaf and nothing more. I am not going to mention ‘God’ or ‘drums’ or ‘road’ or ‘spirit,’ just leaf.” If he writes ten lines doing just that, it would be incredible. Imagine how much “thinking” a man has to do to write these lines from Frost: “It doesn’t seem so much to climb a mountain / You’ve worked around the foot of all your life.”

I have written an essay on Oriogun’s poetry. It should come out in about a month. I read literature to “enrich” my life as well. I mean, my heart aches in this particular moment and my desire is to read. When I am very hurt, I think of reading Shakespeare. The reason: one cannot read Shakespeare without extreme focus—that distracts me from the hurt. As such, my consolation is in the difficulty. Not in the “sweet words” of Shakespeare. He does not say, “I was given a box full of darkness, and that too is a gift.” No. He says, “o vengeance, vengeance! / Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained.” People think consolation, in literature, is about rubbing your head; it’s about kicking your jaw.

I was going to ask you about Afrobeats, especially Burna Boy’s recent comment. He said the genre lacks substance. You work in that culture and are doing very well. What do you think? Is the African Giant right? Personally, I think there is some nuisance getting started in that industry, with the “Afro-adura,” “Afro-this,” “Afro-pluto.” I think it would lead to nonsense in the end. Imagine naming a subgenre for every new style in literature.

That’s question one. Question two: Are you working on any project? A collection of essays on pop culture? Are you thinking of Doing WizKid’s biography? It may not be now, but what are some topics you would like to explore at length as a culture critic?

Emmanuel: Well, for sure, Afrobeats does have a sketchy relationship with itself. Is it a genre or a movement? If it is a genre, in what instances has it pulled towards a cohesive sonic and ideological core? We disregard it as a genre then. For me, the conversation of Afrobeats lacking substance is an understanding of this very divisive term from just one perspective. Perhaps, in terms of lyrical subject matter, few artists have demonstrated the range of Burna Boy, who I consider a descendant of 2Face Idibia. He has demonstrated high quality throughout his career, but so have other artists, within the mainstream fold and outside, where the most interesting African music is being created. For instance, I consider Tekno’s lyric, “turn around make I comot something for your back” a piece of stellar songwriting. Steeped in the dominant Pidgin lingo, it espouses lamba, that understated ability to appeal to urban Nigerian sensibilities, its humorous language for love and the stark tenderness that comes from it. We also have Omah Lay, whose oeuvre places him in the same category as Igoni Barrett, unflinching in their narrative of southern perspectives. So what’s substance, then? Technique is another thing, as only the best artists have reached high levels. But the storytelling is vibrant, it is alive. You cannot hear Bella Shmurda and not hear the scorching pressure of dreams trapped in a house in Lagos mainland, plotting its way out. 

And talking about the many Afro tags flying around, I do not regard them. I consider them at best stabs at humor and at worst, the musician’s desire to elevate their own importance by posing as pioneers. We shouldn’t play to those games, at least not as critics. Everything happening now has happened before, and for every invention, there’s a movement several years ago which laid down the blueprint. Right now, there are only a few verifiable trends, or would I say movements, available in the Nigerian music scene. Street Pop is one of them, so is the Alte counterculture, and most recently I would say the folding of emo themes into the music we’re making. To borrow culture journalist Wale Oloworekende’s phrase, we are “the saddest generation.” Living through the awareness of Nigeria’s existential failure, and paired with internal conflicts, creates a deep sense of betrayal, which sometimes only when we find its expression in art can we be saved. 

For my work-in-progress, I am wary of revealing concrete details but there will be a collection of essays, surely. The idea is to combine critical thinking with storytelling, and some essays I’ve written, even though in a rough form, are somewhat tilted in that direction. I am humble enough to know it’s a long process, but the first step is the most important, and having taken that step, I am grateful. A biography on Wizkid wouldn’t be bad, although it would take a while to dedicate myself to such a project. He’s one of those artists of which there’s so much in the public domain already, and fresh ideas take time. But I’m thinking. I’m always thinking. I want my work to reflect all that we are and all that we do not know we are. I seek to paint life. ◼

Here are some other essays by Emmanuel Esomnofu:

“Exploring “Ojapiano” & the Evolution of Nigeria’s Most Spiritual Flute”;

“Obi Asika & the Currency of Afrobeats Culture”;

“How Adekunle Gold Met Tio Tequila”;

“This Black Body Yours.”