The Novelist as an intellectual

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena

The novelist of whom I write today is not just the writer of novels as a genre in literature. I refer to the entire extended family of imaginists and story-tellers that include playwrights, poets and the novel writers themselves. These are the kind of thinkers that have deployed fictive imagination in their attempt to make sense of and change the world.

Like practitioners of any other discipline and professionals, over the centuries, the fictive imaginists of all shreds have taken time and used their very art of writing and performance to justify their existence and to defend their vocation. As dealers in thoughts and ideas the fictive imaginists are not easy to ignore because they have the ability to capture the hearts and minds of men and women in any society. Any one, in any society, that can arrest the attention and capture the imagination of men and women attracts political attention.

Politicians as political animals par excellence pay attention to anything and anyone that has the ability to seek, find and keep the hearts and minds of the Hoi Polloi, the people, plebeians or the masses as they are variously called. Like their cousins the journalists and scholars the novelists ply their trade, by accident or design, in the very epicenter of the world of politics as a universe of power. While the scholars claim objectivity and scientific research as their entitlement to truth-telling the journalists also hug onto objectivity and fidelity to facts as their asset.

The novelists frequently claim inspiration and imagination itself as their badge of honour that entitles them to the licence to express themselves, comment on people, places, situations and events. The word novel itself is a huge claim about the production of thoughts and ideas that are new, original and unusual, that society needs for its survival and progress. That is how far the novelists take themselves seriously and locate their role in society.

It is the Ugandan philosopher and essayist, himself a novelist in the sense of this article, Okot P’Bitek, who made the bold argumentative declaration that the ‘artist’ is the ruler that commands society through the beauty of words, objects and actions as opposed to weapons that soldiers and warriors use. With his words the novelist can either charm or enrage society into some action. In that sense, the novelist rules society through charm, beauty and ideational influence. The words novel and novelist in Africa cannot be mentioned without reference to Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist and essayist, who actually penned an influential essay that argues that the ‘novelist’ is a ‘teacher.’

As a teacher the novelist reminds society of its history and explains to men and women their condition in life. He is the interpreter of reality. A teacher is he or she that supplies new or novel information to societies. Achebe understood and embodied the idea of the novelist as at once a historian, story-teller, philosopher, political analyst and cultural custodian of culture. In his self-understanding and understanding of other novelists, Ngugi wa Thiongo is unabashedly clear that the novelist is a player in politics. In his thesis on “writers in politics” Ngugi’s holds that all serious writers participate in politics by either affirming or negating the status quo.

More political are those writers and performers that claim to be neutral or apolitical because in that way they endorse the standing order of things. Like other intellectuals, novelists have sided with revolutions and in some instances used their imaginative power to endorse dark regimes. Hitler and the Nazi had some novelists amongst their champions. Fictive imagination and artistic talent are not an innocent vocation as they can be deployed in the services of darkness itself. The novelists find themselves amongst those labourers of the mind and crafters of the social vision that are called or call themselves intellectuals.

Ali Mazrui describes the intellectual as an individual that has a facility for ideas, a passion and a capacity to handle many of them competently. Mazrui might just have been describing himself and expanding that description to refer to intellectuals at large. Intellectuals have that privilege to reflect on themselves and generalise the reflection to refer to others. Edward Said did the same when he rigidly defined the intellectual as, not all thinkers, but that one who “speaks truth to power.” In the Saidian sense, the intellectual is a dissident and a heretic that challenges power and questions authority.

Novelists of the world have severally shown the capacity and passion to handle ideas competently and also to speak truth power. African novelists that include Achebe and Ngugi spoke truth to the power of colonialism and worked over time critique and question African postcolonial regimes that arrested, imprisoned and exiled them. The lives of African novelists have circulated in the thin line between being assets and suspects to different political regimes. Perhaps the novelist is at his best when he is an underdog and a prophet of social justice, not a defender of power and privilege.

The Trial of Christopher Okigbo
In 1967 the Nigerian poet, teacher and librarian Christopher Okigbo died in battle. He was fighting on the military side of the Biafrans, Igbos, that were struggling to secede from Nigeria to form their own republic. The African intellectual community was devastated and largely enraged that such a talented novelist would surrender his life in armed battle for a political cause. Mazrui wrote an angry novel, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, which was published in 1971.

In the novel Okigbo finds himself between Heaven and Hell in the afterlife, sitting in court and being prosecuted for betraying poetry for a political agenda that cost him his important life. The suggestion of Mazrui’s novel is that Okigbo as a talented novelist should have kept away from guns and battles and concentrated on poetry. Indeed Mazrui’s kind of intellectual is a removed thinker that contemplates matters of life and the world from his closet away from blazing guns and bullets.

Intellectuals have a tendency to embrace the Ivory Tower and seek to stay away from the rough and tough terrain of political struggles to which they can comfortably but powerfully contribute ideologically. It is a standing image of the intellectual that he or she is a safe and comfortable fighter that is not a warrior. Journalists, scholars and the novelists as an extended family of mind workers are frequently expected to think and write powerfully but safely away from concrete struggles, an expectation that individual thinkers have found difficult to fulfill.

A Commission that held an inquest into the assassination of Walter Rodney listened to one witness who claimed that the legendary intellectual died while trying to assemble a bomb that he intended to throw at some opponent and enemy in the struggle for liberation. Many thinkers and originators of ideas do not only believe in producing thoughts and beliefs in some causes but also follow up their ideas with action as far as the battlefield itself.

Thinkers that produce revolutionary ideas and do not enact them or defend them in actuality are like the proverbial cooks that cook and do not eat their own food, somehow. It is a question that haunts novelists, and indeed other intellectuals, whether it is enough to just think and believe in some truths and not follow them up with action, some activism that may include physical confrontation. For their refusal to act on ideas novelists and other intellectuals have been insulted as armchair theorists that must not be taken seriously.

Why I write: George Orwell
George Orwell, undoubtedly one of the greatest novelists to walk under the sun confessed that for him writing was a natural calling that he could not escape even if he wanted. His essay of 1953, Why I Write, is that bold confession. He grew up a lonely child that made up stories and frequently spoke to himself and other imaginary people that became his community of the mind. For Orwell and possibly other novelists and essayists, writing began with an enjoyment of words for their sound and sense and ended up a vocation and celebration of language and the uses of it.

Novelists instrumentalise and even weaponise words. Novelists like himself, Orwell tells us, sometimes write for reasons of sheer egoism and the desire to be known and noticed, even to fill up gaps in their lives and appear to be alive when they are lonely and living dead objects. Other novelists write for the beauty of thought and language, the celebration of the shapes, the sound and sense of language. There is also an anger and a historical impulse that Orwell describes as an urge and an itch for the individual to ventilate his or her thoughts, observations and even feelings to the larger world. This is the impulse or inspiration that is sometimes a political purpose that drives intellectuals to publicly express their thoughts and ideas. That impulse and inspiration pushes writers to want to die for their thoughts and beliefs.

The Root of all Evil
For all its grandeur the vocation of novelists like the vocations of other intellectuals has been reduced to a profession and for others a simple job. The professionalisation of intellectualism be it for journalists, scholars and or novelists, has made money a reason for some to write. Once money is the reason and the cause the writer thinks more about the pay and the paymaster than the truth and justice of ideas. All thinkers face the temptation to think and write for the financial market or defend truth and justice. The day ideas became commodities that can be sold and bought truth and justice lost the struggle to money, the root of all evil.

For that reason, writing for money and writing for truth and justice have become two major temptations for the novelist of one kind or another. Writing for the jingle of coins and for a just cause is the difference between sophists and intellectuals.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina in Pretoria: [email protected]