Irele: All mourn death of an iconic critic

The death of foremost literary critic and scholar, Prof. Abiola Irele, on Sunday elicits reflections and encomiums from the creative world, AKEEM LASISI writes

His name did not jump onto the stage like that of a Hubert Ogunde. Neither did it dominate reading texts like that of a Chinua Achebe. Yet, Abiola Irele occupied a central point in the thread that ties the soul of Nigerian vis-à-vis African literature.

He was a critic, and a critic of critics. Apart from breeding many writers directly and indirectly, he breathed life into what creative writers produced, helping readers to have good perspectives of them, while also helping the creative minds to sharpen their crafts.

Indeed, many observers believe that the adventure abroad of the likes of Irele and Prof. Biodun Jeyifo affected the growth of Nigerian literature, say from the 1990s. It created a vacuum from which the country has not fully recovered. The reason is that, after their ‘era’, there were not many literary critics that could interrogate works produced by emerging writers, meaning that the latter generations were denied the interventions that the early comers like Wole Soyinka, Niyi Osundare and Tanure Ojaide enjoyed.

But there are others who believe that Irele’s legacies transcend geographies and ages. That is why the Nigerian literary community has continued to mourn him since Sunday, when he passed on in the United States at the age of 81. From writer and cross-generational witness to African and global literature, Mr. Odia Ofeimun; to teacher, critic and writer, Prof. Olu Obafemi, down to other stakeholders like Profs. Remi Raji and Okey Ndibe as well as Dr. Anthony Oha, encomiums keep pouring in, with most of them stressing the importance of the other eye that Irele brilliantly and vigorously represented.

To Raji, the Ora, Edo State-born critic was a master teacher and a compelling scholar of African literary criticism. His words, “He brought the discourse of Negritude to us in a lucid language reminiscent of Jean Paul Sartre, the original olohun iyo (salt-tongued artiste), teacher of teachers, Renaissance man; above all, a great inspiration and a cultured man.”

Ndibe describes Irele as a giant of African literary scholarship. He says, “His passing is a devastating loss for all who knew him personally, as I did, or through his stupendous scholarly work. He was one of our most insightful and generous scholars, a man whose weighty books illuminate Africa’s literary expressions and bridge the gulfs created by British and French colonial legacies in Africa. Beyond being an extraordinary, world class scholar, Irele was also a deeply humane person.”

For Oha, Irele’s departure is a deep blow to African literature, while another columnist and critic, Dan Amor, describes the passage as a rude shock.

“Just a month after Prof. Ben Obumselu went to be with his ancestors and three days after Onuora Nzekwu’s remains were buried, Irele has joined them. What’s happening in the literary firmament? Is there a festival of arts and letters going on there?” he asks in a Facebook post.

The President of the Academic Science of Letters, Prof. Olu Obafemi, also says Irele’s death is devastating.

He says, “He was a major library and repository of knowledge in global literature and in the humanities. He was a groundbreaker in African literary criticism and human philosophy. What he has done for the development of literature in Africa, even the whole explication of the concept of negritude, is unmatchable. He was a warm and very humble person. His approach to life and literature was animating. He had the capacity to endear people to scholarship and excellence. Above all, he was a fine gentleman.”

 In a piece titled, ‘Abiola Irele: A tribute to the master’, Ofeimun revisits the deceased’s several incursions into the heart of literature on the continent and beyond.  He recalls how phenomenally good Irele was also as a singer, with references to some events within and outside Nigeria.

Ofeimun notes, “In his essential practice as a critic, Irele covered, with a scholar’s doggedness, what may be called the commanding heights and canonical works in African and Caribbean literatures especially those involving Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aime Cesaire, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. His interventions in the major altercations in African philosophy, as witnessed by his introduction to Houtounji’s African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, are like his involvement in contemporary discussions of directions and mis-directions in African education: seminal, comprehensive and as rigorously enlightening as when the deep calls to the deep.

“Never inclined to discount knowledge in favour of fashion, Irele remained one of the most astute defenders of the historical validity of Negritude. Similarly, he refrained from sitting on the bonnet of post-modernism and its disconnection of critical sensibility from engagement with author and literary text.

“As readers of his book, The African Imagination, can attest, Irele accommodated the excitements of new tropes in cultural studies, deploying a firm grasp of the classics within elucidatory practices that remain stubbornly literary. Perhaps, I should note that the most remarkable part of his general practice is his essential appreciation of the need to re-invent Africa’s intellectual resources, not just by going to the source, or as Negritude wished it, through a culture-clash dialectics, but also having the imagination and boldness to turn colonial alienation and the pressures of a globalising world into founts of creativity and weapons of integration.”

Ofeimun adds that it is not surprising that the deceased was very concerned about creating rooms for new experiments, new adventures, beyond the pursuit of commanding canons.

“Biodun Jeyifo dated this turn in Irele hermeneutics to that point in 1983 when he delivered his inaugural lecture at the University of Ibadan – In Praise of Alienation. It was not so much a break, not such a fundamental rupture but a re-tracking of give-away idiolects, ideas that were always there but subsumed under grand frameworks that had Negritude and its sub-texts of culture clashes sorted under the rigours of a Senghorian zeal that had a place for the concept of cultural mullato.”

Ten things you didn’t know about Irele

• He was born Francis Abiola Irele on May 22, 1936, In Ora, Edo State.
• He spent some of his childhood years in Enugu (where he learnt the Igbo language).
• Professor Irele was a polyglot; he spoke Igbo, Ora, Yoruba, English and French.
• Irele was praised as the scholar to have elaborated on the concept of Negritude, as posited in his essay What is Negritude? (This essay is featured in African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory by Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson).
• His first encounter with literature was through folktales and from the oral poets who recounted raras on the streets.
• He studied French and graduated from the University of Ibadan in 1960 and completed a Ph.D in French at the University of Paris, Sorbonne in 1966.
• Until recently he was Visiting Professor of African and African American Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.
• His other teaching positions included University of Ghana, Obafemi Awolowo University, University of Ibadan and Ohio State University.
• In 2010 he took up the appointment of Provost of the Humanities at the newly-founded Kwara State University, Ilorin.
• Professor Irele has been described as a most authoritative voice in African Literature, as well as a fundamental figure in Francophone African and Caribbean Studies. His dozens of academic papers and books spanning his five decades of work testify to this.

  Being a Facebook post by writer and performance poet, Iquo Diana-Abasi

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