By Tony Afejuku

The point of view which Sophia Ogwude adopts in her discourse is such that enables her to make great demands on her considerable scholarly ability. In dwelling on heterogenous texts as she does, she recognises the danger in what I will call – and I am calling here – her puzzling selection. How will she – or, better, how does she – give harmony to her discourse of heterogeneity? Her failure to do so would make her and her discourse run the risk of allowing the scholar-reader’s interest to wane. The gleaner-glimpser-glitterer recognises that she limits her perspective/approach to an aspect to unite the texts. And the aspect in question is the subject that each text contains and addresses – and which seemingly promises a safeguard against the challenges of her aforesaid selection – or inclusion – of texts which give weight and colour to her discourse.

In Critiquing the Nigerian Socio-Political Space in Prose Fiction, Sophia Ogwude gives attention to twenty-three books and seventeen authors. The blurb of the book states that it is “conceived primarily as a book of criticism. It has two main objectives.

Firstly, it sets out to examine selected prose works which have especially resonated with governance and leadership issues in the Nigerian space, the aim being to help the reader to arrive at informed decisions, being as it is that the Nigerian socio-political situation has remained the bane to our growth and progress and has therefore been a focal point for many Nigerian creative writers. This submission joints the fray as the ultimate goal of criticism as with satire is to urge a change.

Secondly, the book scrutinises the purpose and relevance of the resurgence or nascent introduction of African Science Fiction (AsF), and especially interrogates the relevance of African science fiction particularly in the Nigerian context.”

This quotation can elicit different perspectives from the scholar-reader or the reader-scholar. For this glimpser-glitterer, however, what is significant is that Sophia Ogwude wants him to see what she calls her subjects as significant techniques by which she enriches and enlivens her discourse colourfully and glitteringly.

This glitterer tries as best as he can to enter the scholarly consciousness of Sophia Ogwude to have a good glimpse of what the chapters of her discourse conjure up as vivid essences and aspects of the socio-political space she tries to illuminate. The chapters, in different guises, illuminate the subject, the one subject, of man’s inhumanity to man in our country and beyond our country.

As a matter of fact, the hideousness of the Nigerian socio-political space mirrors the hideousness of the socio-political space every tyrant, oppressor, dictator, murderer of whatever kind or colour occupies, holds sway, luxuriates and reigns in.

For example, how are the horrible ones in power in Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and A Day and Ngugi wa Thiong’o Detained which Ogwude equips her third chapter with different from the ones in her eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth chapters whose vital ingredients and substances illuminate, aggravate or expand her consciousness (and the gleaner-glitterer’s) from what was centred or focused on in the said third chapter? Of course, chapters eleven, twelve and thirteen are very hideously painted, portrayed and constructed as those dealing deliberately with the subjects of fantasy and dystopia.

But the extreme deviousness, dehumanisation, fear, oppression, repression, heterotopia, environmental control and the dark warning against the herotaxia of our socio-political space are also, in varying degrees, the concerns of chapter three and other chapters in Critiquing the Nigerian Socio-political Space in Prose Fiction.

Indeed, these chapters dwell on socio-political, environmental and medical Satanism that are substantial aspects of what are printed and pictured as African science fiction and African mysticism. In the books Sophia Ogwude focuses on the scenery in which the horrifying details exist is portrayed as African satanic scenery – even though the painter-photographer literary critic tries to portray it otherwise.

The point this gleaner-glimpser-glitterer is making and underscoring is that the one thread, the one glittering thread, that holds Sophia Ogwude’s chapters together is her framed consciousness of a painterly or picturesque technique that enables her to make and turn one subject into several subjects and several subjects into one subject. And her ability and wisdom to do this efficiently the gleaner and glitterer cannot but attribute to her discernment that enables her to place or match old and new writers, male and female ones, together to paint what she has adroitly painted and pictured as a kind of painter or photographer literary critic. Her discourse will be valued as a work of reference to a critic and writer from anywhere who wants to learn what needs to be learnt about the sensibility of our time and age.

Clearly, I am refraining from saying here other nice (and not nice) things about Sophia Obiajulu Ogwude’s book which I have called here a discourse for all seasons – because it is my wish not to say everything in an enterprise of this nature in this age of the thieving Artificial Intelligence constantly, shamelessly thieving like the thieving scoundrel our country is and may always be – unless it births and welcomes a golden time of golden change.

But the glitterer has tried in his peculiarly glittering manner to critique the author of Critiquing the Nigerian Socio-Political Space in Prose Fiction. How successful or not he is here is left for his readers to judge. But note this: What he has been silent about is as significant as what he has not been silent about.

The gleaner-glimpser-glitterer, however, as a final remark, recommends our worthy scholar’s book, her high discourse for all seasons, to all readers, especially the very scholarly minded ones.

Concluded.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.