When I think about art, I do not always - or entirely - think about the object. I think instead about the artist in practice [which is not to say that craft or process or skill are of themselves art-forms].
An image that comes to mind this moment is of myself seated in a saloon in Lagos—waiting for my brows to get shaped with a razor. There is often—despite the woosh of the air conditioner—the moist of the humid afternoon, which means I am sweating, as is the make-up personnel. Typically, she would be close enough for me to feel her breathing on my face, or to see the slight tremor of her hands before she starts. I am used to my frown, used to getting coaxed to relax, but I can sometimes be as mistrustful of words as I am of a blade. It is, finally, the look in her eyes – that of acute attention—to which I surrender.
This is what I mean by the artist in practice—not so much a universal standard that academic critics tend to impose on things, but more of a particular and focused bent: a specific and subjective relationship that the maker has with the made-up thing. Sometimes I think of it as love, or commitment. But a word I prefer to use these days is seriousness.
What I am trying to say [though I suspect I am going about it poorly] is that beyond skill, vocational seriousness is an artistic impulse that reflects stylistically in the made or finished thing. What I am also trying to say is that artistic seriousness is not just beautiful or useful—it is also style.
I have not always considered myself to be a serious writer. The phrase tends to evoke a kind of severity that feels foreign to my natural temperament. I also do not have many of the usual appendages that go with the writers I admire: a track record of published work, modest recognition within a literary community of peers, an admirable writing discipline. Then, there are other aspects of my own seriousness as a writer that tease me as I inch towards publication next year -
A few months ago, when someone asked me what my novel was about, I mumbled something under my breath, something vague and reductive about a character in my book. These kinds of questions—what I write, what my book is about—tend to come up quite often. In certain spaces they are as casual as a conversation about the weather, and in others, they feel like an invitation to express my position in the wider rubric of world literature. It is still a shock to me when critics are keen to hear about my fiction outside the registers of its plot or themes. But rather in its influences and direction - in its unmediated philosophies.
I like the way T.S Elliot explains this relationship between the “talent” and “tradition” when he says that “no poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. You must set him for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” When I think of Elliot’s ‘dead’ I do not just think about the cohort of privileged male white writers of which he was one—but dead in the sense of the immaterial terrain of logics and influences that come together to make a writing presence. Or, the social and psychological and spiritual and intellectual context that produce or influence the artist.
The artist needs to be sensible-attentive-receptive to this relationship with literary tradition, even if they are writing from outside that tradition, or writing within a tradition but with multiple external influences. This is the seriousness I am gesturing at. Though it is not so much about the tradition itself, but how the writer makes or unmakes those connections.
I, of course, rarely abide these thoughts. As a writer, I can be impatient, obnoxious, uncritical, and defensive—much like some writers I admire. But I also know quite keenly that talent and arrogance cannot make me, or any person a serious writer. Neither will prizes nor publication.
What matters—I think—is the intimacy the writer has with their work and the knowledge they have of the world and the social history in which their work will emerge. The writer must know their work in the context of the present as well as in the context of social, aesthetic and formal history.
One question I particularly despise is this: why do you write?
In my head I know all the answers I can offer—to make a difference, to feel less lonely, because I feel that writing is my calling, because I love to write? These answers may be correct or rehearsed for many. But they can also feel like market constructed sound bites. They do not explain the justification for writing a book—instead of say— an article or a tweet? Then there’s also the other question of late – why fiction? This more recent anxiety comes from my current preoccupation with ideas of fictionality as a dying genre. What is the point of mediating reality through make-belief when narrative permeates all genres—why is your novel not an essay, or a piece of criticism or a diary. Seriousness is not always craft. It is not always talent. And it is not necessarily rigor or discipline. The seriousness of writing—at least to me—is not always about having written.
I remember pitching my novel to literary agents and having to come up with comparable titles. I sat - stunned - in front of my computer: comparable in what context, what universe? Forms, identity, themes, or market reception? Yet the point—at least for the writer—is not in the answer, but in the dialogue. It is about finding your interlocutors, identifying patterns—taking an eccentric writing process and codifying it into form or craft or discourse. It is also about resisting these iterations, refusing to be named or nameable, to be classified, but only after you have thought about why you are resisting. Even the silence of the artist must be a critical act.
Finally, [is anything ever final?] … The other day I listened to a writer I much-admire tell a room full of critics that his writing process was to carry strands of the story mentally for months or years—then finally, to write the novel in a kind of electric rush —a process that lasts about two weeks.
As a writer, I understand this process. As a student and reader, I am mistrustful of it. As a critic, I am a sufficiently disappointed.
loved this so much. so well-thought