Literature and the Right to Be Human

In memory of my beloved mother, Charity Gakure, 1935-2019. Thaayũ. Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it. Nothing is absolute. —Igbo Proverb I accept Brecht's thesis that in settled periods of history, culture—and literature which is its part, with criticism as its partner—can reflect reality. But that in traumatic times like ours, when reality itself is so distorted as to have become impossible and abnormal, it is the function of all culture, partaking of this abnormality, to be aware of its own sickness. To be aware of the unreality of the unauthenticity of the so called real, is to reinterpret this reality. To reinterpret this reality is to commit oneself to a constant revolutionary assault against it. —Sylvia Wynter, “We Must Learn to Sit Together and Talk about a Little Culture” As I was preparing this address, I struggled with the problem of what Edward Said called beginnings and the complex set of circumstances that they entail: “What must one do to begin? What is special about beginning as an activity or a moment or a place? Can one begin whenever one pleases?” (xv). This challenge can be exacerbated by one's relationship to institutions and their history—in my case, the joy and pain of being both an insider and an outsider, a scholar of Euro-American culture from its margins. And so tonight I find myself in a situation that calls for celebration, but also in a place of uncertainty. I, Simon Gikandi, born in a colonial state of emergency, have had the luck to serve as the 129th president of the Modern Language Association of America. My sense of good fortune is, however, tempered by the reality that the state of emergency that characterized most of the twentieth century, including the circumstances of my own beginnings, has not gone away, as many of us had hoped, but has instead become permanent. Everywhere I go around the world, I keep on hearing echoes of Walter Benjamin's prediction that the state of emergency is “not the exception but the rule” and of his injunction that we must “attain a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight” (257). I find myself in a world where achievement and precarity go hand in hand.