Poison Pen
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Beware! Poison On The Bookshelves
Beware! Poison on the Bookshelves
By Chuks OLUIGBO
The rate at which substandard literature now flood bookstands and bookshops in Nigerian markets has become a source of worry to serious-minded authors and scholars. Perhaps this development is a by-product of the unemployment situation in the country. Quite a good number of Nigerians seem to have suddenly woken up to the realisation that writing and publishing books could actually be a source of good money.
It is quite a healthy development that in the Nigerian society where commentators lament that there is poor readership (remember the joke that if you want to hide anything from an African, write it in a book) or outright alliteracy (a term used to describe a situation where people have the capacity to read and write but lack any desire whatsoever to do so), people are actually waking up to the challenges of reading and writing. But the question is, what do they write?
The real problem is that a great many of those who claim to write actually have no business doing so. The reasons for this are many. First, many of them do not have the talent to write. Second, they have no interest in writing for the heck of it. Third, they lack formal training in writing and communication skills. And finally, even when they have written, they lack the patience to allow whatever they have written to pass through seasoned professionals for fact-checking, proof-reading and editing. Rather, they quickly take their junk t the nearest roadside printer who, like them, is neither interested in the accuracy of the facts contained in the work nor in the correctness or otherwise of the grammatical expressions therein. As a result, they keep churning out and flooding the bookshelves with refuse in the name of books and feeding the reading public with poison. These people are not writers even by the longest shot; they are simply people propelled by the instinct to survive in the face of harsh unemployment. But that is the wrong attitude to it.
Recently, while passing through one of those many roadside bookstands in town, i was fascinated by the ‘creativity’ and sense of humour of these new generation ‘authors’. Many readers of this piece would have come across a particular pamphlet (for lack of a better name for it) that has been selling in town in the last few years. It is called Current Affairs, and it is found everywhere, even in the most unconventional places. The funny thing about this so-called book is that one does not find the name of its author or publisher, and it neither has ISBN nor ISSN.
But that is not the story. The most fascinating thing is that this Current Affairs has given birth to many variant titles, all without verifiable authors and publishers. At the last check I could count eight of these, namely: Up-to-Date Current Affairs, Satellite Current Affairs, Latest Current Affairs, Vision 20-2020 Current Affairs, Race to 2020 Current Affairs, Obama Current Affairs, Issues of the Moment Current Affairs, and New General Current Affairs. Again, in keeping with these writers’ sense of humour, each of these variants has the image of America’s President Barack Obama and Nigeria’s President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua on its cover, meaning that they all probably have the same content. So, if all these titles have the same content, why the multiplication of efforts?
But again, these new pamphlet writers are experts in the distortion of facts. They almost always publish inaccurate and unverified information. Take President Yar’Adua’s Seven-Point Agenda, for instance. In their bid to outsmart one another and be the first to nit the bookstands, these writers have so twisted and distorted the facts and content of this agenda that it is now difficult for the uninformed to know exactly what the Seven-Point Agenda contains.
In the face of all these, could the writers of those junks sincerely beat their chests and call themselves authors in the real sense of it? Could they be confident enough to stand in the midst of true writers and feel a sense of belonging and honestly tell themselves that they belong there? I doubt. But that is their personal headache. My worry is the havoc they wreak on the minds of the reading public.
So, while not condemning outright the desire by certain unemployed people to try to improve their economic lot through writing and publishing of books, I also insist that there is need for control. If you ask me, I would say that writing should be left alone to writers. (I am fully aware of the question this might raise, but that is a story for another day). If a non-writer wishes to write, then he must have the patience learn the rudiments of the writing profession or to engage the services of a professional writer who will put him through. The problem is that many people out there are of the impression that writing is about the easiest thing to do, that it is just about picking a pen and scribbling something on a paper, but it is much more than that. No matter how much talented one is, such a person needs some formal training to fine-tune such talents. A person who is not a trained lawyer, no matter his level of wisdom or his ability to argue out a case, cannot defend an accused person in a law court. So it is with writing.
There is therefore need for concerned authorities like the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) and other writing bodies to look into this matter and do something urgently to arrest this ugly situation and safeguard the future of our children who are already derailing as a result of the junk they read from these ‘poison writers’. There is a joke making the rounds in town now about a child who answered in a quiz that it was Sani Abacha who wrote Things Fall Apart instead of Chinua Achebe. The child could have picked that in one of these poisons. Who knows?
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