THE JUDGES’ REPORT
    
     PART I:  GENERAL REMARKS ON THE ENTRIES
 

This year’s Nigeria Literature Prize Competition enters the second of its four-year cycle by returning to the genre of Prose Fiction, the first of four major literary genres, including Poetry, Drama and Children’s Literature. The statistics on this year’s entries show how stiff the competition has been. The Literature Committee received a total of 149 entries. 31 of these were disqualified on grounds of genre, residency as well as year and mode of publication. The Panel considered 118 valid prose-fiction entries for 2008 out of which three (3) are collections of short stories.
 This year’s competition has been quite keen. A lot of improvement was noticed in the range and depth of the fictional world covered by the writer although self-publishing and poor editing still persist resulting most often in poor packaging. The Nigerian landscape was thoroughly covered imaginatively by the competitors. There are still major stylistic concerns in a significant number of the entries, including the problem of acceptable usage, including the recurrence of clichés, inappropriate idioms and the major question of the literary tradition of Nigerian literature, of which style is a core element in the quest for an acceptable standard of African literary English. The writing in a minority of the valid entries show that some of the younger authors still have much to learn from the stylistic achievements of their predecessors and to seek not only acceptable usage but a creative answer to the question, what roles and responsibilities for new authors after the stylistic successes of earlier writers. Some of the novelists also fail to draw a distinction between the discourses of journalism, romance and popular fiction and that of creative prose, which begins its work by “making-it-new”.
But there are also important advances in these entries, especially the range of materials covered in the new fiction. The major subjects tackled by the writers include the management of traditional polygamous homes, the sensitivities and courtesies in Islamic families, the civilities and protocols of traditional courtships and arranged marriages, the evocation of historical events and institutions, the administration of our prisons, events in the Niger Delta, the trafficking of our sisters and daughters abroad, and marriage through the internet with its predictable dire consequences. The themes are a little less comprehensive and representative. Comedy is in such short supply that when it appears its refreshing air has the effect of a gusty wind. This is of course an unexpected lapse in the representation of life in a nation that has been described as the happiest on earth. Genuine satire too seems to be in decline, given the strong presence of satire in the literature of a generation ago. In its place there is an almost uniform condemnation of moral decay with no moral centre as reference point and guide for the reader. The contemporary post-colonial condition is adequately accounted for, but this is often circumscribed by an obsession with representational realism, with little concern for moral responsibility or ideological commitment. On the whole, however, the performance has been heart-warming, with some quite impressive showing in the literary energy and resourcefulness represented by the entries.

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PART II. THE CITATION AT THE GRAND AWARD NIGHT
                               SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2008.

Out of an initial short list of eleven interesting, even inspiring novels, the judges picked two top-grade novels which are here being presented as candidates for the prize. The judges did not consider it necessary to include a third candidate for the final short list, as is customary with prizes at this level. This is partly because of the difficulty of choosing among a handful of other contenders, at least two of which have equal claims for consideration for the third position, but also primarily because the choice of the two entries by Kaine Agary and Jude Dibia was clear cut and not controversial.
 I now present the case for these two short-listed entries in the alphabetical order in which the titles appeared on the initial list of 149 entries.

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 Entry No. 131: Unbridled, by Jude Dibia, was published in Lagos in 2007 by Blacksands Books.  
 
     Unbridled is the story of a young Nigerian girl whose attempt to escape from a life of physical and psychological exploitation and abuse takes her from her Nigerian village to Lagos, from where her quest for liberation and the good life takes her to London, then onward to Leicester in search of a purposeful life and British citizenship. Its technique of reminiscence is suitable for the discovery and self-realization of Ngozi, who is the narrator and centre of consciousness of the unfolding experience. Ngozi’s story of her life is skilfully told in a series of flashbacks that gradually establishes a link between her past and present, between her experience of home and of Black Britain, and between her brutalized childhood and her marginalization as an adult. The eventual revelation of the profound effect of child abuse is particularly poignant; it explains her determined resistance to the battering she faces in London.
          Unbridled is in many respects an unconventional novel. It is written by a male author from the consistent and sustained point of view of the female heroine, Ngozi/Erika. It depicts graphic scenes of the sexual violation and psychological torture of Ngozi as a child in Nigeria and as Erika in London, and it extends in significant ways the yearnings and aspirations of a large proportion of the Nigerian population whose voices are not heard often enough outside the usual platforms for political advocacy. It is thus an important extension of the Nigerian fictional tradition, and it assists the growing tributary of literary feminism to merge with and broaden the narrative mainstream.
     The novel also breaks the familiar mould of Nigerian fiction by making possible a realistic refocusing of the postcolonial perception of the black woman’s relation to the metropolitan values of the Western world as dominant, white, male and middle class. For many of the young women who yearn for the El Dorado of London, this European city of their dreams will not be quite the same again. For this is not the dreamy London of the would be Nigerian emigrant; it is the London of the slum-dwelling underclass; its streets are not paved with gold, its men can be as brutal as any Nigerian man, and the first-time Nigerian emigrant is as likely to end up in a slum as if she were only a rural migrant in Lagos.
     The novel’s message - explicit but subtle, and the strong sensibilities of its far from passive central character, are announced in its evocative title, with its allusion to the spirited horse that shakes itself free from the brutal torments of its rider. Through this implied metaphor, the author works in a pattern of correspondences and contrasts that connects past and present and ties together the themes of violence, domination and resistance. This message is developed through a skilful interweaving of conflicting roles and relationships: male/female, father/daughter, husband/wife, black/white and rural urban. The reversal of the customary way of seeing these relationships inverts accepted notions of identity, bond and self-worth and produces new insights that negate the previously known: not only is the father a brute to his own daughter and the neighbourhood a source of fear and anxiety, Europe and the Whiteman are cold, impoverished, brutal, violent and predatory. The author makes a slight concession to this seamy picture of Britain. He ends Erika’s quest on a planned return to Leicester as a woman in love – but free at last from the life-long torments of male and female relations and friends, after the catharsis of a confessional meeting with her aged mother back in the Nigerian village. Unbridled empowers the female voice by deploying it to reveal both the trepidation and assertiveness of feminity within the domain of family, racial and economic relationships.

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 Entry no. 148: Yellow Yellow, by Kaine Agary was published in Lagos by Dtalkshop Publishers in 2006.

     The two major themes that set the context for Yellow Yellow are: first, the tragic consequences of the economic exploitation of the Niger Delta and, second, the marginalization of women. Although these are the dominant themes of contemporary Nigerian discourses, the Niger Delta theme predates Oloibiri and the discovery of the so-called black gold, or even the political idea and creation of Nigeria itself. It reaches back to the period of the exploitation of the old Oil Rivers when oil meant the red palm oil and not yet its black relation.
     But Yellow Yellow is not just another Niger Delta narrative on these two themes. The narrative lifts the Niger Delta question beyond contemporary economic issues and adds a historical as well as a human dimension to these concerns. Its story is told with admirable economy in a succession of incidents and personal relations that advance the central character’s evolving consciousness of her condition. This young girl, Zilayefa, is barely conscious of the true meaning of her situation, but the reader is made aware of this through the inflection of her family background and its significance for the emergence of a specific Nigerian community of half-castes brought up in single parent families. This meaning gradually unfolds through the changes in Zilayefa’s status and aspirations as she avoids being trapped in a family fate whose origins are as much historical as they are ecological. Seen in the perspective of the world view of this text, the theme of armed resistance that is so dominant in contemporary discourses on the Niger Delta seems a peculiarly male response. By implication, the one feminine alternative to the historical trap of gender, with sexual exploitation as its only weapon, is escape from the environmental pollution and human degradation of oil into the more comfortable urban world of Port Harcourt.
     This alternative reinforces the second major theme, the rise of a marginalized sub-group - a community within the larger disadvantaged community of Nigerian womenfolk. This distinct group consists of those who suffer the social isolation of miscegenation as well as the responsibilities of single parenting and absent fathers. In this novel we are confronted with the reality from which sprang the key trope of postcolonial discourse, that hybridity is the most enduring postcolonial condition. In those colonial times in the Oil Rivers – and now in the Niger Delta, hybridity is not a figure of speech but a reality. It is the original reality from which we perceive our present postcolonial dilemma and psychic condition. This novel surprises us as an imaginative voice for a hitherto unacknowledged hybrid community in our midst, a community with its own evolving ideology and life style. The narrative traces Zilayefa’s tentative groping for meaning from her precarious village existence to her secure foothold among a sophisticated community of Port Harcourt women. She manages to disentangle herself from the trap into which she is lured by the seductions of father figures, and finally arrives at a final rejection of the fate before her, that of the hybrid mother of a hybrid child repeating the mistakes of her own mother. She exchanges this dull future for life as a university educated Nigerian woman, deliberately gambling with her life in the process.
     Conventional morality is irrelevant to the harsh world of Zilayefa. Her actions are more accurately measured by the cause-and-effect of the history and oil politics of the Niger Delta in shaping individuals and communities. Her deliberate, coldly calculating and near suicidal choice of abortion will be imaginatively understood by the reader, even if reluctantly. This author’s fine performance is on display in her unpretentious narrative technique and in the unsentimental account of an unsung aspect of Niger Delta experience. Yellow Yellow is the tre voice of that experience.

Your excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen; it is now my pleasure to announce the winner of the Nigeria Prize for Literature, 2008. And the winner is…