Chinua Achebe was a great writer but not a great artist like Wole Soyinka - Bernard Ubom

Achebe and Soyinka remain two literary icons that have dominated our literary space to date.

My father had introduced me quite early to Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel. He wanted me to write like Soyinka if ever I was to be a writer. He loved Soyinka. So at a very early age, I read The Lion and the Jewel, worshipped its creator and placed him as the preeminent deity in the literary pantheon not only on the African continent but all over the world.

I started wanting to write like W.S. Obscure vocabulary. The dictionary became my best friend. I read it like a text book, scavenging for new 'big' words to pen down. Then I read Achebe's Things Fall Apart(TFA).

TFA made me fall in love with Achebe. I thought Achebe a better writer compared to W.S. Achebe communicated whereas W.S. wrote. Like a shock of atheism in the church, I came to prefer Achebe's simple language to W.S. obscure verbiages. Besides, like my grandmother, Achebe was a good and skillful raconteur. I love storytelling.
The West applauded Achebe's TFA. TFA introduced its people to the dignity of the African society in simple language. So why didn't Achebe ever win the Nobel prize until his demise?

I have always thought that Achebe deserved the Nobel prize but was denied it. But a number of literary critics have thought otherwise. One of such critics, Sam Omatseye, believes TFA was a great book not because of its literary properties but because of its ideological potency and the Nobel prize does not go to a novelist whose work is signposted by sociological fixations supplanting narratives with long pages of how igbo villages are organized.

Sam Omatseye maintains that TFA was not original, was done with gusto and minimal dexterity. In TFA, Achebe wrote about the assertion of local pride, which was not new. The proverbs, never original, just like many of the proverbs in Ola Rotimi's The Gods Are Not To Blame. Omatseye concludes TFA was a good work but not a great work. It was a book that thrived on popularity but not on subtlety.

On the other hand, Omatseye opines that every of Soyinka's works is a stunner, primed with layer after layer of thoughts and meaning wrapped in narratives. And on Soyinka's obscurity? High art is not always easy to understand, asserts Omatseye. Literature belongs to a complex world. It is an art of sublimity and depth and W.S is a master in these. Only a few disagree W.S. deserved the Nobel prize.

On the other hand, I personally think Achebe never won the Nobel prize probably because of his knack for always supplanting the colonial western culture with the pride and colour of the African culture in his writings. His works were tools of western subversion. And obviously the West could not have rewarded such a writer with the prestigious Nobel prize. Not one who always sought to elevate the African culture above the Western culture with his works. But then again, methinks most of his works thrived more on popularity than literary subtlety, depth and complexity. He was a great writer but not a great artist like W.S. My thoughts.

Bernard Ubom is a medical doctor and writer.