LITERATURE IN NORTHERN NIGERIA: LANGUAGE AND POPULAR CULTURE

Abstract

This essay delves into the study of literature in northern Nigeria. The study discusses the scope of literature, the region of Northern Nigeria and aspects of its popular culture, and finally goes ahead to examine the socio-political issues captured in Abubakar Gimbar’s Inner Rumblings. It concludes that the literature of Northern Nigeria still needs to be explored to the fullest by the activities of Northern Nigerian writers so as to bring it to the fore of Nigeria and the world at large.

Keywords: Northern Nigeria, popular culture, literature.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

According to the online Encyclopædia Britannica (2015: 5), Literature is a form of human expression. But not everything expressed in words—even when organized and written down—is counted as literature. Those writings that are primarily informative—technical, scholarly, journalistic—would be excluded from the rank of literature by most, though not all, critics. Certain forms of writing, however, are universally regarded as belonging to literature as an art. Individual attempts within these forms are said to succeed if they possess something called artistic merit and to fail if they do not. The nature of artistic merit is less easy to define than to recognize. The writer need not even pursue it to attain it. On the contrary, a scientific exposition might be of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of none at all.

The essay was once written deliberately as a piece of literature; its subject matter was of comparatively minor importance. Today most essays are written as expository, informative journalism, although there are still essayists in the great tradition who think of themselves as artists. Now, as in the past, some of the greatest essayists are critics of literature, drama, and the arts. Some personal documents (autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and letters) rank among the world’s greatest literature. Some examples of this biographical literature were written with posterity in mind, others with no thought of their being read by anyone but the writer. Some are in a highly polished literary style; others, couched in a privately evolved language, win their standing as literature because of their cogency, insight, depth, and scope. One can conceive of Literature as a body of written works. The name has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution.

Definitions of the word literature tend to be circular. The 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2007:136) considers literature to be “writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest.” The 19th-century critic, Walter Pater referred to “the matter of imaginative or artistic literature” as a “transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinitely varied forms.” But such definitions assume that the reader already knows what literature is. And indeed its central meaning, at least, is clear enough. Deriving from the Latin littera, a letter of the alphabet, literature is first and foremost humankind’s entire body of writing; after that it is the body of writing belonging to a given language or people; then it is an individual piece of writing. Thus, every group possesses a literature peculiar to them and which defines the individual writings that make up that group.

But already it is necessary to qualify these statements. To use the word “writing” when describing literature is itself misleading, for one may speak of “oral literature” or “the literature of preliterate peoples.” The art of literature is not reducible to the words on the page; they are there solely because of the craft of writing. As an art, literature might be described as the organization of words to give pleasure. Yet through words literature elevates and transforms experience beyond mere pleasure. Literature may be classified according to a variety of systems, including language, national origin, historical period, genre, and subject matter. Literature also functions more broadly in society as a means of both criticizing and affirming cultural values. This means that the literature of a people spells out the identity of such people. Literature in Northern Nigeria is hinged on the cultural heritage of the Hausa-Fulani people which in a sense is an offshoot of the Arab tradition.

This essay is about the literature of Northern Nigeria, popular culture and the language use. It is noteworthy that Northern Nigerian literature combines various art forms of drama, music, poetry, orature, etc. and such literature aims to communicate values to the audience as well as to entertain.