Despite All Circumstances

Good evening. Thank you to dearest, brilliant Auma.
To the FELIX JUD FRIENDS Association, thank you for instituting this prize and for what it represents.
To the members of the prize jury who found me worthy, I thank you. To the Harbourfront literature festival, thank you for hosting me.

I’m delighted to be here to receive this prize – and I shall now subject you to my terrible German – the Felix-Jud-Preis für Widerständiges Denken. In some cases, the German has been translated as Defiant thinking and in other cases, as Resistant thinking. I’ve thought about both words and concluded that I prefer defiant. Perhaps because resistant is common, we hear it often, especially in the US, in different forms like ‘resist, be the resistance’ and I cannot help but think, a little unfairly and ungraciously: well look where that got us.
But defiant. There is still some romance in the idea of defiance being used to qualify the act of thinking.

But of course I began also to question this idea of defiant thinking. What does it mean?
I can tell you that I do not wake up in the morning and think to myself—“yep, I’m a defiant thinker!” But I have always believed very strongly in the idea of freedom, freedom to be, freedom to express oneself, freedom to think. As a child, my instinct in the face of authority was not acquiescence but questioning. Perhaps because from my early years I knew that I did not want the things that I was supposed to want and I knew that freedom is a requirement for bucking any kind of convention. I knew that I wanted to live a life of the mind. And that my vocation, the source of my life’s meaning was writing, creating stories.

I have this abiding memory from my childhood: I was sitting in the backseat of my mother’s car as we drove down the sloping road that led from the quiet University of Nigeria campus where we lived, to the gentle chaos of the market. I was looking out of the window, and suddenly I felt an intense pang of melancholy, because what I saw through the window as we drove were stories, so many stories waiting to be told, and I knew that I would not be able to tell them all.

For me, writing is not merely a career, it is a calling, one which for years I was not sure would in fact be a career. I hoped that I might one day earn a living from writing but that had no bearing on whether or why I wrote. If I did not have the good fortune to be widely read today, I would be somewhere, unknown, but writing, always writing. I am grateful to be part of this utterly necessary human tradition of storytelling.

I could not be a writer without also being a reader. Books have shaped me and taught me and consoled me, books have awakened me and soothed me.

As I learned about Felix Jud, in preparing to receive this prize, I thought I would very much have liked to be his friend. For his courage in the face of authoritarianism, for his sense of humour, (after being asked to change his name because people might think he was Jewish, he posted on his store window: Jud remains Jud.) But most of all, I was charmed by this little detail about him, unfortunately it is from Wikipedia which one should never rely on for accuracy, but it was too interesting to resist: Jud worked as a bookseller in the “Frommansche Buchhandlung” in Jena but was fired due to a lack of punctuality.
Now as a Nigerian, for whom a lack of punctuality is almost second nature, I read that and thought “this man is my soulmate from another time.”
(I made an effort, which I insist is a commendable effort, to defeat my second nature and be here on time today.)

But more seriously, when Felix Jud founded his bookshop, Hamburger Bücherstube, in 1923, he sent an invitation to the bookshop opening which read:
„Despite all circumstances—in faith in a better future for Germany and with confidence in the literary-minded Hamburg public—we have decided to open a new bookstore.”

It was not an ideal time, politically or economically, to open a bookstore. But he did. Despite all circumstances, he did. I found those words deeply stirring. Despite all circumstances.

We live today in times that are not ideal. I arrived this morning from America, a country I call home, one of my two homes, the other being Nigeria.

The atmosphere in America today reminds me of Nigeria in the years 1983 to 1998, my years of childhood to early adulthood, during the dictatorship of Generals Buhari, Babangida and, most fearsomely, General Abacha. Each time my parents’ friends visited, a gathering of academics in our living room, they would talk loudly except for when they criticized the military government; then they spoke in whispers. That whispering, apart from testing my eavesdropping capabilities, was striking. They were in the privacy of our home, in a wide yard, with no prospect of being overheard by anybody. And still they whispered, their tones hushed.

So attuned were they to a punitive authoritarian government that they instinctively lowered their voices.
The air was stained by fear, and with each breath you took, you inhaled fear and at some point it became normal, or almost normal.
So many of those conversations about Nigeria’s authoritarian governments ended with an some version of:
This can never happen in America! Look at America!
Go to America and see how things are done properly.

For so long, and for so many all over the world, America has been the shining house on the verdant hill. Yes, it was never a perfect country but it embodied for so many values that were aspirational for so many. America, the country built on a dream, America, the melting point of the world, America, the only country whose culture was globally and greedily consumed (And I see now how badly Hollywood lied to us all, but that is a story for another day)

America, indeed, the beautiful. And so, while we were mired in the ugliness of authoritarian governments, America gleamed and sparkled from afar. America was the place to which we could run, even if only in our minds, for solace.

And today, watching America, I find myself thinking: where do we run to for solace now? How has this shiny place become so mottled with tarnish?

When men with faces hidden behind black masks smash the window of a car to arrest the driver, a woman whom they suspect is undocumented and their evidence of her suspected immigration status is her brown skin, you wonder why they had to smash the car window and terrify the two children seated in the back of the car. They could have arrested her without the violence. It was unnecessary cruelty. Intended to create fear not so much for the woman in the car as for others – people watching, people recording videos later to be watched by millions online. And what is terrorism but the deliberate spreading of fear?

When a president verbally attacks an official who releases reports whose finding he does not like and a television comedian who makes a joke he does not like and a judge who makes a ruling he does not like. And orders the removal from museums of historical truths he does not like, and seeks to control culture and art and to suppress real opposition and imagined opposition and surrounds himself with people who daily feed him praise, bowls of rank oily hyperbolic praise – is the country still aspirational?

It is sometimes said that if you want to destroy an argument in America just throw in the word Nazi. There is a valid point there, which is that as a word it has become a lazy shorthand used too often in the most inaccurate ways. Still, National Socialism was so globally consequential that we cannot shy away from reasonable comparisons in today’s world. And so, yes, there is an economic parallel to Nazi Germany in today’s America – a demand for loyalty from businesses. Be loyal, and your business will thrive; otherwise, watch out.

If you live in a country with characteristics that are fundamentally incompatible with liberal democracy, is the country still a liberal democracy?

In a culture of political fear, art is at stake, human creativity is at stake. No human endeavor requires freedom as much as creativity does. To create, one needs a kind of formless roving of the mind, to go nowhere and anywhere and everywhere. It is from that swirl that art emerges. Gunter Grass once reflected on his writing process with these words: “The barriers fell, language surged forward, memory, imagination, the pleasure of invention.”

As a writer, I recognize very intimately that pleasure of invention. As a reader, I have often felt the magic of literature: that sudden internal shiver while reading a novel, that glorious shock of mutuality, a sense of wonder that a stranger’s words could make me feel less alone in the world.

All art forms explore the beautiful strangeness of being a human being, but literature does it with the most intimacy because it takes us inside. We become characters; we become alive in bodies not our own.

Literature shows us who we are, takes us into history, tells us not just what happened but how it felt, and teaches us, as an American professor once put it, about things that are “not googleable.”

In this way, literature is my religion. Because I read stories, it is easy for me to understand what people resent, what wounds their pride, but also what they aspire to and what lights up their hearts with joy.

It is through literature that I have come to understand how different we are as human beings and yet also how wondrously alike. How we might love in different ways but we all love — and how you do not ever treat recklessly that which you love, whether it be a person, or a nation.

It is because I read novels that I have come to believe in being empathetic, in seeing the world through eyes that are not mine.
I do not always succeed at empathy but it is reading that makes me want to keep trying.

Because reading books, above all else, reminds us over and over again that there are multiple points of view.
A reminder that is needed now, in today’s world, more than ever. That to be a human being in the world is to be part of a project of plurality.

All literature has at its core the idea of what is good. Even the darkest of novels are in dialogue with the good. An old-fashioned word: good, used in this also rather old-fashioned context. Perhaps it is time to embrace more old-fashioned words — honor, truth, compassion, justice.
Especially today when we live in a world which seems to be dedicated to appeasing unreasonable men. Europeans scramble to pay homage to the American King. And there is much tiptoeing around ending the war in Ukraine and speaking of war — do we need another word for the act of invading a weaker country? Meanwhile Gaza is being ground to dust. The Palestinians are seen by the Isreali government as easily expendable, as not fully human. If Hamas militants were hiding in a building in New York City, would Israel bomb it so indiscriminately?

With so much upheaval in the world today, to think of literature is to think of what we are called to do.
We are called to courage. Courage means refusing to make the abnormal normal. Even if only to whisper to ourselves while turning the page of a book. Because when we stay silent as abnormal things happen, day after day and month after month, then they start to feel normal.

We must continue to think, and think defiantly. For defiance to matter, it cannot exist for its own sake. That would be like a child throwing tantrums merely to gain attention. If we are to think defiantly, which is to say insistently, unapologetically, committedly, then it must be in the service of something larger than ourselves. In the service of truth. In the service of freedom of expression. In the service of the greater good.

We must continue to embrace and uphold literature, to create, to write and to read.
Because Reading teaches us how to dream.
By dreaming I do not mean a passive act of listlessness but an active act of the imagination. Where we marshal our moral courage and actively imagine the world we want to live in.  How should it be? What should it be? What do we value? What is the greatest good?

There are times in our lives when we have to compromise, but this is not the time. There are times in our lives when we let ourselves down, but this is not the time. Because what is at stake today is existential.

Someone living in the US who works for the government in Washington DC told me recently that he first felt fear at all the upheaval, how randomly people were fired, how so much was disregarded, so much wasted and senseless, but he had seen his fear turn to anger.
There is a kind of beautiful blistering anger that gives birth not to violence but to resolve, it is righteous but not sanctimonious, it is an anger that says I refuse to let you desecrate these sacred ideals of freedom and justice and fairplay and honesty and individual dignity. I will live by them and proclaim them and support them.

Not everyone is able to speak up bluntly but everyone has the capacity to hold these ideas close, to refuse to make what is not normal normal. Despite all circumstances.

And laughter should exist beside this anger.
I think of how my mother would sometimes, in the face of some minor catastrophe, chuckle and then say ife ojoo na ato amu. This is a terrible thing that is also funny. One characteristic of totalitarians is humorlessness.
To laugh in times like this, to revel in that universal language of laughter, is to remember how brittle, how thin-skinned, and ultimately how insecure the project of authoritarians really is.

Is history shaped by systems or individuals? Both, but today I am concerned about individuals. How a small act by an individual can have consequences that reverberate over time. Felix Jud opens a bookstore in times that were not ideal, and more than one hundred years later I am here, in this beautiful concert hall in Hamburg, speaking his name.

I’d like to end with the last words of a poem called SONG, by Louise Gluck:

Ah, he says, you are dreaming again.
And I say then I’m glad I dream.
The fire is still alive.