The immortality of creativity

Do writers die when they die? They do die indeed but in some cases their legacy stays and sometimes institutions are established in their honour. Sometimes their legacy is intangible. Today I will pick on a few interesting examples of the legacies of different writers.

The late Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez, who died on April 17, 2014 was considered by many as the greatest author ever in the Spanish language. His fame continues to grow even after his death.

On hearing about the death of Marquez, Barack Obama said the world had lost “one of its greatest visionary writers,” adding that he cherished an inscribed copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, presented to him by the author on a visit to Mexico. “I offer my thoughts to his family and friends, whom I hope take solace in the fact that Gabo’s work will live on for generations to come.”

Harsimran Gill, writing on Scroll on 6 March 2018 says, “In 2014, a few months after Garcia Marquez’s death, the estate of the writer of the iconic One Hundred Years of Solitude sold the archive of his photos, notebooks, manuscripts and scrapbooks to the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas for $2.2 million. Three years later, in December 2017, the university made over half of the archive available freely in digital form, throwing open a gateway to the private and public life of Gabo, as he is affectionately known, who continues to hold sway over literary critics and the lay reader alike.”

It is said that Marquez’s physical archive arrived in 40 cartons, containing manuscripts of 10 of his books, including 32 pages of an unpublished memoir, over 40 photo albums, 20 scrapbooks, and over 2,000 pieces of correspondence with other writers, artists, thinkers and politicians. It’s not just an unparalleled resource for researchers, but a fascinating portal into the mind of one of the greatest writers of the 21st century. Marquez’s net worth is put at several millions of dollars by various websites. He was clearly a rich and famous man.

Writing eight years after Marquez’s death, Erika Ardila wrote in 2022 that Cartagena, the city of Marquez’s inspiration has several places that keep the legacy of his Nobel Prize, such as the Simon Bolivar Park, where Gabo slept on a bench the first night he arrived in the city.

It is further indicated that in the courtyard of the Cloister of La Merced, the place where the law school of the University of Cartagena was located when Marquez returned to try to study law by order of his father, lie his ashes just as he requested. Marquez’s remains rest under a bronze bust made by the British sculptor Katie Murray, a friend of the family, while large yellow butterflies fly in the surrounding trees.

Other places, such as the Plaza de la Aduana, are an allegory of the Galleon Fair in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Palace of the Inquisition described in Of Love and Other Demons and the Convention Center, formerly the Cartagena Public Market in Twelve Pilgrim Tales.

Marquez’s most successful work as a writer is the long and expansive novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which became a huge success in the years after its publication in 1967 selling more than 10 million copies in more than 30 languages! It made García Márquez a leader of the Latin American literary “boom” and an international phenomenon.
His novels, The Autumn of the Patriarch” (1975) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) are some of his greatest masterpieces. But his short stories are also some of the world’s best. My favourite,

“Strange Pilgrims”, published originally in Spanish in 1992 constitutes the author’s fourth short story collection. In “Strange Pilgrims”, the reader finds Garcia Marquez’s Latin American characters doing their best to survive on European soil.

Another case study:

Nearly 50 years after her death in 1976, Christie’s work continues to draw in new readers and viewers as well as inspire writers. It is roundly claimed that the late writer, Agatha Christie, currently holds the title of the world’s best-selling novelist, according to Guinness World Records, as well as the most-translated author in history, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
Christie, born 15 September, 1890 and died 12 January 1976), was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives.

The BBC is quoted as having said on 12 January, 1976 that Christie “In the late 1950s, Christie had reputedly been earning around £100,000 (approximately equivalent to £2,500,000 in 2021) per year. Christie sold an estimated 300 million books during her lifetime.” At the time of her death in 1976, “she was the best-selling novelist in history. One estimate of her total earnings from more than a half-century of writing is $20 million (approximately $95.2 million in 2021). By any standard Christie was a rich woman.

Writing in 2022, Avery Kleinman indicates that Christie’s stories have also been adapted many times for both TV and film. Her detectives, such as Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, are recognised even by those who have never opened one of her books.

Talking to a magazine, The Entertainment Clinic, James says about the stories of Christie:
“She just wrote these phenomenal stories. She came up with these ingenious plots. The thing about great stories is that they last forever, and they cross boundaries. Therefore, we’re still reading them, watching them, whatever it is, 100 years after the first one was published. And we’re watching them and reading them all over the world in multiple languages so it just goes back to that central tenet of she was a fantastic storyteller…”

Here is a third case study: Sahara Reporters of September 4, 2013 say that Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, continues to be quite a success. They say that according to the late author’s literary agent, the Wylie Agency, at the time of Achebe’s death, he had sold between 15 million and 20 million copies worldwide in 60 languages.
The Sahara reporters indicate that the sales figures “make Mr Achebe’s modern classic one of the bestselling literary novels and the most widely read book by an African author.”

The Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) was scheduled to mark the 10th anniversary of Achebe’s death in a big way in a two-day event from the 19th to 21st May, 2023 at the Mamman Vatsa Writers’ Village, Abuja. Highlights of the activities lined up for the memorial included tributes and reminiscences on the legend, open conversation between the old and the young writers on the immortality of creativity, and the 10 years after Achebe’s transition. The event would be rounded off with a grand dinner.
About that event, the media is quoted as saying:

“The commemoration of the 10th Anniversary of Achebe’s death, under the theme, “The Immortality of Creativity: Ten Years After Achebe’s Transition,” is a noble effort at recognising the monumental roles of the father of African literature and the founder of the Association of Nigerian Authors – an honour duly deserved. It is, therefore, an occasion for sober reflection on Achebe’s legacies and fruitful discussions on how to sustain and promote them for the development of African literature to which he dedicated his entire life.”

Mr Achebe, who was the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of African Studies and Literary Arts, died in 2013 on March 21 at the age of 82. It is revealed that Achebe’s works besides Things Fall Apart have garnered numerous international prizes, awards for artistic excellence, and earned him more than 40 honorary doctorates from universities in Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States.

Achebe was a recipient of the Nigerian National Merit Award, his country’s highest accolade for intellectual accomplishment. However, Achebe was to later express his outrage at the desultory state of affairs in his country by refusing to accept two national honours given to him by former President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan.

In the last 10 years of his life, Achebe won several prestigious awards and honours, including an award for lifetime achievement by the New York-based National Art Society, the Man Booker International Prize (2007) for his artistic output as well as the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2010) for using his art and cultural advocacy to make the world a more beautiful place. All these awards must have brought monetary gains to Achebe.

A global literary luminary, Achebe inspired other writers as well as political figures in Africa and beyond. The revered South African leader, Nelson Mandela, once described Achebe as a writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down.”
Achebe’s Thing Fall Apart was listed in 2009 as number 14 in Newsweek Magazine’s top 100 books. Though written in the English language, the novel has been translated into 50 other world languages.

In a fourth case study, which is very unique, Dambudzo Marechera has had a unique legacy! Over my last 15 years at the University of Zimbabwe’s Department of English, I have taught a Level One survey called ‘Introduction to Zimbabwean literature.’ Many of these undergraduates, straight from high school, maintain their cool when you take them through texts such as The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing and Waiting For the Rain by Charles Mungoshi. But midway, when the students get to read The House of Hunger by Marechera, they become visibly overexcited. They pick a cue from somewhere that The House of Hunger is the text that will change their lives.

When you give them a background on Marechera and the novella, there is a deafening silence. There is always a feeling that you are not telling them a new story and that the audience is following through, walking a separate private path, comparing your information with their own from the Marechera folklore in Zimbabwe. This includes the ever-present but unconfirmed notions that Marechera was mad.

When you proceed to read aloud selected passages from the novella and make the ‘mistake’ of choosing the public rape scene, the students will cry out and whistle in amazement. Some of them stand up to dance and clap their hands. In one year there were several nuns among the students and I thought they would walk out. They didn’t. They stayed alongside the rest, listening to a reading of the ‘notorious’ passage.
The passage goes like:

“The older generation too was learning. It still believed that if one did not beat up one’s wife it meant that one did not love her at all. These beatings (not entirely one sided, because the man next door tried it and was smashed into the Africans only hospital by his up to then submissive wife) were always salted and peppered… The most lively of them ended with the husband actually f… – raping his wife right there in the thick of the excited crowd. He was cursing all women to hell as he did so. And he seemed to s… her forever – he went on and on and on and on until she looked like death.”

For the whole Marechera series, students rarely miss classes or come late, and one is assured of a full house. Reading The House of Hunger is a rite of passage of sorts.

After their first experience with The House of Hunger, at least a third of the male students immediately begin to be overly outspoken. They begin to grow their own dreadlocks, smoke and drink, scribble their own poetry and prose, and you are waylaid by young men and women who plead with you to look at what they are writing. You sense that they want you to confirm that they are now a part of the club.

Their poetry is angry and melodramatic, without being very clear about the causes and targets of the anger. You realise that the anger is targeted toward their parents, their siblings, the University of Zimbabwe, elders, and even anger against themselves. In their notebooks you find lines such as:

‘Nature the yowls of yore in a pun of roguery’
Which is almost senseless, and:
‘The systematic erosion of my being is the cauldron
of sad dreams.
Skin me alive and sell the carcass for a dollar.’

Marechera’s rebelliousness offers a matchstick to the already growing desire of the students to be free. Unfortunately, this influence is not always positive. In fact, Marechera can be a bad influence because some of these students begin to deliberately miss their lectures and fail to hand in their assignments or meet deadlines in line with what they regard as the Marechera tradition.

Some of them eventually drop out and one never sees or hears about them again. The more gifted of them, who manage to stay on, tend to become brusque and antisocial, or dreamy and reserved.

Outside the academic environment, there are high school drop-outs, job seekers, young farmers, budding guitarists, sculptors, and people herding cattle and goats and house servants who prefer Marechera’s Mindblast to The House of Hunger. They enjoy being part of the Marechera legend.

These people redefine reading. For them to read is not necessarily to comprehend, to get to the essence of the text, but to know that what you are looking at are the narratives of one of your own, considered (even by foreigners) as extraordinary. It is not rare to find at rural outposts such as Mt Darwin and Guruve people calling a fellow who does not read much or write, ‘Marechera’!

Indeed, each writer leaves behind a unique legacy.

Memory Chirere