Abiola Irele: 1936-2017 by Adéléké Adéẹ̀kọ́
<
https://networks.h-net.org/user/login?destination=node/185756>
by Olabode Ibironke
*/"the elephant is more than something of which one says, ‘I caught a
fleeting glimpse;’ if one saw an elephant, one should say so."/*
The African Literature Association regrets to announce the death of
Professor Francis Abiola Irele, 17th president of the association
(1991), and recipient, in 2015, of its highest service honor, the
Distinguished Membership Award. Resilient eminence are the two words
that come to mind when one reflects on the life and work of Professor
Abiola Irele, doyen of African literary and cultural theory and
criticism, publisher of note, frontline academic editor, great teacher,
category-bending anthology maker, and one of the deepest among
Africanist thinkers. Indeed, to describe Professor Irele as one with an
inexhaustible fund of achievement epithets will be far from an
overstatement. African Literature just got poorer with his passing.
World Literature has just lost one of its cardinal bearings.
Abiola Irele’s legacy is vast and deep. He read fluently and wrote
dexterously across many modern literary traditions, earning advanced
degrees at the University of Paris in French, and becoming one of the
most important proponents of Francophone writing of the last half a
century, often in predominantly English and Anglophone university
environments in Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe. As
professor, mentor, and administrator, he was at the forefront of the
struggle to make African imagination the centerpiece of high scholarship
at Ibadan, Legon, Ife, Dakar, Ohio State, Cambridge (UK), Harvard, and
Kwara State University (Nigeria) where he served as the founding Provost
of Humanities and Social Sciences. Perhaps because he saw as imperative
the need to construct a unified African imagination, he also brought the
most sophisticated critical reading apparatuses to the study of
literatures and oratures in African languages.
Irele’s many essays and numerous books on négritude, including /The
African Experience in Literature & Ideology,/ remain the beginning point
for studying that foundational literary movement in modern African
Literature. The historical approach in /The African Imagination/ is
magisterial. His editions of Achebe’s /Things Fall Apart/ and Aimé
Césaire’s classic of négritude, French, modernist poetry, /Cahier d'un
Retour au Pays Natal/ are praised ceaselessly by all. The /Norton
Anthology of World Literature/ that he co-edited with other scholars
lives up to the world coverage ambition of its title.
Of course, Abiola Irele can never leave us. How can Irele be said to
have left us when the records of his work as editor stare us in the face
at /Benin Review/, /Research in African Literatures/, /Transition, and
Savannah Review/. Abiola Irele cannot be said to have left us, as long
as we remember that his New Horn Press introduced Harry Garuba to the
world, gave us the first glimpse into Femi Osofisan's fiction in /Kolera
Kolej/, brought Sembene Ousmane's /Money Order/ to the Yorùbá reading
(and speaking) world as /Sọ̀wédowó/, and midwifed the Yorùbá language
translation of Chinua Achebe’s /Things Fall Apart/ as /Ìgbésí Ayé
Okonkwo/. Abiola Irele shall continue to live at the annual Abiola Irele
Seminar in Theory and Criticism at Nigeria’s Kwara State University.
Every aspect of the institution of literature making, physical and
intellectual, gained some substantial inheritance from Abiola Irele.
To his immediate family, we extend our deep sympathies and pray that the
memories of his time here on earth bring them comfort at this time.
