As a student of American literature and culture at the State University of New York (Buffalo) during the mid- and late 1970s, Chinweizu encountered the writings of Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructionist literary criticism, because Derrida was making a big impression in American academic circles during that period, and SUNY-Buffalo was, along with Yale University, one of the avant-garde places to study poststructuralist literary theory.

In 1975–76, the year that Chinweizu was writing his dissertation at SUNY-Buffalo, the literature faculty sponsored a course administered through SUNY-Buffalo’s Paris program, and Derrida was the featured professor. Chinweizu’s poem Professor Derrida Eshu sends a salvo of critical bullets into the world of fashionable academic discourse that Derrida inspired.

By titling his brilliant dramatic monologue as he does, Chinweizu complicates his lampoon and its ultimate message, making it possible for the poet, writing a decade later, to hit at least two clear targets: Nigerian teachers infected by deconstructionist theory, and those solemn, unoriginal scholars anywhere who do not realize to what an extent Derrida was himself a trickster.

A close reading of the text reveals how Chinweizu also ridicules the obscurities of his fellow contemporary poets, seduced by foreign critics into writing stale, impenetrable, and tasteless verse.

On the one hand, the persona of Professor Derrida Eshu can be read as a playful contemporary mask for Eshu. The professor’s name is structured so that the word that counts the most is Eshu (the Yoruba appellation for the youthful trickster god of boundary crossing, rule breaking, sexuality, opportunity, and communication). In this construction the title (Professor) and forename (Derrida) relate to the word Eshu as modifiers.

Given this appreciation of the speaker’s surname and identity and the fact that the entire poem represents a 20-line speech made by Eshu, the work expresses (playfully and satirically) that all of deconstructionist literary theory is nothing but an invention of this powerful and joyfully disruptive deity.

The speech contains condescending nouns of address such as might be used by stuffy (British) tutors—and imitated by copycat (African) academics. The poem begins with the line “It [poetry] is not a thing for enjoyment, my dear boy,” and near the end the speaker asserts (about literary criticism), “That’s how it is done, my boy.”

The speaker’s description of good poetry as “complex, uncommon stuff” (emphasis added) is another hint that he has appropriated the pretentious idiom of Anglo-American academics, for whom the casual word stuff (for material or language) often suggests an approach of nonchalance or superciliousness toward a topic.

These mind-set markers connote what Chinweizu has elsewhere labeled “blancophilia” and “negrophobia” (“On Negrophobia”), contagious cultural diseases that must be cured if Africans are to survive the postcolonial era and promote a healthy society for the future.

The killjoy academic is more particularly satirized throughout the major part of the poem by the diction attributed to him. Early in the poem the speaker creates a mock-funereal atmosphere: poetry, he says, “isn’t like tasty food or excellent wine; / It isn’t like oven-fresh bread or succulent pear” (ll. 2–3). Instead, he says, it must “be probed / With seismoscopes and divining rods” and “packed in heavy water, / Placed in a vacuum chamber cased in lead, / And cracked by an atom-smasher” (ll. 4–8).

Banks of computers are necessary, he adds, to process and to decode the poem’s “indeterminacy wave forms” (ll. 9–11). The “printouts of eigen-values” can only be properly “interpreted by holy mouths, / Each well anointed and perfumed” (ll. 12–14).

The poem ends with a dismissive and conclusive insult: “If you, or just anybody can understand it, / It isn’t a poem at all—declared the Great / Professor Derrida Eshu” (ll. 18–20).

In his essay On Negrophobia: Psychoneurotic Obstacles to Black Autonomy, Chinweizu explains fully his criticism of diseased, mimetic behaviors among postcolonial Africans and diasporan people of African descent.

Against the background of Chinweizu’s radical ideology, Professor Derrida Eshu encapsulates reasons—given more fully in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980) and in his interview with Akubuiro—for his cold-shouldering of so much of what African poets produced in the 20th century.

Chinweizu composed a serious version of this poem’s fundamental message in his longer, prophetic poem Admonition to the Black World.

Bibliography

Akubuiro, Henry. “Chinweizu Hits Soyinka and Clark Again: I don’t read them. . . .” The Sun News (Nigeria), 27 August 2006.

Chinweizu. Invocations and Admonitions: 49 Poems and a Triptych of Parables. Lagos, Nigeria: Pero Press, 1986.

———. On Negrophobia: Psychoneurotic Obstacles to Black Autonomy: Or Why I Love Michael Jackson.

Categories: Literature, World Literature

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