(Above) D.H Lawrence
Eighty years ago (March 2, 1930) the great English writer D H (David Herbert) Lawrence breathed his last after a 20 year writing career that had produced excellent (if controversial) novels, plays, poems and essays. Lawrence is now considered one of the all-time greats of English literature.
Hey! Many of you might be wondering out there. What’s all this about? Is this not supposed to be a blog for black African literature? Why the tribute to Lawrence? The answer is simple. African literature has been influenced from inception by the English classics; authors like Shakespeare, Smollet, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Emily Bronte, and DH Lawrence. Hence we can not say African writing has existed in a vacuum.
Prominent African writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Njabulo Ndebele, Mirriam Tlali, Tsitsi Dangarembga etc have always confessed how much English works shaped, or influenced their work. As regards DH Lawrence in particular he has had a major influence on Ngugi wa Thiong’o (on the latter’s admission) with Ngugi producing African classics of his like A grain of wheat, and Petals of blood. Ngugi always said he loved how Lawrence “entered into the spirit of things”
Additionally, DH Lawrence always identified with the “masses” so to speak. Throughout his writing career he was targeted, with some of his works banned, seized by authorities. Lawrence came from what many black Africans cynically refer to as “the lowly classes”; but more accurately he was from the working class. He enjoyed travelling, and mixing with “underdogs” ,people who he believed had not been corrupted by industrialization or materialism.
As Africans, we know only too well how many of our distinguished wordsmiths have suffered inexorably at the hands of the powers that be. For many, they have had to endure stints in jail - I have in mind great writers like Ngugi himself, Kofi Awoonor, Jack Mapanje and the indomitable Wole Soyinka. Lawrence, whilst alive was many times moved to despair.
It is not the scope of this very very brief article to discuss Lawrence’s literary works. Suffice it to say that his style was original, instinctive, fluent and powerful. His famous description of the “rainbow” is an example:
“And then in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill (the) colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space in heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven.”
(from The Rainbow)
DH Lawrence published novels like Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, Lady Chatterley’s lover, The Plumed Serpent, The Rainbow, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love. He published some ten volumes of poetry including Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Last Poems, and Pansies.. Among his non-fiction or essays were Studies in Classic American Literature and A study of Thomas Hardy
- O Bolaji
* Bolaji is a black African writer who has published imaginative works like Impossible Love (2000), The Ghostly Adversary (2001), People of the Townships (2003), The subtle transgressor (2006), Tebogo and the Haka (2009), Tebogo and the epithalamion (2009) and Tebogo and the pantophagist (2010)
