Wednesday, July 18, 2007 The Prize and The Truth (Odia) THE NLNG LITERATURE PRIZE CONTROVERSYBefore The Nigerian Prize BY ODIA OFEIMUN Unlike Professor Olu Obafemi, President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, I do not take the Word as an egg which cannot be reassembled once it is broken. The truth is that the word, if it is an egg, was already broken. All that we do as writers is to train it in support of life, scooping it, beating it, refining and spicing it, to educate taste, thus making and adding meaning, nutritious meaning, to existence. How well we do this is dependent on how we use imagination — the heart, mind and will, that is part of our being homo sapiens. Those who do not care about the meaning that they make, who therefore think of deconstructing before they have learnt to construct, are the ones who tend to put the world in trouble. They tell the rest of us that we can always leap before we think. They seek to, and because they fail to assemble the egg that is alr
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