The essayist must take a position: political neutrality is hardly a thing that makes a great essayist, except if the matter is explicitly nonpolitical.
By Chimezie Chika
The Essay as Movement and Exploration
It was the 16th-century French writer Michel de Montaigne who gave the essay its name, even though it had existed long before his time, in forms ranging from philosophical dialogues, historical texts, and critical analysis, to religious exegesis and political disquisitions. But Montaigne was fully aware of this; he did not invent the form, as some people now claim. What he did was to push it beyond its extant formalities. He took subjects that are both public-facing and personal, and commented and mused on them by privileging his personal whimsy above all else: that is, he, as the writer, becomes his own subject. The series of self-portraits he produced, collected in a book (in the intro, he had written: “I am myself the matter of my book”, and: “I do not depict being, I depict passage”), sheds insight into the form he helped advance.
Time and self create a narrative. The personal in Montaigne was not necessarily liberalised to accommodate the entirely personal; rather, the emanations of the personal here can be gleaned in the proximity of the subjects under consideration to Montaigne’s own eternal concerns. Montaigne called what he was doing “attempts”—essais in the original French, meaning “tests”. Thus, his idea was that he was testing and attempting to understand his subjects. And herein, in this origin, lies the very soul of the essay: it is always an attempt to explicate, project, or understand ideas, concepts, events, and people.
While there is no comprehensive definition of the essay (for one of the earliest facts one can learn about the form is that it can take many routes) in lexicons, given the word’s etymology, we will provide definitions that most satisfy the foregoing. The OED defines essay as “a short, often prose composition on a particular subject, typically presenting personal views, analysis, or interpretation”. This definition captures the form (as a thing) as it has come to be known. But if we approach its origins in French vocabulary, as a verb, we can identify an English usage that defines “essay” as “attempting something”, as trying, as venturing. The Collins Dictionary defines this (in category 3) thus:
verb
If you essay something, you try to do it.
[formal]
Sinclair essayed a smile but it could hardly have been rated as a success. [VERB noun]
On the surface of it, verbal definition has nought to do with writing. It simply identifies a word that denotes action. Yet one can say, “I essayed into the rain”, as I wrote in a personal essay I published in Channel Magazine in 2024, and use that as a double entendre for both the physical act of daring to move into a pouring rain and the act of venturing into the unknown of a difficult subject matter as a writer. The most pivotal sense of the essay is as a written voyage or exploration into the unknown and the not-yet-fully-known. To begin an essay is to seek, to try to discover. It’s a thing that demands an explorer’s intrepidity and a scholar’s curiosity.
The essay is therefore always moving.
This movement is couched in its thinking mechanism, which can vary according to subject matter, style, intellect, and erudition. It need not be gainsaid that the intimation of movement operates based on an essay being a call to leave one’s comfort zone—that is, it is not intellectually stationary: it considers, it sees perspectives, positions, and it’s not cavalier about any stance or issue it confronts.
It is a discovery.
A Place for Language and Thought
Perhaps the most important attribute of the essay, its differentiating philosophy, is its quality of thought. Thought makes the essay a canvas for the exploration of ideas, for here one can attempt to spread and examine one’s thoughts on any subject or issue. Thought here is shorthand for thorough-minded intellect, introspection, and circumspection, and the ability to observe, respond, problematise, philosophise, interpret, and understand.
An essayist is therefore a thinker—a person who can offer insight through formal and informal channels. The essayist is someone who is disturbed in complex ways by the things they see. The essayist must be rational, but, depending on his subject, he must needs have emotional capacity and humour. But it is his orientation towards self-reflection that gives him the intellectual ability to attempt to manufacture or look into profound ideas or quotidian issues of human existence. No one should write an essay who has nothing to say. Thought must happen before an essay is written, no matter what form the essay takes.
Specificity colours his thinking, but eclecticism is his friend, for herein lies the ability to consider all that is debatable. The essayist cannot lie to himself first and foremost, or to his readers for that matter, for the foundations of his occupation and thinking would crumble in the face of it. The essayist is a seeker of truth. The act of essay is a search for truth, from the source.
The genealogy of the essay is firmly placed in the realm of language. It trades with language and fights with language. Language itself then comes from experience. In many instances, experience is perhaps the essayist’s greatest currency. The nature and physiology of the essayist’s experience would depend on several factors, however, whether it is one or many experiences. James Baldwin once wrote (in “Notes of a Native Son”) that “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience.” This is an emotional truth.
The modernist English novelist and excellent essayist, Virginia Woolf, attempted to philosophise the essay in many of her nonfictional prose writings. In her famous essay, “The Modern Essay”, first published as a review of Modern English Essays (1870-1920) in 1922, Woolf writes that the essayist “must know—that is the first essential—how to write. His learning may be as profound as Mark Pattison’s, but in an essay, it must be so fused by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface of the texture.” And a bit later in the essay, she says: “There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labor or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter”. There are more than a few things an essayist can learn from what Woolf has to say.
Of course, we are not going to agree with everything Woolf says (“Literal truth-telling and finding fault with a culprit for his good are out of place in an essay”), but her insights on what an essay needs are unimpeachable. She argues that language and thought are connected in an essay. That thinking laced with erudition and wisdom would produce tightly woven language and sound ideas, or it would produce crassness and hollow reasoning: “[T]here is another voice which is as a plague of locusts—the voice of a man stumbling drowsily among loose words, clutching aimlessly at vague ideas”.
Let the essayist therefore know his words; let him make friends with words and how they are used. This is the only way he would be able to carefully articulate his thoughts exactly as he wants them. To reiterate: while the essay is an avenue where thought is formed and fractured, dissected and reassembled, the essayist must understand words and style. Some of the tools of his trade will be found in the works of great essayists (Achebe, Orwell, Woolf, Baldwin, Didion, Sontag, etc.), as well as in a good thesaurus and in The Elements of Style—that seminal writer’s bible by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White.
Form and Deformation
An essay is not one thing. In form, it is so various as to reside in a fertile valley of continuous physical innovation. Thus, a great many prose writings, already written or as yet unwritten, can be given the name of the essay. Woolf notes this variety as well and argues that whatever the quality or form an essay takes—the extremities and middlings of it—they provide counterpoints to the ultimate ideal of an essay.
It is, therefore, strange to see people at this time trying to rigidify what the form of an essay should and shouldn’t be. Essays have taken the form of poetry as far back as nearly three centuries ago (See Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”), and, more recently, something called hermit crab essays have become increasingly popular in the corridors of literary magazine publishing.
The essay—even the seemingly structureless ones—possesses an interior morphology. This form, in its simplest iteration (as most of us have been taught in school), is that it must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is not always so. An essay might take this foundation and tweak or invert it. The inversion itself may not be drastic, but simply be that the essay starts in medias res—in the middle (as in George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”), or it could start at the very end (Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”). The beginning, too, can take various routes: as a story, as a quote, as a visual art analysis, etc.
Avant-garde essays do all sorts of remarkable things with the form. The essayist is always at liberty to invent so long as form does not eclipse or deform the interior thought cartography of an essay. I said above that we need not completely agree with Woolf (or anybody at all, whose position sits at the very opposite of ours) at the point where she says literal truth-telling has no place in the essay. I would say that the essay is expansive enough to accommodate literal and non-literal forms of truth.
There is no literary form or genre that can do without figuration or literalisation in some form or degree. We state by implication, but we also state certain things directly—sometimes in the same statement. Some occasions call the essayist towards metaphorical orchestration—that is, placing the truth of an entire essay inside an extended metaphor—and other occasions ask writers to literally take the bull by the horns and go into the arena. No one should therefore cast aspersions on the essayist who enacts activism in their essays, so long as they are essaying with truth, for they are only doing what that particular occasion of the essay demands (we will come to this last).
So let the essayist not concern himself with form, but with thought and learning. Let him approach his subjects with a clear vision, discernment, cultural wisdom, and psychological insight.
Housekeeping the Essay
I have already pointed to Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style as an invaluable tool for the essayist (for in this and other similar resources, he would learn a writer’s greatest ability: clarity of expression), but let us attempt some more prescriptions and reiterate already stated facts—a sort of beatitudes for the essayist, if you will.
The essayist must be brave: he should have intellectual chutzpah, for it allows him to write with authority.
The essayist should be a sort of scientist: he should be objective always, approaching his topics with cold precision.
The essayist must make his words count: no superfluous words should be allowed to stand in an age where a scarcity of artistry prevails. Language is his friend.
The essayist must have emotional capacity: a capacious ability to accommodate the lessons of the human condition, and emotional balance.
The essayist must be a serious reader: a strong, attentive, and wide-ranging reader; must read the greats of the genre; must also read beyond the genre; the knowledge that emerges therewith gives his writing the kind of maturity that cannot be faked.
The essayist must be an observer of life: he who is patient in observation will have seen all there is to see, and therefore will have the most incisive things to say. Time is his friend.
The essayist must be ruthless when need be, but the ruthlessness must be informed: truth—objective truth, subjective truth (there is such a thing, if it is not mere delusion)—is your greatest friend.
The essayist must take a position: political neutrality is hardly a thing that makes a great essayist, except if the matter is explicitly nonpolitical. The essayist who takes a position sees his way as better in many senses. Again: truth is his friend.
On Morality and Politics
Woolf once wrote an essay in which she gripes about the decay of essay writing. That essay was published in 1905, and it was called “The Decay of Essay Writing”—one of literature’s most acerbic attacks on the undesirability of modern writing. The conclusive point that Woolf makes therein is that essay writing is a moral undertaking that is supposed to inspire and provoke thought. “There are, of course, distinguished people who use this medium from genuine inspiration because it best embodies the soul of their thought. But, on the other hand, there is a very large number who make the fatal pause, and the mechanical act of writing is allowed to set the brain in motion which should only be accessible to a higher inspiration.”
But as I have already said, an essay can be many things. The real problem is the inability of the present crop of writers to understand that an essay as a whole can do more than the parts of what it is presently being configured to do. Much of what I am doing in this essay comes from an observation that a great many literary-minded young Nigerians and Africans from the generation that came of age in the digital era may not even understand what an essay is. Arguments disparaging essayists they do not agree with often go along the lines of “you did not write an essay, you wrote…”. And at such a juncture, a reference back to the meaning of an essay would provide no small insight.
Much of that strategic ignorance comes from strategically limited thinking. It comes from a thorough propagation of medieval solipsism, the likes of which puts the clueless individual at the centre of a (his own) universe that has offered more noble states than this. The writing that emerges thereof puts egotism in contention with nothing, and therefore yields nothing to us. Are writings such as these essays? The simple answer is that they certainly are if they have proposed or revealed something. Any such proposal, any kind, places itself in the line of fire: it asks for a response. And one can respond to them in the same manner that Woolf responded to the drab letterings of her time.
Today’s essays skew overwhelmingly personal, many times not in a good way. A magazine-centred insistence on the depthless personal essay has not helped matters in the least, as one 2017 essay in The New Yorker about this development notes. One longs for the kind of essay that provokes, argues, and edifies—one which need not be agreed with for its merits to be seen. The emotions of such an essay are not panopticonised navel-gazing, as you will quickly find in the glut of personal essays being written now; it understands that the turf of the essay is moral fortitude that comes from emotional and intellectual balance. This is perhaps why the essay is the closest form of nonfiction writing to the metaphor of a boxing arena; in the same vein, it’s also closest to a scientist’s lab.
There is a reason why the essay is the choice form for literary and social criticism, polemics, and cultural commentary, as well as all manner of artistic and political evaluations. It has the immediacy you will not quickly find in other literary genres. While the essayist is not morally infallible—and must avoid any claims as such—he must have the moral capacity to confront the mass delusions of our time, regardless of where he stands.
The reason for this is that there is a link between knowledge, wisdom, and morality. Any decent essayist has this operating in his mind. He therefore has a moral responsibility which he must not shy away from. It is better to read an essay that comes from moral responsibility than one that assumes superiority of argument, which it fails to substantiate.
Unfortunately, so much ideological mortar-pounding gets passed off as a “profound essay” where morality and humanity are lacking. The perversities of modern criticism have all the trappings of faux liberty agitprop and the kind of mob tyranny that lacks self-awareness, for much of it still comes from those who profess to be for humanity. Let it be known now that an essay is not the end of the road: it is something that calls for dialogue and continuous discourse. No one has said it all on any matter. There is no period, and there is no shut door. If a certain individual has convinced themselves otherwise, then they are not doing the work of intellectual balance, for that balance is built on a condition that entire world can neither stand nor see from one place. This disuniformity of position may not be desirable in certain subjective respects, but it represents humanity more than anything else. Vive la différence.
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The question of morality and politics arose recently in the most incendiary of ways when Nigerian poet and critic Ernest Jesuyemi (formerly Ogunyemi) published an essay detailing his experience with winning and losing a National Book Critics Circle Foundation fellowship within a short time. No sooner had that essay been published than all manner of moral and immoral vituperations took over along liberal and conservative divides.
My personal amity with the essayist and my acquaintance with the saga (as far back as last year) notwithstanding, I saw clear issues with some of his positions in the essay, as I did with many of his detractors. Some things are objectively clear: his political position is faith-based; his experience is that of a man who was rejected from a group for that very reason, even when he had been accepted on purely literary grounds. But it’s hard to ignore the rejection of activism in literature (or that certain criticism prefers to look towards that) while affirming it at the same time as the essayist did.
From a human-focused position, let me be clear on what literature is. Literature always stands against power; it speaks into it, bites into it. Yet, literature that cavorts with power is hollow artistry, a failure. The best literature always has something to say about society, about humanity, and the nature of its existence—that is political.
Are we going to dispute now that the very nature of writing makes the writer an iconoclast? The writer is always that; the very nature of his work affirms that; the moral responsibility of being a writer comes with almost involuntary moral decisions which cannot be interpreted in any non-political way. That does not mean it displaces formal analysis; it only contextually illuminates it. If literature, which always emerges from a context, separates itself from where it is coming from, then what exactly is the identity of that literature?
Thus, an essay, which is the most urgent form of literary engagement, is nothing if it forgoes the form’s innate iconoclasm. The essayist has his work cut out for him: he would begin by acknowledging that his thoughts are coming from somewhere, going towards someplace, and responding to something.
Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, The Iowa Review, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1