From Garfield To Black Panther: Nnedi Okorafor On The Power Of Comics

Nnedi Okoroafor. Image: Neilson Barnard/Getty

BY NNEDI OKOROAFOR

My path to writing the big black cat started with a fat orange cat.

I’ve always been attracted to comics. Even before the word, it was the black line that drew me (pun intended). It began when I was about seven years old in the early ’80s with . . . Garfield. My father was an avid Chicago Sun-Times newspaper reader, and every day he would sit at the dinner table and read it. It was while hanging around him that I noticed that there was a comics page every day. The Family Circus, Hi and Lois, Bloomsbury, Calvin and Hobbes, Momma, Ziggy—there were so many I enjoyed. And, oh man, on Sunday, there were pages of comics, and they were in color! I loved these little stories told in pictures. But I became most obsessed with Garfield.

It was more than the hijinks and jokes. There was something about those dark lines, how they looped and swirled to create images and how those images molded with the “drawings” of letters that were words, communicating thoughts and ideas with the pictures. Even before I was writing stories using prose I was marveling at the dance of symbolic representations of sound and images.

Nevertheless, I didn’t arrive at comic books until much later in life. When I was a kid, I’d see the local comic book shops. I was interested and so, yes, I’d walk in there. I had seen boys at school with comic books and their colorful covers with titles in electrical-looking fonts. The excitement of those boys and their flimsy books intrigued me. And since I was very little, I’d always had dreams of flying. Heroes in capes with super powers were definitely in my realm of wonder.

However, when I’d push that comic book shop door open, the bell on the top of the door would ring and then something problematic would happen. I’d like to compare it to that moment when Luke and Obi-Wan walk into the bar or that record-scratch moment in Westerns when the stranger walks into the saloon. The comic book shop was always full of white boys; the person behind the counter was always a white guy. None of this bothered me; I’d grown up in a white neighborhood. What bothered me was their reaction to me. The staring, and staring.The comic book shop was always full of white boys; the person behind the counter was always a white guy.

I’d slowly walk in, trying not to make eye contact with anyone. However, the silent scrutiny and feeling that I had invade a place where I wasn’t welcome would be so strong that I’d leave soon after. On top of this, I was unfamiliar with comic books, how they were shelved, so I didn’t even know what I was seeking. Let alone the fact that when I glanced at all the covers, I didn’t see anyone black or female or outside a male gaze.

It was the late ’80s. I was between eight and twelve years old in those years, the child of Nigerian immigrants, an athlete playing and grandly excelling in the sport of tennis. I was navigating through a lot of blatant racism, prejudice, and xenophobia. I knew when to avoid a space, even if I didn’t fully understand the depth of it. Comic book shops remained an unwelcoming place on several levels for many years. I can’t state it enough: to be white and male was such a privilege if you loved or wanted to love comic books.

My discovery of superheroes didn’t happen until I was nineteen years old and paralyzed from spinal surgery complications when doctors tried to straighten out my acute scoliosis. That’s a lot crammed in one sentence, I know. I wrote a whole book about it called Broken Places & Outer Spaces. I was a semipro tennis player and a track star with severe scoliosis that was increasing in severity every year.

I was eventually told that I could either have the spinal surgery to straighten it out or become crippled by 25 and have a much shorter life due to compressed organs. When I had the surgery, I was in the anomalous 1 percent of patients who mysteriously respond to the surgery with paralysis. So I went from super athlete to paralyzed from the waist down in a matter of nine hours. I’d lost my super powers.

It took me months to regain sensation in my legs (and the doctors didn’t know whether I would until it gradually happened). After a month in the hospital, and then another several weeks of rigorous physical therapy, I got out of that wheelchair and began using a walker. Eventually I graduated to a half walker, then cane, then finally using only my own two legs. But that summer, while I was still using the walker, I spent a lot of time in front of the TV. And that’s when I discovered the X-Men. I especially loved Storm, who could fly.

But the one who intrigued me most was Wolverine because he was so angry and he had a skeleton that was unbreakable. As a 21-year-old who’d just lost her super powers and was now trying to figure out who the heck she was, this discovery gave me strength. It was the first time I understood why so many loved superheroes. The first superhero comic I read was Wolverine.

I went on to consume comics through graphic novels, including Persepolis, A Contract with God, Bone, and two more iconic cat narratives in The Rabbi’s Cat and We3. I read these while I earned my second MA and then PhD. I came to more superheroes through Grant Morrison’s Animal Man and Vixen and Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

And then, years later, while I was a professor at the University at Buffalo, I learned about a country in Marvel’s Africa called Wakanda and I said, “Hmmm, interesting.” I thank Ta-Nehisi Coates for introducing me to King T’Challa. Yes, yes, I was late, but we can’t always be on time.Even before I was writing stories using prose, I was marveling at the dance of symbolic representations of sound and images.

Writing Black Panther: Long Live the King (2017–2018) was a marvelous experience. Initially, I came to it looking at King T’Challa and the country of Wakanda out of the side of my eye. I’m Igbo (a Nigerian ethnic group), and among the Igbo there’s a common saying, “Igbo enwe eze,” which means, “The Igbo have no king.” Being a series of democratic societies consisting of small independent communities, historically, Igbos didn’t have a centralized government or royalty.

I grew up hearing this phrase, and between this and also being an American, any type of monarchy gets my side-eye of disapproval . . . even a mythical one. Then I realized, in writing Black Panther, I could affect him and his country. I could enter into direct conversation and be heard. It was like visiting a country for the first time, and not as a tourist, but as a diplomat. I couldn’t be passive during my visit, and that made my visit even more interesting. I got to listen to, know, and speak to T’Challa and the people and land of Wakanda.

Black Panther and Wakanda hold a powerful place in the Marvel Universe. I’ve always viewed Wakanda as a proper return of African Americans (the direct descendants of enslaved Africans during the Transatlantic Slave Trade) to the continent of Africa. Because one can never go back in the past, the gaze is into the future, and that was where the reconciliation was made . . . at least the beginning of one. There’s a sense of homecoming and belonging in Black Panther that is celebratory. One gets to claim Wakanda as a space and make an African connection.

One of the reasons I agreed to write T’Challa, Shuri, the Dora Milaje, and Wakanda was because I wanted to further develop that bridge. I focused on bringing T’Challa closer to the common people of Wakanda and later, when I wrote Shuri as the Black Panther, bringing her to the rest of Africa.

Comics are powerful indeed. King T’Challa, the mantle of Black Panther, and the country of Wakanda have all evolved so much over the decades. I look forward to what comes next.

Nigerian writer Ben Okri once wrote in his book Birds of Heaven, “The happiness of Africa is in its nostalgia for the future, and its dreams of a golden age.” I think this is true both on the continent and in the Black Diaspora beyond. Wakanda Forever.

Akwaeke Emezi’s Poetry Collection Makes Space For Many Selves

BY CHINELO ANYADIEGWU

Akwaeke Emezi

Hello, Hello! Welcome to my column, Queer Naija Lit, where I’ll be reviewing some of my favourite queer Nigerian books.

CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING deserves its name. Between the first and last pages, my mind became a thunderstorm of questions. What is time? What is being? What is life? What is death, to a god? Each poem presents an experience like lightning. Look: love. Here, pain. See where they connect. At the center of the thunderstorm is stillness. There, clarity is born. If you feel confused and a little unsteady then, congratulations, you’re ready to read Akwaeke Emezi.

What is time?

In colonial reality, time is a wound. Colonial time announces itself by the suppression of other times. It is the present, absent. In Emezi’s work, time is mended by stories that reach across, into, beyond, and before the bifurcation of “this” time.

It’s common to think of time as linear, but Emezi’s poems convey a story that doesn’t go from point A to B. Rather, it explores moments: freedom, peace, reckoning, and hurt can be represented through time — by which I mean experience. In Igbo culture, experience is the focus of a story and, by extension, life (what is life, if not one long story/experience?).

I grew up hearing stories from my family that didn’t hold their center in a particular time or region but in experience and shared understanding. Simultaneously, I was hearing a linear story about my country and people that only made sense if I didn’t look beyond the last few decades. I was — through spiritual and academic colonial institutions — conditioned to think of myself through a lens that denied my existence. When you have two means of storytelling next to each other — like with most binaries — we’re taught to pit them against each other. The “and” of the colonial mind is really a “versus.”

Emezi recognizes this cultural conflict in their narrative, but they step out of the narrative of oppression and into truth. Binaries can show us where things separate, but also where they connect — like a door hinge, or the two faces of a coin.

When I look at time as an experience the way Emezi writes it and compare it to linear, measured time, what becomes obvious to me is the way they are connected, and that one way of perceiving — the linear way — is deemed more real than another.

The consequences (and intent) of this are dire. Experiences and realities that can be validated through linear time thrive. Meanwhile, experiences and realities that can’t be translated into this metric are invisibilized and subjugated. Specifically, the people and environments living in non-privileged realities are subjugated.

Not in Emezi’s book. CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING exists in the reality of the spirit that wrote it. Emezi is who they are, an ogbanje and a god-child. The book is an embodiment of their reality, which is also Igbo reality.

What is being?

Colonization forced a majority of the world to think of beingness as one thing. There’s one (white) human, one (white) reality, one (white) self. This narrative is a modern descendant of Plato’s search for Ultimate Truth, which is fear and control. Colonization is an empire’s attempt to take all that is. I can’t imagine the size of the ego necessary for a person to believe they can know and be all that is, and yet, the proof is in life right now. It’s in the ways we’re still conditioned to try to define everyone else and the ways we’re prevented from defining ourselves. Like Toni Morrison says, definitions belong to the definers.

Our ability to know and define stops at us — and even that is tenuous. To reach beyond the self and attempt to define (control) all reality — and therefore the experiences of people that aren’t you — is violence.

When Emezi writes, it is from deep within themself, made possible by their acceptance of their reality. The book is filled with selves mirroring each other, asking hard questions. This mode of storytelling is grounded in our culture. Duality is an important concept in Igbo culture. Life is possible when two exist. The earth and the sky, day and night. Time and being create life and death. While colonial reality seeks to suppress difference, Igbo culture recognizes that difference itself is life.

A poetry book is brilliant fabric to weave reality with. In physical form, each end of the book serves as a container that the selves in the poem differentiate and reflect within. The difference in the book serves a different purpose from the conflict and suppression that is the current dominant narrative. Instead of suppression, Emezi writes towards connection and integration.

One poem, “Self Portrait As An Abuser” (one of many portraiture poems in the book) fractures the selves in two. One self seeks to live by taking. This self fears being alone, fears being unloved. The other self, on the other end of the page, is healed enough to tell the story as a warning. Between these stories, another narrative emerges.

I literally mean Between. When the stories are read through the space that separates them, a third narrative emerges. The hurting self tries to tell the spirit inside it to live. It doesn’t end there. I count at least ten narratives in this poem alone, and the entire book is like that, yet no two poems are the same. It’s brilliant.

This is a book to be read and re-read, like all true stories. People aren’t ever just “one” thing. We grow, change, heal, and hurt. That’s life. Stillness (which is not rest) belongs to spirit, the internal consciousness. We dip into it from time to time, but permanent stillness is death.

It’s important to place Emezi’s work in context. It makes sense that this was a book written by an ogbanje. An ogbanje is a trickster spirit, and what is colonization if not trickery. Substitute that, unname this, redraw these lands, rename these people, destroy their artifacts. Weave a web of fear over the world so we pretend all is well, as people are hurt. Trickery.

So of course, it takes an ogbanje to see where the oppressors’ tricks fail and spin old realities into new worlds.

Emezi is also the child of an alusi (deity) , Ani. The earth mother. She holds life and death, the harvest, marriage, communal laws, and spiritual practices. Ani is the ground everything is built on, and she is where we return when we leave this realm. The python that swallows everything.

That Ani sends her child as an ogbanje makes sense. The child of Ani has to be everything, a reflection of their mother. For Igbo people right now, that means they have to be part trickery. They are a reflection of the liminal space that the colonized culture — fighting for its own reality — occupies.

It matters that a god of my people showed their face and is queer. It matters the way they continue to experience violence in this embodiment. This mirrors colonial interactions with African liminality and the ways we experience the embodiment of spirit. Their stigmatization by cis-het Nigerians invested on some level in the upholding of colonial reality makes it clear what the arms of oppression are orchestrating us to kill internally. Our own spirits, our own people, our own gods.

I, and any of my people who know to look, know what we see. What we feel in Emezi’s telling. To tell a story is to survive it. To tell a story with all your faces present, as Emezi has done, is to live. As a people, if our gods are alive, so are we.

The whole story matters, it always does. So, thank you Akwaeke, for giving us everything.

Why It’s Okay To Forget The Books You Read

BY NOORA SHAMSI BAHAR

What makes them my favourites, if I can't remember the names of the engrossing characters or the details of the intricate plots in some of my "favourite" books? Is something wrong with me? Is that faculty of my brain which stores and retrieves information faulty? Am I showing early signs of Alzheimer's or Dementia? Do I really even like reading? Am I not reading "properly" enough?

Sir Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, once wrote: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Does this mean that I only "taste" books while reading and then spit them out soon after they go into my bookshelf? Am I simply a taster and not a digester?

I've come to realise that this is not a "problem" unique to myself and is in fact, quite common. I realise that in this digital era, with easy access to the internet and therefore, with information at my fingertips, I don't really have to have total/perfect recall. For example, I knew Bacon wrote something about books, so I simply used the search words "Francis Bacon on books" on Google, and voila, I had the essay from which I took the aforementioned quote. Siegfried Sassoon, a World War I poet, stated that "it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read" and so, I've learned to forgive myself for forgetting, for I'm just an ordinary human.

With this realisation, one may ask, what's the point of reading, if I am going to forget most of it anyway? The answer is pretty simple. One shouldn't read to remember; rather, one should read for the experience of reading. We tend to prioritise recalling over experiencing. I can recall the different emotions I felt and the realisations I came to while reading the books I've read, with each experience different from the other.

While reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), I remember feeling that the Nigerian novelist had mastered the English language—the language of the colonialists. I was reminded of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", particularly the character Caliban, who tells his master Prospero, "You taught me language, and my profit on't Is I know how to curse." I remember feeling that Achebe had symbolically used the coloniser's tools to dismantle the master's house through his tale, which is aimed at the Western reader, and yet, at the same time, he was successful in portraying the African experience in English while preserving African authenticity, which by the way, is neither faultless nor idyllic.

Things Fall Apart is a masterpiece that allowed me to perceive the African people unlike the way white authors such as Joseph Conrad (through his Heart of Darkness) portrays them (in a racist, reductionist, stereotypical manner), thereby offering me the chance to see them through an alternate, non-colonial, authentic lens. I know the novel's name came from WB Yeats's poem, "The Second Coming" and while the poem is about the anti-Christ and the anarchy that he brings with him, the book is about colonisation and the consequent collapse of the Igbo society. The disintegration of values, customs, traditions, relationships, etc. of the Igbo people is also a result of internal flaws within that society, which Achebe didn't shy away from exposing. I remember feeling that the author was just as critical of the colonisers as he was of his own people and I couldn't help but marvel at his objectivity. I remember making a connection between Achebe's novel and Shirley Jackson's unsettling short story, "The Lottery'' because both texts have characters who question rituals such as human sacrifice, and both texts also have characters who cannot accept change. Lastly, I remember understanding the concept of cultural hegemony, where the white man did not need to resort to brute force to colonise the Igbo people in Achebe's novel; rather, colonisation came about through the latter's consent.

The reader of this essay may think that I remember a lot from reading the novel, but I cannot write another word unless I re-read the book again. I don't remember a single character's name or the relationships between characters and tribes, and I don't remember most of the flaws in the Igbo society that led to its demise when the British came into the picture. However, my experience of reading a book by an African author changed me in more ways than one. I got a glimpse of a culture and a people completely foreign to me, I made connections with other texts that I had read, and I understood theories that I had studied but could not apply until I read the novel.

I believe that even if you remember nothing but a certain intense, raw emotion that you felt while reading a book, you have a valid reason to pick up another book and continue to experience the joys of reading.

Noora Shamsi Bahar is a writer, translator, and Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Modern Languages, North South University.

SOURCE: DAILY STAR

Shelf Life: Akwaeke Emezi

BY RIZA CRUZ

ELLE

KATHLEEN BOMANI / ILLUSTRATION BY YOUSRA ATTIA via ELLE

The National Book Award finalist and author of Dear Senthuran and Bitter takes our literary survey.

Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.

Expect to hear even more from Akwaeke Emezi this year, starting with Bitter (Knopf Books for Young Readers, out next week), a companion novel to their debut YA novel, PET, a National Book Award finalist. Their first poetry collection, Content Warning: Everything is out in April, and their first romance novel You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty will be released in May. Screen rights to the latter were bought by Amazon Studios with Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society attached; Emezi will be an executive producer.

Born and raised in Nigeria, the NYT-bestselling writer and video artist moved to the U.S. at 16 and now lives in New Orleans—their house has an Instagram account (@shinythegodhouse) as does their Devon Rex cat, Gus PonPon (@gus.ponpon).

The Igbo-Tamil Emezi is a Gemini, was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree; graced Time’s cover as a Next Generation Leader for their memoir, Dear Senthuran; considered becoming a nun; once wrote six blogs simultaneously; went to veterinary school and has a degree in nonprofit management and public policy from NYU; can’t write in cafes because of the noise; named their garden Emmeline; appeared in Jay-Z’s 4:44 video; and got an Artist Formerly Known as Prince symbol the day after he died.

Likes: Rotimi Fani-Kayode art, soca music, Bolden skincare, black groundnuts, gold ceilings, fruit stands (mangoes to eat with sweet soy sauce and guavas are favorites), clothes that feel like pajamas, cacti. Dislikes: coffee, writing essays.

The book that:
...shaped my worldview:

Of Water and the Spirit by the late and great Malidoma Patrice Somé introduced me to the concept of decolonizing reality itself and taught me how to center indigenous African realities, which was foundational to my own body of work.
…currently sits on my nightstand:

I just started In Sensorium: Notes For My People by the brilliant Bangladeshi writer and perfumer Tanaïs, and so far, it’s an incredible and evocative text that I can’t wait to drown in.
…I’d like turned into a Netflix show:

The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty would be absolutely phenomenal on screen! It’s a brilliant series about djinn and royalty that the author once described as “a fantasy homage to the medieval Islamic world.”

...I last bought:

Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi, because she is a literary legend and the worlds she writes are always so special.

…I recommend over and over again:

Under The Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta is a classic piece of literary fiction reminding us that queer people are a real and vital part of all our histories.
…has a sex scene that will make you blush:

Anything by Katee Robert, but particularly her Dark Olympus and A Touch of Taboo series. Whew!

...fills me with hope:

I’m pretty jaded about the world, so when I read the Brown Sisters series by Talia Hibbert, those books warmed my heart because I got to see Black femmes who were in chronic pain, who were neurodivergent, and who didn’t fit white supremacist beauty standards being loved and loved fiercely.

…made me weep uncontrollably:

All About Love by bell hooks is a deeply necessary and utterly devastating book that can reshape your life in the best way if you let it. I think I had a meltdown by the second chapter.

…should be on every college syllabus:

Oreo by Fran Ross is a satirical novel written by a Black queer woman and published in 1974. I consider it an indisputable genius-level text that should absolutely be taught widely.
...I read in one sitting, it was that good:

The Tensorate series by Neon Yang, and yes, I read the entire series in one sitting on a plane. It really is that good.

…I swear I'll finish one day:

I have chronic pain caused by muscle spasms from C-PTSD, so multiple people recommended The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, but I can never finish it because it contains accounts of trauma that are honestly too disturbing for me to take in.

Bonus question: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be:

I think this one is a classic, but Belle’s library in Beauty and The Beast. Technically, it might be the Beast’s library, but as a kid, that was the absolute dream.

Community Key In Nigerian Memoir

BY SUSAN HUEBERT

Chidiogo Akunyili-Parr. Image via Chidiogo

Everyone has a back story, a series of events that led to potentially life-changing choices. In I Am Because We Are, Chidiogo Akunyili-Parr tells the story of her mother Dora’s life as a Nigerian politician and activist working to combat the trade in fraudulent drugs, and finally as a dying woman in need of medical care. Throughout the story runs the African principle of ubuntu, which holds the importance of the community over the individual.

Akunyili-Parr is currently based in Toronto, where she works as a writer, consultant and speaker. She is also the founder of the community organization She ROARS, which is dedicated to helping women of colour achieve their objectives. Much of her work revolves around the principle of ubuntu.

I Am Because We Are is written in the first person, mainly from the perspective of Dora Akunyili and then from her daughter Chidiogo’s viewpoint. The book covers many important aspects of Dora’s life, including her experiences during the Biafran War and the consequences, positive and negative, of her parents’ decision to send her to live with her grandmother. Although many aspects of her life were hard, these experiences also helped to shape the person she became.

Many of the choices that Dora Akunyili made were responses to the circumstances she encountered. Knowing that Nigeria is the source of many fraudulent drugs, she decided to become a pharmacist so she could help explore alternatives to contaminated and often weakened pharmaceuticals. When her younger sister, a diabetic, died from taking tainted insulin, she decided that counterfeit drugs would be the focus of her work.

Taking on the task of ridding Nigeria of this problem involved making people aware of the issue and then trying to make changes at a high level. For many years, Akunyili worked with NAFDAC, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, in Nigeria. Government positions followed, together with death threats and an assassination attempt. Finally, Akunyili found herself needing medical care and treatment herself in her struggle with cancer.

Throughout the book is a strong thread of family and community. While her marriage was flawed, Akunyili’s relationships with her six children remained strong, even as the family dispersed to the United States and other parts of the world. Her connections with some of her siblings also helped to give her strength in difficult times, including both successes and failures.

Dora Akunyili narrates her own life and death before the perspective shifts to the narrative of her youngest daughter, Chidiogo. Dora draws in the perspectives of her siblings, as well as the traditions of the Igbo tribe, to which the family belonged, and her Christian faith.

Chidiogo’s narrative in the final chapters includes musings both on how the book came together and on her siblings’ reactions to their mother’s death. In accordance with her mother’s wishes, the story is also about healing, both physical and emotional, that people need in the situations they encounter.

I Am Because We Are is a compelling story, especially for readers interested in international politics and campaigns. Some of Dora Akunyili’s speeches are included in the book, giving readers a sense of the ideals that drove her.

Even for those who may not be overly interested in politics, I Am Because We Are is an engaging family story with enough twists and turns to keep readers motivated to continue to the last page.

-----------------------------THE WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

Camouflage: Best Of Contemporary Writing In Nigeria

BY TOYIN FALOLA

Many critics have categorized the different periods of the Nigerian literary scene in different nodes from means, methods, and concerns. No matter the generation, worldviews are shaped by the problems facing them at that period. The literary and national consciousness of the first and second generation of Nigerian writers was predominantly dominated by the notion of instant Nigerian dream and gradual process of the views and moral standing of ethnic conscious Nigeria.

These two generations sought to carry out their intentions with different methods in a bid to reconstruct, adjust, refute and even restructure Nigeria’s history and European standards. As a result, most of their works were laced with complex language, obscure linguistic, and sophisticated writings, creating the notion that the average Nigerian writing across genres should have specific tenets or features.

Post-independence Nigerian writings are particularly rich in language, content, phases, trends, and even structure across all genres. The emergence and inclusion of migrant writers, considered contemporary cosmopolitan writers and domiciled outside their natal matrix but are still very involved in Nigerian affairs, is the game-changer in Nigerian literature.

Adesanmi and Dunton (2005), in a narrow but relevant scope, opine, “Third generation writers prominent among whom are Chimamanda Adichie, Sefi Atta, Helon Habila, Chris Abani, Chika Unigwe, Helen Oyeyemi, Teju Cole, Unoma Azuah, Biyi Bandele, Maik Nwosu, Okey Ndibe, Chuma Nwokolo, Segun Afolabi, Uwen Akpan and Uzodinma Iweala, were born after or around 1960 and were, therefore, temporally severed from the colonial event.” Though limited to Nigerian authors, their assertion reveals that migrant literature and writers constitute a significant generation in the periodization of African literature.

Furthermore, Adesanmi and Dunton highlight the defining characteristics of third-generation writers thus, “Third generation writers’ works are decentralized and not subject to conventionally erect structures or ideologies. They maintain that fluid plot, faster-paced narrative and language shorn of the domestication impulse of the first and second generation of writers with setting almost always urban and Euromodernist”. Still ascribing defining characteristics to third-generation writers, Olaniyan (2012) describes their literary productions as “an overall healthy development of cultural creativity, the type that continually breaches accepted boundaries and invents new forms and suggests new meanings.”

This anthology under review, Camouflage, edited by Nduka Otiono and Odoh Diego Okenyodo, assembles a new generation of writers in Nigeria and the diaspora ranging from the age of 24, which is the youngest, and the oldest about 46. Most of these authors are well known in various capacities, from writers’ forums to winning international awards. The features and ideologies of this new generation of writers in the Nigerian literary scene are in line with the notion of Nduka Otiono’s Introduction in this collection. Otiono established in “Of Chameleons and Gods: A Generation in Search of New Idioms” that there is a total disconnect “between learned critics and academics in the ivory tower and the creative activities of new Nigerian writers,” which has affected the outlook of the writers in the Nigerian literary scene.

Also, based on the criticism of the new generation of writings in Nigeria, Otiono shows how Niyi Osundare, Olu Obafemi, and Charles Nnnolim identify that pale work, ideological sterility, and lack of proper idioms are the significant problems associated with the works of these new writers. However, it is pertinent to state that this critical collection aims to delegitimize and reconstruct the notion that a generation is better than another generation ideologically, stylistically, or aesthetically. Following T. S. Eliot’s goal of his famous essay, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” which hinges on the idea of innovation and expressionism, the contemporary, evolving, and complex ways of living have inspired much of the new writing socially and politically. Even from the title, which shows borrowing and intertextuality, a modern technique by these new writers, from a giant from the African literary scene, Jack Mapanje, Otiono concludes “Camouflage, to the various guises and voices which our contemporaries deploy to speak to the Nigerian condition and to overcome censorship—be it under military adventurers in politics or under pretentious “democrats” in the new dispensation.”

Through the critical reading of the poems and short stories in the collection, the authors adopt the concept of realism as there is a sign of a tremendous pursuant and continuance in the idea of realism by early writers in Nigeria. Currently, most of these new authors take on the transitional role of realism, in which they use descriptive images and inventive idioms to represent the disillusionment and dystopia of the Nigerian space as it is. They are also observant writers, documenting everyday life in straightforward prose and accessible poems, with the skilful description of characters from all levels of the society, accurately detailing their manners and speeches.

In the interaction of the literary with the notable developments in Nigerian literature in different climates such as philosophical, social, or cultural, the various works of the individual authors in the collection shows the movement to a self-conscious trend which is unique and overtly contributes to the idea of generic instability which, even though is problematized, produced an array of resistance for older generations and also to the function of the contemporary Nigerian literary scene.

Following Nduka Otiono’s categorization of the authors in the collection and their specificity, ranging from “David Nwamadi’s “Boom-Time for Grave Diggers;” Angela Nwosu’s “The Final Tea;” Chiedu Ezeanah’s engagement of national tragedies; the unorthodox pidgin poetry of Victor Eboigbe, “Gari don pass Naira;” to the bold, feminist erotic offerings of some of the female poets featured, especially Victoria Sylvia Kankara, Lola Shoneyin, Nonye Bethel and Nkechi Nwosu-Igbo,” it is significant to point out that these instabilities and troubled canon convention by these new authors can be considered as a form of symbolic and metaphorical action that has further shaped our understanding of the Nigerian world and reinvented the Nigerian literary scene. These generic trends and conventional discourses confirm or answer what Okey Ndibe suggests on the idea that we need a new way of telling our stories.

As a result, these new writers have reinvented, reconstructed, and reimagined new languages and devices that justly adapt to the new Nigerian complexity. More importantly, to answer the older critics and how they harshly berate these new writings, I claim that these stories and new writings may seem to be “poisoning” the Nigerian literature, but it is also an antidote for the disillusioned and new Nigerian complexities. These authors’ reshaping and evident rewriting in the collection shows a performative aesthetics that offers and creates new ways of perceiving the new Nigerian reality.

Overall, the analyses of Camouflage’s poems and short stories address and open up many questions and interrogations, particularly in the Nigerian literary scene and space. One of such is the threshold of boom, prosperity and utopia, and postcolonial conditions that the typical Nigerian writer is opened to and its sustainability and continuance by the new crop of writers. In addition, the concerns and subject matter that permeate most of the literary works in the collection seek to continue in the vigorous pursuit of holding leaders accountable for the unpleasable, nervous, and traumatic conditions the average Nigerian citizen faces daily.

It is pertinent to state that these established writers in the diaspora tend to explore cultural diversity in their works. Each of the literary works in the collection is an authentic and apt representation of the numerous phases and chains of events that reeks of disillusionment, which has overridden Nigerians from the period of independence until contemporary times. They seem unchanged, and, obviously, these conversations and topics are what early writers dwelled on and what the new writers are seeking to pursue in different patterns. However, these literary works’ conversations include nodes of community sharing, a different or strange identity, and headstrong resistant literature that are significant stylistic deviations from the old generation of writers. More importantly, they are still relevant in the discussions about the dysfunctionality in the sociocultural and sociopolitical spaces of the country. Excitingly, this collection opens up new dialogues concerning genre, language, and idioms and draws attention to the disillusionment of Nigerian society. It is coming urgently when readers home and abroad are introduced or fed wrong notions about the Nigerian state. These works are a sort of re-representation of the Nigerian consciousness, contributing significantly to the postcolonial conditions of scholarship in Nigerian literature.

This book is about the Nigerian post-independence conditions and new Nigerian realities, and it is also effective in problematizing and dramatizing the relationship between ideology and aesthetics that tends to reshape the Nigerian experience. Interestingly, the anthology litters the individual works of the contributors alphabetically rather than thematically, which gives the reader a memorable and fascinating surreal experience of encountering the unknown and navigating different styles and ideologies while digesting the collection.

Finally, the collection will contribute to the existent, vibrant scholarly discussions and materials on the Literature of Nigeria and the Diaspora literature. It will contribute to new trends and generic structure in this aspect of literature and will be helpful to sociologists, psychologists, policymakers, and other categories of people. This is because it will give exposés on the intricacies of the Nigerian daily experiences and image, which as Nduka Otiono rightly put, “Nigerian writers and intellectuals more positively project the country’s image internationally than the billions of naira spent on foreign missions and image laundering.” Thus, the array of writers portrayed in the anthology, Camouflage, confirms that literature and liberal arts in Nigeria are significant exports that should be seriously considered.

SOURCE: TRIBUNE

In Memoir, BU’s Louis Chude-Sokei Writes Of Navigating “Multiple Blacknesses”

BY SARA RIMER

Louis Chude-Sokei’s Nigerian father helped lead the Biafra rebellion and was killed fighting for that short-lived country in 1968, before his son turned two. His Jamaican mother set up hospitals for the wounded and airlifts for starving Biafran children. By the time Chude-Sokei was a teenager, he’d moved from a refugee camp in Gabon to a strict religious home for “left behind” children in Jamaica to the gang-ridden Los Angeles neighborhood where he and his mother eventually settled. There he lived amongst the vibrant African diaspora of his extended family—all the while hearing people tell stories of his parents, “the JFK and Jackie O of Biafra.”

Growing up, he secretly read David Copperfield and other British Victorian novels in Jamaica, became a devoted fan of David Bowie, and got good enough at football—a game he didn’t even like—to make his high school football team so he could avoid the violence of his neighborhood.

These stories and many others populate Chude-Sokei’s new coming-of-age memoir, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021). These days Chude-Sokei is the director of BU’s African American Studies Program, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English, and holder of the George and Joyce Wein Chair in African American Studies.

“This is the story of a young Black man trying to find himself in a world where he never quite seems to belong,” Ijeoma Oluo writes in the New York Times Book Review. The author is “too African for Jamaica, too Jamaican for America, too American for Nigeria,” Oluo writes.

Chude-Sokei is also editor-in-chief of The Black Scholar, ranked by Princeton as the top journal of Black studies in the United States, and an expert on the literature and music of the Black diaspora and the relationship between race and technology, from robotics to artificial intelligence, among many other subjects.

BU Today talked with him about Floating, which owes its title to a David Bowie lyric, and how in writing it he set out to reconcile the “multiple Blacknesses” of his life—Igbo, African, Jamaican, Black American—and to challenge readers to see beyond the conventional narrative of Black/white in America.

Q & A WITH LOUIS CHUDE-SOKEI

BU Today: What have you been told about your father?

Chude-Sokei: Very charismatic. Good-looking, tall—really tall. Myth and romance make everyone tall. He was the titular head of the family clan and supposed to marry an Igbo woman from a titled clan. My mother, however, came from this Jamaican lower middle-class family, where she’d been taught that Africans were primitive. Yet she married an African, six weeks after they met in colonial London. And moved with him to Nigeria.

What was your sense of yourself at Jamaica’s Seventh Day Adventist Home for children, where you lived from about age four to nine, when you joined your mother in Washington, D.C.?

My goal was to be just like a Jamaican kid. Though Jamaican kids all wanted to be like African Americans we’d see on TV.

You write that when your mother was at work you would dig into her boxes stuffed with newspaper clippings about Biafra and the war and photos of your father and your godfather, who was the president of Biafra. 

Was that sort of like your first archives?

Absolutely. She worked multiple jobs as a nurse at different hospitals, and didn’t talk about the Biafra war, or the genocide. I started looking through all the boxes in the apartment trying to figure out—what is all this stuff? And I’d pull out a magazine with my godfather on the cover. Or a photo of my dad! And clippings about the plight of the Igbos and pictures of emaciated kids.

How were you starting to form your identity as a boy in Washington, D.C.?

In the same way I did in Jamaica. What’s the Blackness here? As I tell in the book, that’s when I discovered the American skin color thing by being called the “n-word” by a white kid. I didn’t know what it meant. I don’t think he knew what it meant, either, other than it’s something you say to a Black kid to make him angry. I also got insulted by an African American teacher who said Africans are an embarrassment to “real” Black people because of the post-colonial violence on the continent.

That was a moment of realizing that American racial differences are very different from what I’d known. In Jamaica there is awareness of racism and colonialism, but it’s more abstract because everybody is Black. People in positions of authority are Black, same thing in West Africa. When you come to America, you feel minority status. That status and its implications are what I began to learn.

Because I was always surrounded by immigrants, it was hard to be subsumed into the American Black/white narrative. They may have gotten on my nerves, but you could never get away from the African diaspora. Folks would sit around and drink beer and eat curry goat and there’d be the Yoruba, and the Igbo and the Jamaicans and the Trinidadians and Haitians and South Africans. It was not academic, nor was it politically correct. A lot of them thought racism was simply Black Americans complaining about America, a country these immigrants almost died trying to reach. They’re like, we just survived a genocide! Trying to argue with them about systemic or structural racism was indeed a challenge.

"We know that America by 2050 or so is going to be browner and less white. Well, Black America is going to be less traditionally Black because of Black immigrants, more of whom have arrived here over the last few decades than during the slave trade."

—Louis Chude-Sokei

Your mother tells you that you first heard David Bowie in the refugee camp in Gabon. What was it about Bowie that so mesmerized you?

It’s easy now to talk about the metaphoric alien that refuses to assimilate, or the Spaceman who decides it’s better to float than come down. But these meanings came from growing up in a Seventh Day Adventist House in Jamaica where reggae was forbidden because it was Rasta or secular. We could only listen to gospel and country and western, which is popular in Jamaica. We couldn’t listen to pop music, except when the girls would sneak in a radio and listen to the Jackson Five. But imagine if that’s your musical universe. Then you hear Bowie. To discover that much of what he was singing was essentially science fiction bolstered my interest in that genre.

Can you talk about that big turning point in high school, when you let a bunch of your neighborhood friends into the gym one night, unlocked the storage room, and they stole sports equipment? You didn’t take anything, but you were all caught and faced a disciplinary hearing.

One of many turning points. I’d also been a victim of serious violence. Friends were jailed or shot. There was a time when it was about fists and knives, but then guns began to show up. I was kicked off the football team and shunned by all the cool guys because the assumption was that I was a snitch.

That’s when I started hanging out with the nerdy kids. Some white, some not. But the white ones all loved Bowie. And were shocked by this Black kid with impeccable sports and thug credentials listening to Bowie and obsessed with sci-fi.

That period is also when I discovered, behind the gym, the college guidance counselor’s office. I was trying to figure out what’s next. I didn’t want to get killed. I didn’t want to go to jail. And I wanted to placate my immigrant family. College was the answer.

What do you hope people take away from your story?

That this is also a book about the complexities of race and racism, not the simplistic binary that is currently dominant. It is safer to reduce race to a Black-and-white debate, when there are so many other nuances and ethnic groups at work at the same time.

This is a story of someone who’s navigated that, internationally and nationally, for his whole life. When I got to college, I was already interested in this thing called diaspora, which you can’t talk about without talking about colonialism and racism, but also immigration. Of course, while learning about this, the cops are harassing my friends and me all the time. We would be pulled over and thrown into gutters, with them stepping on our backs or tossing us in jail overnight only to release us with no charges. That came from being a Black American kid around South Central LA. But amidst all of this, there is still xenophobia within the African American social world and a privileging of African American experiences over other Black or immigrant struggles.

The book is also the story of someone who knows that American notions of race and ethnicity are changing. We know that America by 2050 or so is going to be browner and less white. Well, Black America is going to be less traditionally Black because of Black immigrants, more of whom have arrived here over the last few decades than during the slave trade. Black people with different experiences of race and racism are changing the dynamics, and that is one of the most important facts about Black America today in my estimation.

As the director of African American Studies and editor of The Black Scholar—one treats American Blackness with respect and acknowledgment, because it is intellectual and politically essential to all Black thought and experiences. But at the same time, one is something else. That something else still awaits a full emergence. That’s what this book is trying to signal.


Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald, Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times, where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan.

NIGERIA TODAY IS LIKE CYPRIAN EKWENSI’S YARN

Cyprien Ekwensi

BY UZOR MAXIM UZOATU

All the demented facets of Nigerian life today, from brazen kidnappings and robberies to rampant prostitution and political heists, are like the many wonderful tales of Cyprian Odiatu Duaka (COD) Ekwensi, who died on November 4, 2007.

Cyprian Ekwensi lived a charmed life as a pathfinder in the annals of African literature and it is a striking tribute that the current shenanigans of Nigeria read like the yarns of the popular writer.

Ekwensi was arguably the most prolific author in the comity of Nigeria’s first generation of acclaimed writers.

A novelist, short story writer, children’s literature master, journalist, pamphleteer, columnist etc, Ekwensi gave the world a formidable body of work that can never be wished away.

He was a nonpareil craftsman of popular literature who got to the heart of his readers without any unnecessary dabbling into obscurantism and self-serving ambiguities.

Cyprian Ekwensi is Mister Nigeria, born in Minna in the North on September 26, 1921 of Igbo parentage and lived most of his life in the Western part of the country.

Ekwensi was without question the most Nigerian of Nigeria’s tribe of writers.

He was versed in Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba cultures, as much as he equally dwelt on the life and mores of the minorities.

He deservedly earned his celebration across the length and breadth of the country as a pan-Nigerian phenomenon.

His work has been acknowledged all over the world such that while I was in Canada as a Distinguished Visitor, I was told by Professor Peter Desbarats, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Western Ontario, that Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana was the only book from Nigeria he had ever read.

Some critics tagged Ekwensi as Africa’s Daniel Defoe, after the irrepressible author of such classics as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.

Ekwensi was a progenitor of Onitsha Market Literature when, back in 1947, he published When Love Whispers to spur the market literature that flowered in the Nigerian city of Onitsha after the Second World War.

His novel People of the City became one of the pioneer titles of Heinemann’s African Writers Series, such that alongside Chinua Achebe he gave the world a different view of the canon.

The versatility of Ekwensi can be seen in his novel Burning Grass that helped in no small measure to put the Fulani nomads in the global map of literature.

The disease of wandering known as ‘Sokugo’ was popularised by Ekwensi but let’s not go there because of the wandering president!

It is in the documentation of city life that Ekwensi earned lasting plaudits from the literary critics. One of his novels, Jagua Nana, dwells on the travails of the eponymous ageing prostitute and her tango with the young and dashing Freddie.

The book attracted sustained film interest from overseas and it was debated in the Nigerian Parliament of the First Republic, which stopped its filming by an Italian film company.

Ekwensi eventually wrote a sequel of the novel, Jagua Nana’s Daughter, published by Joop Berkhout’s Spectrum Books, Ibadan.

A yarn-spinner with legendary page-turning intensity, Ekwensi authored The Passport of Mallam Illia, which remains an everlasting adventure story that grips the reader from the first page to the last.

Ekwensi’s titles such as An African Night’s Entertainment and The Drummer Boy are ever-present staples in the junior secondary school curriculum in Nigeria.

An old title of his written early in his career but not published, For a Roll of Parchment, was released by Heinemann, Ibadan, and it bore all the hallmarks of the Ekwensi mystique in Nigeria’s promotion of paper qualification.

For a man who had his training as a pharmacist and worked in forestry, Ekwensi astounded the world with his high literary output.

Some critics like Bernth Lindfors had said harsh things about the quality of Ekwensi’s writings while other equally eminent literary scholars such as Ernest Emenyonu rose up solidly in defence of the man from Nkwelle-Ezunaka in Anambra State.

He maintained a home in the very heart of the city of Lagos, at Ojuelegba Road to the very end. His service in the public sphere had been stellar. From 1957 to 1961, he was the Head of Features at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.

He later earned the distinction as the first Nigerian Director of Information in the Federal Ministry of Information.

Ekwensi was the Director-General of Radio Biafra during the Civil War and became the Chairman of the East Central State Library Board after the war.

He would later become the Managing Director of the Star Printing and Publishing Company, Enugu, publishers of the Star group of newspapers.

He was appointed Information Commissioner, Anambra State, in 1983 and reputedly coined the acronym WAI – War Against Indiscipline – that the military regime of General Muhammadu Buhari put into effect.

All the kidnappers, robbers, debtors, looters, and ill-assorted brigands and prostitutes being paraded all over the nation today are quintessential Ekwensi characters! He created all of them in his many fictions before he died.

This way, Cyprian Ekwensi can never really die!

BOOK REVIEW: THE WEALTHCODE OF THE IGBOS – Revealed: How The Igbos Build Thriving Businesses From Nothing

 

Author: ‘Dunsin Oluwasuji
Publisher: The Extra Company
Place of Publication: Lagos
Date of Publication: 2021
Number of Pages: 149

Reviewer: Isaac N. Obasi

Introduction

Creativity was at its best when Oluwadunsin Oluwasuji put his pen on paper to produce an excitingly captivating book titled The Wealthcode of the Igbos in which he splendidly ‘revealed how the Igbos build thriving businesses from nothing’. Both the writer’s creativity and the creativity driving the Igbos’ spirit of industry (his subject matter) were dazzlingly displayed.

Starting with the Dedication, a reader is thrilled on what to expect in this very remarkable book. The Dedication reads: To a nation that rose from the ashes of war and to her people: Sojourners who had nothing but courage and grit, who formed bonds of fellowship, who build empires in strange lands, who enabled the cycle of prosperity, who nurture their young…(p. i). And proceeding further, the author rightly stated that ‘the qualities discussed in this book are not exclusive to the Igbos, but are prevalent amongst them.’

And again to wet the readers’ appetite, the author asked the important question: can wealth be ethnic or are we just playing into a stereotype? After discussing some Nigerian stereotypes in the Preface, Dunsin Oluwasuji cited some authoritative studies on the Jews such as those of Dershowitz Alan, Bush Lawrence, Lipset Seymour and Raab Earl, Siberman Charles, and Steven Silbiger, to go beyond typical stereotypes and present interesting and persuasive evidence to demonstrate that “wealth and success can indeed reside more with one ethnic group than the other” (p.v). With these as background, Dunsin’s thesis is out there in the intellectual market place for further critical inquiry by scholarly minds (and not by intellectual passers-by) in this important area of research.

Structure and Contents of the Book

The book is broadly divided into two parts, namely (a) the author’s own observations, and (b) ‘excerpts from interviews with successful Igbo business owners to see if any patterns emerge’ (p.iii).

Part 1 titled: Why the Igbos build thriving businesses: My observation is made up 14 well-crafted chapters. In this part, the author creatively identified and discussed such vital themes as ‘Igbos learn before they leap’ (Chapter 1); ‘Igbos love to leave’ (Chapter 2); through other chapters like ‘Igbos know how to drive a soft bargain’ (Chapter 6); Igbos mind their pennies’ (Chapter 11); down to other scintillating and perhaps controversial themes as ‘Igbos have a wealth culture’ (Chapter 13), and ‘Igbos are more selfless’ (Chapter 14). This first part of the book provides demonstrative evidence of what I meant earlier about the writer’s creativity being at its best. This part actually demonstrated that theoretically speaking, the writer elevated his thoughts to the level where intellectual minds would be juxtaposing his work with those earlier cited authorities on the industrious spirit of the Jewish people..

One distinguishing feature of each of the 14 chapters is the use of appropriate scriptural quotations to back up his postulations. For example, Chapter 2 titled; ‘Igbos love to leave’ was supported with the Biblical quotation as The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will give you (Genesis 12 v 1). Another example is Chapter 13 titled: ‘Igbos have a wealth culture’ which is supported with Proverbs 22 v 6 which says: Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Part 2 of the book titled: The Igbos tell it All (Interviews), is no less impressive as Part 1. In this part, the author went further empirical to provide observational and experiential foundation for his theoretical postulations in Part 1. His investigative methodology was superb as he went into the field to interview very successful Igbo entrepreneurs. Specifically, he brought out vividly the experiential benefits of seven business gurus and magnates which he recorded for posterity.

Creatively, the writer gave each of the seven interviews an appropriate title in a manner that provides intellectual evidence and support to his efforts to develop more theoretical principles that are consistent with his earlier postulations in Part 1. For example, the first interview was appropriately titled: The Igbos and the Jews, an Accident of Interaction? The discussions here resonate well with his earlier evidence that wealth and success can indeed reside more with one ethnic group than the other. Some other themes in this part include: the Competitive and collaborative nature of the Igbos; Nature Vs Nurture; The Apprenticeship Advantage; and Trust, Collaboration, Shared Risk: The Strengths of the Igbo.

It will be interesting to compare the chapter on The Competitive and Collaborative nature of the Igbos, with a common view by not-a-few of the Igbos themselves, that the Igbos, do not love themselves. The peddling of this erroneous idea perhaps originated from the historical and political fact that the Igbos, are republican in nature. The idea that the ‘Igbos have no king’ derived from this republican spirit. The common notion that the Igbos do not cooperate among themselves is however well contradicted by the empirical facts emerging from Dunsin’s thesis. Perhaps in politics this may hold some water, but in commerce and industry, this notion is farther away from the truth.

Is the Igbos’ culture of apprenticeship in decline? This is the last issue examined in the book and the discussion leaves everyone in no doubt that this culture will continue to thrive as it is beneficial to the apprentice and to the master. As the author rightly said, mentorship is key.

A Book for Everyone and for all Generations

The Wealthcode of the Igbos is relevant to everyone and indeed all generations of the Igbos – the very young ones (about 7-10 years old) who need to be well-groomed with the early knowledge of their cultural heritage; the adolescents (around 12-19 years) and young adults (around 20-30 years) who need the knowledge of what they are to practise as they grow older in life; the middle aged or older adults less than 64 years, and the elderly (65 years and above) who are preservers and transmitters of good cultural values and practices in family, educational and entrepreneurial life. They all need the book in order help sustain the industrious culture of the Igbos.

Indeed, The Wealthcode of the Igbos is a book for all times as its relevance would continue to resonate with every generation of the Igbos. But in particular, its relevance to the youthful generation cannot be over-emphasised as the values it promotes would greatly help to move them away from the scourge of prevailing ‘violent disease’ afflicting Igbo land. As every Igbo knows, the type and level of violence currently being experienced in Igbo land is strange to its culture.

Conclusion

The author of The Wealthcode of the Igbos is a rare Nigerian who took the pains to carry out a research on the entrepreneurial culture of another ethnic group outside his own. One can rightly describe the author of the book as a cosmopolitan Yoruba and a bridge builder with a farsighted mind. His undiluted love for shared humanity expresses itself in the contents of the book. His book therefore, is very insightful as it confirms with strong empirical evidence the industrious and flourishing apprenticeship practice of the Igbos – a subject matter which has already captured the research attention of the Harvard University in the United States.

•Isaac Obasi is a professor in the Department of Public Administration, University of Abuja, Nigeria.

INTERVIEW: Talking African Literature With Chigozie Obioma

Chigozie Obioma. Image: Facebook

BY KOUROSH ZIABARI

African literature has attracted immense international interest in recent years, and a number of “Afropolitan” icons and rising stars have won acclaim from critics and literary festivals.

Yet most reading lists released by major newspapers and journals are still disproportionately Western-centric, and African literature lacks enough media attention. Despite this, more avid readers across the globe are getting to know names such as Nuruddin Farah, Alain Mabanckou, Ben Okri, Aminatta Forna and Chigozie Obioma, marking the diversification of the literary taste of millennial bibliophiles.

Literature originating from Africa often delves into the legacy of colonialism, sheds light on the tyranny of capital over labor, recounts the identity crisis that many Africans battle with, and represents the unheard voices of ordinary people and unsung heroes.

Chigozie Obioma is a 33-year-old Nigerian novelist and writer who has earned global recognition after publishing three books at such a young age. In 2015 and 2019, he was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Time magazine described his novel “An Orchestra of Minorities” as a “mystical epic” that confirms his “place among a raft of literary stars.” The Guardian referred to him as the “heir to Chinua Achebe” who is “a good writer whose work has a deeply felt authenticity, combined with old-fashioned storytelling.”

Obioma is currently an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the US.

In this edition of The Interview, Fair Observer talks to Obioma about his career, novels and the representation of colonialism in African literature.

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Kourosh Ziabari: In “An Orchestra of Minorities,” you depict the ordeal of an unassuming poultry farmer who falls in love with a pharmacy student hailing from a prosperous family. In order to impress the parents of his beloved woman, he sells his entire belongings to take up a position at a northern Cypriot university and fund his studies. Shortly after arriving in Cyprus, he realizes that the middlemen who had promised him a university placement had tricked him and that there was no position available for him at the college whatsoever. Is this suffering a situation that many young Nigerians go through? While crafting the novel, was it your intention to raise awareness of this challenge faced by Nigerians?

Chigozie Obioma: Yes, I always say that fiction is a medium that takes lived experience and molds it into something that can become so new [that] those who have lived the experience may not even recognize it. Even more so, this novel covers how African migrants are treated in the West quite a bit, but people rarely talk about how we are treated in countries outside of the west.

It is, of course, a shame that the selfish culture of African politicians leaves their states in catastrophic states, but when these migrants go to places like India, Turkey, Cyprus, Mexico and other places, they face inhuman treatments. I myself lived in North Cyprus for five years and the travails of Chinonso, the protagonist of the novel, are similar to what I and others experienced. I wrote about my own ordeal in an essay earlier this year for the Paris Review.

Ziabari: In an interview, you said you wanted to chronicle the landmarks of Igbo history and civilization in the “Orchestra,” including the encounter with the Portuguese in the 15th century and the Nigerian Civil War. Do you think your readers have been able to absorb the historical messages you planned to share with them or is it that this pedagogic effort has been overshadowed by the supremacy of the storyline and the ups and downs of the life of Chinonso, his quest for excellence and his love journey?

Obioma: I think that this being a work of fiction rather than non-fiction — I could, for instance, have elected to simply write a historical book — I had to layer the historical portions around a particular story. So, both of them, I hope, go together. The historical portions of the novel are organic to the narrator, for it is the voice of a god. Thus, through its testimony about itself and its host, it also describes the world as it has experienced it over these many centuries.

Ziabari: You consider yourself an ontologist interested in the metaphysics of being and existence. The themes of fate, destiny and sublimity are often missing in the majority of novels written today, but you explore these territories in your fiction extensively. Do you think this approach to existence is what is winning you popularity and helping your work stand out among hundreds of novels by major literary figures?

Obioma: I am not sure why my novels have received some recognition, but I agree that the themes I have focused on are mostly marginal and not often what many writers consider. One of the reasons why I have focused on fate and destiny is because my people, the West Africans, think mostly in these terms. I want to capture the essence of their common worldview.

It is also because Nigeria to me is a paradox. This is a country that could be rich but is poor. There are, of course, deep philosophical reasons why this is so. But on the surface, that paradox stings and stares at you in the face, and it haunts my mind. This makes one ponder things that are subterranean to the consciousness — things that seems to lie beneath the surface and have no easy answers. The meaning of life, the “metaphysics of being and existence” as I always put it, is one such quandary.

Ziabari: You’ve implied on a number of occasions that your relationship with your homeland of Nigeria is a capricious one. On the one hand, it is the home that sends you away because of its lack of provisions and opportunities. On the other, it is the home that embraces you when you return from the US. Is it realistic to say your novels are partly inspired by your own story and your special connection with “home”?

Obioma: Capricious indeed! But I am wedded to it. The truth is that I am a reluctant exile in America. I wish I could live in Nigeria, frankly. That is my home. That’s where I live untrammeled, without any fear of being an immigrant or a racial minority. It is where my ancestors lived and died, and the place whose food I love to eat. But yet, I feel I cannot live there.

There is a wall that has come between my home and me, and it is a wall I do not have the courage to scale. [In a recent interview, I talked of] how this shapes the tone of my fiction in that it often leads to a sort of “tragic vision” which comes about out of the sadness of writing about Nigeria. I said there that such writing is a masochistic act because “Nigeria riles me, wounds me, and heals me at the same time. I love it entirely and loathe it at the same time, and in that kind of relationship, a certain form of despair often gets hold of the mind. My writing is sometimes an effort to rid myself of that despair through the joy of artistic creation. The witness borne then, if I might say, is a witness to my own surrendering to a light that emerges from my own darkness, and in that light, I am refreshed and made alive.”

Ziabari: Why do you think so few prominent writers have shed light on chi in Igbo cosmology and that old African cultural heritage is neglected by the youth? Do you consider the postcolonial influence of the West on Nigeria to be a negative one?

Obioma: I think many African writers and thinkers have tried to encourage an embrace of our heritage. There was Chinua Achebe, for instance, but also, to some extent, Wole Soyinka. The purpose for me is to reassure our identity as people who had some culture and civilization prior to the coming of the West. I think because of colonialism and slavery, followed by the underdevelopment of most African countries, there has set in this self-damaging inferiority complex — the idea that we are no good.

I was in Abuja around two years ago and some people were debating on national radio whether we should be recolonized. Now, this is a mistake. We only need to learn history, to look back at the sophisticated sociopolitical systems we had, the economic systems, the egalitarian political structures to see that precolonial Africa was not one night from which the West rescued us. I think without this reassurance, this strengthening of our identity, this solving of our identity crisis, we cannot recover.

Ziabari: Your debut novel, “The Fishermen,” was acclaimed by critics and shortlisted for a 2015 Man Booker Prize. Why do you think the novel captured so much attention and elicited positive reactions globally, considering that it was your first novel? Many aspiring writers, who happen to write captivating novels, struggle for years to win publicity for their work. What was the key to the success of “The Fishermen” as a debut?

Obioma: If I knew the reason why anyone enjoyed my work, I would be very glad. I think, humbly, it is simply to work hard and believe in the vision you have for a particular project and to be true to that vision. I have always wanted to write a novel about siblinghood and that celebrates family and consanguinity. I think that is what “The Fishermen” does well above anything else.

In that sense, it has universal appeal and touches on aspects of humanity that are recognizable and relatable. I also often think that there is something profoundly human about the relationship between the four brothers and how, just by speaking words, a stranger could cause an irreparable fracture between them. I think this is what many readers — across the 30 or so countries where the book has been published — connect with.

Ziabari: You once said that you wouldn’t have written “The Fishermen” if you hadn’t moved to Cyprus to study. How did being based in Cyprus influence your understanding of Nigeria? Do you ascribe the creation of “The Fishermen” to homesickness that possibly invigorated your sense of belonging to Nigeria?

Obioma: An Igbo proverb says that we hear the sound of the udu drum clearer from a distance rather than from being close by it. This is very true of writing. When I am in a place or close to a place, it is often difficult to imagine it fully. But when I am separated from a place and have distance from it, I am better able to see it, to fully conceive it imaginatively. Since fiction is all about creativity anyway — the invention of the nonexistent — trusting in hindsight.

If I sat across from you at a cafe and I was to describe that moment on the spot, I would write about the obvious things you did. But if I lie down in my bed later that night and the light was off and I closed my eyes, the fine-grain details will trickle in. I will remember the unobvious things, the person scratching their wrist, or hawking into a napkin — those fine details that enrich fiction. It is when the person is gone and the meeting has ended and the day is forgotten that things become closer, clearer.

Ziabari: Many critics have compared you to the legendary Chinua Achebe and called you his successor. Does it make you feel proud to be compared to Achebe in the eyes of noted literati and authors? Do you personally admire Achebe’s work?

Obioma: In some ways, “The Fishermen” shares an affinity with“Things Fall Apart,” Achebe’s seminal work. Achebe wrote “Things Fall Apart” to document the fall of the Igbo civilization, the African civilization or culture. I am looking at a more specific fall of Nigeria — of our civilization, too, but in relation to Nigeria specifically. So, it’s a similar project. And in the ways in which Achebe tried to reveal the Igbo civilization to his readers, and “An Orchestra of Minorities” does a similar job.

Ziabari: A final question. Where do you think African literature, in general, and the literature of Nigeria, in particular, are heading? Should we expect more Man Booker and Nobel nominations?

Obioma: Ah, I hope so of course. I think African literature is in good shape. There are wonderful writers popping up here and there, and I won’t be surprised if we have more nominations and wins.

BOOK REVIEW: The Prayer Of The Birds

Image: Journal de Montreal

BY KARINE VILDER

With this second novel which risks shaking more than one, we can say that the Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma is really taking off.

Modestly titled Fishermen , the first novel by Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma was one of our biggest favorites of 2016. And we were obviously not the only ones to love it, since he entered the list of finalists for the Booker Prize. So what about this second novel, this time entitled The prayer of the birds ? Well ... in addition to bringing us back to the arid lands of Nigeria, it is also just a treat. Last year in the UK he was also one of the Booker Prize finalists!

The hidden face of Africa

But enough talk. Because to be able to grasp its essence, we must first specify that this book is completely off the beaten track.

You will discover it quickly enough by yourself in contact with its narrator, who would be the chi of a young chicken breeder named Chinonso Solomon Olisa.

Ever heard of chi? Welcome to the club ! From the first pages, it will however be clearly indicated that in the Igbo cosmology, chi is the spiritual being, the parallel identity which watches at all times over the host of flesh and blood whose life it shares.

So when this host one day prevents a pretty student from committing suicide from the top of a bridge, her chi will inevitably be in the front row to closely follow the very sad love story that will soon follow ...

A disturbing novel that allows us to travel far beyond the borders of reality without ever leaving the tragic fate of a man ready to do anything to please his beautiful.

----------JOURNAL DE MONTREAL