Emmanuel Iduma's Blog

The Thirteeeth Short(est) Facebook Musing

2011-01-17T19:51:00.001-08:00

Tupac Shakur said:

"The only thing that comes to a sleeping man is dreams."

I say,

"I want to be a dreamer

So that I would not

Be awakened

To a faithless life"

And

"For a living, I work at Dreamland

And for a dying, who knows?"

And

"...if today comes,

We might only be waiters

In the Chinese restaurant

Of Dreams."

This is it. Verba scripta mendes.

The Fourth Short Facebook Musing (On Fiction/Reality)

2010-07-28T16:10:00.000-07:00

As an addendum to several thoughts in continuum, spiraling in my mind, I find it apposite to write about fiction/reality.

In essence, what is fiction apart from reality, and what is reality apart from fiction? I write of 'fiction' as a writing genre, into which category others might further confer arbitrariness. And I write of 'reality' as a non-fiction writing genre, into which category others have found no need to confer further arbitrariness; for reality, might we say, is already too arbitrary to a fault.

This, however, is not my preoccupation. My preoccupation is to consider whether all fiction is reality, and all reality fiction.

Indeed, we source our stories, invariably, from the known world. Whether we are Rushdie or Okri, Morrison or Allende, we cannot escape the known world in our fiction. It is our tool, our confinement, even our despair. We might choose to write of a man who is deaf but whose ears are miraculously opened to hear a single Buble song, and then shut back. Or a man with seven ears and eight noses, whose head is the size of a mountain. Or like Adichie, we might be concerned with the past, it's
haunting memory on the present, and the overarching exigency of the future. But who says such stories are unreal?

What, in fact, is reality? Can it be measured or delimited? Is reality not what the realtor calls it? Writers, being realtors/creators, choose to call reality what they wish. It is misplaced to say it is too metaphysical to merit an acceptation of physicality. For we know beyond a doubt that physicality is variant; what a man sees might not be what he sees, or should see. A man can call blessed what is cursed. A man can go to his doomsday thinking it is his birthday. Sight is deceptive, even smell, touch, and everything of the physical. We know. I only remind.

In sum, I must point that I, as a writer of what is called fiction, being plagued with compulsion and the tyranny of the empty page, find that there is a world inside my head. My characters from previous stories are as real to me as those emerging on-screen in newer stories. There is a world of them. One of them, Fred, a religious fanatic, competes for attention with Frank, a philosophy teacher charged with the responsibility of healing a mentally unstable patient. The truth is that Fred was begotten in 2007 and Frank in 2010.

There is a world in my head, a real world. It is, sometimes, more real than the world outside my head. And so it is, I think, for every reader of what is called fiction. There are worlds; peopled, ruled, fantasized, appealing, appalling, magnetic, wanting.

Given this, I make bold to say that only fools think that worlds do not exist on paper. And this is the truth of fiction.

2010-06-25T16:16:00.000-07:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More poetry

Pilgrimages: Thirteen African Writers. Thirteen Cities. Thirteen Books

2010-06-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

The Pilgrimages Project

Pilgrimages is a ground-breaking, pan-African project organised by The Chinua Achebe Center, Bard College, in partnership with Kachifo Limited in Nigeria, Kwani? Trust in Kenya, and Chimurenga in South Africa, in celebration of Africa’s first world cup.
The project involves 13 African writers visiting 12 cities across the continent and one in Brazil for two weeks during the World Cup. At the end of the project, each writer will produce a book of non-fiction travel literature based on their experiences, forming a series to be published next year.

The Writers
The writers and cities involved in the project are Funmi Iyanda (Durban), Alain Mabanckou (Lagos), Abdourahman A. Waberi (Salvador, Bahia), Akenji Ndumu (Abidjan), Doreen Baingana (Hargeisa), Chris Abani (Johannesburg), Uzodinma Iweala (Timbuktu), Billy Kahora (Luanda), Kojo Laing (Cape Town), Binyavanga Wainaina (Touba), Yvonne Owuor (Kinshasha), Victor Lavelle (Kampala), Nicole Turner (Nairobi) and Nimco Mahmud Hassan (Khartoum).

Alain Mabanckou in Lagos
Alain Mabanckou from Congo-Brazzaville is considered one of the most talented writers in Francophone African literature today. His most notable works are Verre Casse (Broken Glass), Bleu-Blanc-Rouge (Blue-White-Red) and The African Pyscho. His work, Memoirs of a Porcupine, won the Prix Renaudot, one of the highest distinctions in Francophone literature.

Alain visits Lagos from the 25th of June to 2nd of July 2010, during which time he will crisscross the city, from the ‘highbrow’ to the ‘slum’. Each day of his stay will alternate stops at football viewing centres, local bukkas and beer parlours, upmarket bars and relevant cultural events, and will include interviews with local denizens, artists, writers and other social commentators. Alain will be guided around the city by architect, writer and publisher, Ayodele Arigbabu, who will also blog about their daily experiences on the Pilgrimages website.

The Website
A dynamic and state-of-the art multimedia website has been launched as part of the Pilgrimages project, at www.pilgrimages.org.za. During the 13 Pilgrimages the writers and their local guides will blog on the website. Correspondents, artists and photographers in each city will also post topical content on the site.

The Books
The Pilgrimages Project will culminate in the launch of twelve books in four African cities in January 2012 during the African Nations’ Cup. The collection promises to be the most significant, single addition to the continent’s archive of literary knowledge since the African Writers’ Series of the 1960s. The books will be published by Kachifo Limited in Nigeria, Kwani? Trust in Kenya, Chimurenga in South Africa and a francophone publisher to be announced.

For more information on the Pilgrimages Project, please visit the website:
http://www.pilgrimages.org.za/

The Triumph of Small Things

2010-06-07T18:38:00.000-07:00

A Review of African Roar

I was overly excited when I read the African Roar. By using the word ‘excitement,’ I look upon each story as a triumph, not only of the individual writers, but of the African community of emerging writing. I have been preoccupied with sustaining this community for the last two years, and I feel that an anthology like this is doing much for African writing. We must agree that our writing is not a onetime stint, but a career. Each story, each anthology, contributes to what we eventually become, and what our writing eventually does.

I start with the story that first left me breathless, Hartmann’s Lost Love. It has the force of abstraction and the urgency of a tale, by celebrating love in the time of dying, we are reminded to have permanent keepsakes of goodly moments, which, as we must have known, come not too often. Just as it is with Tshuma’s Big Pieces, Small Pieces. We are told of the horrendous darkness of domestic violence, the love-hate relationship of spouses and children, just as in Purple Hibiscus. But what is most significant, for me, is the few moments of love the characters are allowed. In both tales, we see the proper balance of a story. For even when love is lost, there was love in the first place. One could add to this list Tamale Blues by Attah.

And then, what is the value of courage? Better still, what is the cost of courage? There is a joint-rendition by Musodza and Tapureta. In effect, we find that freedom is what it is defined as. It does not exactly matter whether we are manacled in prisons or unchained in ghettos. We find that our existence is roundabout, that freedom comes and goes, in indeterminable packs. We find, again, that a man might be judged by his actions, by his inactions, or sometimes by the motivations for his both his actions and inactions. Whichever and whatever is the case, we are reminded in Yesterday’s Dog and Cost of Courage that the past, like Faulkner asserts, is not past. It could be wholesome to add Kola Tubosun’s Behind the Door to this catalogue. How much courage does it cost a man to know his HIV/AIDS status in a world that seems to accord the virus a place in the hall of fame of human existence? And when he finds that he tests negative, how much courage does it take to sympathisze with a fellow man who had tested positive?

What is more, we are reminded of the metaphysical dreaminess that accompanies our beliefs in The Nestbury Tree by Morocco-Clarke and A Cicada in the Shimmer by Mlalazi. Essentially, and as John Mayer has sang, belief is a beautiful honour, but makes for the heaviest loss. In the spate of religious melees and derogations, these stories remind us that perhaps what we would be most remembered for after the dusk of this century is our affinity to beliefs, and how far we can go to remain affiliated. Although I favoured Mlalazi’s tale to Morocco-Clarke’s, in terms of telling, I find that both have similitude in terms of context.

I find it irresistible to do a lone review of Nwokolo Jr.’s Quarterback and Co. Having begun a preliminary research in psychiatry, I assert how wrong we are to assume that mad persons are only those who are street-worthy. But this is not what Nwokolo’s hilarious story ultimately seems to engage. It seems he tries to argue that we must find the unreal in the real, the surreal in the domestic, the metaphysical in the usual. I like this; it is my conviction that we could write about unimagined realities. That said, I feel it deserves (and demands) a reread.

There is a return to the moonlight in Siguake’s A Return to the Moonlight and Damoah’s Truth Floats. The latter story, though, thrived only on the age-long tradition of ‘and they lived happily ever after.’ One thinks it should have leaped beyond those bounds. However, that said, what does one find when he returns? Does he find betrayal or does he regain his senses? Does he find truth or lies? The glory and triumph of return seems to preoccupy the lines of both stories; I certainly agree that we must contemplate return, in holistic and previously unconsidered ways.

What Hartmann, Sigauke, and Barnes, have achieved in this anthology is to set into mode a wholesome pattern for emerging African writing. We, who are in the business of creative writing, should be grateful; it would be short-sighted to think otherwise. It is, in fact, the triumph of small, emergent writing, above economic constraints and the throes of falling publishing standards. I rejoice at this first volume of African Roar, and the rest of the literate world will, too.

News Making

2010-05-19T12:19:00.000-07:00

AFTER NEWS THAT PRESIDENT UMARU YAR’ADUA IS DEAD

There might be no such thing, in fact, as bad news. We might receive news based on preconceived notions, on previously expected expectations. Such as the news of the death of a President.

Was it even bad news? What is even, should we ask, the news?

But this should not preoccupy our attention. What should, perhaps, is whether the death of a president was expected, and whether we could live on the expectation that another president would die on us.

Let us never assume that this is preposterous, that we are wrong to think our president would never die again in office. For one, we know it is possible; in twelve years we have lost two presidents. And who knows how disparaged our history (past, present, future) has become because we have lost, in less than two decades, two sitting presidents.

As such, let us contemplate the nature of this last death. We were told lies, unending lies and fables. Or were they even lies? What was the truth? When did our president die? Were we played upon? Could it be more truthful to admit that we never knew what the truth was, or what the lie was, or what the lie eventually became?

Should we rejoice? This is not a question of whether we are expected to. It is a question of whether we are entitled to. Oh yes. If we were not entitled to be certain about our President’s status, how could we be entitled to rejoice? For, as we have seen, someone decides what others are entitled to.

Whoever such someone is, we do not know. Or should not care. We should only believe, with or without a living president, that for a long while in our history, someone has not been honest with us.

That Someone is the only person we should search the news for his - or her or their – death. For if two presidents have died on us, and we have known no difference - no change, only sluggish roundabout movements - then we have no cause to think a President’s death is good (or bad) news. It is no news.

Let us await the better news; that those who have not been honest with us are dead. Until then, no President’s death should make the news.

Argument for Basic Living

2010-05-02T07:47:00.000-07:00

AFTER NEWS THAT A FINAL-YEAR STUDENT OF OBAFEMI AWOLOWO UNIVERSITY, IFE
HAS BEEN SUSPENDED FOR SELLING HER BEDSPACE

This is for the sake of argument; I proffer no solution.

You meet a palmwine-tapper. You are enthralled by his hard work, his unflinching diligence. But you tell him you are the god of Palm Trees, that you would proceed to limit his access to trees. I do not expect that being god of Palm Trees would stop the wine-tapper from protesting. Or put in a better (more recent) context, you meet a student. You tell her you are the hostel-giver-and-hostel-taker. You give the student no room, no space for her lodgings. The student goes to the Black Market, where everything can be bought (even human parts), and buys space for her lodgings. You return as the hostel-giver-and-hostel-taker, and proceed to punish the student for illegality. But this is a cycle; the student has only exaggeratedly acted upon your neglect. She has only built her illegality on your irresponsibility.

This argument has several parts. For one, there is the argument of the right to the internet. In August 2009, during the ASUU Strike, the management of the College of Health Sciences mobilized security personnel to chase students who had found that they could connect to the internet from a location in the College. A circular was pasted almost immediately which inferred that such location was not a cybercafé; that defaulters would be severely punished. I minced no words then, and I mince no words now: This generation of leaders has failed us.

You may think I am rehashing old lines. Perhaps. Yet, the failure of the present leadership became increasingly disconcerting when we began to earn a living from the internet (at least for myself and Damilola Ajayi), and found no means to use the internet without distress. But this is beyond income. The internet, like our mobile phones, has become an appendage, or a second body. And what did the god(s) of palm trees do? He cut our palm trees.

An argument for basic living would thrive on the premise that certain necessities have taken the form of rights. If the internet has become more than a luxury, if it has become a necessity, then an honest school management would seek ways to enhance its usage, not stultify it. Again, if our future life lies somewhere between use of the internet and our mobile phones, how wonderful is it that we yet crowd cybercafés with poor health conditions to access our emails, and our future?

I find no doubts that we have not been told the truth. Someone, or some people, has not been honest with us. This is, always, a question of sincerity. If we are told that this is the Number One IT University, then we are yet to find ourselves dipped in the waters of such advancement. In other words, there is an obscuritism lurking at our gates. There is little or no betterment of our e-portals. Instead, we seek more ways to build non-ecofriendly buildings and roads. We are hooked away from the world, and we are an educational institution. We are wide-eyed when we hear the mention of the Earth Charter. We are hooked away from the world, and our gods are without care.

Or how else do you explain the suspension of a student who sold allotted space in the hostel? May I say that I have argued in several quarters that selling and buying of spaces are wrong? May I repeat that I have no blessings for the lady who sold her bedspace for a hundred and twenty thousand? Having said those, it remains for us to be honest with ourselves. Do we assume that without adequate provision of living spaces, students would not (re)turn to illegality to cure their wrongs? There is the easily referable example of the Niger Delta. Neglect begat illegality. The fact, then, becomes clear. But our short memories have drowned us. How did our gods assume that continual non-provision of hostels would result in a situation of complete legality, complete adherence to rules, complete triumph of common sense?

An argument for basic living, again, stems from anger. Anger at what our nation has become. Anger that our schools, which should remain as torches of light in the spate of failure, have also become caught up with the disease crippling us.

So this is my claim: I have no words for the wine-tapper who is a victim of some high-placed god. I have neither pity nor laughter. Instead, let these words be directed at the gods themselves. Let them read how disappointed I am, and find that I have been severally denied my basic life. And I am not alone.

I belong to a generation of the Denied, whose basic life is the instinct for survival and victory.

THE MEANING OF LOSING

2010-04-03T09:24:00.001-07:00

(A Memoir in Notations)

I do not write this conclusively.

Instead, I wish to describe the feeling of my loss, though difficult and inexplicable. I wish to locate, in the following notations, a counterforce to the randomness of my victimization. Like the Six Day War, although complete with the double jeopardy of ignorance and defeat, it ended in an Israeli victory.

If the item of loss is hereafter found, let this be for the sake of Record, for the intuitive longing to express emptiness on sheets with ink.

I had just returned from a day of Confrontations. Administrative positions are like time bombs, exploding at will. Better still, they are land mines, buried in false places. This defined my day; I was required give unfathomed answers. In such positions, you are waiting upon. Never waited upon. And so, that Wednesday, I had been waiting upon my classmates, colleagues, juniors. The previous night I had spent mostly behind a computer screen, surfing, typing, rarely blinking. Yet, I had to set sail by 9.00am, arrive at a venue where I had to coordinate the affairs of the Christian Law Students’ Fellowship. Upon return by 5.00pm, I dumped my laptop in an ‘Escape Resort’ I had designed for myself beside the room I share with two others. This Escape Resort has a rug, and my books are lined on a small shelf. The other items are a table, a chair and a reading lamp. You might wish to add My Future. This is if you consider how much Dreaming Time I spend in that Resort.

I wake one and a half hours later to find the laptop bag gone. Biyi Olusolape had woken me with a call, which he placed from my Resort. He said he found no bag when he arrived.

We might not tell how much we have thrown into the River until we get drowned. Not until now, I have not known how much endlessness was contained in that bag.

Three years of writing. One year of Saraba. Others.

We, also, are unaware that things and people share similar allotment of spaces in our hearts. If a thing and a person with similar allotment are lost, concurrently, then we know. In this context, there is no difference between a Thing Lost and a Person Lost.

How can you explain this void I feel upon the loss (misplacement, journeying) of my laptop? How can you fathom how much my prayers, dreams, make-beliefs have been coloured by this 520MB RAM, 1GB HDD Thing? This push-and-start, brake-failing vehicle?

It does not matter that a child is a derelict; Mother loves him anyway. I read once that a mother loves her criminal son more than her Jesuit-Priest one. What matters, perhaps, is that one has become the object of her vision, her expectancy. The other is complete and without need for prayer. Vision always exceeds supposed perfection. Journey always out-glories a terminus.

I always prayed for my laptop: to Function, to keep functioning, to retain Memory.

I have struggled to avoid the thoughts of Who: Who came in while I slept? It is of no consequence. The Person is the Person is the Person. I am sure such person knows what dreams I must be having now. The knowledge that such person knows such is enough for me. I need no more.

To blame, too, is of no consequence. Is it blameworthy that I unlocked my front door to let Biyi Olusolape in, given that he had called earlier to request our acquaintance? Would I blame his companionship? Would I blame my fagged-out body and my less-care (scare) for my failing laptop?

War is what happens when language fails: Margaret Atwood. Replace ‘language’ with ‘laptop.’

War is what happens when laptop fails.

Is there war on my inside? Is there the inability to put thoughts to screen in vast soft pages? Have I any story left unfinished in that lost item? Oh yes. This is war. To find myself bereft of any machine is almost to be without cogitation. It is as though I am an electronic advert board without a memory stick. Somehow the advert board cannot be found, but the memory stick, in place though, is expressionless.

War is what happens when Things become Treasures.

So I am re-Making my treasure, re-Asking it, re-Inventing it. Laptops come and go. By April’s end I would have another. But by 2012, it would go, outdated.

The outward perishes. The inward renews. The Advert Board becomes stale, outnumbered, unworthy. The Memory Stick remains, seeks another Advert Board, always numbered.

We all have laptop failures and losses. War always begins. The ignorance of the nature of such war’s end is less important than non-strategy for the war. In battles, there are no victors, no victims. There are always brave Generals on both sides; raped women, child soldiers, weeping mothers, widowed wives, jittery husbands.

The war is the war. The laptop is shadowed.

Lastly.

I was born on a Wednesday. I lost it on a Wednesday.

I am practicing writing backwards. As such Wednesday becomes Yadsendew. YADSENDEW. Does the last three letters strike your memory? DEW? Yes, Dew. Dew must know what it means to lose its place on the grass. The Sun heats it away. The early morning sun.

Dew must understand how I feel now. It is saying to me, “I feel the same way. Always. But I return. I always return.”

I am Returned. DENRUTER.

Denruter sounds like a Jewish name. Therefore, I go to the wailing wall. I bang my head against the wail, muttering, meditating. More than just the Torah. My head moves backwards, then forward. Backward. Forward. I return. On and on. Reclaiming, Claiming. My territory.

I march on. With or without a laptop.

April 03, 2010

THE MEANING OF LOSING

2010-04-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

The Emancipation of E.I.

2010-02-02T02:20:00.000-08:00

It is like asking a Police Recruit to bring his uniform to the screening session. This is what I think I have become – a police recruit who brought his uniform for a screening session. Indeed, the question of age, the question of whether I have become mature, despite my age, is a question that makes me feel like a police recruit. I have been asked to take upon assignments that baffle me, that make me feel older. But this is my point – I do not want to be misunderstood – I have begun to feel emancipated and older.

This emancipation began when I began to ask questions; of identity, of my hometown, of convictions. I believe, succinctly, that questioning is the key to more questioning. I believe there is nothing like the answer, in the world we know. (I wrote recently: In the known world, there are no absolute truths and absolute falses. In the unknown world, there is an absolute truth and an absolute false). If there was an answer, the answer, we might have no artificially inseminated pregnancies, for birth by natural means would have been the answer. In consideration of this, especially since I returned from a SPARCK-organized workshop, there is no conclusive analysis of what my culture is, for instance. I cannot claim the culture of my father; how unknown it is to me! In essence, I refuse to be burdened by the malaise of generalization. I must define my culture, my hometown, by my terms – by the terms I have come to know and understand.

But then, there is a simpler emancipation, and this is hinged on the fact that in 2010, my parents would be far away, living hundreds of miles away. This is not the first time we would be living apart. But this is the first time they will live away while I am an undergraduate. This undergraduateness is something special to me. I have come to think in their terms, in terms of what beliefs and convictions they taught. But I desire to teach myself those beliefs and convictions and weigh them myself - find them false or true, or both false and true.

I want the freedom to choose. I want the freedom to question.

Abimbola Odeleye, a classmate and friend of mine, gave me this title, “The Emancipation of Emma,” and I appreciate her gift of the title. But it is a difficult thing to be emancipated, as emancipation is actually what it is not called. There is the emancipation that is unknown, and which is certainly more demanding than un-emancipation. This is the emancipation I think I should face and pattern my life after.

So let me try, even if I fail, to state my agenda, now that I am emancipated.

For one, I want to write with precision. I do not want to generalize any longer. I want to ask like Ujunwa in Adichie’s Jumping Monkey Hill, “Which Africa?” For this agenda, this first one, is the crux of my emancipation; to question. Which Africa? Which University? Which Hometown? What Culture? If there is any success, it should be the triumph of these small things, these questions. The kind of writing I wish to indulge in, henceforth, is the writing that addresses questions in precise detail.

It is my intention to ask in my forthcoming e-book, Alphabets of a Small City. Here’s a brief statement of my intention:

What I’m trying to do is to ask unquestioned questions about Obafemi Awolowo University. Thousands of people have emerged from this institution, and it appears there’s been no informal documentation of their sojourn and journey. In Alphabets of a Small City, I seek to ask very informal questions, not necessarily with question marks, but with a definitive probe. In the end, I anticipate the profundity that comes with questioning; the keepsake every questioner leaves behind in the questioned.

For me, it is not a book for (or only about) the university community. It is a book of humanness. There is, I believe, a London in Ife, a Mongolian trait in this Yoruba town. What’s more, I want to open up this small city to the world, for questions, for sightseeing.

The way to achieve this would be hectic, I know. The task is to describe the unknown to the known, for those who know and for those who do not. This is where the little knowledge I have about writing fiction would come handy. Fiction, which is basically telling the unknown in a known way for a known world, has been my major practice for years. By intending to write a non-fiction work in a fictive way, I seek to bring the features of fiction into focus and use. I hope this would be the case when I’m through. I hope someone would notice that I tried to do this.

In using alphabets to open up this small city, I seek to show the magnitude in triviality. Alphabets make words; words make phrases, and so forth. Alphabets culminate into the reality that is Obafemi Awolowo University.

In the end, it could be a major triumph or a minor one. Major or minor triumph, I care less. What I care for is the opening of channels of questioning, of seeing the new in old things. This might be part of a process to (re)create a new way of thinking about places we take for granted – which shape our lives and our thinking.

May we always question.

So, this emancipation is a call to duty. I am called to duty. To represent the evidence of good parenting (whatever it means).

I am called to duty. I am emancipated.

Emmanuel Iduma,
25 December 2009

Shifting Home

2009-12-30T07:11:00.000-08:00

29 December 2009

Uncle Sola has been with us since we moved from Lagos. In Lagos, he drove the big church bus that carried our belongings to Ile-Ife. Now that we are moving to Ohafia, he’s going to drive my Dad’s car. He would not drive the big truck – so big that it contains our belongings and has space for more. I make the point that we came in to Ile-Ife with a bus half the size of the truck. Everyone laughs, Uncle Sola especially; he has become part of the family. He will return tomorrow; I do not know when we’ll see him again.

Transition is a complex thing. This is what I’m thinking about throughout the journey. Transition. How it could be emotional, yet gladdening. The point is, I’ve known transition all my life, and I should not be overcome by it. We moved first when I was one, then when I was four, then eight, then thirteen, then fifteen, and now. So what? But I am overcome by this transition.

I sit with the truck driver, his followers – a lady and a guy – and a Policeman in the truck. My elder brother has declined to come along with us; I am the firstborn now. Surely, I’d have to be machismo, sit in a truck; how many meters high I do not know and I’ll risk the danger of falling. But soon, and throughout the journey, I forget that it’s a truck. This is the way with life: one gets accustomed to unaccustomed things.

Behind the truck is our family car, a Nissan Quest. At first, like the proverbial tortoise, the truck (slow and steady) wins the race. We wait for about two hours for the Quest to catch up. Then it goes ahead. Then it overheats. Then it stops. Then it does not move again. The truck, again, moves ahead, towing the Quest. Oh sure, transition is a complex thing. We got home at about 12 Midnight.

The reason for our continued transition (or movement) is the nature of my Dad’s job. One thinks it should not be called a job, but a ministry. Whatever it is. It’s what I’ve known all my life. I try, only recently, to speculate on the inference of this continued movement. I am still speculating, though. What I know is that it has brought momentous challenges, momentous meanings. As a family, we have questioned the Presbyterian Church system of moving ministers after a four-year term, to a new location – sometimes within the same state, sometimes not.

And this is what I’m asking: what is home? One thinks home is the hometown his father was born and grew. I disagree. I’ve made home in Akure, in Port Hacourt, in Onitsha, in Abuja, in Lagos, in Ile-Ife. My father was born (and grew) in Afikpo. I have not lived in Afikpo for a combined period of up to one year.

Now, my family is making home in Ohafia. It’s my mother’s hometown, no doubt (she was born there, her father and his father before her). But she, like me, has made home in several places. I might not make home in Ohafia. (God knows, when I live this January, I might not return until August). So it’s not exactly my home. But you see, I’m thinking about my siblings.

I ask my younger brother, who is jumping around the house, doing things he ordinarily would not do, “Are you hungry?” “Yes,” he says. I ask again, “Are you happy?” “Yes,” he replies again. This is poetic; I write a four-line poem almost immediately,

House
In my
New house
I’m hungry
And happy.

My siblings, the last two, are the ones who have their lives redefined. For me, I will try to keep defining my life by Ile-Ife, at least until September. After that time, I should be in the Nigerian Law School and after then, wherever. But Ohafia, God knows, is not my home. One might give me a punch for this, your family’s there. I disagree. My family’s there. I am not there.

Home shifts. For instance, my younger sister cries when she’s leaving Ile-Ife. Now she’s jumping around the house, happy and blabbering. One should have said Ife was her home, one should have shouted that assertively. But one cannot; Ohafia will become home to her as Ile-Ife was. She’ll make new friends. As I once did. She’ll resume in a new school. As I once resumed. She’ll have a new room and house. As I once had. (Meanwhile, the sitting room in Ohafia is bigger than Ife’s). And in another four years, when she’d be thirteen, her home will shift again.

I’ve had the same experience. I have coped. She will.

My Daddy and Other Daddy's I've Known

2009-10-22T14:29:00.000-07:00

For Reverend Francis Agbi Iduma at more than 50 and less than 60.

There’s only one way to write about a man you’ve known all your life: with prejudice. This the way I’m determined to write this short piece about my father, my daddy, and all other daddys I’ve known. What inspired me (partly) was insufficiency; I didn’t have enough money to buy the gift I dreamed for his birthday. So here’s another gift, in another way, I hope it lasts long.

I’ve known my daddy as several daddys, each daddy for a specific period in my life. My daddy changed, in my eyes, from childhood to adulthood.

My first daddy did not have a name. Just a face. A man who’d shut me in the room during morning devotion because I cried for no apparent reason. Who danced alongside my mother. Who held my hands while I went to the church to be baptized. And who disappeared when I was only four.

Next, he became the subject and object of telephone conversations. While my brother and my mother and I strived to join him in the United States, I talked incomprehensibly with him on telephone. I understood few words of our conversations, saying, “Okay,” “Yes. He’s here,” and nothing else. He talked on in the background. I just agreed to whatever he said. Looking back, there was no dream of an American sojourn or journey; just the dream of my father, being with him. Clad in white sweater, hands pocketed, behind a San Francisco Theological Seminary building where he had gone for his theology education. And yet, with all this hunger for my first daddy, he had no name, just a face, just a voice, just a way of unnerving every fantasy and bringing them out.

My second daddy lasted a short while. On a visit to Nigeria in 1995, he came with lot and lots of sweet and lots and lots of clothes. He was the Santa Claus daddy, the giving one, the one who paid my fees, sent it regularly through Western Union. And when he visited, I waited all day to see him. We lived in Onitsha then, my brother and I, and he was to come from Lagos. When he came, he became my second daddy, carrying me in his arms all stairs long; it was so ravishing and so lavishing to be borne on his wings. This Santa Claus daddy. All the while I was carried, I thought only of the gifts he’d brought. We’d been promised that by my Uncle and Aunt. America was the land of plenty. Whoever visited from there without the graciousness and plenty of God?

My third daddy returned to Nigeria in 1997, a Presbyterian Reverend minister, a man with final booty from America, complete with the air and franchise of a returnee. Dollars. Aloof to contemporary Nigeria. Too good to be Nigerian. He was the daddy I went to meet in 1997, in Abuja, where we’d be together as a family again, after a long while. He was the daddy that was too kind, but unknown. This was to change soon. This daddy only lasted a short while.

The next, fourth, daddy was a daddy of discipline. Oh God. He took his time to flog, to punish, and he did with so much dexterity. Who knows how he became this daddy? In one instance I was sleeping while evening devotion was in progress. I got a knock, on my head, that sent the sleep away; it did not return after the devotion. In another instance he had travelled to Netherlands and I had become rebellious, so much that my mummy said she was the inappropriate one to punish me. My daddy was the best to punish me. “When he comes back,” she kept saying. I lived my days in dread. He was the daddy that flogged me out of play when I came ninth in my second term in secondary school. So that I came first the next time. So that that was my worst result in secondary school.

The fifth daddy was a daddy that could not be predicted, like a dice. That time when he returned from Netherland, I expected the beating of my life. But he preached to me instead – there goes the story of how I became a Christian, born again. My father preached when he should have flogged. In another instance, I got no beating all through the last phase of my primary school, when I was never placed first or second or third. I’ve never asked him why he never beat me then after each term ended. I might never ask.

My sixth daddy was a revised Santa Claus, who gave us independence. Once a friend told me I could join him to Canada, complete my schooling there and all. I was only in senior secondary school. My father said no word of no. Gave me transport fare to meet the friend in a far away part of Lagos. He allowed me to travel alone at 13, from Abuja to Lagos and vice versa. Now I look back in wonderment and awe. His was a love that was not over-protective, the perfect kind, that gave us the freedom to choose. To become whole. Now, very less than three decades old, I feel so matured. And truth be told, I am not. But that feeling is what I’m most grateful for. That feeling has made me into this slightly over-ambitious young man.

The seventh daddy is the daddy we all dislike. The daddy that emerges at adolescence. Saying no, no, no. He suddenly feels you are being too wild, too exuberant. You must tuck your shirt in. You must help your mother in the kitchen. You must read your book as and when due. You are too lazy, too dirty, too irresponsible. But he’s the daddy you’ll love better later, now that he has a name, a face, a mannerism, a wife.

The eight daddy is the university daddy. Smiling at your achievements, cautioning mildly. Respecting your talent, giving it a voice. Once a friend was amazed at the way I conversed with my daddy. “Like brothers,” he said. And this is the daddy I most love. He’s mostly the daddy who respects your talent. Says every time you’re a hard working fellow. He’s been this daddy always. Like when he sponsored the production of a movie I wrote at 12. Who knows where that video is? God knows I don’t want to see it.

The daddy of Simplicity. We could laugh and laugh at his funny ways. And he’s just too funny. His dance. His comments. His aloofness to certain contemporary things. I’ve learnt most from him that life’s much easier that it’s taken. His honest laughter. His frank way of talking about the most trivial of things.

This is the daddy I’d be when I grow up.

So here’s a hearty toast to a man I’ve known in several ways in the several phases of life I’ve had. But the most important lesson he’s taught me is what some call morality. I call it spirituality. A lesson in the unseen things. Day and night he teaches me this, and as it’s said, I’d not depart from it. Arthur Miller must have had him in mind when he talked about the moral function of writing (permit the inclusion of that word here). He said, “The effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimization…as history has taught, that force can only be moral…”

He’s not just a moral daddy. He’s more than that. Fortunately.

_________

Postscript:
Originally written in celebration of Francis A. Iduma’s birthday. 14 October 2009.

The Life and Times of Emergence (II)

2009-10-12T11:01:00.000-07:00

It’s painful to write about something you shouldn’t write about. Like driving a car when you should have walked, like licking ice cream when you should have drunk La Casera. Hah! This is exactly what I’m attempting to do: write something that should have remained unwritten. Like Paul D in Beloved, I should keep this where it belongs, “in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.” Although, my pain isn’t as heavy as Paul D’s.

When I got the call saying I’d be chosen to participate in the second assessment stage of an essay competition I entered for in May, I was elated, and I screamed. Soon, I made a list of things I should do with the prize money, first or second or third prize, whichever. I felt it was not perfectly satisfactory what I had done with the last.

But there’s something about dreams, about hope deferred. Hope deferred, the Bible says, makes the heart sick. I should have known.

I didn’t. I lived through last weekend high on fantasy, dreaming of things to buy, of a business to start, of a girl to ask out – now that money wasn’t a problem.

I should have known. Fantasies are despicable. Like Disney’s musical, “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.” Hah!

It was an essay competition of The Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM). I was invited to their office in Ikeja for the second stage of assessment, having passed the first. I was wary of telling friends. Now, looking back, it was a good decision.

A friend, en route Lagos, drove me. A good ride, I must say, laden with various fantasies. Again!

The moment I entered CIPM’s reception, I saw Ayodele Obajeun, who had won a string of essays in the past, including World Bank’s. I said to myself, “some competition. Some good competition.” There was another fellow beside him, and no space for me to sit. Opposite there were two others. Only two of us, out of five, did not wear suits. I, savouring simplicity, had worn a shirt and a tie. And I said again, to myself, “some competition.”

Looking back, I am pleased about the conversation that ensued between Ayo Obajeun and myself, and the other fellow. God help me, names elude me.

Being the last to arrive, I waited until the others had gone in for the defense of their essays before my turn came. While waiting, you know the usual. Nervousness. I read through my essay without commitment, with half my mind. In time, I’d know this was a mistake. I should have rent my head, stuff the essay inside, making a vow of commitment.

My turn came. I faced the largest panel of judges in my life. Other times, in Moot Competitions I attended, judges are usually fewer, three or four, but here I had close to ten. “Some competition,” I said to myself again.

One of the judges, seemingly the head, began with an introduction, calling names and titles. I cannot remember any, and it’s obvious I paid no attention. I quietly flipped through my essay. During the introduction, I had been told I’d give a ten minute presentation on what I had written.

Some competition. Some good competition.

I gave the presentation, feeling somewhat good that I began to sound confident at some point. And the faces of the judges seemed encouraging, some nodding, intently and all.

Feeling confident, sometimes, is an ice cream made in Devil’s Factory.

One of the judges, who soon became some trouble (pardon, please), a lady, simple looking though, said I had answered my own question.

That I had not dealt with “The Impact of Global Recession on Human Capital Development in Nigeria.” It was disheartening. After the encouraging faces. After the confidence made in Devil’s Factory.

I stuttered my way through an explanation, but regained my swagger (?) when the head of the panel asked another question.

I was told to leave. They had no more questions for me. I bit deeper into the ice cream of confidence when another lady, not the earlier one, said I justified the marks I’d been awarded.

It’s good I had told Ayo Obajeun I was not a writer of essays, that I basically wrote fiction and poetry. It’s also good he said someone had heartily told him he was going to feed himself with essay writing. He might win. The results are due on Thursday.

It’s good because I did not make the first, best, three.

It was terribly disconcerting. Hopes dashed against the cold floor.

Why this fits into the life and times of my emergence is because it gives me something to focus on; quite bad that I missed impressing ten judges with my non-fiction.

And they complained that our essays were not up to standard.

I must not battle with such the rest of my life. I’d stick with creative writing. Writing like the four books on my reading list this month.

I’m excited about sharing them, first as a list, later through reviews:

Beloved (Toni Morrrison)
Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
Tropical Fish (Doreen Baingana)
London Fields (Martin Amis)

So long, essay writing.
I have poured the final libation.
Here’s an eternal toast to fiction.

Time To Remember

2009-10-03T14:53:00.000-07:00

This is a new poem. For the ASUU strike. Whomever he is.

After prolonged ASUU strike

It’s time to remember
That not everyone
Has a collar up their bone
To tuck feelings

It’s time to remember
That though there’s
A lot of gnashing
Not everyone cares

If we do remember this
No car halfway a mile
Should stop suddenly
And ask questions

No one should wake
After a nightmare
For the simple truth:
It might last forever

2 October 2009

The Life and Times of Emergence

2009-09-24T02:35:00.000-07:00

(Part One)

Only my side of the table did not have alcohol. I thought of this as a triumph, for Onyeka Nwelue, author of The Abyssinian Boy, said I should be ‘deported’ as a writer. Writers must love alcohol, he opined. Then I asked him whether writers had a country they all belonged to. He said yes. I laughed hard and long. This was only the beginning of the end for an evening that made me want to become a writer, at all costs, a decision I did not know I had to make again.

Let me show why I made this decision.

Two weeks ago I sat with Tolu Ogunlesi in his NEXT office. He’s a man I’ve known since 2007, when Dotun Eyinade told me about a well-travelled young writer. And in 2008, with our email correspondence having tightened somewhat, he said he’d like us to meet personally. It was not until this month that we met. I met him in the guise of Saraba Magazine, asking for things we could do for publicity. But the real thing was to meet someone whom I consider a mentor, for his hard work is astounding. And he’s also a pacesetter in winning prizes. Damilola Ajayi says he has captured the internet. I agree. Once I felt an inferiority complex typing his name into Google’s search bar.

The point about this meeting with Mr. Ogunlesi is that I found one quality I had to have if I wanted to become a writer. Simplicity and humility. For no matter how popular, or how many prizes a writer has won, he must not think himself beyond the roof, for his inspiration is only from inside the house, not above the roof. Mr. Ogunlesi strikes as a man of simplicity and humility, and that is the kind of writer I want to be when I grow up!

And yes, that evening when I sat without alcohol, I had attended the Committee of Relevant Arts Book Party for the Nine Shortlisted NLNG Poetry Prize authors. I cannot reproduce their names, for though I attended a party organized on their behalf, I was on duty for Saraba. I can vividly remember two names. Ademola Dasylva and Lindsay Barrett.

In that party I met Wole Dasylva, who is a final year student of Philosophy in Ife. His father’s book was shortlisted. For five minutes I thought he was the shortlisted poet, and I exchanged numbers based on that misconception. I want to be a writer so that people can take me seriously, so that they can stop what they are doing to exchange numbers with me! That’s selfish. But it’s not really conceived out of selfishness. Writing should be taken more seriously in Nigeria, and writers too.

Regarding Lindsay Barett: he is the oldest poet amongst the nine shortlisted authors. His contemporaries are members of the Mbari Club, a club whose members included Chris Okigbo, Achebe and so forth. So you can guess how old he is, how long ago he started writing. The moderator of the book party, Deji Toye, said he was being unfair to younger writers, only starting to write poetry this century and being nominated for Nigeria’s biggest literary prize. But that is the kind of writing I like. I want to always be refreshing, to write agelessly.

And I also remember Lindsay Barett because of his son, A. Igoni Barett. He’s the author of From Caves of Rotten Teeth. Damilola Ajayi and I had met him through the internet earlier, when he wrote to acknowledge our publicity for his book in our second issue. When we walked up to him and introduced ourselves, and told him we had plans to make Saraba print, he openly disagreed. He said making Saraba print would be a profitless affair. That there was no market for literature in Nigeria. And he cited the example of Farafina Magazine. I was not pleased. It angers me to hear Nigerians do not read. But its true in many senses. Especially in the literary sense. Onyeka Nwelue affirmed that when he gave a reading recently, only Indians bought his book. Nigerians merely flipped through the book and admired its cover! They did not buy it.

I’ve heard many people say they do not read Nigerian books. That Nigerian writers had a way of being verbose. But the problem is that these complainants do not know anything about Nigerian writers, they do not even know Nigerian writers. But this is why I want to be a writer, a Nigerian writer. I want to be able to write books that would be read by every Nigerian. And I would like to be part of the writers that would change the notion that Nigerians do not read Nigerian books.

One other thing: I have a certain sense of duty now that we have decided to make Saraba a path to literary renaissance in Nigeria. In our quest, we have met and communicated with countless of literary power brokers in Nigeria. My friends, with whom I attended the 37th Conference of the Nigerian Society of International Law, were amused when I kept screaming happily about the response of Jahman Anikulapo to me regarding Saraba. It seems we have captured the heart of many. Now, it’s time to sit down, count our costs, and make it the greatest literary endeavor Nigeria has known.

It’s that table I return to. I believe that on that table sat the future of Nigerian writing. Onyeka Nwelue, more popular at the moment than any of us, says he loves India, where he wrote his first book. But what is striking was that he said he’d always write Nigerian stories.

Ifeh Agbomire, who had written me to tell me he loved my blog, said he guessed correctly when he told Onyeka that Damilola Ajayi was the extrovert and I the introvert. I laughed. My family would vehemently oppose that opinion. He was not alone, though, in this assertion. Jumoke Verissimo said the same to me, for Dammy had engaged her in a conversation and I only watched. But this is not what I took away from meeting Ifeh. It’s always amazing to meet people who share the same enthusiasm, who read, and who negate everything you’ve heard about Nigerian literature.

In the end, it’s a glorious aftermath that I look forward to. The current ASUU strike has served a momentous purpose. (I hope this is not an infamous statement.) I do not usually know how to respond when friends tell me how bored they are at home. I would’ve to suggest their involvement with literature. I already have a bag-full of events to attend in the coming months. This is why I have decided to chronicle my life and times as an emerging writer, struggling with becoming relevant, attaining significance.

And just as I told a friend, Saraba has employed me.

Burma Boy

2009-09-21T03:52:00.000-07:00

Burma Boy
After Biyi Bandele

My father visited
Second World War
and returned with
a carcass
without arms
half-blind
half-deaf
and he warned me
not to shoot a gun
while a white
Burma Boy
was watching

Saraba on Issuu

2009-09-07T05:57:00.000-07:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More saraba

The New Saraba

2009-09-07T04:31:00.000-07:00

We have uploaded the new Saraba site. There's a Saraba for everyone! Please visit and enjoy. Check us at www.sarabamag.com.

The Homosexual Activist: A Poem

2009-08-16T01:26:00.000-07:00

The Homosexual Activist

A homosexual activist

died in my hands

and he told me

the futility of Facebook.

It could be that

his profile was

inactivated

and his status;

or that

he’d tried to

post our wedding

photo with letdown.

It could be that

our honeymoon

at Notre Dame

was unmentioned

in his profile

and he sought better

ways to make

himself known.

Who knows

why he became

a homosexual

Activist?

Emmanuel Iduma

Recent Favorite Characters

2009-08-16T00:33:00.000-07:00

And finally, non-fiction...

Given my perpetual affiliation to fiction these past weeks, it seems important that I find certain characters mention-worthy. It surpasses mention though, what I want to write about. To think that I completed some books with my soul bare, stripped of feelings, is to understand the power of fiction. And to think that such feeling did not come to me while I read fiction alone, that it also came whilst I watched certain movies, is to be grateful that creativity has a strong hold on humanity.

Below is a dual-review of some sort, a compilation of all I’ve thought about from a book and a movie. I’ve done the review through the guise of characterization, naming my favorite characters and attempting to pitch my thoughts through their force. I hope my impressions cut to the heart of the artistic value of the works.

Eddie O’Hare

It’s difficult to say who was the most memorable character in A Widow for One Year. A simple synopsis of the story by John Irving runs thus: a couple lost their son in an accident but subsequently begat another child. Their house is replete with photographs of their dead sons, each photograph bearing the memories of their past with their sons. They raise their new child, a girl, with the knowledge of those memories. But theirs is a dysfunctional family: the man who is a bestselling children fiction writer seduces several single mothers after he has painted them nude. The mother, a beautiful woman, consistently sleeps with a sixteen-year-old boy who is living with them as an assistant to her husband. This sixteen year old is Eddie O’Hare. The peculiar thing about his characterization is that he is infected with the grief of the family, as he cannot forget his sexual experience with the 37-year old woman. This experience he lives with his whole life, after the woman has disappeared with all of the photographs in the house save one. And to think that the boy after thirty two years can only date an older woman is to understand how the grief of Marion Cole, the woman he’s had sexual relations with, affects him.

He’s my favorite character because through him I see that grief is contagious, even to an outsider, a person not directly affected by the grief. The important requisite for the transfer of grief is a willingness to receive. Through him I discover that grief is a choice; that because he opened himself to the grief of his lover, it contagiously affected him. And finally, that grief can last a lifetime, that one can carry scars of grief until the day he dies; way into his fifties Eddie O’Hare was still affected by another woman’s grief.

Eddie is only a construct of the other important characters. Each of the important ones – Ted Cole (father), Marion Cole (mother) and Ruth Cole (child), respond to grief in peculiar ways. Ted blames his wife in some way for their dysfunctional relationship, and seeks the comfort of women, as fleeting as his pursuit is. In the end, he cannot agree with his daughter on who she should be, how she should view herself, and does the irredeemable act of suicide. His wife disappears from the scene for thirty-seven years, claiming when she returned that she did it for the sake of Ruth, who she did not want her grief to affect. And Ruth, in between grieving parents, becomes an insecure woman, remaining unmarried way into her thirties.

In the end, we see grief as a binding force, a compulsory string that binds every character, defining their lives. John Irving agrees to this too, affirming it in his appearance at the World Book Club. Though he was talking about his most famous novel, The World According to Garp (which I am currently reading, and I hope by God I’d write something after), he noted that there are certain things which happens to a person that he cannot recover from. But I’d modify it to read – they’re certain happenings a person cannot recover from if he chooses not to recover from them. Recovery may be hard, impossible even, but what’s important is that unlike Eddie O’Hare the affected person must try to overcome his grief.

Dr. David Henry

He’s the chief character in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a film based on a book by Kim Edwards with the same title. And the theme, perhaps, is similar to John Irving’s – coping with grief. My friend, Damilola Ajayi, has reviewed the movie and John Irving’s book, and the reviews can be found on his blog. I am not attempting a review of the movie. I’d only attempt to state why Dr. David Henry was my favorite character, and how he coped with his grief.

The facts were that he had a twin sister who had the Down syndrome and who died when he was twelve. His mother never recovered from the death. He carried the scar of his sister’s death and his mother’s non-recovery into his marriage. His wife gives birth to twins, but upon discovery that the second child was a girl with the Down syndrome, he handed the child to a nurse whom he requested to take the girl to an institute for children with such incapacities, and lied to his wife that the child was dead. But the nurse adopted the child, and took care of her until adulthood. He did not recover from this action, as his guilt mingled with his grief – manifested in his desire to have a strong child, unlike his dead sister. But this singular action altered his life. It reinforced what I had thought about in relation to Eddie O’Hare. That we can decide how grief is to affect us. Life would have to throw grief our way, but what we do with it becomes an altogether different matter. The thing is, Dr. David Henry decided wrongly how his grief was to affect him.

By choosing to dispose his sickly child, he sacrificed his marriage – his wife became dissatisfied with his sexual failure (because he did not want to risk having a sickly child) and turned to other men, having countless boyfriends. His wife overcame her grief (thinking her child was dead), but his grief was too contagious to be ignored. Again, as I learnt from Eddie O’Hare, grief can be contagious to those around us. Soon, David Henry’s wife left him; who could cope with such mismanagement of grief? His son, the supposed strong son, had a poor example of fatherhood – his father always shut himself in his darkroom, for he had become a photographer. His photography was also an attempt to create a second handle of existence for himself. He took to taking photographs of women he thought were beautiful and strong enough for daughters. And when he began to seek for his daughter, his grief had overtaken him so much that he could not start a meaningful relationship with her.

In the end we see a series of cataclysmic events tied to David Henry’s grief. One flicker of light, though, was the fact that his grief gave the nurse that adopted his daughter a gift of motherhood. Grief, I discovered, gives gifts as well. What matters is what gift the recipient has chosen to receive.

I could go on to condemn my favorite actor’s actions. But in a backward glance I find that he was being human, only acting out his natural instincts. His sense of protectiveness took over in a moment of decision, and it overshadowed his sense of reason. Protectiveness is, perhaps, a dangerous trait; it seems everyone possesses it. What’s important is that this sundry human trait bow to the more inhuman one – comportment – as difficult as it may be in the time of crises.

For in the end, as John Irving affirms, “…in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.” We must find a permanent cure for ourselves, though.

Some Poetry

2009-08-11T05:51:00.000-07:00

I've complained on and on, I'm tired now. I'm finding it difficult to write non-fiction. Who says John Irving cannot influence me that well. Currently reading The World According to Garp. Below are two poems, Looking No Further and Ghost Arrival. I hope it makes some sense. Please tell me if you find me metaphysical. My friends, resonating Tade Ipadeola, have suggested that. Please critical feedback. And pray with me that inspiration comes for non-fiction. The poems have been published in The Economy of Sound: Saraba's Poetry Chapbook.

Looking No Further

I have tried to be

a magician

crossing seven seas

and oceans, having

reputed talisman

from India and Bahrain:

but I am here

in this room I made

twenty years before.

I took upon the thought

of visiting the moon during

my honeymoon, placing

a self-made flag and

claiming to my sweetheart

how wonderful it is:

but I have never left

or felt another existence

except the feather on this wall.

It is not presumptuous to think

that I could write a masterpiece,

along glorious shelves my name

to be found, to speak as though

I held a vial that ran the world,

and move around countries

with ease: but this typewriter

placed on this table last century

has grown clumsy, with friction.

To think I have become this,

a self-cursed man, riding terribly

in mistakes of final years,

to think I can watch the ocean

fading, and be void of tears, to

think I have no finger to hold

a pen; to think all these

and remain sane, alive,

I am without words and grateful.

I’ll look no further

I’ve found a place.

Ghost Arrival

When the ghosts came

I was sitting on the cubicle

thinking of a woman

whose love I’d missed.

They shut my arm

in their manacles

with garrulous attention

as though I were a fool.

Until the ghosts left

I could slap the gecko

scurrying on the great gulf;

they left and I stopped.

It’s the ghosts I attribute

my beautiful essentials

the coherent Jesuit

of my grand career.

So now, the attention I got

first garrulous, now grand,

has made my age like

the grand canyon in orbit.

Three Favorite Characters

2009-07-14T07:24:00.000-07:00

Here are three favorite characters from my recent readings. I expect to have a second part of this, or to make a routine, to once in a while turn in a revelation of the characters that have made much meaning to my writing, and life.

Aksionov

A Russian name is not easily recognized, and so is Russian fiction. I discovered Russian fiction only last year, and the first thing that struck me was the unfamiliarity of the names of characters. Usually, I had to forget the names and focus on the stories, and often I ended with a lack of parley and acquaintance with the characters. So that’s the backdrop with which I’m introducing Aksionov, major character of Leo Tolstoy’s God Sees the Truth but Waits. It’s a short story; yet the depth of the characterization baffles me. My hero is made to go to jail for a murder he did not commit, and after twenty-six years he meets the man that actually committed the crime and set him up. The simplicity of the plot is astounding: the man who wrongs Aksionov begs for forgiveness and he forgives. But my favorite part is that when the order for his release came, Aksionov was already dead. It made me see life in a new light. That a man’s greatest weakness is to let circumstances rule him. For to my character, it did not matter if he had lost all for the criminal exuberance of another man, that 26 years had gone for that exuberance. What mattered was that last moment of truth, of the discovery of truth. What he did at that moment made him unforgettable.

Lamang

Quite unexpectedly, this man catches my attention in Helon Habila’s Measuring Time. I can say there is a bias in me for the popular ones, Mamo, LeMamo and Zara. But I decided to look elsewhere, at the tiny bit of humanness that exists even in the most unlikely characters. From the start, I am told that Lamang is the king of women, winning the charm of women in his younger days, marrying a woman for money’s sake and losing her during childbirth. But soon, his person becomes dependent on politics, on power, on survival. I could say I love the charismatic attitude he possesses. But what is most enthralling to me is his instability, especially of the power he wields. This power fizzles in stages; his political influence fizzles first and then the power he owns over his family. And when he dies soon after he learns of a son’s betrayal, I can find meaning in the words of Amitav Ghosh: “This is how power is eclipsed: in a moment of vivid realism, between the waning of one fantasy of governance and it’s replacement by the next; in an instant when the world springs free of it’s mooring of dreams and reveals itself to be girded in the pathways of survival and self-preservation.” So there I was learning power, what it really meant, from a most unlikely character.

Cacilda

Mia Couto’s Everyman is a Race is a collection of stories that, Oh God, just sets me in revelry. Revelry because I cannot stop reading it, each individual story with so much potency and craftsmanship. What is more, I find it difficult to even choose my favorite character from the string of characters. But as they say, the more the merrier. So it was merrier for me to choose Cacilda. Her background is similar to most Africans, especially those who are nationals of previously war-torn countries. And I daresay her background is universal: the feeling of a mother with a son fighting a war and who has since written a single letter. Cacilda has a man she visits to read the letter for her, often. This man narrates how addicted she is to the letter, as though her whole being is hinged on it. Then news reaches the village that Cacilda’s son is dead and it is only rational that her reader takes word to her. He is not prepared to trigger irrevocable consequences, so he decides to write a new, more interesting letter to her. but in the end of the reading and when he stands to leave, she puts the letter into the fire and tears drop. One would have to look deep enough to find that Cacilda knew about the death before he came. But she allowed hope to persist. And what other virtue demands cognition than this?

A Road Less Taken

2009-07-14T07:13:00.001-07:00

Here's an article I wrote in 2008 after the close of Colloquium of New Writing, a writing conference/seminar I was a part of organising. I have scarcely written non-ficition recently, and I apologise to all followers of this blog. I'd be back in August, with a bang, and a lot of creative experiences...

I want to think that this whole business of writing is a long shot at nowhere; that those of us who consider ourselves writers are only trying to try our hands on something needless. I also want to think that there is no future for us, especially those of us not in the arts, and that when we finally discover how furtive our writing attempts are, we would sit down sullied in shame.

Yet, with all these, there appears a truth in what my friend, Arthur Anyaduba said. We must not add vanity to vanity. Let me not indulge the temptation to write on that. What is noteworthy is that no matter how much it seems writing is a long shot at nowhere, we who are blessed with talent must make it worthwhile.

There remains a subject-matter dear to my heart. A subject matter that have preoccupied my thought in the last few months. Colloquium of New Writing. That one, with all rectitude, I want to write about. And if I finally come to a point in these lines that I feel satisfied with what I have written, it would be significant and satisfying for me to draw a curtain on that chapter in my writing life—the chapter called “Colloquium of New Writing.”

Permit me to disclose that I do not write as a founder or initiator or ‘visioner.’ I cannot pride in something that massive. What I can pride as is that I was a participant, perhaps an active participant. Or maybe it is good that I was a member of the Planning Committee alongside other literary enthusiasts. I may have detailed information, but that does not preclude anything more than I would suggest.

The short history of the Colloquium of New Writing is as follows: In August 2007, a group of young writers—writers of poetry and fiction, I mean—met to talk about their works, the works of established writers and to talk about other topics of interest to the young writers. I was part of that group of seven that attended. Between March 14 & 15 2008, another Colloquium was held. This time we were about fifteen in number. Finally, between 4^th and 6^th of September, 2008, another Colloquium was held. This time, the participants were more than twenty-five.

It was a glorious event, the three days of the recent Colloquium. I use the word glorious with much sentiment. The event would remain unforgettable in the terrain of my time. Especially the time that has to do with writing. It was not glorious because we had such literary dons like Prof. Adebayo Lamikanra and Dr. Gbemisola Adeoti on the first day, talking about fiction and poetry respectively. It was not glorious because we had a celebrated literary enthusiast, Dr. Chima Anyadike on the second and third day talking about fiction. It was not glorious because we had Kaine Agari, author of Yellow Yellow, on the final day. It was glorious for a reason I cannot explicitly state.

I may want to write this with a certain skill of journalism. I may want to report the glory I have talked about in every splint of detail. But it does not come to me as that. There is something ringing in my interior.

That thing began when my friend and ‘colleague’, Ayo Famurewa said to me, “Emma, you can dream.” We were talking about the PEN Competition we were planning to enter for and I expressed my desire to be one of the winners, alongside herself and our friend, Arthur. She laughed and said those words.

When I thought about the Colloquium, I thought about the enthusiasm of all the young writers that were present. When we were planning for the Colloquium, we originally planned that about 50 young writers would be present. In all, about 33 persons registered their interest. It brought to fore what Salman Rushdie said about the business of writing. That writing was never an affair for the multitude. This is problematic in some sense. I do not want to be assumed as a person who arrogantly prides himself as a writer. We had 33 registered persons, and that is the point I want to drive.

But I saw enthusiasm. This enthusiasm I talk about rang through the days that we could not exhaust talking about the work of each writer present. We could go on and on to talk about writing. That was the extent of the enthusiasm. No one wanted to stop, I dare say. One of the highpoints of that enthusiasm was on the second day. We had taken assignments that were based on the activities of the previous day. The enthusiasm made us write beautifully crafted assignments that were adjudged better than the works contained in the Brochure.

I return to my talk about ‘dream.’ ‘Dream’ is as important to a writer as to any other. We go to sleep at night fantasizing about fame, our books winning tons and tons of awards. We think about fortune, large fortune enough to keep us doing nothing but writing. We build castles made of our credibility, credible enough that our pen would remain vivid many decades after we have written. When we write, we dream that it matches the vision and ideology we have. We expect that our characters would fit the words we express. That is all ‘dream.’

So the enthusiasm made so much resplendence because I met persons who had dreamt and who, I expect, would keep dreaming.

The three key words used for the Colloquium were “Write, Connect, Publish.” Glad to say I connected, that I met people. Writers. That is very essential for us in that trade. We cannot underestimate the power of networking, the power to connect. I cannot know if I have written a classic without meeting people, especially people who share the same dream. They know the limitations, they know the words. When I come to them sharing my story or my poem, they know where it is coming from. They put themselves in my shoes and tell me what is wrong and what is right. And I must be largely obedient to them.

I expect to soon get published. I await the right time. And if there was something the Colloquium did, it was to remind me that writing had become a craft, a trade, for me. A craft to the extent that if I wanted publishing, I should expect to work like a man who made cars, or like a carpenter.

We must never forget that this road is less taken. Not many would spend nights working on a story or a poem, or anything for that matter. Indeed, human existence has been largely cheapened. There is a preference to shadows rather than to substance. When finally, substance becomes far from redemption, suffering humans grope under their inadequacies and failure.

But one way to redeem time and be gainful is to write. It is needless to say that Christopher Okigbo has become the father of African poetry. I like to think that he dreamt, like most of us. I like to think that his dream contained the glory of his poetry beyond him. Today we celebrate him. As Helon Habila noted, “The best a writer can do is to keep doing what he knows best, to write as honestly as possible, never to be swayed by the ephemeral glitter, the shallow praises, to always keep an eye on history, on posterity.” That would entail looseness. A certain detachment to ephemeral things. It would require independence and creativity. If these are foremost on a writer’s mind, I bet posterity would never outlive him.

So that afternoon, when Ayo Famurewa joked that I dreamt a lot, it rang in my ears that ‘dream’ was good for me. It was dream that gathered us at the Colloquium. It was dream of posterity, of the future, that brought us. It was the dream that in the road less taken, our marks would remain for all those who ventured on that path of doggedness and determination. Yes, our path is less travelled, but we know beyond doubt that it is the accepted road.

With the Colloquium finally ended—a colloquium we had started planning over two months ago—I come to ask, “what is the purpose of this?” I may not find an answer readily. But I know something I share with my friends Ayo and Arthur. A thing I share with the 30 other young writers that registered for the Colloquium:

We want to do things that would never end, write lines that would never stop being read; etch our names in an unending watermark. And then, when we finally sail to forever, time would never be able to outlive us.

A Millionaire Writer

2009-06-15T11:53:00.000-07:00

[This is a response to a poster I saw in my University, about "A Millionaire Writer Seminar"]

I sincerely hope by now that the fuss about ‘A Millionaire Writer Seminar’ is over, and that its organizers have made quite enough profit to cover their costs, for as I know by experience, these things come with large expectations and demands. This might be the only fair thing I have thought about regarding the 13^th June event. Permit me to candidly state my thoughts, without any grouse, without any fear, and if I may, without any claim that I have taken this ‘personal.’ I have rapport and respect for some of the faces I saw on the poster, but when the issues following shortly arose in my mind, oh God, I had to drop sentiments. But, dear reader, note that these are personal opinions, and not in any way central.

Perhaps a great misadventure I am making is to classify all writing as literary, because what the ‘millionaire writers’ taught is not in any way literary. Yet, I am not dissuaded that literary writing or not, there is something indeed central and shared about putting pen to paper or about flinging fingers across a keyboard. That shared something is what is forgotten, and what our millionaire writers have failed to remember.

For one, true writing has never been a simple task of making money, and I hope I do not sound as an advocate of some sort or a heavy-bearded guru of writing. But that was why I started by assuming that what the millionaire writers propose is nothing literary. Again, literary or not, I assume we can agree with all the gory and pain renowned writers have had to undergo to become masters or to write masterpieces. But when writing is looked upon as a slingshot at fame and fortune and so-great gain, I am perturbed that it has lost its quality of finesse. For when it comes to the final analysis, masterpieces are not written in a hurry or as a sideline adventure. Writers of all kind are the prototype of Orhan Pamuk’s description: they are those who shut themselves in a room and write.

Let it be wholesomely clear then. I am not exalting poetry or fiction above other genres. My claim is that writing is not a simple task of making money. And if this is contended, may we recall the masterpieces, and see if they were written just simply? Achebe, our granddaddy, began writing TFA at the age of 22, and did not get it published until he was 28. Habila wrote Waiting for an Angel for 3 years. There’s a plethora of examples.

And annoying it is that we have confined upon the art of writing the instant gratification that has plagued our age. When we entice people to write online articles for the (sole?) purpose of how many thousand dollars they are going to make, then we have just transferred the plague. And when we try to testify to them about how we have made some thousands, with the hope that we would be looked up with some fame and renown, we are just teaching them that, hey, come write for the money.

I have a book that teaches, in what the author calls “Erica’s 20 Rules for Writers,” that writers should take their mind off publication. That is strange, and might not be necessarily construed to the extreme. But the stuff of that idea is that writers must first write for themselves. For Joseph Brodsky, 1988 Nobel Prize Winner, he had lived all his life private. He says, in the opening of his Nobel Lecture, “For someone rather private, for someone who all his life has preferred his private condition to any role of social significance…” And as Salman Rushdie added, “Much great writing has no need of the public dimension.” I do not wish to allegorize and conclude that writers should have no social significance, but the social must emerge from the private. A writer is first concerned with his inside before his outside. Where he is most concerned with how much thousands of dollars his next online article would accord before what point he is going to make, then he has gotten it all warped.

And to think that we have also easily conferred renown status to ourselves, with such appellations as ‘renowned freelance writer’ is quite disturbing. I do not dispute any of this, neither do I claim it has no veracity. But I am amazed that so little is made of real renown. A writer is never putting himself in the limelight. His work puts him there. Ernest Hemingway did not appear to receive his Nobel Prize, but his work spoke ahead, and still does. Please, give me something to call you renowned for, and don’t confer that status to yourself. The crux of this is that writers let their writing speak, not themselves. And when the minor is made the major, it is a big hoax.

So I’m thinking that we must write with independence, without any claim for mammon, to express ourselves from deep within, without the frontier thought of ‘a millionaire writer.’ For “good writing assumes a frontierless nation. Writers who serve frontiers have become border guards,” Rushdie noted. To become a border guard one loses his freedom to the internet’s call, to lazy American college students who put up their essay topics and pay a site to write it, to the dream of dollars paid through Paypal, or e-gold. These are borders; a border is an in-between, an amoral stand-post, which does not take one here or there, which is not progressive or regressive. And this is what the organizers of the Millionaire Writer Seminar want to make of us: to have no depth, to do something that’s not exceptionally bad, but lacks the force of meaning our generation needs. It is therefore clear that they have not done something disparaging, something uncalled for. They have only stayed on the surface. And what we need today is something deeper.

What we need today is to the art of dis-covery. Notice it is hyphenated. Of course, we need to open the cover, discard the lid and find something hidden within, not waiting at the beckon of the internet for titles and no inspiration.

Agreed, make the cool cash from the internet. Go on without one foothold for your name. Become what Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman calls ‘history’s fools.’ An individual being fooled by history. For when you have succumbed to instant gratification, when you are successful as a renowned freelance internet writer, you would have been fooled by this moment of history; this moment that writing has become an appeal to five thousand dollars and not a counterforce to shallowness. In the end, I have no suggestion for you.

The Demise of Mr. Michael J. Scofield

2009-05-30T08:24:00.000-07:00

There is one thing that I have to inevitably state in writing this, and that is the fact that Michael Scofield died at the end of the sensational soap opera, Prison Break. I am sorry if this is new gist to some, and truly I am sorry. I offer my apology because suspense goes to the root of any story. If have denied anyone suspense, let it be known that it was denied me too. Those who saw the last episode said he died before I watched it myself. And so, if you please, I am taking my revenge.

But revenge is a bitter matter that should not occupy any line, and it should not be heard that I wrote anything for revenge. What follows here might be more serious than the title suggests, or it might not, because altogether I am just indulging certain things I thought about during (and after) my experience with Prison Break. I would take the liberty to call it PB henceforth.

A little history is significant for me. My elder brother had gotten himself with PB in late 2007 and early 2008. I was too sentimental to start the first season. I preferred to watch everything at once, like a traditional movie. But I talked with an older person, a woman I call Auntie, and she started narrating PB. It was surprising as well as enlightening. And so I decided immediately to start an escapade with PB. The rest, as they say, is history. I became a fan, interlinked with a network of fans that stretches beyond the tiny confines of the University campus where I reside.

Of course the first thing I noticed was that this was no Nigerian soap or movie. I agree to so many things about the Nigerian movie industry. The first that I agree to is that we have no long history as Hollywood. That’s fine, arguably. This goes to suggest that no one should blame us when we produce sham and nonsense. Like saying a toddler should be punished when he shits on his napkin. But I could create an exception, a counter argument, easily. What happened to all the money pocketed from the productions? What happened to creativity? You know, it happens that most Nigerian movies have no creativity: lines are clichés, spoken too mechanically, stories are too flawed, titles are so God-knows-what (imagine: Chelsea v. Liverpool). No depth. So if anyone puts up the argument that we have spent little time in the industry, I would say, we have spent so little time and gotten so much money, what happened to using the money wisely? Surely Globacom is only five years old. Would Mr. Adenuga dare put up the so-little-time argument?

But PB was superb in production, in retaining its suspense. Once it was Scofield breaking away from Fox River, then he went to Panama and broke out from there, then he spent his time on the outside trying to bring down the Company. Our own movies rarely have suspense; it’s always one father-in-law refusing his son-in-law, two funny men acting comedy, or two actors always acting romance roles in different productions. Ever seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, August Rush?

What is more, PB created a story we could believe in. a story people could tell their friends who would be wide-eyed and love Scofield. PB created a Scofield people began to quote, a T. Bag hero. I remember hearing someone quoting the Scofield Version of the Bible. My point exactly is that stories must make us see ourselves in them. This is a writer’s task. There are stories in every window, tales behind every door. But the writer must create his characters, his plot, in an unforgettable way, in a manner that becomes central to every human, regardless of race, culture or claimed religion.

And this brings back the Nigerian angle. I don’t have to apologize for bringing in the Nigerian angle. In fact, we all deserve an apology for all the crap we have received in the name of movies, from greedy producers, who have no desire to see the craft of moviemaking grow. The production of any movie or soap would determine the reception it would receive. Despite the greed of our producers, they have refused to have foresight, to see beyond the profit they think they are making. I agree that there are exceptions to this, producers who are bent on seeing the industry grow. But the good is overshadowed by the bad. This is too apparent. Foresight would require soaps like PB, and it could be amazing the reception such would receive. Scofield has become an international star, alongside Theodore Bagwell, Lincoln Burrows, Sarah, Sucre, Mahone, General, name them. Our producers have not seen beyond video rentals as their marketers, neither have they grasped the power of theatres. Moviemakers elsewhere make all the money they spent in a week of releasing the movie. But here it is different, and a tiny profit is looked upon with so much magnification and shallowness. I might not have concrete facts and figures. This does not less my angst.

My cousins and I recently argued on which was more tremendous: Twenty-Four (Where Keiffer Sutherland stars as Jack Bauer) or PB. Many chose PB. In giving reasons they said it was more real, more applicable to life. This is the ultimate end for any story, written or maimed or acted. It must be applicable to life. One might argue that PB was made for entertainment alone, but in the end entertainment would not answer our questions, would not give us a true picture of ourselves. Entertainment cannot show us the true struggle between what should remain and what should not.

The demise of M.J. Scofield, main star of PB, was an interesting end. A friend argued with me that it needed to end well, and I said no. But I do not want to end on any argument about how to end a good story, or what makes a good end. What I can say is that I was intrigued each time I saw PB, and I sincerely hope I would begin to have intrigue anytime I see Nigerian productions.

For all he did, for all his sacrifice and heroism and intellect, for finally bringing down the Company, I hope Michael Scofield made it to heaven. Permit me, PB was so real it seemed there was really a Scofield somewhere.

Address to Kokolettes

2009-05-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

[I imagine HiTV boss, Mr. Subair, has asked me to address the 12 young, beautiful maidens that have gathered at the request of D’Banj, for an exciting reality show that begins in June. The following is the short speech I would give.]

Ladies and gentlemen, I am flabbergasted by the honour to address this august gathering. This gathering is august not because it falls in the month of august, (that is obvious) but because the persons gathered here are people to reckon with world over. So I really mean it when I say I am utterly flabbergasted that I was chosen to make the opening speech for this beautiful fanfare. Permit me to say that what we have starting today is historical in every sense. In one sense, it is a happening that has never occurred, where a renowned musician would remember others and not think of himself alone. In another sense, there has never been anything like a Koko Mansion, where women would be exalted because of some virtues. In the ultimate sense, the very nature of the reality show insinuates very interesting lessons and inferences. This is what I was bothered about when I received the invitation from Mr. Subair, and I hope to share these lessons and inferences with this august gathering. There are two things I hope that would happen at the end of my speech. One, I hope my inferences would be clearly understood, without prejudice. Second, I hope my speech would elicit enough applause that would remain memorable for a long time.

Let me start by reminding you, beautiful ladies, that what Mr. D’Banj has solicited to do for the next 8 weeks is not new in human history. This is not the first time women are the ‘central furniture’ in a marriage. This is not the first time men would not think of what they have to offer a marriage but what the women have to offer. So I am not surprised that Mr. D’Banj has said that Koko virtues would earn one of you first place. The virtues he has cited are familiar to what men want their women to have in a marriage including the “ability to cook sumptuous meals for D’Banj and his friends especially during impromptu visits.” My question for you, beautiful ladies, is, do you know how to cook sumptuous meals? Do not be fooled by the globalized nature of our world. The fact that you, women, are still considered objects has not been deleted. That is why your benefactor, Mr. D’Banj, has stated that the Koko virtues are what he and other “successful bachelors in his position” should necessarily look out for when “picking out a wife.” Notice the world ‘pick?’ It is just as though these successful bachelors are in a supermarket, picking groceries. In short, you are nothing but grocery to them.

I know that since you are here you have gone through a rigorous screening. You must be applauded. Immediately I read about the reality show, I immediately wished I were a lady. Not everyone gets such attention as having “full access” to Mr. D’Banj. Though my mum would have questioned me about the real meaning of “full access,” I doubt that she would not have allowed me the privilege of being a contestant in this reality show. For one, full access is not something I have really thought about. But honestly, going by the sexualization of our world, I doubt that full access would mean nothing intimate. But that is not mine to debate. What I am assured about, even by looking at your faces, is that you are beautiful. Beauty is a gift, somehow, and you did not make your face, did you? You found that men began to flutter when they talked with you, and that some were bold enough to call you very wonderful names. But what I wish to remind you is that beauty is subject to time, and aging is very real. Therefore, I beg you, if there are indications that your beauty is paramount to your marriage, ask your spouse if he would still marry you thirty years from today. Unfortunately, I must say, all the Koko virtues were dominated by the beauty virtue, and I am still wondering. But I must congratulate you for passing the test of beauty, though I am afraid if you would pass that test many years from now, despite aging creams and facial cleansers.

I am also concerned because you are being called, a kokolette, which as I guessed was a variant of the word, ‘koko.’ As at the last time I heard the word, Koko, it was a word with deducible vulgar meanings, especially in that popular song of Mr. D’Banj, in which he sang, make I tell you the koko… By now, you get my drift. Being a kokolette means that you are what the world has become – so much vulgarity. Are you such a woman? If you have not thought about it this way, think about it now.

Yes, and undoubtedly, you are going to become a celebrity. Becoming one of the final 12 ladies of this contest has already made you a celebrity. You would join other quick celebrities made from reality shows. For a while you are going to live in an illusory world, filled with anything you want, fabulous food, fashionable clothes, and a koko mansion. HITV would make your face famous. Mr. Subair, my good friend, would ensure that. Being associated with such a figure as Mr. D’Banj is no easy feat. But what is ‘celebrity,’ my dear ladies? I hope you agree that what makes people celebrites today is very cheap and simple. That is why Paris Hilton is a celebrity and all her gang of friends. That is why one of our musicians can impregnate more than 3 ladies and go about with his head high. I am afraid that with this reality show, you are joining the league of celebrities. Let me assure you that you would do anything to remain in that league; Mr. D’Banj can have “full access” to you, and so on. But you are a celebrity, thank God and thank Mr. D’Banj.

Finally, beautiful ladies, do not get the false notion that this reality show is about you. I would be disappointed at your cognition if you think in that manner. The fact is that this show is about Mr. D’Banj and those friends he has chosen. There are many facts that attest to this. One, you would have to cook sumptuous meals for him. Two, he decides who is to go and who is to remain through what he calls, “koko mycine.” Three, he wants you to help him and other successful bachelors know what to look for when they are picking out a wife. And finally, this might just be one way of extending his status as a celebrity – a celebrity who cares about people. Very selfish, don’t you think?

In the final analysis, I must not dissuade you from what you have already begun. It is a journey where you must learn several lessons, however bitter they might be. You are going to have loads of fun. That is not to be debated. But when it is ended, you are going to remember all I have said today, I assure you.

My heartfelt thanksgiving remains to the organizers for this rare privilege, especially to Mr. D’Banj. Thank you for listening, I await applause.

Postscript:

As I noted in the beginning, this is imagined, though genuine.

My Father's Book

2009-04-23T10:24:00.000-07:00

My father published his first book when I was 10, it was titled Nakedness: Secrets of Enjoying Marriage. He says it is his bestselling book till date, even after he has published five others. He presented his most recent, Cry of the Youths early this month— that was when I started thinking about his career as an author.

There are certain inescapable fears for a writer, such as the tortuous road to getting published, the fear that people would misunderstand what you write, the fear that your readership would not be wide enough, the fear that you would not have a subject to write about next, the fear that there’s nothing monetarily for you in writing, and so forth. The truth is that, in what I have known about my dad’s writing, he has not been plagued by these. I remember vividly when he told me about the new book he was working on and that he had titled it Cry of the Youths. There was a confident simmer in his voice. He did not doubt that he was going to be read, that his book was understandable. So, I have began to notice that there is a difference between his career and mine.

For example, I have completed about three novels to date, and at the completion of each, I find them inadequate to be published. Spectrum Books accepted to publish one of those manuscripts (asked me to pay 80 percent even though they knew I was an undergraduate), and a publisher in U.K accepted the other. But I suddenly developed fear that it would not make good reading, that it did not have the necessary literary quality. But my father has never dumped any manuscript except once, in the 90’s.

The reason I have given for this parallel is the context in which my father writes. My father writes for a Christian audience, spiritual and theological. I write for an altogether different audience—an audience with stark naked eyes to lynch or acclaim. This makes me angry, that Christian books are read with levity, any grammatical flaw is accepted (I must disclaim here and now that my father’s books are not on the slaughter table here). I find evangelistic tracts with so much error that I am appalled that they are meant for ‘salvation.’ For me, it brings the message to ridicule. So while I am bent over my computer desk trying to please readers and critiques, glass-eyed professors and their students, my father’s worry is just to meet his personal deadline. He has a softer audience. He is freer than I am.

Close to 100 copies of my father’s new book had its page 15 where page 3 was supposed to be. We had to sort out those copies and separate them. My father, in his usual simplicity, said it was expected, called it “printer’s devil.” I am glad he called it “printer’s” not “publishers.” What we have in Nigeria, as Helon Habila pointed out, are printers and their middlemen, not publishers. It hurts me to see that my father’s efforts are rewarded with such flaw, such simple flaw that could be avoided if we had more publishers, more publishers in the real sense of the word, not money-seekers. In an ideal society, writers are to be paid for their works. They do not pay any 80 percent. They have the brain, they do the writing, and they are paid for it. My father has paid for the publishing (printing) of all his books.

Behind a curtain in a corner of our sitting room, there are packs of my father’s books. The packs have also spilled over into the study room, struggling for space with more than 2,500 books which the authors probably had no worry about their distribution. My father sells his books himself. Aside few distribution outlets around the country, like several Scripture Union bookshops, he solely distributes his books. My thoughts are that this is unfair to him, to any writer. Nigeria’s publishing industry must revive to fit in today’s world. Books survive regimes and ages. To do injustice to books and authors is to do injustice to the future of knowledge. Every writer who distributes his book himself has been unjustly treated, and deserves an apology.

There are few people who thought I was the author of my father’s new book as I am mostly called by my surname. So when the banners publicizing the new book were hung around the Campus where we live, some thought I had finally published. And some said, “so writing flows in the blood, eh?” These were the only comments that renewed my belief that writers are writers, regardless of subject, because my simple belief is that writing should connect to the human condition. My father writes about marriage and youth, but he does not write about these subjects in story form. I write fiction and poetry. The same subjects. It is only a difference of form and context, not meaning.

I have thrown away all despondence. I don’t care anymore if Nigeria’s publishing industry is revived so that my father can get a fairer treatment. What I only care about is that writers always find a medium to express themselves. Let printers publish me, I don’t care. Let me write on slates or tables or my palm, I don’t care. Just let me write. For this age, what would matter alongside the writer and his desire to write is the medium through which the writer is expressed, a veritable tradition that should never be lost.

So when my father writes another book, when he is bent over his A4 sheets writing longhand again, he shares my thinking in this poem;

Homesick

There’s a sickening feeling

in my gut, stomach and head,

I’m waiting for my beloved

to carry me to a rest place.

In that place are lines and guts

papers stacked above my head

faded sheets, harpless books there.

I want to go home and write

carry me to a resting place

heal this sickening feeling.

In the final analysis, just let writers write, even if they are treated unfairly.

A Small City's Alphabet

2009-04-03T10:02:00.000-07:00

I feel really bad that I'm updating this more than a month after, schoolwork always seem to stuff the writing life. But we always emerge victorious. Here is something for the next issue of Saraba, just to start the fuss before April 15 when we publish...

Five years and more, I have lived here. This was where I made my adolescence and transited into adulthood, and this was where—as honest as it gets—I came to the conclusion that life must be lived in a small city, a simple existence of knowing your neighbor and he in turn knowing you. So, here in an improper subjective order is a presentation of Ile-Ife, supposed spiritual headquarters of the Yoruba race with it’s Enuwa and Ooni and Oduduwa Statue and Opa Oramiyan, name them all. I call this improper because it is only a campus view. Just like that afternoon I climbed a hill and saw the campus sprawled, perhaps in beauty, perhaps alphabetically.

Amphitheatre: This is the first hallmark of Ife, the well-planned buildings, and some argue, what sustains its greatness. It took me long to take in the architectural ‘wonder,’ to become a fan of the buildings. They say Awolowo used Cocoa money to build the university, because he had heralded free education, because he was angry about one federal action or the other, because he believed in regional sovereignty, maybe Yoruba sovereignty. And then he called the best of the planners, architects, surveyors, and what resulted is a landscape once reputed to be the fourth best estate in the world. So the amphitheatre is only a part of the buildings, modeled and named after the Greek Amphitheatres where lions ate enemies for sport. In some way, the purpose of the Greek Amphitheatre resonates in Ife. The only difference is that the sport has changed—social gatherings, congresses, religious. And enemies, well, it depends on the context.

Bats: Bats are the only mammals that can fly. Right? I’m not sure anymore. Or maybe angels too. No, I’m not sure again. I’m only sure about having firsthand knowledge of living with bats. Living with bats because one day they ran down their mess on my shirt, and I have helped a friend scrub their mess on him with tissue paper, without success. But bats are a major feature of Ife. Reports have it that they were chased away from wherever during the Ife/Modakeke crises. And since then, here in the campus have they made permanent residence. You say animal rights, let’s leave them to stay. I say what is the University administration doing about their stay? Or do they balance the ecosystem?

And yes, there are bat hunters too. The less sophisticated ones use catapults to sling stones at the trees during the day, when expectedly the bats are blind from the night’s adventure. The more sophisticated ones used guns, usually dane. You still say animal rights? Now what of my rights—that day I had to run with hands on my head and ears for fear of the gun missing the bats?

Café Jameel: I know the owner of this Cyber Café is a crippled Muslim, and just by the name it’s certain. This does not really matter; so far it has mattered only once. In 2006, a fight broke out between residents of Awolowo Hall—notorious for what is called ‘Aro’ or the absence of dignified behaviour—and Muslims. One Muslim had forcefully stopped the viewing of porn in the common room by jacking out the video player. Café Jameel was vandalized; I guess the basis was that it was a hive of Islamic propaganda. There are other cafes, and recently what is generally known as Yahoo Yahoo, has taken root in some. Ordinarily, the café should be a makeover from no internet on the airspace, if there’s anything like that. But now, I cannot say. Poor English speakers with good cars and women you cannot say if they are beautiful or ugly and sagging trousers and no manners—that’s what the café has become. That’s the definition of internet fraud, a lucrative business here.

Just the other day, I witnessed the nabbing of a man who had hacked into the Cyber Café’s computer and allocated browsing time to himself. That was the start of a career.

Dramatic Arts: Once we had a very renowned theatre, showing plays by Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, and so on, and regularly too. I guess the tradition still remains, because there is a bust of Ola Rotimi with his famed spectacles just at the entrance of the Department of Dramatic Arts. It’s not called ‘Theatre Arts’ like in other places, and perhaps that’s why when I travelled alongside some of the students of that departments they sang and made unentertaining banters all the way. Very undignified.

ECOBANK: ECOBANK and several others sprang up suddenly. Especially when the present Vice Chancellor assumed office. I had a debate about the banks and capitalism; the argument was not about the banking halls but the ATMs that consequently followed. How it should have been new hostels and not ATMs; that is the way of capitalists, they said, exploiting, widening the gap between the rich and poor, those who can afford and those who can’t. My argument was, don’t use the ATMs if you care so much about Karl Marx and co. And logically, don’t use the banking halls.

Faborode and Fabayo: The names of two stalwarts here. The former is the Vice-Chancellor, not too tall and confident in photograph and action. He’s altogether a master strategist, it is said—our calendar is maintained and yet no strike and protests though welfare is bad. The latter is the revered Chairman of the Security Committee. Motorcyclists know by heart his plate number. He taught my Dad and said to the class, you can fail, you’ll still meet me here. That was almost 30 years ago. He’s still here.

Great Ife: Ask me the brand name of this city and I’ll say this. It’s placed on many cars and in an interview you can say Great Ife to get the job. Once the Vice-Chancellor mandated that an unheard-of anthem replace the Great Ife anthem which has vivid lines of aluta and acerta. The moment he asked a multitude of students to sing the anthem, they sang the Great Ife anthem. And sure, nowadays people say the greatness of Ife is questionable. Always has been?

Halls: Status comes from almost anything. Even Halls of Residence. You’re staying in a hall considered the best (and costly when it comes to buying sleeping spaces) and you’re a big boy or girl. But me, me strange and scorned, decided in my first year that I would not tolerate the sight and smells of the Halls, moved to my father’s official residence. Though the Halls are not commensurate with the population, and though the living condition is poor, life is not a ‘hall’ of roses, right?

International School: I joined the school in 2004, it was started in 2000, to make secondary education classy in a classy university. Graduating with honours—best behaved student in my set—I set out with the notion that I couldn’t have had better. But let me pause here to note that I have always asked what is international about the school. I did not have classmates from Lisbon, for example.

Jingo: Perhaps the most popular nickname for a lecturer. Great teacher of Philosophy, teaching the most fundamental of Philosophy courses, PHL 101. But this man, Dr. Dipo Fashina, for me, is a typical example that there still remains some level of scholarship in a fallen Nigerian educational system. That’s the simple thing needed to be said about this man—scholarship.

Kingsword Campus Church: My father was angry with my elder brother for attending this church, and why, for instance, are they called a ‘church’ and not the customary nomenclature ‘fellowship’ which is here and there in the campus; this school is reputed for being an evangelistic school, second after Oral Roberts’. And there’s a committee my father is a member, Religious Harmony. Who said there is something to harmonize in the diverse religions that hypocritically say harmony?

Livingspring Music Festival: Christian Music, the local-based organizers claim, should have as much interestingness as secular music. This is why I am happily writing this: so much trash has been produced in the name of Christian music; God does not deal with its quality, but its message. False million times over. Anyway, I’ve sang twice in the Festival Choir, and I can say a year without the festival is, guess—

Megaphone: The biggest news agency here, biggest for a reason I cannot place. I have been editor of another, for almost a year until I willingly handed over. This is the best life an undergraduate writer can have—place your writing on a wooden board and get feedback, good or bad, in equal measure. For Megaphone I am a freelance writer, and I enjoy the independence. I wish all writers were independent, for they are supposed to be citizens of no country.

Newbuka: In full, New Bukateria, where all the yahoo boys get drunk, and you get the best dates, and some Christian meetings take place, birthdays, photographs. In short, the hotspot of the university, the kind of mixture you get in cities. Think of it, cities are where everything comes together.

Obafemi Awolowo: First Chancellor of this university. His free education thing is still being heralded, and for establishing this university, it was named after his death in 1987. But Ibos, my father included, despise him for being the Finance Minister after the Biafra thing, and stripping them of all their previous wealth. That’s the interesting about him, his reputation is divided. I don’t know in what measure, or which side it favours.

Prison Break: You know what: the craze. That’s all, the craze.

Quarters: I live here, Road 8b House 8, Senior Staff Quarters. I have friends here, those who have lived here all their lives, from birth. Just recently, a classmate asked, “Are you a quarters’ boy?” I said yes. She nodded. Perhaps she had seen me driving my father’s car. That is our trademark.

SUB: Home of all rebellion and at the same time all activism. It’s the former for the authorities and the latter for the activists. Where do you draw the line? Anywhere. I’m tempted not to believe in activism because of the fraudulence of some, but hey, my friend is gunning for a Student Union Building position. (Oh, I’m sorry, it’s actually Students Union).

Town: Overflow of student residence. Some stay because they need the privacy and can afford. Others grudgingly afford because they have no place in Halls. I say I don’t care about the security or the long bus queue or the good money being made from students. I care about—I have forgotten. Without this school, Ile-Ife town would have been insignificant. I bet. I cannot swear.

U- for now, nothing.

Visitor’s Tag: You’re given this if you do not have a tally reading “Staff” of “Student” as soon as you enter. This is just a visitor’s information. In short, you’ll need a visitor’s tag when you visit.

Woolimgton v. D.P.P.: This is the Law section of this, and I owe my allegiance there, being an undergraduate in that faculty. The above case is what is called a locus classicus, and we had to memorize the ‘dictum’ of one dead and gone Lord Sankey to get full marks. It centered on presumption in the law of evidence. Did this all sound technical? That was the idea. We are studying a course that is technical and rigid and sometimes outdated. Help! Help! Help!

Xenophobia: I did not easily get this word, the X thing and all. But I thought about what my mum said, that I should not bring home a Yoruba girl. I scorned her. I doubt the impossibility of that. However, there’s always this feeling amongst non-Yoruba occupants, staff and student alike that, this is not home. One Nigeria? You guessed right. Forgive my use of Xenophobia, anyway.

Year Book: I have started itching to get away from here, and the ideal thing for every graduating class is to make a Year Book, detailing everyone in the class. Meanwhile, I am lobbying to be the chair of my class final year committee. It is the only political thing I’d do in school.

Zoology: This small city is demarcated in just another way—courses of study are partitioned in the status their professionalism commands. It’s the idea that you cannot compare Law with Zoology or Medicine with Foreign Languages. How unfair. How unfair to think that five years from now what I graduate with would define me and not what value I can produce.

So this is a terribly subjective alphabet of Obafemi Awolowo University. Forgive me for any oversight, any undue humour.

Caves of Rotten Teeth

2009-02-24T01:08:00.000-08:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Second Edition of "From Caves of Rotten Teeth" Now Available

From Caves of Rotten Teeth by A. Igoni Barrett is a collection of short stories that was first published in Nigeria in November 2005. The Orange Prize-shortlisted author Laura Hird described the book as 'a brilliant debut collection' and in an interview with the literary magazine Pulp.Net named 'The Phoenix', a short story in the collection, as one of the best stories she had ever read. 'The Phoenix' won the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition.

The fourteen stories in this edition of From Caves of Rotten Teeth (five of which did not appear in the first edition) deal with circumstances that reflect the day-to-day existence of modern African life. Although the stories may at times seem surreal the reader will recognize the truthfulness and realism with which they delve into the lives of their characters. The author has an uncanny eye for detail and a deadly accurate, though sometimes satirical, ear. With these stories he has achieved a vision that is both lighthearted and profound.

Praise for the second edition of From Caves of Rotten Teeth

'In this collection, Barrett entrances the reader with his lush language and imagery that brings the essence of struggle alive…the effect on the reader's imagination will last for a very long time' —Uzodinma Iweala, author of Beasts of No Nation

'A. Igoni Barrett's prose captures, with enviable depth, the emotions and circumstances of his characters…from addiction to everyday survival, these stories are delivered with sincerity' —Kaine Agary, author of Yellow Yellow

'These stories share the same beauty of language, the same keen sense of observation…reading the collection is a journey into a world that is sometimes humorous, but very often a reminder of all that is wrong in our world' —Chika Unigwe, author of The Phoenix

Orders can be made by sending an email to fromcavesofrottenteeth@gmail.com

The book is also available from the following places:

Kachifo Limited: www.kachifo.com

Glendora/Jazzhole: www.glendorabooks.net

Onyoma Research Publications: +234-807-763-8752

Quintesscence, Awolowo Road

Terra Kulture, V/I

www.booksng.com

Saraba 4 Life

2009-02-16T10:05:00.003-08:00

Here's to say that there is finally Saraba, a new electronic magazine I started with some friends. You can download from here, or go directly to the site, www.sarabamag.com.

A Writer's Perfect Valentine

2009-02-13T19:22:00.000-08:00

Ordinarily, I would have argued that I’m not interested in this whole business of valentine, this whole business of new pregnancies and uncalled for extravagance, this whole business of new girlfriends and whole pocket money spending. But thank God I found that I could relate valentine to writing, and writing always gets me grinning from ear to ear (thanks to you, Tomi Adewoye).

This year’s valentine would be 20 years after the fatwa was declared against legendary writer, Salman Rushdie, for his book Satanic Verses. Twenty years ago I was still in panties, that date, and you should ask what impetus I have to write about a subject almost my age mate.

I could have succumbed to this temptation; this temptation we all face to think history is the past, time is now and the future is tomorrow. But I have learnt to regard history as yesterday, today and tomorrow, even forever. I have learnt that history is as much with me as time. And so this is my basis for writing on a subject ordinarily my age mate.

And if that is not sufficient, the words of the man I write about justify this: to win this fight is to win one skirmish in a much greater war. To lose would have unpleasant consequences for me, but it would also be a defeat in that larger conflict. So it is clear that there is something beyond September 24, 1998 when the fatwa ended. It is clear that there are lessons that never should be forgotten.

A writer’s perfect valentine should be one spent writing about love. But this is so complicated, so much that it is an absurd suggestion, even a flimsy one. It is increasingly difficult to write about love in a world so full of hate and conflict, and who takes you serious, anyway, when you write about love?

So I propose another perfect valentine for a writer.

I’m writing about Salman Rushdie’s fatwa, so I think it is very easy for me to say a writer’s perfect valentine is a fatwa. Let me explain a fatwa by the circumstances of Rushdie. It was said that killing him would be doing a gracious act for God, and so he had to move around in secret, demeaned, and almost without a life of his own. Those were his words.

This perfect valentine should be one where a writer is given a test of difficulty, a test of persecution, because he has written.

No one should write without liberality, freedom. No one should write being afraid of what should follow. No one should write with twists of humiliation around his heart. The writer is not dependent, he receives his independence from, should we say, angels of inspiration. Angels that visit at will, coming to turn the waters, and the waters are turned and something jumps into the well of the writer’s mind. What can the writer do? Subject his writing to some fanatical engagements? That would be unfair.

From time immemorial, totalitarian governments and institutions and even religions have sought to use their only weapon, power, to suffocate the writer’s independence. But as Rushdie learnt from his own experience, “…the art of literature is more resilient than what menaces it. The best defense of literary freedoms lies in their exercise, in continuing to make untrammeled, uncowed books.”

For ten years, Salman Rushdie had a valentine gift of the fatwa. It should be contradictory that Valentine’s Day is a day of expressing love. It should even be contradictory that religion should express hate on Valentine’s Day.

‘In the name of God’ is a terrible phrase to justify hate. Could God be dethroned by a writer’s book or could he have directed violence because of a book? His supremacy should not be threatened by a book.

But where it is not God but his ‘subjects’ fighting a book, then a writer has just begun to enjoy what ingratitude God’s Supreme Fighters have for the independence he has been supernaturally endowed with.

“A writer’s injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams,” said Rushdie. Despite God’s Supreme Fighters wounding Rushdie with the fatwa, he was said to have written his funniest books during the period of the fatwa. So this is a perfect valentine afterall, a matching of persecution with victory.

So while there is the great escapade about a misunderstood St. Valentine’s Day, a writer must receive his perfect gift. A gift of no trammeling and cowardice. A gift to write from inside, from the raw depth of his soul. That’s a way to match persecution with victory.

At the end, it is not God’s Supreme Fighters that would prevail. It would be Rushdie saying, “Love feels more and more like the only subject.” Love matching hate; love stuck between the lines of independence and liberality.

Here’s to a writer’s liberty to write about things that should be written about.

Happy 20^th Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie.

Modern Destinies

2009-01-23T05:50:00.001-08:00

I am sorry for pasting this late. Due to school work and all the inevitables trying to distract me from the writing life.

n the following lines, I wish to chart my journey with the computer, a journey visibly unending. I have authority to do this, for my generation saw the bloom of the computer. My generation witnessed the transformation, and can easily relate it. In the end it might be that I have charted the journey of so many belonging to the present, and what else is the desire of all storytellers? Than to find that there is humanity dotted in their prose.

The journey began in a face-me-I-face-you room in Ketu Lagos. I had been invited to stay the night by a friend of my family, friend by virtue of the fact that he attended the parish my Daddy pastored. It was an interesting adventure, to sleep in a room and yet have the feeling that you were in a large hall, given that there were ubiquitous rooms in the house. Beyond that, it was in that little Lagos room that I began my electronic journey. Who knows, it might just be what is called destiny—we do not know where rooms can lead us to, what journeys they can begin.

Four persons slept in that room. My family’s friend, his brother, another and myself. That another began a conversation about his recent escapades on the internet. Forgive the word ‘escapade,’ I know it sounds romantic; of course the computer is romantic. This guy was fat as far as I can remember, but possessed the sanguinity that makes good talkers. He talked to the brother, or to the room, because I would not have heard if otherwise. He narrated how he had met a lady from Egypt in the chatroom. There was another country where he met someone different but I cannot remember. But I was mesmerized and awed. That there was something in the internet that could take one to distances unimagined, adventures unspoken. He described his chat with the said Egyptian, and he narrowed it down to the amazing opportunities for him. It was possible, he said, to leave Nigeria if he knew how to play his cards. Any place but Nigeria, I guess.

I left that room not feeling I had started a journey. It is just now, writing this, that I realise that it was a start. Something led to another and I found myself in a cybercafé. My elder brother had visited one earlier and had told of a boy who was so good he used a hand to type on the keyboard. Now I laugh at how naïve I was, thinking that such feat was the hallmark of a genius. All the same, the common thing to do in the cybercafés that sprung in streets in Lagos at that time was to open an email. Walking to the counter, I ordered for a one hour ticket. My brother had advised that the best way to learn was to watch the person beside me. I cannot remember exactly but I think my neighbour was a novice as well, so it left me with no choice but to beckon on an attendant who helped me put in the details on the ticket. He left me, and I wasted a good hour, not knowing what to do, feeling stupid and inferior and a dunce at the end.

Soon, I overcame the first challenge, I opened an email: idumaemmanuel@yahoo.com. I must comment that such is the way of the computer, it never leaves you. It is an attractive witch and a desperate housewife. (Forgive these expressions). Soon, I began to check my mails and visit websites, and soon, I cannot even remember the rest of how I learnt mastery.

Yet, though adventurous, the above does not capture the essence of what the computer has become to me. Of course, this essence is measured in the lens of my writing life, a life (I think you know) that means next to God.

The computer first became important in my writing life when I sent an email in 2005 to Chimamanda Adichie and she replied, and I remember running all the way (in an Abuja open, busy street) to my Daddy, announcing that she had replied. That has become by the way, now, but it got me started on the electronic literary trek. Soon, I began to spend sleepless nights in my dad’s office, typing furiously, only returning dreary-eyed home.

At that time I was working on a manuscript, later accepted for publication by Spectrum Books. I remember that Chief Joop Berkhout, Chairman and probable founder of Spectrum, acclaimed how neat my manuscript was formatted. Though my romance with Spectrum Books did not end with my manuscript being published, the experience cannot be forgotten.

The rest is best. Spending a fortune on the internet downloading and reading and surfing, such that I was asked once if I had become a Yahoo boy. Variously, I have endured the stink of marijuana for the pleasure of remaining on the internet. And all those embarrassing experiences are not compared to the glories that have come.

It is on the internet that I have been published most. It is on the internet that I have met writers I admire and respect. Networking made easy. It is on the internet that I have nursed my ambition—a terrible one that keeps me awake and angry. And it is on the internet that the computer has come alive for me. It does not matter that I have two computers, what matters is that the internet has made those computers full of energy. Recently, I found that my blogsite had been listed as a link on Chimamanda Adichie’s site. What a glory!

The present phase of the journey is the new electronic magazine I am working on with some great folks (please find details of ‘Saraba’ in the pasted submission guideline). My friend, Ayo Famurewa, had gone to her Yahoo group to paste the submission guidelines on it only to find that some anonymous person had done so, and all we had done was to send a mail to many literary enthusiasts.

What is left to say is that the bloom of the computer has sincerely created a modern destiny for me. At this point, it is doubtful that this modern destiny has not clung to everyone in this generation. It is a destiny because it has defined what literacy is. It is a destiny because everyone, all of a sudden, seems to be a computer guru. It is a destiny because it has attached chains to our necks in the name of flash-drives. The list is endless.

There remains what we can do about this new, modern destiny. We must take it in and define it ourselves. In this new destiny, we must forget the conventional saying that we cannot decide our destiny. We can decide this destiny. The computer cannot make us, we must make it.

Introducng Saraba

2008-12-27T06:35:00.000-08:00

Saraba is...

Saraba is a monthly electronic magazine that publishes emerging writers of prose and poetry and would debut in February 2009. By ‘emerging writers’ we mean writers who have been published little or not at all but have recognisable talent and qualitative writing.

Interested contributors are required to submit their works. Fiction writers are to submit stories not exceeding 3,000 words. Poets are to submit not more than three poems. The e-zine also welcomes submissions of reviews of books and published short stories. This should not exceed 1,500 words. The last category open for submission is creative non-fiction. In this genre we expect works that reflect creativity but are not stories. The word count for this is 1,500.

We are working on a theme/subject-matter of family. All entries (except reviews) should reflect the theme whether overtly or covertly.

We are not bothered if the work submitted has been published elsewhere as long as the author still retains the right to publish it. If, however, Saraba is the first site that publishes the work, we expect to be credited when it is chosen elsewhere.

Please submit alongside a photograph and a bio not exceeding 50 words. If you cannot do this while sending your work, please do it immediately you are informed of the selection of your work.

All works should be pasted in the body of an email and the relevant genre indicated in the subject line i.e. ‘Fiction Submission’ or ‘Poetry Submission.’ Entries should be sent to saraba2008@ymail.com. Deadline for this call is January 20th 2009. However, 15th of each month would be the deadline for the next month. Contributors would be informed in two weeks.

Please note that contributors would not be paid.

The e-zine would be downloaded free from www.saraba.com. A demo-version of the site can be assessed from January 30, 2009. But the official opening of the site would be on February 15, 2009 when the first issue of the e-zine could be downloaded.

Saraba hopes to work with young established writers as guest editors.

Expecting your submission!

A Creative Experience of Lagos

2008-12-09T05:23:00.000-08:00

I daresay the best way to examine a city is how many books have been written about it. That said, I’d shut my face with a book and care less if many agree or not, and it would only be appealing if the following paragraphs attest to it.

Perhaps a better way to state it is to say that the best way to examine a city is how much creativity can ooze from it. I prefer this! Again, if you please, I’d put it another way: the best way to examine how creative a city is, is what a writer does immediately he returns from it.

So if the above premises are accepted, I’d proceed to write about a creative experience of two journeys. At the end, it might not be a very good narration of an experience. But I hope it’d be clear that the experience did spur creativity. By two journeys I mean I actually visited two cities, but there is the compelling nature of the one I make my title from.

But there was Enugu. Enugu belongs to me in some way, because of the four of us that visited the city (for a competition, we won!) I only could decipher the following and translate: otutu ihe di ebube ne me na Enugu (great things happen at Enugu—I hope I got the spellings right). Yet, it did not really belong to me. The following lines could not have been written by the ‘owner’ of a land, but a writer whom a new visage was conferred on. The lines I wrote the night we arrived at Enugu are;

Enugu seemed like a bird
metallic and humble
yet giant with a measure
of hopelessness,
or was it helplessness—
the people in it
like limbs of a leper
(permit the language)
Or like fortunes of
a talebearer;
jagged like pieces of
metal, hanging on a
forgotten landscape,
although unforgotten
by the hills in sight
and the people in flight.

If I must say, those were the best I could write of Enugu. The best I could see in that country of imaginations. It could be that nothing other could come to me from Enugu, but it could also be that until I wrote that poem, Enugu would shatter before my eyes. And be a city without meaning. A certain wish thus dangles. A wish that such writing about cities, about country, would be read and cause a catalyst for change. Change, recently, has become the word.

It is to Lagos that I attribute the best creativity. Lagos that did not bring a poem from me. Lagos that I stood four hours in the rain, only because I decided to visit for a Christian musical concert. Lagos that I jumped BRT buses. Lagos that increased my return fare over a 100 percent. Lagos that rendered my phone and MP3 Player desirous of a miracle.

And Lagos that has a story for everybody, that makes a story for everybody. (I read somewhere that behind every window in Lagos, there was a story waiting to be told). Just the sights of Lagos alone. A graphic representation of life. Nigeria without Lagos is dead! No Lagos, no future! How far can one go without Lagos? Books and books and yet unending tales, possibilities.

To define Lagos would be to define nothing, just the surreal dream of flexibility. To write about Lagos is to write about nothing in particular. Not the people, because the people (like in Enugu) are in flight. Not the BRT buses, because when time happens to the buses, they might stop moving. Not Tafawa Balewa Square, because it could accommodate 350,000 people, but leave them in the rain. It is clear then that Lagos could make me write this, but could deny me the possibility of writing about it.

I’d be mad if this happens to Nigeria. That writers would keep writing about it and it would deny them the conferment of change, of reality. Indeed, that’s the way to write about Lagos. With the watermark of change, reality. Again, change is the word. That writers would not stop writing because it is doubtless that change would come. I resist the prompt to write a little about the word. I resist the prompt to define change in some way that would evoke glory.

Yet, as one does not leave Lagos without a creative experience—that experience to write nothing-yet-something, that experience without limits—this dear country would not leave anyone without a good experience to tell.

I am tempted to say amen.

Things Fall Apart, Me, and Two Others

2008-11-17T01:23:00.000-08:00

Things Fall Apart, Me and Two Others
By Emmanuel Iduma

Perhaps it is to join in the global acclaim of a great novel that I write this. Perhaps it is for something else; a celebration of a personal story founded in the footprints of a great story.

Indeed, I prefer the word ‘story’ to ‘novel’; perhaps because it sounds affiliated to a more sensitive narration of the condition of human existence.
I feel somewhat guilty starting this with mere speculations—‘perhaps.’ I feel guilty because the whole glimmer about TFA – you know what – is not a speculation, neither is the story one of great speculations. It is a story with far-reaching insistence on reality. I’d put that on a stick on paper and place on my computer – a story with a far-reaching insistence on reality.

Yet, though condemning my speculative beginning, I return to it. I return because I have to choose between two options. Do I write this in celebration or as a result of influence? No answer appears forthcoming. Indeed, it might be a combined effect of the two speculations, building up to a momentous rendering in honour – which makes it unimportant whether this was written for celebration or as a result of influence.

And so, why could I have written in celebration? It is for a reason so obvious. For a story told half a century ago to remain so contemporary is sufficient reason. For a story whose characters remain alive in a world with so much potential to muffle them is also enthralling. For a story to have relevance so astounding that it is insignificant that the lines are covered with Igbo words and expressions. Such a story deserves celebration, indeed.
What is more, 50 years, as my mother would say, is not 50 days. Thereupon, it is reasonable to align with Habila and measure time, try to find that centre-string that joins history and posterity. True, it would be worthwhile to do that – measure the time of TFA. Finding that it is a story without a centre, that establishes a parallel between the history of the 18th and 19th century and the posterity of the 20th and 21st. That, without doubt, is a celebatory way to look at TFA – measure it’s time. Measure its relevance in time; and finally, hang it in a space called tomorrow (or forever) where its profound relevance would be unending and indestructible.
If I daresay, that is a way to look at stories. Not ‘40 Million Copies Sold’ or ‘#1 New York Times Bestseller,’ but its ability to be measured in time: say, 50 years for a start. And I propose, a story should not be called one, until it can be measured in such way. That is what s worth celebration. Think of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Rushdie, Austen, Miller, Orwell, Hemingway – and then add Achebe.

Second, why could this have been written as a result of influence? In 2001, two friends and myself began to write what we called ‘The Critical Stage.’ That year we had read TFA for our mid-secondary school exams. And sure, it did influence the said novel – characterization, style and so forth. I still have a rewritten copy, the first draft having been misplaced by our English teacher.
I assume that though that was a childish move, it is not in the larger context. By ‘context’ I mean nothing egregious. I simply want to think that we are not alone in being tremendously influenced. The African literary landscape is coloured by those influenced by TFA. Indeed, the man-behind-the-story is referred to as the granddaddy of African literature. Whoever is the daddy?

My point is simple. Any writer who fails to influence is probably trying a slingshot a nowhere, a non-remarkable sojourn in the ocean of the pen. Achebe has succeeded in this, and more than I can say, he is a writer. I do not join in the assertion that writers are hard to define. Influence must be one sincere way to measure a writer – and measure time too.

I find that I am exaggeratingly influenced by TFA. True, I consult the classic when I want to review my stories. So do not be surprised to find patterns of similitude in my forthcoming works. Such is good – being influenced by tremendous success; a seed of goodliness which would not remain the way it was planted. In a dream I’m having – dreams do come true – my works would have more acclaim than TFA! Reason – I’m influenced by TFA.

Salman Rushdie’s words seem accurate for a final paragraph; “by using what is old and adding to it some new thing of our own, we make what is new.”

How to Write in Nigeria

2008-11-05T04:58:00.001-08:00

Write about Nigeria with no expectation of financial failure. You have written a book so that the politician you invited for the book presentation would give a large sum of naira.

Write about Nigeria with a sincere expectation that only students would read your book. You cannot expect a man that leaves his house by 4.00am and returns by 10.00pm to read anything you write. But students would be forced to read your book, because they expect exam questions from it and because it is their parents that gave them the money they used to buy your book.

Never make the mistake of making your book big. That would be your greatest undoing. A big book is usually boring. Write a simple small pamphlet. No one has the time to read your big book. If you have a big book, divide it into many parts. Then sell them under different titles.

Write about Nigeria with an understanding that the economy would be among the first twenty in 2020. So if you are not writing in 2020, the price of your book must be very low. There are many things to buy aside books; clothes, DVDs, jerseys, you know what. Never think someone would forfeit buying a jersey that would show his lifelong commitment to Manchester United and buy your book that has nothing to do with Chritiano Ronaldo. What is more, your book does not contain the lyrics of Beyonce or Puff Daddy or R. Kelly. How do you think your book would be placed on top of a priority list?

If you write about Nigeria and there is no reference to PDP or godfathers, then it is a big political failure. You must understand that politics is a good marketing tool. It would sell your book. Is it not true that politics has defined everything in Nigeria? What about the Democracy Day thanksgiving done in churches? What about the universities built by politicians? So if you are wise, your book must conform to politics.

Write a biography only if it is related to past Nigerian leaders. Many leaders have led in unforgettable ways. One of them is called General Sani Abacha. It does not matter if he is dead. You would be foolish to write a biography on someone like your father, or yourself. (But if you are a Nobel Laureate you can try that. Only if you are a Nobel Laureate.)

Your writing must show how committed you are to Britain and America. For instance, you can thank Britain for continually colonising Nigeria and thank America for lending Nigeria her songs and movies and celebrities and language. Don’t you remember that the reigning Queen has visited Nigeria and that the last two Presidents of America have also come? They love Nigeria, and you must love them too.

If you are writing fiction, your characters must want to leave Nigeria. You must make them believe, like you do, that Nigeria is not a good place to live in. When you write in this way, an oyibo may read your book and love it and invite you to spend holidays with him. And then you may find your way to keep staying there. Because you are Nigerian, you are the wisest person in the world.

Think about your name on the cover of your book more than you think about what you write in the book. This is very important. You want the money and fame the book would bring, don’t you?

Never write with the expectation that your book would be sold
On the blurb of your book, lie that you have travelled to about ten countries. No one would read you in Nigeria when you say you have lived in Nigeria all your life. No one gets the sensibility to write in Nigeria. You must write with an experience you think comes only from outside. This is why you should use ‘winter’ instead of ‘harmattan,’ ‘pants’ instead of ‘trouser,’ ‘medicine store’ instead of ‘chemist.’

And then, when you have written about Nigeria, have enough money in your pocket before seeing a publisher. They would not publish you if you do not. No one cares about talent in your country. The least they care is your eighty percent deposit.

But if you don’t want to write in the ways that have been suggested to you, think about sincerity and posterity and history. Forget the ephemeral glitters and never stop wanting to be heard.