In Waiting for an Angel, one of your characters says, "In this country, the very air we breathe is politics."
Exactly. Because the African societies—almost all African societies—are
in a formative stage now. Our rulers are not what they should be. Our
economy is not what it should be. So we cannot afford to write escapist
kinds of literature, going back seventy years, eighty years. We have to
put all our resources into shaping our future. There is no one to do it
for us. You have journalists; you have columnists. But what will last
is the novel. It's going to be there for hundreds of years. It's going
to be a document that will reach our children.
If
I were a kid from the Nigerian country-side and I wanted to go to Lagos
to be a writer, what would I want to do? What path would I want to
take?
The easiest way, if you want to do that, is to become a
journalist. Because most of the writers in Lagos are journalists. So
you will get to meet them. You have to join the writers' body called
the Association of Nigerian Authors. They have meetings, and that's
where you see all the foreign writers who come to the country. They
give talks. And whenever there is a competition, that is where you get
to hear about it. And they publish anthologies of writing from new
writers almost every year, so you are lucky to get your work published
in it. That's also where you are likely to hear opinions about your
writing, because you show it to people there who are aspiring writers
like you. The competitions are very, very important. Once you win a
competition, it sets you slightly above other people there. You tend to
get interviewed by these journalists in the literary columns, and
people take you more seriously. And maybe your work will be published
in an anthology. Then you are a published writer, and you start going
from there.
And you won two competitions at the same time?
Two in one year, and one the following year.
You came across this book Aspects of the Novel, which you say became your bible. What did you get out of that book?
Everything. Everything. After reading that book, I really decided I
wanted to be a writer. I just loved everything. And the examples—so
many books mentioned. I was impressed by the amount of books cited
there, and that this guy must have read all these books. And then I
started thinking, "Let me try to get these books." Because the books he
used are the best from English literature.
Do you remember which ones?
Henry James, Dickens, even some French writers and Russian writers. So
I said to myself, "Let me just get these books and read them." So I
started gathering some of them, the ones I could get in Nigeria, and
reading them. That was before I went to university. But what that book
taught me was just about the whole craft of fiction—from
characterization to point of view to everything. And when I went to
university, on the first day of our fiction class, I was just looking
at the lecturer, because the text for the course was Aspects of the Novel.
And I had read it cover to cover. And at one point I was quoting from
the book and she said, "Wow." She was amazed.
You said that literature opened you up to the idea that life could be different from what you saw around you.
Yeah. Life could be more meaningful. You see, literature is ordered.
You have your beginning. You have your middle. You have your ending.
You have your story. You have your plot. Everything follows. Everything
falls into place. If we could actually make our lives like that, life
would have more meaning. I know life doesn't follow a plot. But imagine
if you try thinking like that, following the example of literature,
dispensing with whatever is not necessary in our lives, knowing that if
we go outside this line we should follow then the story is going to be
destroyed. Our lives are going to be destroyed. We could just go, doing
what is necessary, what we have to do, dispensing with whatever is not
necessary, like a good story. Then we live a happy life. We have a good
moment at the end.
In England, is
it different to be in a place where the power of the written word is
not so much that it can endanger your life? Where it's just…
Just "literary activity." Yeah. It's very different. And it shows in
the literature here. Their books are mostly about domestic affairs.
This husband divorces his wife. This person leaves home and doesn't
come back and the children grow up without a father. Whereas in Africa,
you can define our literature as mainly political. So the writers here
are more relaxed. There's more freedom here. There's more latitude to
do what you want to do, say what you want to say. And I think there's a
danger here of forgetting one's origins, one's roots, if one stays here
too long. So one needs to keep in touch with one's roots all the time,
to keep going back. It confirms to you that what you are doing is
right.… But the good thing is that there are a lot of African writers
here, from all parts of Africa.
What do you think the Caine Prize could do for literature in Africa?
You know, there has been a lot of debate in Nigeria, among my friends,
among poets and writers there, about whether this prize is really good
for Africans or not, or whether it's a kind of patronizing prize given
to Africans by the colonial masters, based on their idea of what
African literature should be. But I see that as bullshit. We have to be
realistic. The situation back home is very dire, very difficult.
Writers need any break they can get now. Nobody is giving us any
chances. The writers who made it, like Wole Soyinka and Achebe, they're
not helping anybody; they're not introducing us to the publishers.
Nobody is making any headway. The Commonwealth Prize is different. The
NOMA Prize is different. They are for published works. But with the
Caine Prize, you can enter with a story in a journal. It's going to the
grass roots. It's going to the young writer who has nothing going for
him. If you look at the winners over the past few years, they have been
writers who are unpublished. Writers like me. Before me it was Leila
Aboulela, a Sudanese housewife. We need that kind of thing now, because
the publishers are not there. If I was in Nigeria now, if I hadn't won
the Caine Prize, I don't even want to think of where I would be.
One
of your characters says, "There is so much we can't understand, because
we are only characters in a story and our horizon is so narrow and so
dark." Is the way so dark now?
No, I think it's better now.
All over, especially in Nigeria. We are real people now. We are not
just characters in a story now. We don't live by the whim of the
author. We can actually turn our lives now. We can actually think for
ourselves culturally. We can hope now. There is hope.
Frank Bures is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon. He writes for Tin House, the Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. His profile of Elizabeth Gilbert appeared in the May/June 2002 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
