Q: You are one novelist who has contributed to the redefinition the contemporary Nigeria novel is presently going through. Against the backdrop of what you and your colleagues have been able to do, how can you describe the 21st century Nigerian novel?
A: I see the 21st century Nigerian novel as basically a child of the unique circumstances that gave birth to it. The time is long gone when all you needed do was summon the courage to put pen to paper and a choice of publishers came beckoning for your signature. I dare say that the situation now is more like manuscripts everywhere but not a publisher in sight. The few around only put their imprint where their money is, merely luring the unsuspecting novelist into vanity arrangements that only serve to demean the calling. On a personal note, my only effort so far was among those returned by Heinemann as they rested the African Writers Series of yore. But for the apt intervention of the New Gong experiment where a cooperative of writers leveraged on their individual propensities to fight the decay, Vision Impossible may still have been languishing in a drawer somewhere. All the same, though, getting a job out is only the first step in a marathon. It is only time – imbued with its normal dose of hindsight – that will tell how we all fared.
Q: Your novel Vision Impossible is an impressive study in fictional experimentation. What could the possible influences for this creative disposition of yours be, since we couldn’t say, like they say in popular parlance, that you matured over time, Vision Impossible being your first novel?
A: Well, I can only say that maturity is an internal thing and then take an additional alibi in the overt dearth of genuine publishers that I had hinted of. By this I mean that I could have been releasing my tenth novel if things were to be as given. I once read Achebe bemoaning this lack of publishing outlets and cherished his comment that it had the advantage of having writers staying longer with their works with the added opportunity of honing them to perfection in the intermission. In my case I worked on Vision Impossible for more than twenty years, vowing not to start anything else till I thought it done. In effect, I kind of matured standing still.
Q: In Vision Impossible, you probably set off to x-ray the indignities of military adventurism, but you ended up just telling an intriguing story of a character locked up in the maze of self identity-seeking? Would you say that for you, the story-telling impetus overpowers the tendency to fight a socio-political cause with your art?
A: It all depends on where a guy is coming from; and, perhaps, where he is headed to. I doubt if I can ever be labelled a committed writer. It is not part of my calling I dare say. The story I tried to tell was about people occupying a particular space at a particular time. It just happened that the story of Vision Impossible took place between the military coups of 31st December, 1983 and 17th November 1993 during which time our soldier brothers had become rampant. I therefore could not close my eyes and reel out a love tale as if my characters existed in a different setting. The story had to be told and told well. The aim should be for the betterment of humanity more than a miniature socio-political cause as the case may be.
Q: The language of Vision Impossible certainly says something about your debt to Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe as seen at various points of the novel. What aspects of the linguistic deployment of these accomplished literary figures do you find particularly enchanting?
A: I must admit that like every other person who has endeavoured to write, I owe my development to those whose works I had the privilege to drink from. By this I mean that the list could be longer than the trinity you named. Regarding Okigbo, Soyinka and Achebe one cannot but confess that they epitomize the height to which anybody can take his art irrespective of geographical location. By this I mean that every time I sit down to write I do not compromise standards and these three icons represent the ideal par excellence.
Q: Vision Impossible presents an emergent pattern in what I call “creative restraint”, in that it tries to avoid concrete references to socio-political and historical indexes of the culture that produced it. It is further instructive that in the bid to achieve this kind of distancing, other interesting aspects of your artistic personality is made more prominent. How would you describe this enterprise of yours?
A: Rather than restraint I would want to think that it amounts to the opposite. In this enterprise I tend to see the stating of the obvious as a leash tied to the creative persona. Concrete references whether of socio-cultural or historical indices are seen as tools around which the entire creative exercise can tap from without restraint. That way, for instance, it was possible for the lead character in Vision Impossible to visit Nigeria from within Nigeria and get back – what you aptly termed ‘ambiguous geography’. In another instance, one could afford the opportunity of having all the action happening in homogenous settings that could stand for several places within a given geographical milieu. So I may say that it is within the powers of the creative person to take convention for granted and still tell a good story.
Q: From your artistic statements in Vision Impossible, history occupies an indispensable space in your fertile creative imagination. What exactly is the role you think Nigerian history has to play in the fictional consciousness of contemporary Nigerian novelists like you, even though we are no longer talking about culture conflict, colonialism, disillusionment and things like that?
A: As much as we have to agree that it is the current affairs of today that graduate into the history of tomorrow, no writer – Nigerian or otherwise – can operate without an acute sense of history. I seriously think that history as a field can contest for the position of the superstructure of story telling. No story can be told well in a vacuum devoid of history, even if it were to be about Utopia or Erehwon. It is the known history of other places that will constitute the pedestal that will buoy the imaginary location. If we were to zone in on Nigeria, the uniqueness of our story makes it all the more imperative.
Q: Nduka Otiono has described contemporary Nigerian writers as not being “pretentious” in his spirited efforts to defend what older Nigerian writers and critics see as an alarming subscription to sexuality among the writers of your generation. Considering that you are a ‘culprit’ of this tendency, how can you explain a phenomenon that appears to be a consensus among our new novelists?
A: In line with the foregoing, the Nigeria writer of the 21st century cannot be easily extricated from the entire body of world writers. Whatever trends that hold sway internationally are bound to reverberate here. I really wonder why people complain about sexuality only now. I recently reread John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath written before he won the Nobel in 1962 and was mildly alarmed at its unrestrained salaciousness given how our compatriots rile about it decades later. I would want to link this with the way and manner of our Christianization. Most of the writers and critics you refer to were trained in schools run by missionaries that tended to see sex as another crime they’d rather committed in a closet than wrote or read about in novels. Otiono cannot be wrong to think it sanctimonious. But didn’t a critic label Achebe’s A Man of the People pornographic? Or is Achebe one of us?
Q: Vision Impossible missed out of the shortlist of the NLNG Prose Prize this year in spite of its copious artistic merits which should give it an ascendancy over the some other works that were favoured. Nigerians just sincerely wish that people like you who have been ‘denied’ recognition should not loose focus and interest in contributing to the development of Nigerian literature. What part do you think that literary prizes should play, especially in encouraging literary creativity in Nigeria?
A: It was up to the panel judges whose eminent potentials cannot be questioned. If winning literary prizes were part of why I write then I might as well pack my tools and head elsewhere. Posterity has more to do with it than what a group of men and women think about it over their cups of tea paid for by their sponsors. Be that as it may, literary prizes are easily the only way to make ends meet in the short run for somebody practicing fulltime here, but I think they should be won more by merit than any other considerations that may mar the overall utility of the exercise.
Q: Now on a lighter note, how did you come into writing serious literature, considering your non English and Literature background? You have certainly refuted Professor Tony Afejuku’s theory that people without a literary background are fortuitous writers.
A: This whole placing of restrictions on the path of writers – be they moral or disciplinary – reeks of ‘thinly-veiled’ censorship to me. If nobody else should write serious literature but people with English and Literature backgrounds then they might as well write them with no sense of history as they are not trained historians. It cuts both ways. After all, all the subjects used to be one before these demarcations were introduced. And even now there are still stifled calls for the unification of some faculties. Books are written by people who understand the subject they are writing about – be they novels or textbooks. Who is fortuitous or otherwise matters little in the circumstances.
Q: The Diaspora has over the years constituted a ‘safe haven’ for some of our new writers. Do you sometimes meditate over the possibility of taking your art abroad?
A: I’m yet at a loss as to what these safe havens contribute to a writer’s craft. Yes, I could venture abroad to perhaps earn a decent living from my books or elsewhere but I do not see how going that far to wash dishes will improve my writing. For now I’m still here.