Conversations oil wheels of literature – Babatunde

Bookshelf: Your short story, ‘The Collected Tricks of Houdini,’ was long-listed for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, one of the richest prizes in the world for a single short story. How did this happen and how did you feel? Rotimi Babatunde: I was informed that my work had been nominated […]

Bookshelf: Your short story, ‘The Collected Tricks of Houdini,’ was long-listed for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, one of the richest prizes in the world for a single short story. How did this happen and how did you feel?
Rotimi Babatunde: I was informed that my work had been nominated for the award a fortnight before the news became public, with the proviso that the information was to be kept secret until the official announcement. The nomination was a lovely surprise. Works by some of the most globally recognised names in the art of contemporary short story have featured on the long-list for the award. Surely, ‘The Collected Tricks of Houdini’ would not have minded joining that elite company.
Bookshelf: What inspired the story?
Babatunde: Several years ago, I was reflecting on the ideologies that have been influential on the African continent from the mid-20th century to the present day – you know, from the independence movement and pan-Africanism through communism and capitalism to democracy and religious fundamentalism. In the course of that reflection the character of Hannibal popped into my head, and I started laughing. That was when I knew Hannibal’s story had to be written. Hannibal was, at one time or the other, an adherent of the ideologies I earlier mentioned. His adventures in the advocacy of those ideologies influenced the presentation of his life to me as both hilarious and moving.
Bookshelf: Hannibal’s character seems to represent a lot of people that wear ‘coats of many colours,’ so to speak. Have you come across a lot of such people or was it pure coincidence?
Babatunde: You’re right. Many people exist as hypocritical bundles of contradictions. However, to me Hannibal does not seem to belong in that category. If ideologies were spouses, Hannibal would be a serial monogamist rather than a polyandrist or a polygamist. His commitment to every position he held was total throughout the period he believed in it.
He is a combination of passion and naivety. Perhaps, his major flaw could be located in his incurable optimism. But that flaw was also his major strength. It informed why Hannibal – like the famous escapologist Harry Houdini – had the ability to wriggle out of every ideological position. There would be valid grounds to question his inconsistency just as well as there would be to appreciate his about-turns, since optimism has never been a crime.
Bookshelf: What do you hope to achieve through this story?
Babatunde: Most literary writers drive towards similar ends in their works – to do something new with the genre in which they are working, to shed some light on the human condition, and to give their readers some pleasure. The unique technical challenge I encountered in writing ‘The Collected Tricks of Houdini’ lay in balancing concrete description and narrative summary. That challenge was informed by the fact that the work compresses several decades of a man’s life into the limited confines of a short story. I also wanted to highlight the human impact that political, economic and religious ideologies have had on ordinary people. And I wanted to do that with wit and aesthetic adventurousness. Fiction doesn’t have to be dour and depressive, even when it focuses on weighty issues.
Bookshelf: How did your writing career begin?
Babatunde: I began writing at a young age. I have been a keen reader from childhood, and that interest in books spurred me into Reading and writing are symbiotic. They feed into each other – in the same way that being a gourmet may lead one into becoming a chef. Or that smoking marijuana leads some people to start growing it, to use a less politically correct analogy.
Bookshelf: What is the trigger for your themes?
Babatunde: Life – the human being alive, to paraphrase D. H. Lawrence. That was why he called the novel ‘the bright book of life.’ Life is the trigger and the objective. A piece of creative fiction that doesn’t thrum with life is of little worth, even if it is teeming with ideas. Other literary works also serve as triggers for my creative process. That is because literature is a conversation, sometimes even an argument, across and within generations. This conversation is sometimes about content and at other times about style. A few examples of these arguments come to mind. Chinua Achebe quarreled with the depictions of Africa in the works of Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary. And in the years after the carnage of the civil war, writers of the so-called ‘alternative’ tradition like Kole Omotoso and Niyi Osundare criticised the absence of Marxist ideology, and to some extent the limited use of elements from African indigenous orature, in works written by the generation of Soyinka, Achebe and Okigbo.
From other climes, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra shunned the colourful language of his venerable countryman Pablo Neruda and opted for a stripped-down, prosaic style which he called anti-poetry. And T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and their fellow modernists rejected the aesthetic of the Georgian poets – their contemporaries – and embraced that of the long-dead Metaphysical poets. Also, the African-American writers James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison disagreed with their precursor, Richard Wright, on his conception of literature as social protest. Such conversations oil the wheels of literary production.
Bookshelf: You seem to be more active as a playwright. Is there any reason for this?
Babatunde: I am not sure if that is true. A good number of my plays were commissioned, and that hastened their presentation to the public. I tend to take longer before letting go of non-commissioned work. To illustrate, the first drafts of ‘The Collected Tricks of Houdini’ and ‘Bombay’s Republic’ were written years before they came into public circulation. Not being in haste for publication is my preference, but others might favour a faster process. Many roads lead to the market, as the saying goes.
Bookshelf: Your plays seem to take you around the world. Can you share a bit of your experiences travelling and reading?
Babatunde: In the theatre, you can observe in real time how the audience reacts to your script. That is one of the beauties of writing for the stage. Some years ago, ‘The Bonfire of the Innocents,’ my play about a group of young Nigerian students, premiered in Kiruna, located in the far north of Sweden, before going on a tour of some 60 performances across that country. Kiruna is above the Arctic Circle. It is so cold, even when it’s not winter, that it makes a refrigerator seem like an absolute sauna. It was amazing to see how the young people living there, despite the fact that their experience is markedly different from that of their counterparts in tropical Nigeria, connect with the action of the play. Further proof, I had to conclude, that the universal is in the local.
A similar experience was replicated during the production of ‘Feast,’ whose script I co-wrote. The production, a part of the Cultural Olympiad which ran with the 2012 Olympic Games in London, was staged at the Young Vic. It was gratifying to see how the spectators set aside their different ethnic, national and racial identities in their engagement with the narrative of captives taken from the western coast of Africa to the Americas during the Middle Passage, as well as with the travails of their descendants down the centuries that followed.
My adaptation for the stage of Lola Shoneyin’s celebrated novel ‘The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives,’ was also a great experience. Theatre is a different art form from the novel, so the objective I set for myself in adapting the novel was to create a script that would keep faith with the novel’s intentions and that would also dramatise rather than narrate. Good plays show; they don’t tell. As in most other productions of my scripts, working with a talented team – which included the artistic director, music director, cast members, technical crew, and others -helped in bringing the adaptation to life at the Ake Festival in Abeokuta.
Bookshelf: How do you view the development of playwriting and theatre business in Nigeria?
Babatunde: Nigeria has consistently produced brilliant playwrights across generations, from James Ene Henshaw and Wole Soyinka to new voices like Zainabu Jallo. Even in the United Kingdom, a notable number of recognised playwrights are of Nigerian descent – Bola Agbaje and Dipo Agboluaje, for example. So producing excellent playwrights is not our problem. Our problem lies in the lack of infrastructure -infrastructure defined in its widest sense – to support the work of theatre practitioners. Some brave producers still manage to keep theatre alive, but the situation could be much better.
Bookshelf: How do you think this branch of literature can be encouraged?
Babatunde: The solution is simple. Increased government support for that branch of the arts, setting up a national endowment for the arts and other provisions for funding theatre are present in our national cultural policy, but those provisions haven’t been implemented.
Mention any country with a tradition of vibrant theatre and I will show you how a funding structure put in place by its government has created a platform for that country’s stage to flourish. Germany, Sweden, Finland, France and other countries in Europe heavily fund their theatres. The UK government subsidises the work of a great number of theatres and the US gives tax breaks for donations to the theatre.
Arguments advocating increased funding for the theatre have been put forward from as far back as the time of Bernard Shaw and Harley Granville-Barker, and a century of theatrical practice has proven those arguments right. Funding the theatre does not only boost cultural capital; it also increases economic capital. Practitioners nurtured in the subsidised theatre sector go on to become key players in commercial theatre and the film industry, thereby contributing to national economic growth.
Bookshelf: In 2012 you won the Caine Prize for African Writing for your short story, ‘Bombay’s Republic.’ How has that impacted on your writing career?
Babatunde: It has benefited my writing with a larger readership, for starters. The Caine Prize has been spectacularly successful in promoting writing from Africa on the international stage. It is remarkable how much it has been able to accomplish in the mere decade and half of its existence, despite its being run on a shoestring budget. More institutions of comparable energy and steadfastness to the Caine Prize, based within or outside the continent, are needed. The important thing is their commitment to promoting literature from and about African countries. Some exciting initiatives like Writivism and Short Story Day Africa have recently come into existence to meet that challenge. And before them there was Saraba Magazine, which is currently organising a manuscript competition for Nigerian writers. Our literary ecosystem would be richer if we let a hundred flowers bloom.
Bookshelf: You have a novel in the pipeline. What is it about and when is it due to be published?
Babatunde: Work is progressing on the manuscript. Talking in specifics about a work in progress could be counter-productive.
Bookshelf: What do you do when you are not writing?
Babatunde: I read and travel, among other things. I had thought that the writing life only requires sitting for long at your writing desk, but I was surprised to discover that it entails a lot of travelling.