How graduate project became my latest novel – Audee T. Giwa

Bookshelf: Your most recent work of fiction is titled ‘Yarinya’. What triggered the story? Audee T. Giwa: The pre-story of ‘Yarinya’ is in ‘Yarinya’ itself, because there’s a prologue, which is rarely found in my works, that attempts to fictionally explain what occasioned the novel. The centrality of it is polygamy. It’s an offshoot of […]

Bookshelf: Your most recent work of fiction is titled ‘Yarinya’. What triggered the story?

Audee T. Giwa: The pre-story of ‘Yarinya’ is in ‘Yarinya’ itself, because there’s a prologue, which is rarely found in my works, that attempts to fictionally explain what occasioned the novel. The centrality of it is polygamy. It’s an offshoot of a long-term undergraduate project. When I was in school we were asked to do creative writing as our project work. Then as now, I have always been concerned with polygamy and the way it’s abused in Hausa land. I know the way people appropriate religion to further perpetuate their personal interest. My supervisor then, Professor Mbulelo Mzamane, God bless his soul, did more than encourage me. He told me it was publishable. He was so carried by it he took an excerpt, you can imagine what that means to an undergraduate student, and published it in what they called Dandali Journal. That was a changing moment in my life. But after that, I kept writing. I wrote ‘I Would Rather Die’ before then, ‘Marks on the Run’ and so on. I presently teach creative writing in Kaduna State University, so one day I was telling my students that I was sure my original scripts when I was their age is somewhere. Somebody said “we would love to see it.” That was how I went through my archives and discovered that ‘Yarinya’ is as good now as it was then. The themes are germane. All I needed to do was rework it to fit into the current situation because my exposure now is greater. 

Bookshelf: What did it take to rework ‘Yarinya’ after so many years?

Giwa: It became more difficult because I am now more conscious of writing. Then, the spontaneity made it easier. When a story compels you to write it, it’s often easier. That’s the reason for the phrase-to have zero draft is better than to have no draft at all. 

Bookshelf: How would you compare ‘Yarinya’ to your second novel, ‘Marks on the Run’?

Giwa: For young readers, especially students, they identify more with ‘Marks on the Run’ because it was set in a university and all the characters are young people. So it’s understandable that the youths would empathise with that kind of story. It’s a no-hold-back kind of story. Where issues of corruption and sex are concerned, you can bet youths are going to be interested. That’s what the book is all about. It told the story of a lecturer who was framed. Sexual harassment was inverted. We also had where a woman raped a boy. You invert reality and incidentally you see that it doesn’t negate its occurrence. It does happen. Lecturers get harassed every day. Rape is a seductive process. 

Bookshelf: What books have influenced your writing journey?

Giwa: Anybody who can count the number of books they have read haven’t started. You don’t estimate. I started reading from the age of fourteen, fifteen and still find books to read, reading an average of a book a week. At the beginning, before I knew I was going to study literature, I was influenced by James Hadley Chase who was the vogue then. At that time we waited for every new Chase novel to be imported. And we were always the first to read it. He was my founding influence. If you read ‘I Would Rather Die’ you will find a lot of borrowed expressions from Chase’s novels, including style. So, it’s not good to tell students not to read James Hadley Chase, that it would corrupt them. No. At this age, tell your students to read anything they like. Otherwise, by the time you create a barrier they wouldn’t read at all, because some are looking for an excuse. When I reached A-level and began to study literature, I fell in love with poetry. From then reading was nonstop. 

Bookshelf: You have written four books so far. Which of them would you describe as your favourite and why?

Giwa: ‘I Would Rather Die’ is my favourite because when I read it, I smile and wonder whether I was really nineteen when I wrote it. It wasn’t published until around 1994, but the last full stop was placed in 1980. 

Bookshelf: How do you approach writing?

Giwa: I have never ever set out to write a novel to get published. I set out to write a story. It may surprise you to know I don’t have a single short story collection anywhere. Once I begin to write, the characters keep developing. 

Bookshelf: Some writers are of the opinion that it’s better to grow first as a short story writer before writing a novel. What do you have to say about that?  

Giwa: They are being scientific about it. All these rules about how to write only applies to those who don’t decide to write. The rule for writing is to first write. Once this is done, the work can be panel-beat into anything.  

Bookshelf: How do you view the development of literature in Nigeria today compared to a decade or more ago?

Giwa: One big irony about the development of literature in Nigeria as a whole is that writers are far more prolific and more in number with more germane topics, so much that they can spew a lot of books. But the irony is that, this trend is challenged by great competition. These include advertorials, television, handset and the internet. Now you have more books but fewer readers. I was appalled when somebody said the books published by African Writers Series were rubbish. You wake up in 2017 and say people who put us on the literary map wrote nothing? It’s only when you negate history that you talk like that.

Bookshelf: What are you working on at the moment?

Giwa: I am working on two books. I am disturbed by the frequency of chat room abuses, the evil in the social media where you can be friends with someone and then it leads to something evil. I am still doing my research.