How not to write for children – Lizi Ashimole

Bookshelf: You haven’t published any creative work for a while. Why is that? Lizi Ashimole: Basically, publishing in Nigeria for the creative writer remains more like a cash and carry business. The challenge there is, when you do get a publisher, based on my experience, you pay for your work to be published and they […]

Bookshelf: You haven’t published any creative work for a while. Why is that?

Lizi Ashimole: Basically, publishing in Nigeria for the creative writer remains more like a cash and carry business. The challenge there is, when you do get a publisher, based on my experience, you pay for your work to be published and they return the work to you, but don’t market for you. So, you are not only the creative entrepreneur, you are also the vendor for your work and that is quite tasking and challenging. Primarily, in this nation, except a book is on the prescribed reading list of schools, you are not likely to have a market. We have not yet groomed our children to read for leisure or for love of a story. For those of us who write for an audience that is not the classroom situated readership, it is an economic misadventure.  It is not for the lack of stories to tell, but the lack of that vehicle that would convey the story to the reader. Who is going to take away that publication burden from you, the writer, market and promote it. We don’t have many of those platforms available. So, that may be the reason why many of us are writing but the books are locked in our laptops.

Bookshelf: You have published children’s literature, such as ‘Tales by the Fluorescent’ in 2007 and ‘The Groundnut Child’ in 2004. How were they received?

Ashimole: Again, the issue of reception of a book can only be what I say it is because there is no formal structure for determining bestsellers. What is the yardstick? Who is the monitoring or regulatory body and by what do we determine the book has sold a thousand copies? Is it by the publisher’s sales or the schools or the number of people you personally sold to? And if you don’t have a formal marketer, whether it is a publisher or an agency that is dedicated to marketing your books, how do you know which book sold the highest number of copies?

Most of the books we read, you see they are bestsellers by New York Times and so on. There is a structure that is used in monitoring, a concerted community that discusses books as they come out. There is a created platform where books are made topical. We don’t have such here. 

When you ask what the reception was, I ask you back, by whom? Was it sold to pupils? The answer would be yes. If I give you any copy, the first question you need to ask me is, in this country, how many publishers are dedicated to children’s literature? If you can name one publisher who makes his business out of publishing for children, that may be indices to determine how many were published and which sold fastest and by which margin the first author or book, beat the next one. What books sold at a particular book fair, and what book fairs are targeted at children’s needs? We are looking at a gamut of unexplored situations when it comes to writing for children in Nigeria. When books are not part of a reading list, parents who are economically burdened, do not see buying a book as adding value to their child. They would rather buy a snack or the latest dress or toy. 

Bookshelf: We seem to have a shortage of writers who write children’s literature…

Ashimole: I wouldn’t call it a shortage. 

Bookshelf: Then why is it that even Nigerian Prize for Literature a year ago, failed to select a winner in the children’s literature category?

Ashimole: They did not select a winner, not because there are no writers. There were entries, but they said none of the books met their criteria.

Bookshelf: They explained that most of the writers did not write for children.

Ashimole: In the first instance, there are not too many who will tell you that all they do is write for children. I conducted studies on children’s literature for my master’s. Primarily, you have stories that failed to make it as adult literature and were passed on to children and became children’s writing. But they were not primarily written for children. It might be about children, about growing up, or their experiences, but that does not mean that it is for children. The first generation of Nigerian writers who were said to be writing for children, were actually writing adult stories, which were felt not to be good enough, and so were pushed to the younger not-so-literate readers as a way to introducing them to literature generally and the English language, primarily. 

You also find that most of the writers who came out of Africa and became the icons of literary development, at one point or the other, had something they wrote on the side for children, such as Chike and the River and Buchi Emecheta who started with children’s literature. Every one of them, at some point in time did, as if it was some kind of rite of passage. It does not work that way. Writing for children is a genre on its own. You must have the language, the feel for children, the ability to enter their world and see the adult world from the eyes of a child and be able to write about it from what they would have seen, without that mediating adult know it all predisposition. 

So, I do not know what stories were considered by the NLNG-sponsored Nigerian Prize for Literature, but for that body of critics to come up with that decision, they must have seen something. Secondly, we also have a whole lot of writers who write to win an award, so to speak, and after that you do not read anything else written by them and probably read nothing before the award.       

Sometimes you have this rush to groom people to write for children. I know that ANA did that once in a while and even considered unpublished manuscripts as worthy of winning an award. Where does that happen? A manuscript wins an award and then it gets published or does not get published? Ten years down the line and that manuscript is not in the market. Meanwhile that person has won an award for a manuscript. It is like many areas of the Nigerian society. We are still evolving and a whole lot of people are trying to find out what works for them. How many of our writers are earning purely from their writing. There is not a single person, not even Achebe or Soyinka. Every person does something on the side. 

Assuming you are talking to someone who wants to write for children, what are the major guidelines you would put forward?

Ashimole:  Primarily, do you understand children or speak their language? Do you have an idea of the kind of things children are interested in? When you speak to or about children, do you talk down on them or at them? Until and except you can get into that perception of the child’s story, then don’t write for children. 

I have another challenge about writing for children in Nigeria. The majority of us writers take the cheaper route of publishing in black and white. If you are serious about writing for children, say zero to six years, like I do, it must be in colour and have words that are rhythmic and resonate, because at that point in time it is their ears that you are focusing on. 

Bookshelf: Which of your books fall into that category?

Ashimole: It is ‘The Groundnut Child’. At that age the child is restless, active and learning things. So, my books for them at that age are meant to be read, it is a family thing, parents, uncles or aunties, reading to their children. Don’t forget that for the child you are writing for today, it is a contest with television. In sophisticated parts of the world, there are pop-out books. These are ways of catching a child’s attention.