Inspiration works in mysterious ways, says Akpan
Failure introduced me to fiction writing while I was preparing for the priesthood. I was four years from ordination and teaching 60 preteen-agers per class at St. Francis Secondary School in the slums of Lagos, Nigeria. But my dream lay outside the classroom. I longed to be a columnist for the Nigerian Guardian, where I […]
Failure introduced me to fiction writing while I was preparing for the priesthood. I was four years from ordination and teaching 60 preteen-agers per class at St. Francis Secondary School in the slums of Lagos, Nigeria. But my dream lay outside the classroom. I longed to be a columnist for the Nigerian Guardian, where I imagined I would write articles criticizing the ills of my country. I’d hoped that if I submitted four articles a month to their Op-Ed page, after six months I could show up and say to the editor, “I am the.… Please, make me a regular columnist!” So I went to work and sent in my first package of four articles. I was well into my second package the following month, when it dawned on me that they weren’t publishing any of my pieces. When I phoned them, they said my pieces weren’t…well, good enough. I’d failed. I was a miserable 28-year-old. Teaching, which I’d once taken pleasure in, now depressed me. My students complained that I’d become tougher on them. Some days I was even angry attending Mass, and sleep was difficult. I stopped reading the Guardian for a while.
Some months later, when I went back to reading the paper, I noticed that the Guardian serialized stories on Saturdays. So I decided to attempt fiction. After a few nights of writing, it felt as if a gate had opened into parts of my being I never knew existed. Every night I ran through that gate, like a mischievous child, and played and explored and ran after flying termites all over again. At night even when there was a power cut (we suffer daily power cuts in Nigeria), sometimes I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking characters. It was crazy. I was free to make and to destroy, like Jeremiah. Awesome responsibility. I’d never been so happy, and yet so frightened—except on the day of my First Holy Communion. Which is the easiest way I can begin to describe an earlier turning point in my life, when the faith that called me toward my other vocation—the priesthood—deepened.
I was 11. First Holy Communion, best day of my life. As an Ikot Ekpene morning sun poured its rays into the cavernous Prince of Peace Chapel, I choked with awe, waiting to eat God. Having experienced the indescribable freedom and joy of First Confession the previous day, now I trembled: But how do you eat God? And how do you live after that? Awesome responsibility. The Handmaid Sisters had warned us not to chew but to just let the Communion melt on the tongue. After Mass, the whole day, I walked around feeling this deep peace that finally the Lord was my portion but also anxious I would have to pee or go to toilet, to flush away the Body and Blood of Christ. It was like what Rilke says: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”
So it wasn’t too strange for me to begin to believe that I could be a priest, the one who changed mere bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, the one who reconciled people to their God in the confessional. And that Wednesday in January 2000 when, after endless rewrites, I submitted my first short story, “Soaking the Gun,” to the Guardian (they started serializing it three days later), I could imagine the beauty and terror of being a writer.
The author and his book
Uwem Akpan is a Nigerian-born Jesuit priest. His short story collection Say You’re One of Them was published in 2008 by Little Brown and Company. It features five stories set in different countries in Africa. Each story focuses on a set of children that represent a different and often violent situation.
The first short story is told by an eight-year-old boy named Jigana. His sister is a prostitute at 12 years old. His ten-year-old sister wants to follow her sister’s path. Jigana’s siblings also include two-year-old twins and a baby who is part of the family’s team for begging. The story is set at Christmas time. The patriarch of the family manages to steal some party presents, but these are not what you would find under a traditional Christmas tree. He has zebra intestines and three cups of rice. He also has some gift-wrapped insecticide. One Christmas gift is a container of sniffable glue. The story presents the fate of children in Africa within the tragic confines of the facts of African life.
In “Fattening for Gabon,” Kotchikpa and Yewa are not on their way to a life of success and wealth as the title of the story suggests. The story begins with the information that it is more difficult to sell your own child or nephew than selling other kids. The children have not seen their parents for a long time as they have AIDS. In the story, Kotchikpa’s uncle is referred to as Fofo Kpee and he tricks the children with a flashy motorbike. He packs the bike with fruit, toilet paper, yams, and five people for a joy ride.
The caretakers that take Kotchikpa and Yewa are only in the business of selling the children as slaves. They provide the youngsters with feasts of food, including a soup with meat in it, and a white string that holds the pellets that killed the animal.
In this case, the story contains a Dickensian tone as the adults are the phony caretakers of children who are fighting for their lives in a dangerous and unsafe environment.
Akpan provides deep sketches of the children in all of these stories as they witness horrific events. They all are seeking ways to survive.
Critics have called Akpan’s stories compassionate and artful. The New York Times’s Janet Maslin describes Akpan’s work as deft in handling dialect and detail.