It took me seven years to write my novel – Richard Ali

You’ve just added a year recently  and before that you had a novel published at last. Do you feel older, wiser as a person and as a writer? I sincerely hope so! But, I admit, I’m not always sure about that one way or another. I guess this is the problem of the man in […]

You’ve just added a year recently  and before that you had a novel published at last. Do you feel older, wiser as a person and as a writer?

I sincerely hope so! But, I admit, I’m not always sure about that one way or another. I guess this is the problem of the man in the arena, the impossibility to see oneself—that vantage, in a broader but more imperfect sweep, belongs to the people in the stands, the others who are looking at you. I’m not very good with birth day commemorations, it’s just another day, one flows into another—and on the 3rd of September this year, it rained in Jos and I couldn’t even catch a drink with my friends. As a writer, however, I’ve come a long way in my estimation and the chief reasons for these are two events I participated in this year; the Ebedi Writers Residency and Farafina Trust Workshop. These have given me new perspectives into writing which I’m sure my next work will benefit from. So, yes, it’s been a very good year in my life.

Despite adding a year, you are still quite young. Did you think you would accomplish this much in such a short period in your life?

Nothing really, Fate? I’ve had things happen to me, starting with editing Sardauna Magazine in 2004-2006 to Sentinel Magazine, Parresia. . . And, yes, these have happened while young. I like to think it is how creditably I have discharged of these duties/responsibilities that should matter, not my age at the time I did them—this should be what should endure and I hope these things do endure. But, that is not for me to judge, I can only hope. It will all be decided by History, by my contemporaries and by people who come later. Yet, there is the vague sense of trepidation—the wonder if the rest of one’s life story would be as interesting as what it has been up till now. The last three decades of my life, especially the last ten years, have been dizzyingly interesting. I hope fate, as written for me, and as I write it for myself, would be kind to me.

City of Memories has been described as ambitious for taking on the sectarian crises in the north-central region and tying it up with a love story. How did you come about conceiving this novel?

The core idea of City of Memories came from a belief that love could cure the sectarian divisions that have torn the country apart, especially my own city of Jos and recently the Northeast. During the civil unrests in Jos, in September 2001, I thought—what if the very first of these sectarian crises started from a love affair gone bad? And that was when the character of Ummi al-Qassim was born, and with her the stories of the tragic Usman and Ahmed. Her story, of course, foreshadowed the story of Faruk and Rahila, and of Eunice Pam and Ibrahim Dibarama. But, growing up in the soyayya tradition, whose contemporary example is the Kano literature in Hausa called soyayya novels, I decided to pay respects to that tradition in the affair between Faruk and Rahila and between Faruk and Maryam Bazza. Another element in the conception of the novel is the writings of Cyprian Ekwensi, to whom I nod perpetually in City of Memories—his stories about ordinary people, his immensely detailed and well imagined character sketches, have an authenticity I’ve always admired and which I have shown my respect for in this novel. All these things came together in conceiving City of Memories.

I know it took you quite a long time to write this book, some five or six years. Why did it take that long?

Inexperience, largely. When I started writing this novel, I had next to no idea about the art of crafting the novel and my first five drafts were really just narrative. They looked nothing like the novel in your hands now, only some characters, a story without a line and the basics. The turnaround came when I first met my now partner at Parresia Publishers Ltd, Azafi Ogosi, on Facebook. She did the first proper editing of the book, with a mind to how fiction worked. The next draft was the most crucial as my friend, Uche Peter Umez, had introduced me to Nigerian author, Jude Dibia, who is one of the finest prose stylists in the country—Jude was the one who made a novel of City of Memories, showing me patiently the tricks of point-of-view and conflict and so many other things. And, he gave my manuscript a title to boot. The final edits was done my Rose Kahendi, a multilingual editor from Kenya who edits Parresia’s books. With long gaps of time when I completely abandoned the project, especially in the course of my first five drafts, the entire process took about seven years. I hope the text has been worth the years it took to write.

The novel has been warmly received and praised for the elevated prose employed. To what extent did your background as a poet influence this style? And why was it necessary to employ alternate-reality in the novel?

Language has always interested me—I date the period of this interest to my mid-teens, when I first read Wole Soyinka’s prison notes, The Man Died. I had never read language used so powerfully, that was near a decade before coming across Toni Morison and James Baldwin who have a subtly different way of packing power and beauty into words.So, I started out as a poet and I know my being a poet shows in my prose, I know because a part of the time spent editing was spent editing out flowery and elegant expressions of the sort poetry thrives on but which loses the reader of a novel. I once read part of the early drafts of the novel and a woman commented—she said hearing me read was so beautiful to the ears but she couldn’t see what I was reading. That was when I knew something had to be done. I hope the language in City of Memories isn’t so elevated as to make it obscure?

Alternate reality is a tool we use when you wish to compress history, if for example you want to give the feel of history to a novel and yet, you don’t want readers and critics to try to plot the novel against recent history, you use alternate reality. A novel isn’t a historical text, nor does it pretend to be, nor should it be. You should, in fact, forget historicity and everything else when you read a novel—it has to transport you into its own time. The text is sacred, anything else, in criticism and in understanding, is secular. Alternate reality is a curtain to shield the sacredness of the text itself.

So do you now see yourself principally as a poet or a novelist?

Both!  I hope to come out with my debut poetry collection soon, hopefully early next year, while working on a novel that’s been buzzing in my head for a year now. It needs a lot of research which I hope to do next year. I am presently a published novelist; soon I will be a published poet—wear both caps. There are some things I would naturally express in poetry; others need more space to achieve their expression. The short story is a genre I’ve tried my hands on but with little success. It bridges these two and I hope to experiment with it as well. The writer tries to express as best as he can, the genre employed is the one he imagines to be the most effective.

The characters in your novel exude an aura of intelligence and a commendable grasp of philosophy. Was there a particular reason for this or as some critics say, is it an attempt to portray the intellectual side of the northerners?

It wasn’t a deliberate attempt to portray an intellectual side of “northerners” and I’ll tell you why. To do so would mean there is another equally valid non-intellectual side of northerners, no? But, we cannot have these personal indicators transferred to groups. Northerners is a vast group of possibly 80 million people, how does one force adjectives such as these on so many people? People are individually either intellectual or not and it just happens that the main characters of the novel are from the northern part of Nigeria and are all intelligent upper-middleclass characters. And while this is true, the nature of their intelligences,   is very different—as are the dominant ideas that shape these characters. Eunice Pam is, for example, shaped by Feminism and her political experience—her opposite, Ibrahim Dibarama, was formed by the trauma of the Civil War in which he served as intermediate officer, a Lieutenant Colonel. While these two can be described as intelligent and intellectual, they are different in the nature of these markers of self.

Why are my major characters intellectual? Because it is amongst the intelligentsia who cause all the problems of Nigeria and it is amongst them that the solutions to these problems must come. You can trace the arc of this from Eunice Pam, on to Ibrahim Dibarama, on to Rahila and then on to Faruk Ibrahim. Each of these is a subtle improvement on the preceding character—so that we find in Faruk the complete antithesis of Eunice Pam. This is my opinion, as the reader owns the interpretation.

Mine is a novel about northern Nigeria, it is a Nigerian novel and anyone anywhere should be able to recognize parts of themselves in the book.

There are also a number of characters who cannot be considered intellectual in any way—the almajirai, the assasins, Sidi and Dije are examples. Even that supreme vehicle of the story, Maryam Bazza, is more a naive young girl than an intellectual.

You were at the Ebedi Writers’ Residency and I suppose this implies that you are up to something. Do you mind telling us what it is about and how your experience at the residency helped?

Ebedi was a supremely important experience in my life and I am most grateful to Dr. Wale Okediran and the board of the Residency for giving me that opportunity. In the course of the Residency, I thought out a new novel, it’s going to be a historical novel set between 1919 and 1950, following two generations of a family across the country from Brazilian Quarters to Ibadan to maybe Benin City, then on to Jos and Surame, in Kebbi, and then Kano. There will be an archaeological expedition and there will be a lot of mysticism in it, both western and indigenous. There will also be human beings and a few djinns as well. It will be about words, and music and power and how far we are free agents in history.

The chief challenge is getting the resources I need to enter and recreate the period in which this fiction inhabits. Film, photos, a lot of these resources are held by archives outside Nigeria and getting access to them is, at best, only by proxy and more than not, these are not things you can make a digital copy of. Also, books from the period have been hard to get though I have found the Project Gutenberg archives immensely valuable in this.

Insha Allah, I will overcome these challenges and write this book.

You have been editing Sentinel Nigeria for years now and have the opportunity of coming across writing from all over Nigeria. What do you think we should be on the lookout for as regards the future of Nigerian writing?

Watch out for a new sort of confidence, I call our generation the Unapologetic Generation—this is a generation on the whole possessing a sort of self-referred confidence that bowls over. There is a lot of stunning new writing going on. I’ll give you a tip sheet of four writers to look out for, apart from you, Abubakar, of course. Look out for Nze Sylva Ifedigbo, Gimba Kakanda, Ukamaka Olisakwe and Ifesinachi Okoli Okpagu. Also, the 2012 Class of the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop—Ese Emuwa, Kechi Nomu, Efembe Eke and Nasir Yamamma especially.

These guys embody the confidence I speak of and I’ll wager you the coming years will prove this.

 

You are co-founder of Parresia Publishing. A year down the line what would you say the challenges have been?

Our chief headache is marketing and distribution, for which individual deals need to be struck with bookstores, marketers and distributors. In some cases, 40 percent of the cover price of a book goes to middlemen such as these—these make books, especially for a publisher committed to quality writing and quality aesthetics, expensive. We are tackling these challenges one by one and we hope that by the middle of next year, the average price of our books should come down to #1000 per copy. Our marketers have pinpointed this as the optimum market entry price for Nigerian books. So, we hope to meet this by the middle of 2013.