My writing nearly cost me my life – AA Rufai

Bookshelf: The Incredible Cock is an allegory, much like Goerge Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm.’ How much of an influence was Orwell to you as a writer? Ahmad Adam Rufai: George Orwell to me is like the manure in the farm in which I geminated as a writer. One thing that stands out for me in his […]

Bookshelf: The Incredible Cock is an allegory, much like Goerge Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm.’ How much of an influence was Orwell to you as a writer?

Ahmad Adam Rufai: George Orwell to me is like the manure in the farm in which I geminated as a writer. One thing that stands out for me in his writings, particularly ‘Animal Farm,’ is the beauty of his having to successfully express it in his own words, “fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.” Eric Blair, the British author who wrote under the pen name, George Orwell, approached his writings with a mind seeking to expose one form of lie or the other. In a way, I’m also mostly inspired to write when I see a clear case of injustice, which often gets me irritated. This is what informed my writing ‘The Incredible Cock’ as a fable in the satiric style of ‘Animal Farm.’ The influence of George Orwell’s classic on me as a writer has been absolute, so much so that two of my stories that are still works in progress are fables with animal characters. The third one is a parable with a man and a woman as the only characters. The literary vehicle I use may be an imitation of George Orwell’s art but I take ownership of my own craft – I create originality by taking charge of the driver’s seat and not falling asleep while at it. 

Bookshelf: Where Orwell’s novel is a nuanced commentary of politics, yours is a searing depiction of the violence animals and humans practice for different reasons. What commentary were you trying to make?

Rufai: We live in a world of the oppressed and the oppressor and the oppression increases by the day with all shades of gory details but my take on this story is that the oppressed must wake up to the realization that the oppressor is not invincible.

Bookshelf: The novella focuses on the unwanted and aggressive sexual advances of Raaks against the hens. This is coming at a time that the #MeToo movement is starting conversations. What commentary are you trying to make with this novella?

Rufai: ‘The Incredible Cock’ being published at a time when the #MeToo movement is gaining global momentum is purely coincidental. I got inspired to write this story during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, after a live drama of some chickens played out right in front of my eyes, when one huge red rooster sexually hounded a pretty white hen. The theme of sexual assault and harassment, in my opinion, has been an issue that has existed from time immemorial in different societies but in varying degrees. It has all been hushed up in conservative societies like ours in northern Nigeria. If you consider a character like Gimbi the hen in the story, who was defiled, quite savagely, and her chastity taken away by the giant rooster Raaks, you’d see that she immediately secluded herself from the other chickens because she didn’t want the news of this terrible ordeal blown open so as not to further compound her trauma. 

Bookshelf: How difficult was it to write a graphic story like this considering the themes of the novella?

Rufai: This is not a story I wrote in a hurry. It grew from a draft of just two pages when I first penned it down in 2003. Subsequently it evolved over the years up until when it was published in 2017. I took my time, carefully observed the local itinerant chickens around. It’s not as if I made it a duty to go on the lookout for them. Often I stumbled on them as I take a walk and I tried as much as possible to depict the chickens in the story just very much the same way I’ve seen them behave in their natural habitat. You need a great deal of patience to do this. I have read the earlier drafts of this piece to my reading group back in Jos, and the criticisms that came out of those sittings were really helpful. 

Bookshelf: What has your journey been like as a writer?

Rufai: Honestly, I never knew I could write. Perhaps the creativity might just have been lying there dormant in my head but this was unlocked when I met Professor Deborah Klein, an American lecturer who taught at the University of Jos back then. I majored in English so I had the option to take electives from literature. When she discovered I had not registered for creative writing, a course she taught, she insisted I did.

Back in the hostel, I joined Sule, a student then who was two classes ahead of me in the department. He was a source of mentorship to me in a way because I took after him in writing commentaries on happenings in the university community. I mostly wrote about the inadequacy of our welfare facilities on campus, the incessant hike in tuition fee, students’ romance or campus politics. I was somewhat an invisible man at the time because my signature name AA Rufai was quite familiar on campus, but I’ll be in the midst of these students who talked about my articles without them knowing that the person standing next to them was indeed the writer. I grew in the ranks and became one of the leading writers on campus. 

But the experience was not all a bed of roses. Once, my life was seriously threatened because of a letter I wrote to a student union leader. This was in 2001 just after the Jos riots broke out. I had to vacate the hostel and fortunately for me I did because I later learnt that some group of students stormed my room in the night with machetes on the day I left. They nearly lynched my roommate if not that he hurriedly showed the assailants his ID card to prove that he was not me. A committee involving security experts was set up by the university authorities to look into the matter.

Someone in the committee, during its sitting, said to me, “You couldn’t have written this letter. You’re only in 200 level. Someone in town must have written this letter and sponsored you to cause trouble in the university.”

As it turned out, I was to be vindicated when the content of the letter was made public by the recipient after he pasted copies on the notice boards. A good number of students wrote a rejoinder in support of most of the issues I had raised with him in the letter. The matter was eventually settled at the state police headquarters where we were asked to sign a bond. 

Subsequently the authorities had their radar on me. I was often invited to the campus security office to answer one query or the other because I never stopped writing even after that life-threatening incident. If there was anything those acts of intimidation and outlandish ideas they had about me achieved, it only made me popular as a writer on campus. Just when I was about graduating, however, I was awarded the best student writer after a vote by students.

Bookshelf: This is your first published work. What was it like holding the first copy in your hand?

Rufai: After many years of looking for a publisher, it’s like taking delivery of your first child from the labour room after successive stillbirths. That was the exact feeling I had after my publisher, Advance Publishers Nigeria Limited, handed me the author’s copy of my book. It’s really a double victory for ‘The Incredible Cock’ because I have another publisher, United P.C., an imprint of Novum Publishing GMBH in Austria. Though they are yet to send me a hard copy, it gives me joy to see the book being displayed for sale on Amazon.