‘Suffering is often the forge of quality literature’
Chuma, your novel, Diaries of a Dead African, has been published since 2003, why is it just coming out in Nigeria? Let’s just say that Diaries of a Dead African has been a ‘well-kept secret’ – which has now been declassified by the way. I have spent some time outside Nigeria so that probably accounts […]
Chuma, your novel, Diaries of a Dead African, has been published since 2003, why is it just coming out in Nigeria?
Let’s just say that Diaries of a Dead African has been a ‘well-kept secret’ – which has now been declassified by the way. I have spent some time outside Nigeria so that probably accounts for it.
The novel is quite funny and profound at the same time, how did you manage to blend together these emotions?
We can also define humour as ‘an unexpected direction taken by meaning’. There you are at a funeral with your properly sombre mood, and an unexpected coincidence of words makes you laugh out loud, before you remember where you are. That is the human for you. Our minds continue to make patterns, to make some kind of sense, sometimes humorous, despite what our sense of decorum tells us is proper. We have a saying – to excuse ourselves from inappropriate laughter – ‘sad stuff that provokes mirth’ and then we go on and crack the joke just the same! So for me, the humour in Diaries of a Dead African is deliberate, though hopefully not contrived. I tried to see the humour in the desperate circumstances of my characters, bearing in mind that we all have situations that are relatively desperate, and this being the lives we live, we are not going to take a holiday from those lives in order to get our laughs. We will live and play in the mezzanine of our woes. Indeed we may go through profoundly sad times today, only to find the same situations hilarious, years later, when we relate it to others. Humour is the canny writer’s sugar coating. We may have sad-making tales to tell, but we have no justification to tell them so sadly that our readers who have paid good money to buy us go out and hang themselves after reading all the misery we have to sell.
I have been intrigued by some of your characters particularly Calamatus Jumai, the conman, how did the idea of such a character occur to you or did you model him after someone you know?
Well… if you ever meet a character like Calama I’d love an introduction, absolutely! He is a figment. The book emerged from a serial which I had proposed to a couple of British periodicals. I had in mind a single diary written by Meme Jumai. I planned to write a weekly diary, along the lines of my serial, The Ransom Note of Sisi Eko, which I originally published on my blog, www.african-writing.com/chuma, and which has since been reprinted in the Punch. Anyhow, the London Review of Books bought the idea, but wanted Meme’s entire diary to be published in one swoop. So I compressed it all into Diary of a Dead African, and it was published in 2001, and translated into Italian for La Internazionale in 2002. Having finished with Meme Jumai, it occurred to me that his son, Calama who had such a painful and traumatic circumcision would probably have an interesting story to tell. That was the genesis of the multiple Diaries, as I got into the heads of the two sons to find out why they abandoned their father quite so disgracefully.
Although Diaries of a Dead African was published many years before Adaobi Nwaubani’s I do not Come to you by Chance, the 419 character at the centre of her book does share Calama’s larger-than-life braggadocio and you have to accept that it, kind of, goes with the territory of one species (by no means universal) of the Nigerian con artist. I suppose that if wealth is not loud there would be less incentive to acquire it by all means. In the world that Calama and Cash Daddy occupy, the length of the motorcade does matter. My enjoyment of my nine-month-old Mercedes can be soured by your driving past in a six-month-old model… and just like that, the race is on again, to replace, to upgrade, to compete.
The tragedy of the Jumai clan in the novel seems to stem from tradition. Do you think African traditions are stifling or is this just a social critique?
A tradition would no longer be a tradition if it changes with the weather. Tradition is not fashion. It is the comfort of the well-worn. And yet it ought not to chafe. It ought not to hobble. It should ennoble its adherents, not enslave them. We must have constant conversations between our past and our future, which should tell us how to live in the present. I do not hallow tradition for its sake. I think that the ’Jesus’ of our traditions would arrive today and declare them phariseetical. They are not fit for purpose in a modern age and should be bent or broken to fit.
Yet, I also think that the only thing more criminal than our dysfunctional traditions is our wholesale replacement of them with even more dysfunctional foreign traditions. If I ever stumble upon a Mental Store the one thing I’d like to buy – and gift all my friends and acquaintances – is a new mindset that builds what I am from what I was… that creates my future from the bricks of my present… so that I can still speak the same language in my old age as I did in my childhood. So that the child that was my past can still recognise the elder that is in my future. So that the grandfather I never met can recognise, speak with, the grandchildren I have not yet met.
This may be just me, but I think that once the basic needs – food shelter, procreation… have been sorted the next imperative is who we are. Identity. I visited the British National Archives in Kew Gardens and was struck by the overwhelming number of elderly folk researching their ancestry. In our early decades we spend all our time seeking the food and shelter and sex that our survival depends on. When we have banked and built and birthed we return to the question of who we are, who our parents were, what it all means. It is the same with civilisations. Civilisations afflicted by the inferiority complex will follow after modernity like dogs in heat. As they grow in maturity they will recognise the thinness of their veneered modernity. Then they will return, hoary-haired, to the ‘Kew Gardens’ of their collective memory, seeking, perchance, vestiges of their history, their traditions. They will gather up those relics, but they will have only historical value, for once we disconnect ourselves from our roots they are no longer ours.
It is a peculiar curse, only to recognise our destination in the rear view mirror.
Interestingly, you mentioned that your mother played a huge part in your turning out a writer, but reading through this novel, one sees that the few women in it are of questionable character and I have heard some women ask if you are sexist. Do you have anything against women?
I love women is the short answer. The thing though, is that Diaries of a Dead African is merely one pot of soup. The hands that cooked the okra can cook the egusi. All that the recipe for Diaries called for was a pinch of the feminine. Much more of that would have changed the savour. Does it mean I cannot ‘torchlight’ women? No. Indeed close watchers of my work may observe that I frequently write in the female voice, and that voice is mostly sympathetic. The question might soon be: what do I have against men! The thing though is that I tend to question my characters intimately. That may be just the cross-examiner coming out. So my lead characters may be empathically rendered, but they might well end up being ‘questionable’. As we say, nobi persin wey call police…
In what way exactly did your mother inspire you to become a writer?
Her speech was layered, lucid, metaphorical. She was possessed of a deep and a fecund memory from which she hauled fresh and scintillating anecdotes again and again. She sometime took the breath away with an idiom that was so finely turned, so perfect for the scenario. Once, after another deployment of a rare gem I asked her why – in my thirty years with her – she had never used so well-hefted an idiom and she explained that the situation that called for it had never before arisen.
Your next work has an interesting title, The Ghost of Sani Abacha. Does it have anything to do with the late strongman?
Well, yes. Although only six or so of those twenty-six short stories are about leadership, they relate loosely to life in the aftermath of an autocracy. What it is not is a fist-shaking, politicised anthology. If there was an agenda in the writing of the collection it was to write fine stories. If one theme haunts the tales it is the drama occasioned by the stretched ribbons of our yawing moralities – eleven of the stories are relationship tales of the spousal, filial, or the merely sexual. You might well ask what all these have to do with a dead dictator. While this book was not inspired by a visitation of the ghost of the late dictator, as a country, we ought to ask ourselves the question whether we all should be treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. What stress, do you ask? Why, the stress of decades of militarism. There is such a thing as the Stockholm Syndrome, after all. Does the man who is the victim of violence in the office dispense it at home? Does the woman brutalised by her mother brutalise her own children? I once listened to a radio programme in Lagos on corporal punishment during which a female caller suggested that spanking of children should start when a child was eleven-months old, and continue until the age of 6 years. At which time flogging could then be commenced. There was a flurry of calls from other listeners with their own tough-love theories and I realised that if the radio was being received in Foetal Kingdom there would be quite a few still births in Eko City! So we need to ask if the violence we visit on ourselves, our children, to comply with mostly hypocritical diktats create generations of compliant, non-creative, risk-averse automatons who have little initiative and who will by haunted by the ghost of dead floggers when they cradle their own children. As a country we must interrogate the might=right equation of militarism by which an armed robber and assassin is converted into a head of state by the success of his heist. It may be in our past, but we are the children of that past and our moralities and personalities are shaped by that past. The Ghost of Sani Abacha is first of all a literary broth I have cooked for my readers, but in the gentle aftermath of savouring it, I invite us all into the couch of the psychoanalyst.
When are we likely to see this book on the shelves?
It will be released in November, available in time to mail out to your Christmas gift list.
You have been doing great things with your ezine, African-writing.com, what inspired it?
Thank you. It is more than an ezine though. Its first three issues were produced in print and online editions. Those three editions were edited by the poet, Afam Akeh, with whom I started the magazine back in Oxford. In more recent times, we have gone back to a mixed print and online platform. So you can buy African Writing in print as well as in PDF downloads. Our next edition will be available for download to your ereader. I think my inspiration for publishing the magazine is a desire to have on one plate a potpourri of the literary talent available across the world. Our last issue of the magazine for instance has seventeen countries represented, fifteen of them from Africa. A professor friend once told me that a really good poem could make his week. That is the sort of reaction we want to excite in our readers.
African-writing.com has no doubt given you access to many Nigerian and African writers. What do you think will define the future of African literature?
Technology and vision.
We will write, whatever the state of our politics. Indeed there is sometimes an inverse relationship between bad politics and good writing – since people rarely cry out until they suffer pain. Sadly, suffering is often the forge of quality literature. Anecdotally, it seems to me that Robert Mugabe has done great things, unwittingly, for Zimbabawean literature, just as South African literature would have been a different beast entirely if Apartheid had not happened. It is the dysfunctional society which tosses a Jack Mapanje into a Malawian prison that creates the prison memoirs, prison poetry, prison tales and imprisoned characters of Mapanje‘s published repertoire. In genteel societies privileged writers can only imagine the life on the margins. In some of our societies, our stories will bear the imprimatur of the lived life. So, yes, technology and vision. Tech is just a tool. A press can manufacture a telephone directory just as easily as the collected tales of the Ashanti Kingdom. So the 21st century confluence of so many technological channels for the creative impulse will define African literature, but will only take it as high as the vision and assiduity of those that create that literature.