The ultimate prize for any writer is canonization – Isaac Ogezie

Bookshelf: You won the SONTA/ Olu Obafemi Prize for Playwriting in 2016 for your unpublished play, ‘The Sandcastle’. What was the experience like and how has it influenced your writing, generally?  Isaac Attah Ogezi: Of course, I was delirious with joy when the President of the Society of Nigerian Artistes, Prof. Sunnie Ododo, informed me […]

Bookshelf: You won the SONTA/ Olu Obafemi Prize for Playwriting in 2016 for your unpublished play, ‘The Sandcastle’. What was the experience like and how has it influenced your writing, generally? 

Isaac Attah Ogezi: Of course, I was delirious with joy when the President of the Society of Nigerian Artistes, Prof. Sunnie Ododo, informed me that my entry was adjudged the best. However, prizes don’t influence my subsequent writing in any way. If anything, they boost my belief in what I’m doing.

Bookshelf: You are a legal practitioner, poet, playwright, short story writer and book reviewer. How did a lawyer end up being the other four?

Ogezi: I didn’t just become a writer like in a dream of the night after I had been called to the Nigerian Bar. Not at all. You can become an accidental professional footballer, public servant or actor but never an accidental writer. There has to be the days when you mastered the skills before coming of age to be announced to your world. In fact, one could say that I had always been a writer before I became a lawyer. The secret of how I manage to combine the hustle-and-bustle world of legal practice with writing at the same time can be attributed to effective time management.  I believe that you can always find time for whatever you love. In this case, law practice and writing seamlessly mated together.

Bookshelf: In 2014, four things happened to you. Your collection of short stories, ‘The Threshing Floor’ was published under the Nigerian Writers Series and ‘Ezeulu’, a play. Also, ‘Under a Darkling Sky’, another play, was nominated for both the NLNG-sponsored Nigerian Prize for Literature and the Soyinka Prize for African literature. How did you feel back then with all these going on for you?

Ogezi: It’s too early in the day to call 2014 the golden year of my writing career. This is because I foresee better years ahead. Be that as it may, 2014 was a most memorable year for me. Perhaps, my greatest surprise of that year was the selection of my short story collection, ‘The Threshing Floor’, among the best ten books to be published by the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) under the Nigerian Writers Series. On the heels of this came the nomination of my play, ‘Under the Darkling Sky’, for both the NLNG-sponsored Nigeria Prize for Literature and the Soyinka Prize for African Literature. The year was rounded off with the online publication of my prize-winning play, ‘Ezeulu’ I felt grateful to God for those favours because merit alone cannot guarantee you a place on the longlist of any prize but the God-factor which many erroneously call luck.

Bookshelf: What was it like being nominated and not winning any of those prizes at the time?

Ogezi: For those of us whose purpose for existence is writing, we see it as a marathon race of which mere hitches, such as being nominated without winning an award, does not remove sleep from our eyes. Prizes are fringe benefits of being a writer and not the principal aim. The ultimate prize for any writer is canonization and not any ephemeral literary prize that can even be awarded to works that do not possess enduring literary quality.

Bookshelf: How have these nominations impacted on you and your work so far?

Ogezi: As a writer, I’m already prize-laden. What awards or nominations do to me and my subsequent works is that they serve as a great source of motivation. The judges of these awards, who are mostly authorities in literature, seem to be telling me that I’m on the right track. 

Bookshelf: Sometimes writers depend on prizes for validation. What’s your view? 

Ogezi: That is tantamount to self-deception. The validation every true writer looks forward to in his life’s oeuvre is canonization. Can such an award-winning work still be remembered after the effervescent sensation of the award ceremony? Is the work being studied and written about ravenously as a work worthy of critical exegesis? Can it outlive its author? Writers like Emily Dickinson and John Keats never won awards in their days but are more celebrated than most writers who won awards in their times. Just as I have said earlier, awards motivate the writer but it is not his ultimate goal.

Bookshelf: ‘Under a Darkling Sky’ was a play about Ken Saro-Wiwa and his service to Ogoni land. Why did you choose to write about Saro-Wiwa?

Ogezi: Two things informed my writing a play about Ken Saro-Wiwa. One, the lawyer in me who’s always repulsed by injustice and dictatorship. Two, my Marxist orientation which often pitches me against oppressors of any kind. It’s already a notorious fact that Saro-Wiwa’s slaying with the other eight Ogonis by the kangaroo military tribunal was a travesty of justice, a judicial murder. Apart from the bare-faced denial of their fundamental right to fair hearing during trial, the Ogoni Nine were  executed within the period the law allowed for them to lodge an appeal against their conviction. To further show how the military junta under the dark-goggled Abacha was hell-bent on killing them, they were not allowed to enjoy the usual stay of execution which all condemned convicts in capital cases are entitled under our law, pending the hearing and determination of their appeals. The question of whether I was able to translate the poignancy in the Saro-Wiwa story into my play is best left for the critics and readers.

Bookshelf: Hypothetically, if you’re to write another book like it, who will you choose to write about?

Ogezi: Ironically, I may have to look backwards in history. The story of Queen Amina of Zazzau in the 14th century is most appealing to me as a dramatist who prides himself as a feminist. Wale Ogunyemi’s treatment of the same subject is commendable and I can see the challenges in having such brilliant attempt outclassed.

Bookshelf: Award-winning ‘Ezeulu’ is a stage recreation of Chinua Achebe’s ‘Arrow of God’. Why did you single out this particular work of Achebe’s? What did it take to put it together?

Ogezi: It was quite obvious that I had to choose Achebe’s ‘Arrow of God’ for a stage adaptation out of his oeuvre. The dense, multi-layered nature of the work, which is susceptible to diverse stage interpretations, was my major attraction. It gives free rein to the adapting playwright’s imagination to put flesh to some of the shadow characters like Captain Winterbottom’s girlfriend, Dr. Mary Savage, make simpler some grey areas in the novel and, of course, create new dialogue. Personally, I don’t envy any playwright commissioned to adapt Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ for the stage, as he is left with limited room to create dialogue and tinker with the plot.

As regards the adaptation process, I first took my time to study the text very well, made copious notes on its characterization and the underlying themes. I then drew up an outline of my adaptation and the play wrote itself.

Bookshelf: ‘The Threshing Floor’ explores varied themes. There’s the issue of religious hypocrisy, deception, fraud, marital infidelity and so on. What did you set out to achieve in the collection?

Ogezi: My short story collection, ‘The Threshing Floor’, is a montage of varied themes from religious hypocrisy, marital infidelity and human deception and fraud, to spiritual mysteries, the limits of justice, the many and uncertain shades of love. I used the word montage advisedly because the short story is a kind of a snapshot on the society, capturing rather fleetingly its frailties and foibles as well as strengths. Through the instrumentality of the short story form, I have examined the timeless theme of appearance versus reality, which is the single thread that runs through all the stories, especially in the titular story, ‘The First Stone’, ‘Arekwu’ and ‘Pages from a Suicide Note.’ The aim of literature to me, is to entertain, albeit with some messages subtly passed across. The moment a writer loses sight of this in the name of some messianic mission of changing the world, his works become dreary propaganda that the readers have to read stoically. That’s why in all my works, I strive not to bore the readers, no matter the seriousness of my subjects. That was what I sought to achieve in this collection, to hold the multi-faceted mirrors to my society in an adroit manner that it will still tell me, ‘thank you.’ I see literature as kindred of diplomacy where you can tell someone to go to hell, and he still tells you thank you. 

Bookshelf: How did you start writing, in general?

Ogezi: The first step to becoming a writer is to be a great reader. During my secondary school days, I read omnivorously many junior African texts such as Ekwensi’s ‘An African Night’s Entertainment’, Achebe’s ‘Chike and the River’, Michael Crowder and Umaru Ladan’s ‘Sani Goes to School’, Onuora Nzekwu’s ‘Eze Goes to School’ and several others. Owing to the verisimilitude of these stories, I had innocently thought they were true-life stories. Happily enough, when I came to realize that they were not, I tried to write mine. This love for literature made me study it at the Advanced Level at the then School of Preliminary Studies, Keffi. I started writing as early as fifteen and since I had my hands firmly on the plough, I have never looked back.

Bookshelf: Literature has come a long way in Nigeria and Africa in general. How do you view its evolution over time, particularly in Nigeria?

Ogezi: It’s indeed a salutary one. Since literature is a reflection of the society, it’s not static but as dynamic as the society it mirrors. Early African writers were admittedly enamoured with challenges of their days. While writers like Achebe, Armah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote back to the West in socio-politically committed and anti-colonial literature, their South African counterparts like Alex La Guma, Richard Rive and Dennis Brutus grappled with apartheid in their works. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s when most of these African countries became independent, the pre-dominant themes changed from anti-colonial literature to self-examination of what Africans had done with their hard-fought independence. This era was still dominated by the early writers, only that their thematic occupation had undergone some metamorphosis. The 1980s witnessed the birth of Marxist writers like Festus Iyayi, Bode Sowande, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Odia Ofeimun and Ben Okri whose forte was the treatment of inequities in wealth distribution among the economic strata in the society. The post-military era is championed by Helon Habila, Chimamanda Adichie, Chika Unigwe, Sefi Atta, Remi Raji, E. E. Sule, Ahmed Maiwada, Afam Akeh and countless other writers. Despite the hurdles of securing lucrative contracts from reputable publishers and the lack or near absence of the concomitant promotion of their works, this perhaps can be called the golden age of Nigerian and African literature due to its vibrancy and dogged refusal to be pigeon-holed like their predecessors. The hurdles before the 21st century Nigerian writer are fortunately ameliorated by limitless opportunities on the Internet such that at the press of a few buttons, an electronic book is published with the whole wide world as its market. It has never been this good.

Bookshelf: If you are to spend a year in a desert with only the basic things you need to survive, what five books will you not leave behind?

Ogezi: Though I don’t pray for such an eventuality, but should it happen, the five books I will not leave behind, excluding books with spiritual leanings, of course, are, Henrik Ibsen’s ‘Four Major Plays’,  Eugene O’Neil’s ‘Collected Plays’,  Complete Works of Shakespeare, ‘50 Great Short Stories’ edited by Milton Crane and a world poetry anthology.

Bookshelf: You are yet to write a novel. Do you have any in the works?

Ogezi: There’s none at the moment. I’m more worried about the relevance of the novel as a genre in our hi-tech world of the Internet and the plastic arts of television and You Tubes than contributing to such a dying art. The art of playwriting on the other hand, is so disciplined and exact that most renowned playwrights like Anton Chekhov and Sean O’Casey refused to dabble their hands into novel-writing, a genre best suited to writers who were once journalists because of its latitude for the verbose.