‘Why my novel comes long after Caine Prize win’

Tope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer who won the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing for his first published short story, ‘Miracle’, pulled out of a novel-in-progress. In 2019, years after, his debut novel, ‘A Particular Kind of Black Man,’ gets published. Bookshelf recently cornered him for a chat in Kaduna where he talked about […]

Tope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer who won the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing for his first published short story, ‘Miracle’, pulled out of a novel-in-progress. In 2019, years after, his debut novel, ‘A Particular Kind of Black Man,’ gets published. Bookshelf recently cornered him for a chat in Kaduna where he talked about his work, living in America, and more. Excerpts:

Bookshelf: Why would you say it took you this long to publish a novel?

Tope Folarin: I think part of it is that I won the Caine Prize for African Writing for the first story I ever published in 2013. I was the least published person on the shortlist. The winning story, ‘Miracle,’ was pulled from a prior version of the novel that I just published. I went to London after winning the Caine Prize. Afterwards, I traveled around Africa, Europe and even America, and it was really good to get people’s perspective on the story. In a certain way it has changed what I really wanted to write about, hearing people talk about my work and how it has impacted them. I think as a writer you write something in a particular way and then someone perceives it in a different type of way based on their experiences. I think after that process, I wanted to do something I hadn’t seen before, and sometimes that takes time. I know there is an expectation about the kind of novel that some of us are meant to produce and I was keenly aware of that and I didn’t want to produce that kind of novel. I wanted to do something that was new, and something that wouldn’t turn someone off. So it took me some time to strike that balance.

Bookshelf: What influenced your choice of the title ‘A Particular Kind of Black Man’?

Folarin: So, for a long time I had a different title. It was called ‘The Proximity of Distance’ for years. A funny thing happens when the publisher accepts the book and the process starts. He came back to me and said “we are not sure about this title, is there any other you can think of? At first, I was upset because again I had been thinking about the novel with this other title I had for some time. Then, when I was talking to my editor, it came to me that ‘A Particular Kind of Black Man’ is really the best title. It refers to the journey of the protagonist, a black boy who becomes a black man growing up in the states. His father told him that in order for him to be successful, he had to be a particular kind of black man. His father doesn’t always have much respect for African Americans and says, “yes, you can embrace that part of who you are, your blackness, but you have to differentiate yourself from other people who look like you. You have to become a particular kind of black man.

My protagonist does that, but then throughout the novel he wonders who he actually is because in trying to satisfy others, he has spent so long creating this persona. Growing up, the protagonist asks the question, “if my entire purpose in life is to be a particular kind of black man, then who am I? How do I determine what makes me laugh, cry, and smile?” So, he begins a journey of self-discovery. The best title, in my view, does a few things: It invites a reader to engage with the work and also kind of summarizes it. I think titles are really important and this matches the work and captures what the book is trying to do.

Bookshelf: What triggered the story?

Folarin: I think it was what happened, back in 2006. I was in London and just started working at Google. I had just graduated and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I had this job I was happy with but I also wanted to be creative and I wasn’t sure how. There was a moment when I moved to London and had a very brief flash of the novel I was supposed to write.

Shortly, I started learning to write and wrote this long novel. I knew it wasn’t very good and so I started reading. I have always been a reader and wanted to figure out how to be a good writer. I noticed that all the books that I admired were by poets. But I didn’t have much interest in poetry and kind of slept through my poetry classes in high school and even college. So I started reading poetry because I thought, these were the vitamins I needed to take in order to become a good writer. By 2010, I was doing nothing but reading and writing poetry. Initially I started writing a memoir, but as time passed, I realized that I was actually working on a piece of fiction. Now, that was the genesis of the novel.

Bookshelf: Your central character, Tunde, has had a difficult childhood. There was his mentally ill mother who abused him, and then his stepmother who prefers her own children. Then he experiences double memories. What was the trigger for this twist in Tunde’s life?

Folarin: I think it’s a really good point. The double memories are really about Tunde recognizing the fact that he inhabits a reality that was not constructed for his benefit. His father was basically saying, we inhabit this country, this reality that will oppress you if you don’t become the kind of person they want you to be. When Tunde recognizes that, for the first time he comes to grips with the idea that if he wants to become a full person, he would have to recognize the kind of oppression that is a part of his environment and his everyday life. I think once he begins to recognize that, that is when he begins to question everything. If this reality was not created for my benefit, how much of my life and how much of my memory can I trust?

One thing that really kind of moved me and influenced my writing was something James Coetzee said about how we are walking stories. The really interesting thing about that is that memories themselves are part of that narrative. Our memories are not always a hundred percent accurate. What happens as you grow older is that your memories adapt themselves to the narrative of the life that you have created about yourself.

I was talking to my brother once and said, “do you remember that one time we went to the park and you pushed me and I fell and I scraped my knee?” My brother said, “what are you talking about? You fell by yourself,” and then he told my dad and my dad said “no, he didn’t push you that time, I remember vividly, you fell.” Then I had two options, and I thought they were lying to me, but they had no reason to lie to me. I have recognized the fact where I created this narrative where I became the victim, so the question is, why did I do that? Tunde has a similar situation where he has created a version of himself that satisfies other people, specifically white people.

Bookshelf: As a Nigerian who lives in the United States. How much of these two countries would you say has influenced your work?

Folarin: My parents were born and raised in Nigeria, and I was born and raised in America. My parents are very proud Nigerians, so what that means is that whenever I went home, it was like going to the Nigeria of their memories. They left and states in the US for many years, so they were not necessarily plugged into the latest version of the country.

My dad always told me never to forget that I am a Nigerian. So, ultimately this sense of connection filters into my work. But there is also this shame that comes with being connected to Africa in America, and to be honest it wasn’t something I initially embraced. When you are young and, on the playground, you just want to be accepted and belong. If somebody finds out that you have this connection, they start asking questions like whether you live in trees. I visited when I was one years old and then didn’t visit for many years, so I didn’t have a sense of what it was. Even when you are watching the news, you see tragic stories. So, for much of my younger life I didn’t want that association. But I become intensely interested when I get to college. I study Nigerian and African politics, pan Africanism and reading Kwame Nkrumah and his speeches and so on. Then I discover that many questions I am grappling with and many things they are saying are things I was wondering about my own life. I went to grad school and my second master’s degree is in African studies.

So I spent my twenties trying to connect in a very visceral way to this thing I had initially rejected. My book is also about that process of discovery, about trying to embrace every part of who you are. I think part of what happens when you grow up in the states is that, if you are not a white person and want to be successful, you spend a lot of time repudiating a part of yourself white people don’t accept or understand. That was something I experienced while growing up. That is what happens when Tunde gets these double memories because he has never lived his whole truth. He is not a full human being, and there are people who are not because they grew up in that context.