‘Why NLNG Prize win is personal to me’

Jude Idada was recently announced winner of the Nigeria Prize for Literature in Abuja, sponsored by Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) company, for his children’s literature titled ‘Boom Boom.’ He was shortlisted for the same prize, drama category, for ‘Oduduwa, King of the Edos’ in 2014, and longlisted for ‘Sankara’ in 2018. He has published […]

Jude Idada was recently announced winner of the Nigeria Prize for Literature in Abuja, sponsored by Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) company, for his children’s literature titled ‘Boom Boom.’ He was shortlisted for the same prize, drama category, for ‘Oduduwa, King of the Edos’ in 2014, and longlisted for ‘Sankara’ in 2018. He has published a collection of short stories, ‘A Box of Chocolates’, an anthology of poetry, ‘Exotica Celestica’, a stage play, ‘Oduduwa: King of the Edos,’ among others. He was a finalist in the New Directions Filmmakers of the future project by MNET and selected as one of the playwrights for the British Council’s Lagos Theatre Festival. In this interview, he talks about his win, not giving up after being nominated twice in the past, the inspiration behind his book, and more. Excerpts:

 

Congratulations on winning the Nigeria Prize for Literature. How does it feel winning a hundred thousand dollars?

Thank you. For me it’s more than just about the money. It is fulfilling. It also felt validating to a large extent. I have been shortlisted before and I have also been longlisted. I have also gotten an honorary mention. So, it was a combination of a cycle, a long wait as it were. It was exhilarating, especially when I didn’t know I had won. I didn’t know it was my name they announced there at the venue and people were shouting around me. I was expecting to here my name and it was the title of the book that was first mentioned.

I always thought I was this stone-cold person and nothing could faze me. Before now, the winner was announced without much suspense. But this time was different. Everybody was in the hall and the tension was there. We, the competitors, were so nervous that when the waiters came to offer us drinks and food, we declined because we were too nervous to eat. Surprisingly, I was more tensed than I thought I would be. That is why I didn’t even hear my name. Everything was quiet in my head. Before then, they had played a trick on us. They came to us and said, “Oh! The judges are hung. Two judges are voting for one, one judge is voting for the other and there was an external judge who had the veto vote, and the decision has to be unanimous.”

 

What inspired ‘Boom Boom’?

I have a friend in Canada who had an arranged wedding. They had gotten a wife for him in Nigeria and he just came to get married a couple of years back. He is AS, a carrier of sickle cell, so was the intended bride. Everybody tried to talk to him not to go ahead with the wedding but he went on with it. He is a very strong Christian and said he believes God will not visit a sickle cell child on him.

He carried on and got married to her. They have two daughters and both of them are SS. One of them who turned nine-years-old at that time had a very serious crisis. I went to the hospital with him and she was crying. She kept saying, “Daddy, why me?” and he said, “God knows why.” In my mind I felt he made this happen and not God, and that he should take responsibility for his actions. I then started thinking back, what if he knew about sickle cell when he was much younger? What if he had understood the dynamics of sickle cell? It’s so hard when you tell people about their genotype and sickle cell anemia when they are in love. They don’t hear what you have to say. They can’t hear you. If they had learnt at eight years old, they would be able to grasp that information and take it seriously so that when they meet a person and they discover they are not compatible genetically, then they can part ways or keep the relationship platonic. Even if they decide to get married, they would have to decide that they won’t have children of their own. They could adopt or do something else.  But definitely not procreate and bring a child into the world to suffer. Definitely not giving birth to someone who is condemned to die right from birth. It is a horrible thing to do, having them have that sword over their heads forever.

But that didn’t get me writing at that time. I wasn’t even writing at the time. I was ill and in South Africa. Tosyn Buknor had died and there was all that on the internet and all that reminded me about my friend. Earlier in my life, I had lost three people to sickle cell, so I already had a background. Hauw’u Audu is a lady who lives in Abuja. I had never met her but she was my friend on Facebook. The first time I met her was at the award night. She would call me up on Facebook; she was going through a series of crisis and she didn’t think she was going to survive the last one. I just had to go with her through that crisis at the time. So, I really saw the fear and felt the pain. It had become personal.

It was at that time I was asked to submit an entry for the Nigeria Prize for Literature. I just felt that was what I was most connected to at that moment. If I had written ‘Boom Boom’ earlier, maybe it wouldn’t have had the same resonance it has. At the time I wrote the book, I did from a place of truth and pain. I would say the stars aligned. I didn’t want to write the second adventure of ‘Didi Kanu’. I was looking for something new and then everything came together to make ‘Boom Boom’ happen. It was, however, very tough to write because it is very technical. You have to understand the disease and its dynamics. There was also the challenge of speaking about it with children.

I love challenges so I said I will do this even though I was ill at the time. My doctors would instruct that my laptop be taken away from me but I told them I had to write the story. I had to research and speak to doctors. I even spoke to the doctor who was treating me at the time. I had this upper respiratory tract infection and I would ask her questions about sickle cell. She wondered why I was asking because I didn’t have sickle cell. I told her I was working on the story and she told me to ask about what I was suffering from. The story possessed me totally.

Personally, I believe in the spirituality of art and that we as writers are just vessels. I feel like at that point in time, it was a story that had to be told, and I was receptive to it. I just believe it was flying around and it saw that I was an airport waiting to be landed on and it did. People who suffer from the sickle cell disease prefer to be called warriors and not sicklers. So, having a book that tells their stories, one that they connect with, has been wonderful. I want to believe that I won the prize because of that collective swell of goodwill and celebration. The celebration of having a book that lets people know what they go through and how they survive it.

 

What would you say was most challenging about your writing process?

What was most challenging was that I was ill when I did. I was so ill that I had to be placed on oxygen. I had to also be transferred to another hospital in Pretoria. But I had to write through it. Even the editor couldn’t believe that I finished the book. I kept saying I will finish it, even if I am dying there will be a completed manuscript. So, that was it. Between being ill and the technicality of finding that voice which is the voice of Boom Boom. Boom Boom and Osaike were the voice of the book. So, finding Osaike’s voice was the challenge, an eight-year-old boy concerned about his sister’s health when both of them had just lost their mother. I was going to deal with such a dark subject and I was going to write it for kids. So, I was wondering how I would write about a dark subject for kids while making it hopeful, educative and informative. I think it’s the most technical thing I have ever written.

 

What do you plan to do towards the sickle cell course now that you have won the prize?

Even before I won the prize, I spoke to some ‘warriors’ whom I knew and there was a presentation of the book by the Sickle Cell Foundation itself. For every copy of the book that is sold they have a percentage. But with this win, I am going to give some money to the foundation and some others who are doing similar work.

 

Being that you were writing for children, how were you able to make Osaike triumph over the situation?

First and foremost, I made Osaike me. That is what I decided to do. I said I was going to take myself back to that age. Who was Jude at that time? What were my fears and desires? How did I confront the world as I saw it? So, I think that helped me with the truth of Osaike. Osaike is not a perfect character, so he learns as he fights for his sister’s life. This also teaches him about himself. The story explores jealousy, true brotherhood, what it means to have a family and hope even when there is none.

Compard, the dog could talk but only Osaike could hear it. This is what happens to a lot of children. Sometimes they say there is something under my wardrobe or under my bed. But we keep on telling them that there is nothing there. As we grow older the world kills our spiritual awareness. That is why a child may cry when given to a particular person and yet hug another. They are like dogs who see what we don’t. A dog’s ear can suddenly perk up and it starts to bark at the wall. This is why I used the dog and its relationship with the boy to explain the spiritual, and of course, their dead mum.

On the book cover, Osaike is pointing up to a star. When the mum was dying, she had told Osaike that “whenever you want to talk to me, just look up to the sky and gaze upon the brightest star; that is me. By doing that, I was also trying to teach children how to understand the concept of death. I wanted to take away the fear potential of death. Death is not the end; it is not as horrible as we think. It’s transformative. Even as we get to the end of the book, it ended with Boom Boom telling her mum that she can rest now. Boom Boom had survived after getting the stem cell transplant. She told her mum “it is okay, we are good now. Daddy will get married and somebody else will love us like you loved us.” This part was a big issue between my editor and I. She wanted me to change it, that why would the daughter want another woman to take their mother’s place? She wanted it to end with the husband staying unmarried for the rest of his life.

But they were a young couple and I don’t believe that love is a prison. I believe that when you die, you go into a realm where there is greater love. So, if you say that a man shouldn’t marry again, that means you are trying to equate the love of this realm to that of the realm beyond. But the love of that realm is so great that if we, the living, understand it, we won’t feel bad that someone who has left is being deprived of life.

The concept of love, pain, grief cannot be overlooked in this book. Talking about it takes me back to the writing process when I would stop to cry. I was so connected to the story. Like I said, it is a spiritual experience. However, I wrote ‘Boom Boom’, whatever happened when I wrote it is beyond me. It affected my readers the same way it affected me.

 

What advice do you have for those hoping to win the Nigeria Prize for Literature in the years to come?

I’m hoping that people don’t write for the money. I’m hoping that they have stories to tell and they want to tell that story as honestly as they can. I say this because there are four judges who you have no control over. You don’t know what they like or what they want. NLNG doesn’t publicize the kind of content they want. They just say, be a Nigerian and write a story. Some years you write and they tell you the reason why your story did not win was because it was dealing with a foreign individual and they wanted something Nigerian. The next year you write and they tell you the story that won was dealing with a foreign individual in a universal setting. So, you never know. At the end of the day, it was like all the stars aligned for me. So, my advice is for writers to write as honestly as they can. Do not write for a prize but because you have a message or a story to share. Then just hope that whether you win or not, you keep on writing, because at the end of the day, the person who comes first might not necessarily be the most successful writer in the next 10 years. The fact that I won it now doesn’t mean that others won’t be successful too. Anita Daniel Oniko is 12 years old and she wrote a book that is very powerful. I didn’t even know she was 12 years old. So, someone like that is who we should celebrate. She wrote a good book at that young age. I started when I was eight years old but no one could support me at that time. She is lucky to have parents pushing her, who submitted the book on her behalf. At that age, my parents would ask me to go read my books. So, we should celebrate that family, that child prodigy, her parents who are open minded and exposed enough to know that they have a duty to harness whatever gift their child has. Anita lives in Lagos and she is homeschooled. Her mum gives her all. She grooms her child with such an open mind. I am hoping that sometime in the future we will hear her name on a bigger pedestal. When I was shortlisted and she wasn’t, I called her mum, and she said Anita has been crying all day and I asked to speak with her. I told her that whatever happens I will always be her friend and we will be in touch. I told her it’s not about her; I have also been through this. It doesn’t mean anything whether you are shortlisted or not.

I feel that in our little ways, we have to encourage each other. Writing is very lonely. It is not as rewarding as we think. We could go stretches without being rewarded. It is not a sprint at all, it is a marathon.