‘Why the message in my novel is urgent’

Bookshelf: What is your novel, ‘Easy Motion Tourist’, about? LeyeAdenle: It’s about women, violence against women, Lagos, police brutality, prostitution, dogs, corruption, crime, love, and dark forces. It’s about Amaka, a young woman who runs a charity that looks after sex workers. She does this by day, but by night she offers a different kind […]

Bookshelf: What is your novel, ‘Easy Motion Tourist’, about?
LeyeAdenle: It’s about women, violence against women, Lagos, police brutality, prostitution, dogs, corruption, crime, love, and dark forces. It’s about Amaka, a young woman who runs a charity that looks after sex workers. She does this by day, but by night she offers a different kind of service, a service she carries out in secret to protect the girls. Her biggest fear is the day a girl would turn up dead because she, Amaka, failed to protect them. The novel opens on that day.

Bookshelf: What was the inspiration for the work?
Adenle: I remember the exact moment the story came to me.  It came to me whole, almost fully formed. I didn’t know the entire plot, twists and all the characters or their names, but I knew the substance of the story and I knew how I would tell it. It was from a conversation with two of my brothers and my mum. We always get into long, engaging discussions whenever we’re all together. This time we had been talking for a while and the discussion had turned to the vulnerability of sex workers and violence against women in general and I had a thought. That thought, or realisation, became the plot of the story. When I returned to my place that evening I started writing and I completed the first chapter. I continued writing every day till the story was done. In all, that first draft was completed in two months. I felt an urgency to tell the story. That was in 2008. Today, I still feel the urgency for the message of the story to be shared.

Bookshelf: How challenging was it developing the major character, Guy Collins?
Adenle: Guy Collins is not the major character. Think of him as the supporting act;he’s the narrator of the story.However the major character, if there is one, is Amaka. She is the hero of the story. Developing her was challenging, as she is a composite character of some truly remarkable women I know, some tragic, some fabulous, some of them victims, some of them helpers and protectors of victims. She is as real to me as each of the amazing women she represents, but from all of them came Amaka as her own person.
Guy Collins is partly based on a friend of mine whose real name is Guy Collins.

Bookshelf: You have written that a prostitute you met a long time ago made it into the book. Can you recount your experience and how you are paying homage to her in the novel?
Adenle: Late one evening several years ago, on SanusiFafunwa Street, the Red light district of Victoria Island at the time, my friend was driving and he had stopped for me to get down and buy him a packet of his brand of cigarettes. I was very conscious of where I was and I didn’t want to be seen by anyone. I just wanted to buy the cigarettes and get back into the car so we could leave the place as quickly as we came.  A girl I had seen and avoided eye contact with touched my hand and said something that amounted to soliciting. Without looking at her, I shrugged her hand off and told her I wasn’t interested. When I turned to return to the car she was standing there looking at me, her face fallen, maybe even close to tears, and she said, ‘You didn’t have to say it like that.’
Those words, and the deeply, deeply, painful sad look on her face, led me to many realisations – after I got over the initial shame for my own behaviour –  that in most cases at least, prostitution is not a choice but a lack of choices.
She is there in the novel, physically and in spirit. See if you can find her. I hope the reader sees her the same way I have come to see her.

Bookshelf: How did you come about the title?
Adenle: The manuscript was initially called 24 hours in Lagos, and then it was called Amaka. The title, ‘Easy Motion Tourist’, is from a highlife hit song by the Harbours Band Group. It was a track on a record they re-recorded in 1971. I believe the late Fatai Rolling Dollar composed it. The inspiration for the song, or the cryptic phraseeasy motion tourist, came from the plight of one of the band members, SeniTejuoso, who was locked out of his home by his father sometime in the 50s after returning late from a night party. Gabriel, one of the characters in the book, draws similarities between the backstory of the song and Guy’s situation in Lagos.

Bookshelf: Why did you choose the crime genre?
Adenle:This particular story wanted to be told as a crime story. At the core of it, it is about a kind of crime; violence against women, but it’s also about a lot of other things and it could have been written from another perspective. I would not say that I chose to write in the crime genre; I would say the story chose to be told as a crime story. Maybe my love for the genre has something to do with it.

Bookshelf: You are also an actor. Has that influenced your delving into writing?
Adenle: I have done some acting, but not as much as I would have loved to.  It’s one of my three great loves-don’t ask me what the other two are – but the writing came first. If one has influenced the other, I would say my writing influenced my decision to go for my first ever audition. It was for a stage play. I’ve always wanted to write a play. I still might do, one day.

Bookshelf: What do you hope to achieve through your story and do you think you have succeeded? 
Adenle:If, from reading ‘Easy Motion Tourist’, other people are made to confront their prejudices like I was, if they come to the same realisation as me, if attitudes change towards sex workers, if the topic of violence against women becomes a national issue, if attitudes towards women change, then I would have done my job.
I do not know if a charity like the one Amaka runs exists, or if anybody out there is doing what she does, both officially and secretly, for the girls, but I hope ‘Easy Motion Tourist’ can inspire someone or a few people to start.

Bookshelf: How long did it take for you to write the book and how challenging was it?
Adenle: The initial manuscript was written in the space of about two months. It took several rewrites and edits later before it became the book that it is today. The initial draft was easy, it poured like a stream of consciousness. The rewriting and the editing was the difficult part.