He does not live here. He plies his trade in the United States of America. But his blood is 100 per cent Nigerian. It is also 100 per cent Igbo. And, if I may add, it is 100 per cent Abia. There is a bit of Yoruba in him, too, because of an accident of birth in Akure, the Ondo State capital where he set his first novel The Fishermen— that great work of literary fiction which introduced us to Chigozie Obioma.
The dynamics of the childhood of this amazing writer who calls me “ore or my friend or my brother”, and the good he put the dynamics to, remain interesting to me. He is the fifth of twelve children. Their home in Akure — where his father had to start a home because of his job with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) — was noisy. As a recluse, he would always hide and books provided him safe havens. Chigozie, who speaks Yoruba, Igbo, English and Turkish, started reading as early as six years of age. And the more he read the more he discovered he could also write. Noise thus produced a world-class writer. What this means is that we can always make something good of whatever situation we find ourselves.
I choose to celebrate the good in Nigeria today through Chigozie, who I feel comfortable addressing by his first name. I woke up two days ago to the news that his sophomore novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, has been longlisted for the Booker Prize. His first made the shortlist. I expect An Orchestra of Minorities to also make the shortlist and eventually get the coveted prize. Another Nigerian, Oyinkan Braithwaite, also made the list with her debut My Sister the Serial Killer. I also understand that Bernardine Evaristo, who is also on the longlist, is of Nigerian descent.
Chigozie’s An Orchestra of Minorities is phenomenal. The narrator is neither a man nor a woman. It was a first for me to see a novel in which the narrator is neither a man nor a woman. The narrator is the chi, the guiding spirit in Igbo cosmology. You can say Chi wrote about chi and you will be right. My encounters with Chigozie in March and our e-encounters give me the impression that he is an unassuming gentleman ever willing to offer literary assistance, even with his tight schedule.
No hairs! Yet he was a first-class student at the Cyprus International University, where he won a scholarship for a second degree and stayed back to lecture before America beckoned. At 27, his novel, The Fishermen, shook the literary community. Now at 33, he is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His An Orchestra of Minorities, in my view, has the potential to do better than The Fishermen. For someone with these sterling records, you will expect Chigozie’s head to swell like Ijebu gari. But no, he acknowledges the fact that luck had a role in his achievements in life. He told me in an interview in March: “I have classmates; we went to this elite school top programme in creative writing and I was like the only one who sold my book, even from the set before us. Then there is this girl who just sold hers, and there is another about to sell hers. That is out of about 22 people. Some of them are working in McDonald now, getting very low pay but they are fantastic writers. Not everybody is going to succeed in that…You need luck.”
For Chigozie, he will never trade art for propaganda, which he believes does not endure. That is why he believes the first focus of any work of art should be the artistry. “Fiction, for me, is a lot of things. It is a story but it is also how you tell the story. For instance, everybody can draw, but what makes a great painter is the light, the colour, the shades brought to the drawing. 200 people can draw a portrait of you, but one will stand out and people will say this is a work of art.” He believes writing propaganda can get you a lot of money and fame “because everybody is politically wired, but it will not endure in the end”.
Chigozie’s quest for enduring art has created a problem for him. The problem is that he is always on the lookout for ways, other than the traditional, to tell stories. No wonder he wrote an over 500-page long novel in which the narrator is the chi. Those who have read Chigozie’s essay, The Audacity of Prose, will not be surprised about his ‘disdain’ for the traditional. “The essential work of art is to magnify the ordinary, to make that which is banal glorious through artistic exploration. Thus, fiction must be different from reportage; painting from photography. And this difference should be reflected in the language of the work — in its deliberate constructiveness, its measured adornment of thought, and in the arrangement of representative images so that the fiction about a known world becomes an elevated vision of that world,” he argued in that essay for The Millions.
My encounters with Chigozie have left me with the feeling that pursuing one’s passion and standing for what you believe in are enduring virtues. Before studying in Cyprus, Chigozie was at a private university in Enugu. On Wednesday morning, he wrote about being ‘pursued’ from a college (university) because of a book he wrote. “I did Economics in a Nigerian private university in Enugu but it was a complete waste of my time. I left there because I was always protesting and they were going to throw me out,” he told me in March. After the Enugu misadventure, his chi led him to Cyprus where his star shone and soon America saw it and liked it and we are all reaping the goodness through The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities and more to come. He has also struck me as very principled. Or, how do you see someone who pulled his book from a dollar-denominated prize because he felt the sponsor was causing havoc to the people? I have since explained to him that the firm in question only liquefies gas and has little or no role in gas flaring.
If there is any paragraph in An Orchestra of Minorities that will stay with me for a long time because it speaks to the situation in our country, it is where the chi speaks of “the land of lack, of man-pass-man, the land in which a man’s greatest enemies are members of his household; a land of kidnappers, of ritual killers, of policemen who bully those they encounter on the road and shoot those who don’t bribe them, of leaders who treat those they lead with contempt and rob them of their commonwealth, of frequent riots and crisis, of long strikes, of petrol shortages, of joblessness, of clogged gutters, of potholed roads…and of constant power outages”.
My final take: We must all find a way to end a situation where Nigeria remains a land of lack, a land of man-pass-man, a land in which a man’s greatest enemies are in his household; a land of kidnappers, a land of ritual killers, a land of policemen who shoot those who don’t bribe them and a land of leaders who rob those they lead of their commonwealth.
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