Title: The Writer in Mirror: Conversations with Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo
Edited by: Evelyn Urama
Review by: Adaobi Muo (Ph.D.)
THE Writer in Mirror: Conversations with Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, edited by Evelyn Urama, is a collection of interviews with Akachi Ezeigbo, by researchers, critics, theorists, and journalists. The four hundred and ninety pages book is organized in six sections and holds forty-two conversations across two decades and eight years (1992 to 2020). Most are already published in local and international academic journals, newspapers and magazines. The book puts to temporary rest Adimora-Ezeigbo’s audible and untiring artistic voice as she faces the mirror and speaks outside the mask of arts. Consequently, the family, cultural, gender, language, educational and political dynamics and orientations, which, together, shape and sharpen the writer’s robust literary oeuvre and prodigious scholarship, are carefully excavated and collectively archived in one accessible space. According to Urama, the book aims to present Ezeigbo’s interviews in a “single reachable volume” for the growing number of researchers interested in her arts (xxiv).
The book opens with “Foreword” (1 and 11), by Stephanie Newell and Patrick Oloko. Both, respectively, justify the necessity of the book citing Adimora-Ezeigbo’s unsurpassed prolificacy and popularity within the contemporary Nigerian literary landscape. Newell, additionally, emphasizes Ezeigbo’s robust scholarship, gender/social activism, theorisation and oral artistry and observes that, for her audience, the book probably provides a “first time” comprehensive view of the profound link between the several portfolios of the writer (ix). For Oloko, Ezeigbo’s irrefutable contribution towards balancing the gender landscape of Nigerian writing makes her the best candidate for the necessary mirror gaze. He locates the utilitarian value of the text in its capacity to “enrich the reading experience” by revealing remote and concealed forces and intents beneath Ezeigbo’s writings (xii). He notes the profound impact of the book on the increasing Adimora-Ezeigbo scholarship. Oloko’s perception of the role of interviews in closing writer/reader schism adds significant force to his argument and remains one of the most invaluable statements on the necessity of the book and Ezeigbo’s creativity.
Akachi Ezeigbo’s mirror gaze commences with “Profile: Personal, Literary, Professional and Psychobiographies,” constituted by four conversations. The first two interviews show silhouettes of strong and successful female relatives and good schools that, initially, planted and nurtured healthy seeds of gender activism and writing in the writer. Also illustrated is the dependence of Ezeigbo’s creativity on her immediate environment, as exemplified by the close connection between her parents’ real love story and fictionalised Eaglewoman and Ossai’s in House of Symbols. For readers who, like Oliver Twist, seek some more by asking for her autobiography, Ezeigbo unveils Ezechi Onyerionwu’s biographical Literature and Life: Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo as the book to read. She locates her near-total satisfaction with the book in its attempt at situating her creativity within the broader historical context of African literature. Other interesting disclosures include Adimora-Ezeigbo’s on-coming Igbo novel and on-line poems. Ezeigbo’s compelling compassion, she identifies as a parental bequest, is best demonstrated in her one-night free shelter to a stranded stranger in her UNILAG home. In the account is perceived the audaciousness and empathy that undergird her personality, creativity and activism.
Enhancing the first images in the mirror, the two subsequent interviews display Ezeigbo’s voracious reading appetite and her intimate and unbroken communion with a host of prominent literary deities and ancestors from different regions of the world who shaped her literary “sensitivity and sensibilities” (23). In these are perceived the other strong arm beneath the writer’s prodigious accomplishments. Adimora-Ezeigbo’s self-revelation here is mostly prompted by Olatunbosun Taofeek’s scholarly curiosity based on the writer’s novels, including The Last of the Strong Ones and Roses and Bullet. By reason of length, it is the most ambitious, spreading across thirty pages (22-51). Very few responses in the entire book echo the profundity and preferences of Ezeigbo’s equally phenomenal critical enterprise as much as her submission on Achebe’s Arrow of God. She considers the novel a classic, “Achebe’s best … most powerful book,” in terms of content, form and relevance, while the protagonist, Ezeulu, is unveiled as her “favourite character” (29 and 28). This provides a formidable foundation for a holistic reflection of Ezeigbo’s eminently successful writing career, scholarship and activism.
Armed with fourteen interviews, the second section, “Career Development: Accomplished Academic, Administrator and Award Winning Writer,” is the most populated region of the mirror. It brightens the writer’s mirror image through colourful scenes of her long and demanding, but rewarding, journey to the zenith of her enviable writing, and academic careers, from the late 1960s to the present. The first six conversations made several significant revelations. These include her key success factors of effective time-management, hard work and discipline and sense of fulfillment, rotating around her perception of success as impact. Next, is an identification of space, time and money as prerequisites for a successful writing career, in a manner that reflects Woolf’s seminal “A Room of One’s Own.” Again, is Ezeigbo’s disclosure of her challenges as a female HOD in English Department of UNILAG and in which the administrator in the writer shows up in the mirror. Another is Ezeigbo’s perception of the necessity of talent and criticality of skill in creativity,