The latest news in the literary world is the Booker Prize longlist. Two Nigerians- Chigozie Obioma and Oyinkan Braithwaite – made the much-coveted list. Last March, 33-year-old Obioma spoke with Associate Editor OLUKOREDE YISHAU in Lagos. We reproduce the piece to celebrate this exceptional author, whose first novel The Fishermen, was on the Booker prize shortlist:
Art endures, propaganda doesn’t, says Obioma
Chigozie Obioma, author of the Booker Prize shortlisted The Fishermen and the wave-making An Orchestra of Minorities, has a problem: He hates telling stories the traditional way. This problem led Obioma, who is an Assistant Professor at the University of Lincoln-Nebraska, to write an over 500-page long novel in which the narrator is the chi, the guiding spirit in Igbo cosmology. “I don’t like to tell stories in a traditional way so I am always thinking of an invention,” he says in a restaurant in Ogudu-GRA, Lagos.
The chi tells us the story of Nonso, a poultry farmer, and Ndali— set largely in Umuahia, slightly in Lagos and Abuja, and a lot in Cyprus. Nonso, a 24-year-old lonely orphan, sees Ndali trying to jump off a bridge into water. He persuades her against it. To show how painful it will be, he flings two of his prized fowls into the water.
She rescinds her decision and both of them go their separate ways. They run into each other months later. Ndali feels she owes him her life. He is to find out that heartbreak was responsible for her attempted suicide. A relationship soon starts and before long, Nonso feels like marrying Ndali and tells her his plan. And then begins the real drama of their lives.
Ndali’s father is rich, stupendously rich, and finds it difficult to accept an illiterate poultry farmer as son-in-law. Through Ndali’s brother, Chuka, Nonso is humiliated a couple of times. The humiliation gets him thinking and talking with Ndali and a friend, Elochukwu, and in the long run, he discovers that getting an education may swing things in his favour.
Another dilemma sets in: with universities in Nigeria ever on strike, he wonders how many years it will take to complete a degree. Still, he picks the matriculation form, but soon opts for the option of selling his valuables and heading abroad for studies. Everything appears set until he gets to Cyprus and discovers he has been scammed.
Cyprus turns out hellish. Passers-by call him “slave”. He is mistaken for the Brazilian football star Ronaldinho, and the jealous husband of an expatriate nurse from Germany who helps him turns things upside down. He turns out one of the minorities in faraway land and his shouts for help or his cries for bailout sound more like an orchestra without efficacious power. Returning home only aggravates things. And a lot more sad events follow!
An Orchestra of Minorities is the story of the power of love, the sacrifice a man or a woman is ready to make for love not to suffocate and die. It is a wrestle between destiny and determination. It is rich in folklore and it is a morality tale, with betrayal and revenge as major themes.
This tragicomedy is far more ambitious than Obioma’s critically acclaimed debut The Fishermen. No one knows you better than your guardian spirit, and using this all-seeing spirit as the narrator gives Obioma the opportunity to tell it all despite the fact that the narration is in first person. The omniscient nature of the chi also gives Obioma the leverage to dwell in the spiritual realm, such that parts of the book read like magical realism.
We see the spirit taking leave of the host’s body to spy. We see the chi putting thoughts in the host’s mind in order to influence his actions. We see chis of two beings having a chit-chat. We also see a ghost crying in a bus pleading against a marriage on account that the suitor is a murderer.
Of course, the one the ghost is speaking to cannot hear, only the chi does. And we see the chi at times helpless while Nonso faces the adversities of life.
The novel, Obioma says, was inspired by the death of a Nigerian, Jay, while he was studying in Cyprus for a degree. He says: “The guy whose story inspired the novel, why did he so badly want to get out of the country? He had been deported from Germany, then hardly had he come back to Nigeria that he wanted to badly to get out.
“People walk through Sahara Desert, through Libya at a time when ISIS was beheading people. They saw this but still they were undeterred. It is because it is almost as if Nigeria is a hellfire. Why will you so badly want to leave?”
Jay, says Obioma, came to Cyprus because of a woman he was betrothed to. He needed to make money to be able to give her the best in life.
Unlike Chinonso, Obioma has had a pretty good life. He grew up in a home with twelve children. His banker-father ignited his love for reading in Akure, the capital of Ondo State, where he learnt first to speak Yoruba before speaking Igbo and English. He would later learn Turkish while in Cyprus.
The very interesting dynamics in the house, he believes, made him a writer: “I was not the very playful type. So, I sought a sort of privacy through reading. Reading was an escape from the noise. It was very early in life that I develop interest in reading and writing.
“When I learnt how to read was very early, probably six or seven. And then I discovered that stories go into books. Once I made that discovery, the more I read and the more I read, the more I quietly wanted to produce my own work.”
Because of the metaphysics in his works, some people, he says, have been asking what they should call his type of writing. “It is not fantasy. It is reality and it is also not at the same time. I guess for me I just begin from the principle, from the world view of the Igbo that there is no difference between the world of the living and the dead. I think even the Yoruba and the Edo people have such belief, which was what Ben Okri used in Famished Road.
“You could have extremely realistic thing happening with interference from the metaphysical world. I think it is unique. You see it in our films because that is our reality. A novel as a genre is European.
“The first novel was Spanish. You have free will in the Western tradition and agency. A character has to have a motivation and that motivation spurs him. I do it because I believe it is a form of reality,” he says.
Obioma 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 adds: “For me, the concept is very important. For the Fishermen, the way the story is told is to have Benjamin as an eccentric narrator who tried to understand things by associating it with something else. The father is an eagle, the mother is a snake, the brother is a sparrow, stuffs like that.
“For An Orchestra of Minorities, the concept is through the chi telling the story, being so being loquacious, going on tangent, sometimes, for a long time because he is trying to defend something difficult to defend. Instead of telling the story directly, it is going on this digression to convince Chukwu not to punish his host.
“There is also the issue of classicism, which we experienced in Cyprus, the way they treat Nigerians, Africans and all that.
“I think it is a mistake when you just set out to pursue an agenda. Artistry should be the focus. If not, you end up writing propaganda and I see that a lot. True it can get you a lot of money and fame because everybody is politically wired, but it will not endure in the end. What endures in the most is the art.”
Before studying in Cyprus, a private university in Enugu was where Obioma first tried to have tertiary education. “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.”
Obioma believes in luck. He says: “Writing is not vocational. It is a gamble. I have classmates; we went to this elite school top programme in creative writing and we graduated and even the set before me, I was like the only one who sold my book.
“Then there is this girl now 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 McDonalds now, getting very low pay but they are fantastic writers.
“Not everybody is going to succeed in that. But being in academia also helps because I have time for research and there is a research fund and they pay for everything. Not everybody will have that opportunity because it is very competitive. You need luck.”
“It is for this reason that he always advises his students to not rely on writing alone: “You have a soft landing like tortoise has. If you are a successful lawyer and you sell your novel for a million dollars, fine and good.”
With the success of The Fishermen, Obioma can live off it, “but there is a twist to it because there are so many dependants asking for money. If it were just for me and my immediate family, I will be fine without having to do any other work, but I am still teaching”.
But there is a price to pay for remaining in the academia: “There are so many invitations that I cannot accept because of my being in the academia unlike (Chimamanda) Adichie who can go anywhere.”
But he has no regret because “teaching develops you as well because you are reading a lot of works that are embryonic, in their early forms and the more you read the works of these future great writers, when you see the pitfalls in their work and you follow through to see them improve, the more you are immune to making those mistakes in your own work”.
He is also happy affecting a lot of people: “Over the next five years, I would have taught some 2,000 students and those will keep buying your books and they will always remember what you did. I think one can even form even a solid base from doing that.”
He says he may consider teaching one semester a year so as to have more time for public speaking, which he is bound to get invites for now that he has published a powerful sophomore whose Nigerian edition has just been published by Parresia Publishers.
The United Kingdom and American editions came out earlier and foreign rights have been sold in several countries. Soon Nonso and Ndali will speak French, speak Chinese, speak German and so on and so forth.