From five and six-figure deals to other kind of international book and screen-writing deals, Nigerian authors in Sweden, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom are breaking barriers, telling spellbinding tales and receiving well-deserved accolades, writes United States Bureau Chief OLUKOREDE YISHAU
Yarima Lalo had twice been killed, the first time was during the onset of the Nigerian civil war and the second time was during one of the many riots in the early 80s Kafanchan. Now, in his third coming, a visit to a train station brings back flashes from these previous gruesome ends. Unlike Lalo, Nani has no such history. She is a woman who has to endure pain so raw it can be touched.
And in the case of Owoicho, he loses his wife and three of their four children on the day their plan to relocate to Canada is approved. And wait for this: Kemi and two other women experience what it means to be black women in Sweden. Yarima Lalo is the man Abubakar Adam Ibrahim built his new novel, ‘When We Were Fireflies’ around, Nani is Chika Unigwe’s creation in her new novel, The Middle Daughter, Owoicho is the main character in Nigerian-Canadian novelist Michael Afenfia’s ‘Leave My Bones in Saskatoon’ and Kemi is one of the three women through which Lola Akinmade Åkerström continues her exposition on Sweden in ‘Everything Is Not Enough’, the follow-up to her debut ‘In Every Mirror She is Black.’ ‘Everything is not enough’, and another book, known now as ‘Deepest Well’, now have dual deals in the United Kingdom and the United States. The U.S. deal is in six figures and the UK one is five figures.
Breaking barriers
Publishers in Sweden, where Åkerström calls home, have refused to publish her novels because the racism she tackles is an issue the country sweeps under the carpet. “Some gatekeepers wanted me to water down my message before they would consider publishing my work but I declined. This work feels so much larger than my personal desires. I usually don’t like the phrase “giving a voice to the voiceless” because I believe we all have our own voices. But what I do believe in is using your platform to elevate the voices of others who are marginalised and aren’t being listened to because of all the metaphoric noise in various rooms. That’s what my debut novel IN EVERY MIRROR SHE’S BLACK was about,” she said.
Chimeka Garricks, Nigerian-Irish writer and author of ‘A Broken People’s Playlist’, which recently got published in the United States and the United Kingdom by publishing giant HarperCollins, told The Nation that there were elements of luck in how the book initially published in Nigeria by Masobe Books got the big deals. “I hoped it would get into the international market, so after I wrote it, I prepared the best I could (for instance, I negotiated a publishing deal that kept an open route to the international market if the chance came). In a way, I bet on myself.
“But honestly, almost all of it (i.e., the fortuitous encounters and connections, unexpected support, a big slice of luck or God’s favour if you will) was out of my control,” he told The Nation. His collection of stories contains fascinating stories about broken people. “The stories were inspired by music and named after the stories that inspired them.”
United States-based Ukamaka Olisakwe, the author of ‘Ogadinma’, has broken a new ground with writing for television. Olisakwe told The Nation: “TV writing is quite nerve-wracking. Unlike with fiction or nonfiction or poetry, where you write for yourself until you are ready to share your work with editors and readers, here your work is assessed not just by your colleagues or the creators or producers, but also by the company funding it, the streamers, their readers, executives. There are so many levels to the assessment that is quite tortuous. You receive lots of notes and you rewrite and revisit, and tweak and polish, until that work has passed all the checks.
“Will I do it again? Absolutely. It is tortuous, but the team you work with make all the different. The creators are the most beautiful, the kindest, the most amazing people I’ve worked with. Jude (Idada), too. It’s such an honour to work on this project with that brilliant man.”
Language
These authors, though overseas, fill their works with Nigerian nuances. The language of The Middle Daughter is English, but with a peculiar Nigerian cadence. Unigwe admitted that she was trying to achieve Chinua Achebe’s desire for African writers to do with English language what the owners didn’t dream of? “The family at the heart of the novel is an Igbo family who speak Igbo at home; so it makes sense that in transcribing their world, that I find a way to maintain the Igboness of it. One of the reasons I love writing in English is its malleability. You can stretch it and bend it and force it to do what you will regardless of how the original speaker meant for it to be used. See how we use ‘swallow’ to refer to fufu in Nigeria. We have ‘nounized’ the verb “to swallow” and given it a new meaning in the process,” the 2012 winner of The Nigeria Prize for Literature said.
‘A Broken People’s Playlist’ is written in English that is unapologetically Nigerian. Do not have a heart attack if you see words such as ‘ajebuttered.’ Garricks is only exercising his poetic licence.
Tackling challenging subjects
Iowa-based Ibrahim, whose book examines the controversial topic of reincarnation, told The Nation he doesn’t necessarily believe in reincarnation. “I am fascinated by the idea of it and what it means for the people who believe, or through a series of events, are made to believe it. I have read accounts of people whose stories lend credence to this discourse. Like Omm Sety and others, controversial as those others have been. What has always been important to me is how our cultures, especially here in Nigeria, have grappled with the concept, of how new-borns are given the names of deceased relatives because they are thought of as returning souls of deceased loved ones. For me as a writer, this is a fertile field of imagination to be explored and that is what I did in this story,” he said.
Atlanta-based Unigwe said she was haunted for years to write Nani’s story. “I’ve always disliked that Persephone never gets completely free of Hades, that her abduction is whitewashed and I love seeing ways in which stories cross cultures and times,” she said. For Afenfia, his new novel was compelled by the need to highlight “the fact that for many people, especially Nigerians – young, middle-aged and old – as we see in the novel, leaving their homeland for Europe or the Americas is existential”.
Garricks tackles subjects such as extra-judicial killings, corruption, and other ills in Nigeria.
Sweden’s racism gets called out in ‘In Every Mirror She is Black’ and its sequel, ‘Everything Is Not Enough.’ Åkerström loves the bloom in much more contemporary fiction “where Black women are given space to not be perfect, make mistakes, and fail spectacularly too.” She added that Black women don’t have to always be strong or work twice as hard for what others get so freely.
“I love that literature is deeply individualising and humanising our stories, and giving us a wide range of emotions and genres. My work is about pushing us from a space of always surviving to thriving against all odds,” Åkerström said.
Olisakwe, whose young adult novel, ‘Don’t Answer When They Call Your Name’, has just been published by Masobe Books, described the work as “a playful, rebellious idea that emerged from a conversation with my family, about this girl who wrestles with a god.” The founder of literary magazine, Isele, said: “The idea was ridiculous and lovely because I was rebellious as a child. I was the girl who did everything good girls weren’t supposed to do. And so it was interesting, to attempt writing about the things I could have done as a child, the kind of adventure I would have gone on—that interesting phase of my life was bright and shiny, before puberty set in and adulthood dimmed my lightbulbs.”
Exile and the muse
Unigwe, who is a faculty member with the Georgia College and State University’s MFA in Creative Writing, doesn’t believe living abroad should rob a writer of the inspiration to write. “The muse is like home, it’s in the heart. It follows you everywhere,” she said. Afenfia, who has published two books since moving to Canada, said living in one county and relocating to another can be drastic and harsh for anyone. “I do not believe that writers come with a special absorber or skill set that make them more adaptive to the culture shock you experience when you move to a new country so I think that a writer can lose the will or inspiration to write just from having to find work, worrying about bills and utilities, challenges with language and all the other barriers a newcomer to any country might face. I do not know how I didn’t lose mine, but because I didn’t doesn’t mean that it might not be challenging for other writers,” Afenfia said.
Dublin-born Garricks said he already had writing fatigue in Nigeria. “I can’t tell the difference really. But even with fatigue, God dey: we go still run am,” he said.
Better support system
Afenfia said the government and community here in Saskatoon is supportive of creatives, including immigrant creatives and writers “because they want to support and promote diversity and representation so that also helped me a lot.” Olisakwe, who compares moving to America as an adult to learning to use the left hand at an old age, said access to books and journals and archives not available at home, has made her a better writer.
