Tares Oburumu, Bayelsa born writer, poet, and literary essayist, who has just won the Sillerman literary prize for African Poetry is one of Nigeria’s brightest young poets. The prize is an exclusive preserve of the African Poetry Book Fund. At an early age Oburumu realised he was going to be a writer and he pursued the dream diligently. In this chat with EDOZIE UDEZE, he made it clear that being a writer pays handsomely well and that the prize means a lot to him.
What inspires you to write?
Water, childhood, grief, hunger, fishing, loss, my mother; the two brothers we lost: their tenderness, the hope that we will grow into a family full of boys, because we had just one sister. My father’s insensitivity, the small bookshelf he built, his coming and going which placed our welfare in the hands of my grandmother and my uncles. With these, I was able to see the world clearly. I couldn’t have placed my inspiration elsewhere. They gave me a threshold to stand on and look at what defined my existence, my experiences. Literally, I was hemmed in, and everything I saw as a child had life because of my father not being there, the water which surrounded us, and how we survived, depending on how it flowed during the flood as we farmed, fished, told stories, and resiliently gave our lives for it. Derek Walcott provided that door by which I opened my own windows and walked into my experiences which were made of water, my mother, and everything that was made to kill us as an extended family living by the banks of the River Forcados. My father’s small library also gave me to the world of books, offered me that opportunity to see knowledge as the point on which the earth turns. Chike And The River was my first book, read with so much love and vigor, as it introduced me to the written word on paper, afterwards, directed my sensibilities toward the sublime experiences I had as a child growing up by the bank of the River Forcados. If I am asked again and again, what inspires me, I have no better answer than this: water. I come from water; my survival, my story, my life, the breath I breathe comes from it. It is difficult to separate me from it, and difficult to say which one loves the other more. I think I that what inspires me, loves me more than I love it. It’s water that connects me to mother, to my father’s own experiences, to loss, to hunger, to grief, to the brothers I lost, to my only sister, to my grandmother, to the uncles I grew up with, to Derek Walcott, to Seamus Heaney, to Tomas Transtromer, to the young Ocean Vough, and to the small bookshelf I was submerged in as fish in water.
When you read a book, what are the salient things you look out for you?
Syntax. Words fascinate me. How they are arranged and the forms in which they appear on a book draws me closer, first, then binds me to it. The depth with which they are arranged in clauses and phrases, lines and verses, stanzas, and in harmony, is the spell that will tether me to it for hours and days without giving in much to the other things that equally need my attention. I grew up in a home where order was seen as something close to being holy, and at a point in my adulthood, looking back at when I was a child, I thought order to be something holy. It was what led me into Ben Okri’s “ Famished Road” and planted me in that book for hours without knowing that I have not eaten for hours. It was what led me to Derek Walcott’s “ Omeros” and I closed myself in its walls bound to the room as if nothing existed save the words I ate minute by minute. When I took up Mandela’s “ No Easy Walk To Freedom” the words succeeded in trapping me in the pages for hours until I finished reading it in a day, and I had to deal with the migraine after. That fierce headache lasted for two days, not until I listened to my mother and saw a medical doctor. I have come, not easily, to the conviction, that a good book is rated so because of the words it employs in telling the plot of the story, in dramatizing the scenes of the play, in the versification, or putting into poem, of the world it’s building.
The world of writers is a world of words. We live for them. And if one must tell a story, write a poem or perform a play, one must live in the words, and for the words. Make the words live the life they should live on the pages. Three months had me stuck with “ Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy, not because it’s a classic but because he made the words live. Books are living things and it’s the words skillfully employed in them that make us breathe as humans.
At what point in your life did you realize you would be a writer?
A few days ago when the African Poetry Book Fund announced me as the winner of this year’s Sillerman prize for African poets. At every point of my twelve years journey in writing pieces of plays, short stories and poems, I never see myself as a writer. I only believe in what I do; writing, having the semblance of a writer, I never had the idea I would become one. They are thousands of people out there who just write for the fun of writing; just a string of words put together and let a few friends look at them; isomeric with authorship, in a resigned fashion, nothing more than being a village minstrel who never dream of being a poet, but sings his heart out to a few people who care to listen; this was what I was doing on the social media: Facebook, and I was dubbed a Facebook poet. I remember one renown poet calling me a Facebook book poet. In his words “ you have never been long or shortlisted for any major prize, nor have been given an award, so to call you a poet or writer is calling a bird an angel. It’s this bird-stage I resigned to. It’s in this bird-stage, never dreaming to become an angel, that I wrote all of my manuscripts, not as someone who knew he would become a writer but as one who doesn’t know how fate works and who is not ready to know.
Of all the books you have read, which character struck you most, how, why?
I do not read much of prose works. I read books of poetry more than any genre. I would instead say that about a character I read in a poem by Seamus Heaney. The character in “ Digging” from the book “ The Death Of A Naturalist” who took something from me, which I thought was not mine and made it mine. These words of Andrew Spacey, for me, defined the will rather than the essence.
“ I now believe that the “digging” poem had for me the force of an initiation: the confidence I mentioned arose from a sense that perhaps I could do this poetry thing too. And having experienced the excitement and the release of it once, I was doomed to look for it again and again”
I substituted fishing for farming and saw in the little boy that Seamus Heaney was, the long history of the water that surrounded my family, the means to survive in it and left the identity question unanswered. Though I admired the courage of the farmer in “ digging” as much as I did in my mother as a fisher, I knew I had no future with the River Forcados. The boy character’s personality was my mien; the doggedness that was my initiation into something different from what the river offered me as a boy.
What book or books triggered the muse in you?
I owe Derek Walcott a lot that I cannot, in my lifetime, pay. After reading his book of poems “ The White Egrets” I submitted myself wholly to the responsibility to my mother, to where I come from and the stories that bind both family and place of birth. If I am to be buried inside a book, it should be the “ White Egrets” or if a book could mean a place of origin, it should be the “ White Egrets”
In what genre of literature do you express yourself more and why?
Poetry. At some point in my twelve years journey writing, I have the feeling that I was born with it. If I had studied it, perhaps I won’t have been able to come up with a line of poem. Perhaps. But I did like to think that I find it beautiful with poetry because I have read more books on poetry than any other genre.
What is the significance of the literary award you just won?
It has made me believe that I would be a writer, opening the once closed doors, I personally locked against myself, to world of books where I think I belong.
In other words, has literature bettered your life?
It has. Even long before now, the little help I get, in my resolve against suicide, trying hard to feed my daughter, is from the friends who believe in literature, who think I have a future in writing.
Who are your favorite authors ,why, how?
Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Tomas Transtromer, and the young Ocean Vough. The duty of a writer is, first, to the self, and the self is the story that needs to be told. They embodied their stories and told them with so much belief in where they come from. What makes a writer is the origin. They wrote about it and I am indebted to say the least of how fascinated I am.
Are you a rereader repeating a book again, why, why?
I do not read a book again after the first read, just as I do not look up a word again and again. I spend months reading a chapter or a piece of poem, slowly, taking one word, one line, one moment, one scene at a time.
How do you arrange your library, at home, in the office?
I do not have a library yet. Neither do I have a home, nor an office. I do not know how I arrange it when I have one.
What book are you reading now what lessons?
I am still reading “ Time Is A Mother” by Ocean Vough. Until I finish reading it, I won’t know what the lessons or objectives are.