Writing In Nigeria

A writer’s take on the challenge with telling authentic Nigerian stories

1.

The Nigerian Writer 

I’ve sat on this grim notion for a while: For good reason, no exceptional Nigerian writer who writes about Nigeria lives in Nigeria. Hence, few Nigerian stories get translated into and disseminated through two important sophisticated media—films & books. Most contemporary Nigerian literature is written by dual citizens—usually of US and Uk descent—who, in order to get published by Western publishers, center immigrant narratives or, when they do bother to write about Nigeria, are somehow so far removed from our reality to the point where they churn out stories that come across as parodies, at best, and laughable, at worst. They perform—or audition, as my friend put it—for the West, to be in their good graces. 

Other African countries are not exempt from this anomaly either. In this day and age, any prominent African writer whose words commands worldwide readership suffers nearly the same fate. One way or the other, the West has a hand in their resplendent, almost envious career. So, they, too, pander; except for a select few, they dilute their stories to suit the foreigner’s palates and idiosyncrasies or tell our stories in a way that appeals to the West then try to market it back to us—the same way our politicians do with oil and petrol.

In the same vein, the dual citizen Nigerian writers use phrases from indigenous languages which they often explain in the next line (God bless those who don’t) or (God forbid) refer to ‘akara’ as bean cake, or italicize Nigerian words like ‘trafficate’, assuming any editor will let them keep such a word in the final draft, too. Their characters are either caricatures or stereotypes that either speak perfect English or posh pidgin.

The remaining writers, to avoid the sinister fate that befalls those who write poorly about these decrepit countries they have thankfully escaped, write more about their new, complex experience as a way to discover their identity and explore their humanity in their new environment. Racism, gentrification, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, police brutality, consume their minds. A select few choose the cosmopolitan route. Curiosity shouldn’t be limited by geography, after all. This isn’t a spotlight meant to open them up to ridicule or further scrutiny. I have a bone to pick and it’s not with them. My focus lies elsewhere, which is here, our battered homeland.

2.

And so it Begins 

Under favorable conditions, writing is an extreme undertaking and writers who live here and write about Nigeria understand how any attempt to articulate their insane plight unintentionally turns every conceivable hyperbole to express the difficulty of the process into a cheap euphemism. Our situation is dire. It isn’t a fruit rotting on one side but from the inside out. That being said, beware of cynicism. Being a writer here is no joke. If you can’t take the pressure, no matter how much you love it, then abandon it. Fundamentally, Nigeria needs three kinds of writers: 

3. Writers who understand storytelling.

4. Resilient writers. 

5. Writers who betray.

3.

Writers who Understand Storytelling 

In this country, we have more writers than storytellers. This problem affects both those who write for film and those who write for books. While I might not offer a perfect definition to separate writing from storytelling, I can explain my retort in the context of our situation. I’ll use ‘writer’ in an unorthodox way. A writer is someone who understands the technical aspects of their craft but doesn’t use them in service of the story. This is the novelist who can spot the comma splices, who knows the sixteen different rules on how to use the comma, who can judge when to use a semicolon or em dash. They craft ingenious metaphors and lay down wicked plots. The titles of their books will beckon your name. They have a clear theme, but all these ingredients don’t mix well with the other aspect of storytelling. The story—the why behind the character’s want and need which constitutes the philosophical argument that takes the reader or audience on an emotional journey as the character experiences their arc—the story never comes to the fore. In film, this is the director who makes a film with amazing cinematography, a good soundtrack, a star-studded cast, but the script is decrepit and the plots are more complex than the characters. Nigerian writers need to go back and study storytelling and master its elements. Know how to embed theme; master rhythm and pacing; understand that dialogue is a tool characters use to achieve their goals and not a conversation; incorporate set pieces and costumes that make the setting pop and reveals something meaningful about the characters. Master genre, since it is a tool used in playing with expectations. How can you engineer conflict that doesn’t feel flat or forced if you don’t understand the value of wants and needs, the place of stakes and tension, mystery and revelation in a story? This problem of storytelling falls to the main aspect that Nigerian writers neglect: characters. This is where the main problem stems from. And this problem is a symptom of another problem which I’ll explain later.

4.

Resilient Writers

Lately, I’ve seen writers lament that they’ve squandered their youth. They can’t write literature anymore. They make excuses and want everyone to wallow with them.

Mine is a lesson in resilience: I grew up with the expectation to become a ship captain hovering over my head. Being from Oron, where the maritime academy is situated, my life had been graphed out by my parents. However, this dream died when I took 41st position out of 43 or so in the Nigerian Navy Secondary School, Calabar. The plan became for me to graduate with a bachelor’s degree, get a Master’s, and eventually a PhD in whatever course. Pretty textbook stuff. I tried a bunch of things during this period: stand up comedy, which was good but not a medium that suited me. I switched to music: I took guitar lessons and expanded my knowledge on music theory.

Then, in my first year at uni, I decided to become a writer. I had no interest in writing books. I wanted to write scripts. A sucker for spectacle, I wanted my stories to find home on a big screen. I even went as far as scribbling an epigram—the best stories are written in courier new font—which I believe to this day to be true. However, someone who acted as a one-time mentor suggested I write books instead. Sensing my drive for fame, to be known, he concocted a lie saying, there are no popular Nigerian script writers. Books were the way to fame. 

Back then, as someone who’d never done art throughout secondary school, I didn’t know who or what a film director was. So, I believed him. I was 15 or 16 and I’d never read up to a dozen novels before. So I picked up Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence—a wicked place to start. The book punished my ignorance. At every turn of the page, a new word. Still, I persevered. I wrote words in columns, filling entire 20 leaves with words galore. Being a stubborn person who loves a challenge, I dared myself to master writing—without guidance—which, now, I consider as madness and unnecessary; also, from that same drive, I googled the names of the most difficult fiction books out there and began reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Ulysesses and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Torture. Torture. Sweet torture. I moved to philosophy. I read Nietzsche and Kant, Hegel (whom I barely understood), Kierkegaard, Satre, Camus, Foucault (I hated myself for this), Adam Smith, Karl Marx, etc. It was insane because I had to read most books at least twice and every sentence in them at least thrice. I hopped between the three dictionaries on my phone at the sight of a new word.

In my house, there were no novels save for Last Days at Forcados High School, Independence and Purple Hibiscus, two of the books I’d only acquired because of JAMB. Self-help books and books on insurance, which I found boring, dominated my father’s library collection. In my city there are no bookshops with curated Nigerian and African books—Chimamanda’sbeing the exception. The ones that exist sell only books by Nora Roberts & Danielle Steele.

When I wasn’t reading my pirated ebooks, throurummaging through my mother’s Success Digest magazines. My younger brother, seeing my zeal, stole books—A tale of Two Cities, Romeo and Juliet, and books from the African series—from his school library for me, which he returned once I completed them. Then, I wrote my first novel-in-stories, The Final Abscission. The story was good, but my storytelling was convoluted: the prose was insufferable: in a passage I wrote, “the [protagonist] lived in a mansion that was baroque in etiquette.” Baroque in etiquette? Shoot me in the head. My friends read the incomplete draft over—they loved the story, but hated the writing. It was cumbersome, a drag, tedious. Me being me, I huffed at their taste. It wasn’t my fault they didn’t know what the hell I meant with all those new shiny, pompous words I’d acquired in a short span of time. They, too, should download three dictionary apps, I consoled myself.

During this period I thought myself to be above editing, too. God, I was insufferable, naive, ambitious and determined. By then I’d read Nabokov and Thomas Hardy, Helen Oyeyemi and Toni Morrison, so, in a bid to write rarefied prose, I wrote some more. Curious to see if there was anyone as ambitious as myself, I joined a local Book Club, Literary Friday. There I met a small community of writers who gathered twice a week to eat waffles and discuss books written by contemporary Nigerian writers such as Elnathan John. They read excerpts from their own works, offering criticism in-between searing banter. In my free time I read Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutola, Cyprian Ekwenu, Chimeka Garricks, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim etc. on my Anybooks app. 

I had to discover and figure out how to read Joan Didion, Louise Glück, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Eve Babtiz, bell hooks, Brontë and so on. Moving from book to academic papers on the completed book, to reading counter critiques, formulating my own ideas on their works, too. At this point, I’d joined another local online community of writers called Talemongers. They organized a weekly contest which forced you to pen short stories on the fly. After my second or third attempt, I won the horror contest and took that story to read at Literary Friday. Anxiety made me quiver as I read, but I persevered.

One thing I noticed which struck me as odd was that very few of the writers were writing about Calabar. They preferred Lagos to here. This brought  a personal crisis to a crescendo: I didn’t know if to continue writing about Calabar or just invent my own worlds, which I did. I drained seven pens writing my second novel on sixteen twenty leaves because I didn’t have a laptop. I learnt how to write cursive so I could write faster without risking RSI. Later, when I got a second-hand laptop, which broke down eventually, I learnt touch typing so I could type faster as light is not guaranteed.

After eight months, when I was done writing, in between freelance copy editing work for different clients, I typed everything up with my phone. Finally, I had a manuscript which I slowly polished until the hassle of querying, submission and… Let’s just say reality put me in check real fast.

My story is similar to many others who have chosen to become writers in this country. It took me only five years to learn two fundamental things about the craft: writing doesn’t pay at once or, for some unlucky few, ever. The only writing that seemed to pay was copy editing and content writing. No one cared about writing about Calabar, let alone Nigeria—even my peers found it daring, novel, which was strange. That I could write about the city I’d grown up in sounded heretic, that my characters didn’t come with easy-to-pronounce names like John Rabbit or Mike Turd was quote-unquote bold. 

With everybody hustling for money, I watched my peers veer off into academic writing and full-time freelancing. A guy I know, the founder of Talemongers, who writes 10,000 words a day like nothing, works for a Hong Kong company, churning out interesting complex stories with ease. He doesn’t write about Nigeria or its inhabitants. An incredible talent in service of some capitalist foreigner with money to throw. (I was skeptical about the 10,000 words claim, too, until I used his formula to write 6,700 words when I struggled with 1,700 most days.)

I was scared to send the manuscript for the book I’d written to agents because the story was pro-gay and the question I grappled with was: Does the law criminalizing queers allow other people to act inhumane without guilt or shame? If yes, then, to what degree? What are the consequences of this bias? Who benefits from this marginalization? If the law is not on your side, who cannot be against you? Does this lead to genocide? What does it do to the moral fabric of the nation?

My parents are conservative, so publishing that book, titled The Dark Gospels, would open me to frisson. I would no doubt be tempting estrangement, so I cowered. However, without resting or mourning my situation, I threw myself into another literary challenge and wrote a lighter book instead—a collection of eight short stories titled The Yellow Ruler.

When I began researching where to publish the book, I got introduced to the fact that most Nigerian publishing houses don’t accept short story collections. I found only two, submitted my manuscript to one, and, afraid I might not get a response or a reasonable royalties, I decided to self publish, which was another behemoth in itself. For a 45,000 word book, the printing press I reached out to informed me that it would cost 940,000 naira to get 1,000 paperbacks. That’s approximately twenty-one times more than my tuition in a year. Madness. When I’m still owing my editor 40,000 naira for the work he did in The Yellow Ruler. So when my peers chose other ventures, I totally understood. They weren’t being unreasonable. In fact, I, in my persistent delusion,  am the unreasonable one. In the face of all these challenges, I choose to strive on.

5.

Writers Who Betray

Recently, Oris Aigbokhaevbolo wrote a piece claiming literature in Nigeria is dead; he’s wrong, it is gestating. Some of the best books to grace this country are in the heads of people who are trying to survive. Give them time. It takes forever to write something timeless. But to respond broadly to this claim, my own personal struggle aside, I’ll address all the ambitious Nigerian writers working in the shadows. This is to dispel the spectre cast by the critic.

To the young and ambitious Nigerian writer, quit now, if you can. Or follow the MFA to the published-in-an-anthology pipeline. Process your passport, leave this country and never look back. Collect your Pushcart Prize and make a lengthy post on Twitter chronicling your journey towards your success. Dedicate your win to Nigeria. Edit your bio. Become part of a rare class of elite writers. Worry about your profile in The New Yorker. Your words have bought you freedom: squander it.

Now, if you’re foolish enough to be a Nigerian writer who decides to live in Nigeria then, at least, be wise enough to buy your coffin alongside your favorite books. Save your parents the trouble in advance. I’m not saying this to be quirky or funny. I’m as serious as can be. This is no joke. Part of the reason why Nigerian stories seem to be no good is, nobody is being honest enough to wreak havoc. The truth is such a taboo. Under our politeness, heinous crimes go undocumented, countless bone-chilling stories are barred behind our fake smiles. Our silence is a cemetery. This is why most characters from our books and films are forgettable. They have no truth to them. They are safe picks. Yes, the reading culture in Nigeria is abysmal, which is troubling for the average upcoming writer, because if there is no audience, why bother? The problem is systemic and systemic problems need systemic solutions, but, as harsh as this next thing is going to sound, you are writing more for the next generation than you are for your peers.

Don’t fall into the trap of writing vapid comedies. After all, laughter is not only present at a comedy special, it is also a common feature of an asylum.

The Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut in a recent interview said: Betrayal is important for writing. For life too. One must always betray something. This is what the ambitious Nigerian writer must learn—betrayal. The best writers I know, desecrate. They bring light to the darkest caves. They unearth time capsules that hold clues to genocides; their works ferret out propaganda, undoes indoctrination, unmasks fear-mongering and, in some cases, checkmates abuse of power.

These writers don’t just write, they cast spells. Their words induce insomnia. They build worlds that hijack your imagination. They can make sleep a second-rate luxury and turn dreams to poor imitations of their gripping narratives.

But, to become one of them, you must first learn to betray. As an artist it is almost a crime not to be an enemy of the state. Especially if you commit yourself to tell the truth. If the government—as corrupt as the one in Nigeria is—loves you, then you’re doing something wrong. The powers that be should seek your death like the CIA sought Fidel Castro’s. There is much to celebrate in Nigeria, but there is more to denigrate.

Our stories are full of omissions. It is in that gap that the roaches and snakes lay their eggs; it is in that gap that evil sleeps unperturbed. Don’t become one of those writers who omit the evidence, submit lies and sit in wait for the audience’s applause. Point to the blood on the red carpet. Understand that we have set up wedding decorations to conceal the fact that we’re burying bodies. Blow the vuvuzela. Collect the megaphone and scream about how it’s become a crime not to be a fraud. 

In one of the secondary schools I went to, against the school rule, all my classmates, excluding me, had a phone in the dormitory. The chapel  prefect used to scale the fence to patronize sex workers. Boys fucked boys by the altar in the chapel. My friends have told me about the cruelty of girls to other girls in boarding school, about the abortions conducted with spoons and hangers. In another school, a senior student, the son of a politician, suspended for flogging a junior student, came back through a bush track in the middle of the night to flog the boy again for reporting him. At Ikot-Ansa, they burnt a boy for stealing one cup of garri. Parents dumped their only child, who died at 21, into a dustbin. For giving out my blazer in SS3 to a classmate, my father flogged me until I fell asleep. The first girl to kiss me was in SS2 while I was in JSS3. I accused the wrong person of stealing something another person actually stole and watched my classmates lunge at him with belts, sticks and stones. My mother, whom I love, sliced my lips with a razor so I would stop sucking on them—the mark still remains till today. Occasionally, I find my mom sucking on her own lips. My uncle kicked his daughter and broke both her legs. In one of my secondary school a corper raped and impregnated one of our classmate. The armed robbers who attacked our house back in 2007 gave us twenty naira to buy paracetamol after splitting open my dad’s head with a cutlass. 

We live in a very sick society but everyone is going hush hush. The young ambitious writer must learn to betray their family, their friends, this sick society. They must examine where the dysfunction stems. Write about your state, your city, your street, your home, yourself. There is nothing impersonal about writing. To the aspiring writer, don’t quit your job; in fact, I propose you learn it well and gain mastery in it. Observe how your coworkers operate, how their minds tick, the words they use, their thoughts, habits and manner. You can learn the form of writing by yourself or by reading craft books but stick to your job. Writing is a profession that is intrinsically about other professions. We need books and TV shows that chronicle how the legal system works here; we need to know, in detail, how the hospitals are run. 

Tell us the sweet things, too. Let your characters have names like you. Let them eat your food. Did you attend your parents’ wedding like I did mine? Did your folks travel in a bus just to attend your matriculation? About the men who take out flies from their pammi before they gulp it down, the smiling traffic warden undeterred by the relentless sun. Your book ought to be a herbarium of familiar habits: your stories should mirror your world or transcend them. Submit these stories to magazines, get paid, rinse and repeat. Remember, greatness starts with betrayal. Most of us lead lives that don’t make sense by design. Question the embroidery. However, like my friend Eyonsa said to me years ago: To write something way make sense, you gats live life way no make sense.