Xeroxing Reality

Rethinking fiction and nonfiction as distinct categories in an attempt to liberate Nigerian writers

Introduction 

We have a problem on our hands: although there are more stories than people in the world, we have resorted to borrowing from Hollywood all its ills and not even half a glimmer of its brilliance. The symptoms are diverse—hackneyed plotlines that bear no resemblance to our society, unrealistic dialogue, and the treacherous execution of everything else. The diagnosis is simple: we are second-rate, at everything. 

Instead of drawing from the same landscape, we are drawing from the depiction on another artist’s easel, like AI without sufficient skill to even render an exact copy. 

Make no mistake, being good imitators would still give us a bad reputation; besides, it gets tacky at some point, too, just as a person who can fake accents and mimic celebrities’ voices is only thrilling for the first twenty minutes or less—if you’re more impatient than me. 

But, if stories run in the millions, what then denies us access to mine ours?—for profit and for empathy; to reshape culture, politics and, hopefully, even humanity in general. Surely, we go through the same emotions as the rest of the world. We’ve experiencedd grief and laughed at comedy (dry, satirical, ironic, and slapstick); we’ve known envy, have witnessed cruelty, poverty, and the seen the dangers of political instability play out in a myriad horrific ways; we’ve observed the rots in our essential industries and institutions: from understaffed hospitals with misogynistic doctors to arrogant musicians with poor performances, to corrupt politicians who employ ethnic disenfranchisement to win elections. 

We’ve also seen how viral horrific incidents splits our society into warring factions, making visible a cross section of our morals, a vivisection that gives us an uncomfortable yet informative front row view of who we are as Nigerians, because, just like a character in a film, our choices define us better than we can define ourselves. 

Our society is rife with stories of domestic abuse, underage marriages, infidelity, dubious deaths in boarding houses as a result of unchecked abuse, corp members murdering their abusers, sex trafficking, marriages in absentia—the list is endless. 

Everyday people fall in love, and long-lasting friendships are born from chance meetings. Testimonies to ultra human loyalty exist, too, as well as instances of incorruptible integrity. 

Both at the grand, political level and in our personal experiences, we have lived such incredulous and incredible lives that it makes one wonder why the stories that get canonised into our literature or films—except from a select few—are inept or fail to grapple deeply with the surreal scope of our immediate and distant reality. 

If we don’t lack stories, what then widens the gap between reality and adaptation? Why does white light refract a shadow inside of a resplendent rainbow?

Many answers can erase these question marks, but, to me, the problem is fundamental, one that lies at the core of how we conceptualise stories in general. 

Where the Sahara Meets the Atlantic 

In Zinzi Clemmon’s 2017 debut novel What We Lose, the narrative shifts between fiction and nonfiction as she includes photographs from magazines, math equations and the meaning of certain mathematical terms (a similar technique employed by Fran, Ross in Oreos), stats from textbooks, and quotes from journals. 

Zinzi Clemmons and a cover of her Novel, What We Lose

The story itself is quite as tumultuous: Thandi, our protagonist, reckons with the death of her mother, the elusiveness of love, becoming a single mother as the man who impregnates her first gives her money to abort the child before returning to marry her when she decides to keep the baby, and watching her father get married to another woman. 

Apart from how jarring the book was in the beginning, what drew me in, what pricked my curiosity, was the sometimes dissonant, sometimes seamless intersection between fiction and reality. At some point I couldn’t tell which was which and that was that for me—I wanted to master this technique. 

Later on, I discovered the book was based on Zinzi’s own experience, which added another layer of complexity and analysis to the text. And makes it more relevant to my argument in this piece.

Teju Cole and the cover of Every Day Is For the Thief

Teju Cole’s debut novella, Every Day Is For the Thief, employs a similar slant: photographs taken of Lagos are as common in the book as the chapters; the line between fiction and reality is made thinner than an eyelash. 

These two books plagiarize reality. The authors make no attempt to conceal their hand. Theirs is the point where the Sahara meets the Atlantic, and I would argue that their experiment unearths an almost imperceptible truth that underscores how nearly all of our literature is conceptualised and developed into the forms we consume. 

Fiction and Nonfiction

At some point, every beginner writer comes in contact with this crude distinction—fiction and nonfiction—and comes to take both parts as entirely distinct from each other. In this regard, literature falls into the same trap biologists did when they made the distinction between living and nonliving things. A taxonomic and scientific segregation that gets taken for a fact can cause all sorts of problems as is evident in literature. 

“Fiction” defines narratives which we conjure from our imaginations: the settings are magical, and even when realism is applied, there’s something geometric, you know, binding about the writer’s descriptions, a stubborn insistence on verisimilitude; the characters, which the disclaimer in the book’s front matter swears are not taken from real people, are grand or surly or funny or clumsy, round or flat, too, according to Forster; the stories unfold in genres and sub-genres etc. Nonfiction on the other hand sticks to the facts, is about real people and their real experiences in real places. 

To be fair, these definitions, to a large extent, are useful: the disclaimers in works of fiction help protect the author, and designating a narrative as nonfiction helps the reader engage properly with a text. It matters if a story is based-on-true-events, or is a reimagining, a remake, a reboot, or a documentary. 

That being said, there is one thing we must acknowledge: in nonfiction, most of the fictional parts are dressed up as facts, whereas in fiction, most of the factual parts are disguised as imagined. 

Sucession’s Poster

Succession, the just-concluded prestige TV satirical drama about an abusive News corp patriarch and his difficulty in finding a worthy successor between his three children (four, I almost forgot Connor), is designated as fiction. 

True fans know the show is based largely on the Murdoch family (and couple of other families that own News corporations, too, but theirs is negligible), which might seem speculative until you include this fact: on The Black List, “a list of unproduced screenplays most liked by Hollywood industry figures”, the creator of Succession, Jesse Armstrong, has a script titled, Murdoch. The premise of the screenplay is even more telling, “a drama in which Rupert Murdoch and his family disagree over who should have control of his company.” 

Sounds a lot like the premise of Succession to me. 

So, a couple of names were changed; it is based on real events but passed off as fiction. 

Illustration of Toni Morrison

Beloved, Toni Morrison’s magnum opus, her most ambitious work even, tells the story of a woman who kills her children to avoid them being conscripted back into slavery. In interviews and in writing, she stated she got the story from reading about the actual event. She took that situation as her window into that period. She interrogated the woman’s motive and the era that drove her to such an extreme action through a fictional book by turning the woman’s baby into a ghost that came back to live in her. Jazz, another Morrison’s novel, follows this exact pattern: she got the plot—a young girl killed by her lover—from a newspaper clipping and expanded on it. 

Movie poster for Half of a Yellow Sun

Half of a Yellow Sun, one of Chimamanda’s most ambitious books, takes inspiration from the Biafran war. While it’s easy to box these examples into the “historical fiction” genre, it puts a cloak over an obvious pattern in stories which we delineated as fiction and nonfiction. If there’s any exact definition to be given that conflates both once and for all, then it’s this: fiction and nonfiction stories are, at their core, expansions of memory, history and reality using imagination. 

Every story expands either of all three elements to a certain degree and takes liberty with the rest. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Eve Babitz and Proust were wantonly confessional in their works, turning their quotidian or salacious lives into fully-fledged myths, supplanted by the mystery and gaps their history left to obsessed readers. 

Some of Shakespear’s most popular works, as piercing as they are, were based loosely on actual events. Hans Christen Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, a fantastic fairytale, was an esoteric confession of heartbreak for unrequited love after being rejected by a man he yearned for. 

I’ve written enough essays to know how fallible memory is; in fact, any deep research into memory as a subject will surface the same fact, that memory is not a  recollection of the past but a recollection of what we think we remember, a palimpsest of the past.

History, our collective external memory, suffers a similar fate. For all its claim to objectivity, there is a lot of revisionism and a distortion of facts by historians and authors alike. The truth is, at best, not a lie, not wholly irrefutable—Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Emily Brontë comes to mind. 

If fiction and nonfiction are fictions, and truth is contentious, then, we are at liberty to create as we please by applying our imaginations without bothering ourselves on being entirely original—everything is a copy; originality is a myth. 

Xeroxing Reality

It comes as no surprise to me that one of Nollywood’s most critically acclaimed,  commercially successful and culturally relevant films, King of Boys, is rumoured to have been based on real events and real people or that The Trade, one of the most lauded film from our industry in recent times, was also inspired from true events. True events in the hands of a master storyteller are nothing short of breathtaking. You will be blown away, because at that stage, it’s a matter of execution: the plot, the climax, and the internal logic of the story are all in place, all that’s left is for the storyteller to animate the event, restructure the narrative to enhance its emotional impact and unveil its moral and philosophical relevance. 

King of Boys poster featuring Sola Sobowale

“Artists steal” is less a quip to encourage plagiarizing one’s contemporaries’ work and more a phrase that suggests artists should steal from reality. Stories are dying at your feet. Xeroxing reality echoes a sentiment espoused in my other post Writing in Nigeria, because to take reality as one’s muse will involve some form of betrayal, one would have to expose a hundred emperors in new clothes. 

Nigerian writers need to take liberty with their imagination; by all means, change a couple of names there, flip the genders, vary the height of the characters, give them a different tragic flaw—in short, be creative! 

Professional thieves work hard. 

Once freed from the prison of fiction and nonfiction, the main flaw will emerge, which is, most of our writers do not have a firm grasp on the fundamentals of storytelling. Contemplate theme. Why are stories arguments? What is the function of a symbol? Why does some dialogue work and others don’t? 

Old Nollywood interpreted the Nigerian reality through elements of theatre which it adapted to film—a key reason why their works are successful up until now, so much that they invoke nostalgia; bad art makes one cringe in retrospect—and New Nollywood, instead of adapting our reality to film, is xeroxing Hollywood, with much failure, I must add.

A complete recipe for disaster. 

We should expand reality more (how elements expand is one way to study and ascertain their properties) and transform our art to unprecedented levels of greatness.