Tuk-Tuk Trail to Suya and Stars by Doreen Baingana

Doreen Baingana writes in AGNI Online, about a dance many Nigerians are familiar with--a keke napep ride, and a snack many Nigerians love--suya. Have a restful weekend!

You venture into the dark, and it looms over and crowds your every space, thick, even pushes into your earlobes like cotton wool, this hazy yellow darkness choked with harmattan dust. You are boxed in by solid air and you must breathe it in. You enter a tuk-tuk, the most rickety vehicle ever made, as if banged together from the spare parts of small cars circa 1960, Austins, say, and old saucepans panel-beaten into shape, all loosely held by rusted nails and chains and placed on top of what was once a three-wheeled motorbike, now an ungainly carriage with a snub metal nose. You sit on plastic, which is easy to wipe of dust, but clings like a kid to your sweaty thighs. All the tuk-tuks are painted orange to compete with the river of dirty sand called the road—haze, heat, rush, animal-like hoots and horns. Orange to shock your eyes into seeing.

Still, it provides the miracle every vehicle does: to move, all you have to do is sit, or rather grip desperately, as there are no side walls or doors. The breeze is a blessing; it strokes your cheek and whispers in your ear that you can breathe, it’s okay, but not too deeply. No, your lungs cannot suck air out of dust as fish do out of water. This dust that covers everything in a fine gray layer, gauze-like, sticky.

You realize as you climb into the tuk-tuk that with cars you settle quickly, assured that the solid metal case will protect you from the rush of the busy street, the intense heat and light, the potholes underneath, the direct hit of any accident. For a while, driven from A to B, you have the pleasure of giving up responsibility and you sink gratefully into the cushioned bowl of the back seat. Not in a tuk-tuk. You sit, yes, but unsupported, holding tight to the rusty rail, sweaty fingers slipping as you are shaken from side to side like jelly, shaken inside out. You are in a blender, a coffee grinder, an angry machine that jostles and jangles you. It sets your stomach churning and everything in it is squeezed and kneaded and turns to shit, straining to escape with every hard bump, your ass clenched tight. Oops, you piss in your pants as the tuk-tuk driver swerves to avoid potholes the size and shape of dried ponds. His dark ball of a head bobs in front of you as he does the same desperate bouncing you do: the tuk-tuk dance.

It’s not all dance. It’s real danger, as each swerve to avoid falling into a pothole leads to a motorbike coming straight at you. Read more on AGNI.

Doreen Baingana is the Ugandan author of Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe, which won an AWP Short Fiction Award and a Commonwealth Prize. She has also won the Washington Independent Writers Fiction Prize and was twice a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, African American Review, Callaloo, The Guardian (UK), Chimurenga, and Kwani.  She is a guest writer at the GCLF 2012. 

The Voice Interviews: Lola Shoneyin

Lola Shoneyin is a poet and novelist. Her collections of poetry include All The Time I Was Sitting On An Egg and Song Of The Riverbird. Her novel, The Secret Lives Of Baba Segi’s Wives is a tragicomic tale of the four wives of a Nigerian patriarch. The critically acclaimed Baba Segi, as the novel is now fondly called, was long listed for the 2011 Orange prize for fiction. In this interview, Lola Shoneyin, one of guest authors at GCLF 2012, speaks with Wana Udobang. 

Reading some of your poems and this novel, sex is an ever present theme. I recently attended a talk on erotica and one of the panellists made a comment that “The ultimate freedom is our ability to come to terms with our own pleasures”. I also remember during a part of your TED lecture, you saying that sex was a metaphor for freedom. Firstly, what is this freedom for you? And secondly, do you think as women around the world, we are groomed without a sense of ownership of our bodies, or understanding of our own pleasures, or perhaps what we should and shouldn’t enjoy is still being dictated to us?

Freedom for me is being able to speak and act in a way that gives me personal fulfilment, without the constraints of a vigorously hypocritical society and without causing anyone distress. Sex, as a theme, is important to me because even though across religions and societies it is an essential ritual that ought to be pleasurable, we have found ways to bleed the pleasure out of it, we have taught ourselves to suppress that which is instinctive. The woman is targeted here. She has become the one who cannot, must not enjoy sex, as if sexual pleasure for her translates to promiscuity and narcissism. This is of great interest to me.

It is this lack of courage and ownership that sometimes prompts me to create female characters and poet personae for whom sex is complex. This is the truth. Like freedom, sex has been made complex for a lot of women. This shouldn’t be the case.

The sex in this book is what I will describe as graphically subtle, as though your grandmother is describing sex to you in many ways and you feel the impact of what she is saying without using the words you think she should use. Was this the writer’s less aggressive way of saying something?

The sex scenes are graphic but matter-of-fact, not gratuitous. I struggled sometimes, and toned things down so readers do not engage with sex scenes at the expense of the story. Nevertheless, I wasn’t going to discard my personal style. My friends who read my book say they can hear my voice. The fact that I am a Remo girl who grew up with five brothers means that I am not a shrinking violet when it comes to calling genitalia what it is. I call it by its name while carrying deep respect for it.

When reading reviews and other pieces about your book, Bolanle seems to be driven as the central character but I feel like it’s made of an ensemble cast even though her arrival is what drives the plot. From the reviews you have seen what do you find to be the interesting misconceptions of the work?

To be honest, I don’t read a lot of reviews. They are a distraction. I’m one of those people who cannot watch themselves on the TV or read interviews in the papers. I cringe. Reviews can cut you quite deeply when people misinterpret your intentions. It’s not worth the anguish, especially when you know that some people in Nigeria will write unsavoury things in order to draw attention to themselves.

In the novel, Bolanle has some unsavoury experiences and she spends a large part of her time in the story in a perpetual haze. During your reading at the LifeHouse, you said you wanted to use Bolanle to shed light on the issue of depression. In this space, where we have something of a disease priority list, how dangerous is it that depression is still dismissed as a serious mental illness?

It’s horrifyingly dangerous. In Nigeria where there is a very high rate of employment amongst the youth, where young girls are married off to old men who basically rape them, where women are put through unspeakable trauma when they lose their husbands, where young people do not have access to basic amenities but see development in other African countries on the internet, where girls are blamed for the sexual abuse they experience, inevitably, mental health has been and is going to be a huge problem.

I think religion is doing a good job of masking these issues. People believe you can pray mental health sickness away, they believe that the discovery or worship of Jesus Christ is accompanied by an inexplicable euphoria. Many have become adept at putting on these performances, by faith, even when they are dying inside, but most cannot pretend… so they are dragged to exorcisms and deliverances.

One of the problems is that Nigeria does not have the number of specialists required to deal with the magnitude of the problems. We live in denial. When things explode, and they will if we don’t develop a more profound understanding of mental health, we will not be prepared.

We live in such a judgemental, superficial society. We are obsessed with an unattainable perfection.  When we find that someone in the family suffers from mental health issues or disabilities, we are most concerned about the stigma and those who might laugh at us. Even when we strive for a solution, it is driven by this fear of disgrace. We must start understanding that many people who suffer from mental health problems will never be completely cured. As such, we need to learn to help manage their conditions. That is the sole reason why we are able-bodied and ‘normal’: so we can support the needy, the broken, the depressed, those who society has damned.

The back stories of the women in the novel create a sense of prior history, ambition, emotion and even prior encounters with their own sexualities. But in our highly patriarchal communities, we have labels of daughter and wife and everything in between is meant to be a vacuum. What is your take on the evolution of the female in contemporary Nigerian society and even African society? For you what are the dangers regarding this kind of identity suppression and sometimes lack of it?

The Nigerian/ African society has changed in the last hundred years. Sometimes, I don’t know if it’s for the better. So many elements of our cultures, especially the part of us that lives and let’s live, the ingredient which made us tolerant has been lost. With foreign religions has come a very hypercritical streak. There is a condemnatory tinge in the way we regard other ethnic groups, other genders, other religions. This has fed nicely into the patriarchal societies.

I remember one of your twitter updates, where you had read a review of your book described as Chick Lit. Any responses?

It wasn’t a review. That silliness can be found in an article written by Ellah Allfrey for Guardian UK. Believe it or not, she worked as an editor at JonathanCape for many years and is now one of the editors at Granta. I don’t think Ms Allfrey read the novel, in which case it was totally unprofessional to classify it that way. Either that or she just doesn’t know what chicklit is, which is, at best, disappointing.

I am not knocking chicklit. It is enjoyed by hoards of women and personally, I’m up for anything that encourages people to read more. However, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives is not chicklit. I sincerely hope Ms Allfrey knows that now.

In the book, you take on different voices and so the pages shift from first person narrative to third person, so you let each wife tell their story themselves instead of telling it for them. What prompted that decision? 

I wanted readers to ‘hear’ directly from the wives. This opportunity does not come about very often. Women in polygamous homes are often cagey about their personal views because there is too much at stake. A wife seen to be exposing matrimonial secrets could jeopardise her place in the family. Yet, every woman has a story. In my head, I created an invisible character that they could all talk too, hence the conversational tones of each narrative voice.

Baba Segi reads to me like a televised play, that was written in Yoruba and then translated. As the creator of the work, are my assumptions on the right track?

I first heard the story when I was fourteen years old. The second of my five brothers had a girlfriend who was a medical student at the local teaching hospital. She would often come over to our house and tell us about her interesting day-to-day experiences. As soon as she told me this story of the polygamist, I could see the tragic element, as well as the farcical. It had great dramatic potential so I decided that I would one day write it as a play. Twenty years on, I was at a low point because I couldn’t get a publisher for my unpublished novel. Out of frustration, I ran the story of Baba Segi by my agent. She loved it and I started working on it straight away. Most of the ‘scenes’ would be played out before me on an invisible stage before I actually started writing them down. That’s how I write. I see it first.

What kinds of stories do you like to read?

I like short novels that are under four hundred pages where the plot thickens quickly and characters themselves display astuteness and sensitivity, where there’s humour and some irony. I write what I like, in that I write what I like to read.

As someone whose work was long listed for the Orange prize, do you feel any level of validation by winning prizes?

I fret when I am nominated for awards; I feel exposed and vulnerable. My partner constantly tells me to just pause and enjoy these moments. He’s right. I feel very lucky that The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives has done so well in winning the prizes it has won but I don’t read anything into them. I don’t let myself. I still have too much to learn.

Humour seems integral to your writing both as a poet and a fiction writer. If you were forced to analyse your own work, what do you think it adds to the darkness?

A light-hearted interrogation of society that precipitates serious evaluation.

As someone who is a writer, a teacher, a woman, a mother and a wife, what does feminism mean to you?

Feminism for me is about creating an enabling environment for women, especially in societies like ours where the doors have been shut in their faces. It’s is about women regaining complete control of their bodies. It’s about the luxury of having options, the value of being able to make make choices.

Favourite Book? Sula by Toni Morrison

Favourite Movie? Probably Avatar. A lot of my friends hold this against me but I don’t have any hang-ups about its commercial appeal. I like what I like.

Book you wish you wrote? The books I wish I’d written are full of pain and anguish. So, although there is something beautiful about the tragedy, I can’t imagine what it must have taken out of the author. We have to be careful what we wish for sometimes.

What’s your take on writing with a message or writing for art sake?  I believe in the freedom of expression the freedom of interpretation.

Do you think art should always have something to say? Not if it feels like being silent.

This was republished with the kind permission of Guerilla Basement.

The Voice Interviews: Chibundu Onuzo

In this interview with Ainehi Edoro of Brittle Paper, Chibundu Onuzo, guest author at GCLF 2012, speaks about her writing and her new book The Spider King's Daughter. 

Why did you choose to set your first novel in Lagos?

I grew up there so I know the city quite well and I suppose with your first novel, you want to be writing about home territory. There are so many things you have to grapple with as an inexperienced writer and adding an unfamiliar setting is just an extra difficulty. It’s hard enough trying to evoke a place you know.

I’d never have thought of Lagos as a city of love, but you convinced me. What made you think of a Lagos romance?

Have you ever been to Tantalizers or Mr Biggs? Lagos is the Nigerian capital of romance. Every guy is a toaster and every girl is a babe in Eko.

Abike and Runner G are the two love birds. Can I confess that my favorite of the two is Runner G? I find his strength in the face of so much suffering both sexy and inspiring. Can you tell us how that character came to life?

I just started telling the story from his point of view. His voice came naturally to me because I think in personality, we’re quite similar.  You say he’s strong in the face of suffering but some readers have complained about his passivity in the face of adversity.  If I suddenly woke up poor, I’d hope to be like the hawker, I’d be capable of eking out some sort of living and putting away a few hundred Naira a week. If Abike suddenly woke up poor and was forced to become a hawker, she would organise all the other hawkers and form a hawkers' union and become the State Commissioner for the informal economy by the time she was done.

Why doesn’t Runner G have a “real” name?

I couldn’t find one. I just got to the end and nothing fit so I left him nameless and then his namelessness became a wider metaphor for the faceless poor in Lagos. When I was in primary school, there was an ice cream seller I used to buy ice lollies from almost every day and till today, I don’t know his name.

Isn’t Abike kind of a bitch? Lol.  Not really. When viewed in the context of her childhood, she’s actually quite humane, maybe even more humane than the hawker who had role models and a close family structure. I always tell harsh readers that any kind act you see Abike perform (such as the way she stands up for her driver) must be magnified  because of her upbringing.

My love affair with Abike is a bit different. I feel really drawn to the very things that made Runner G have such a hard time being her lover–her snarkiness, snobbishness, “sharp mouth,” her queen-of-my-domain mentality. Was her character difficult to write? Did you have to tap into your inner bitchiness?  

Giving Abike a narrative voice started off as a plot device. I only had one narrator in my first attempt at the book. As I’ve mentioned, the hawker is in many ways quite a passive character so not much had happened by page thirty. He was just walking round Lagos and describing things and musing. So when Abike came along, she was in the worst instances, not much more than bullet points and in the best instances, very, very obnoxious. So she certainly went through many rounds of editing.

Abike’s mother is a Nollywood actress. Your description of her odd ways is prettyhilarious. Could you talk a little bit about the Nollywood reference? What is it about Nollywood that made you want to say something about it in Spider King’s Daugther?

Abike’s mother is not my only reference to Nollywood in the book. The way I’ve structured the scenes borrows quite heavily from Nollywood filming techniques. If you’ve ever watched a Nollywood movie, the main character will walk in on her husband cheating on her, the camera will zoom to her eyes widening in horror, then the scene will change and we have to wait to find out what happens next. I do this kind of thing quite a few times in The Spider King’s Daughter.

You touch on depression a little bit–Runner G’s mother is a depressive. Were you trying to speak to the popular misconception that Africans don’t suffer depression?

I don’t really like the word depression. There are many shades and manifestations of sadness and depression is such a blanket term. The hawker’s mother has a very deep and quiet melancholia. Her shade of sadness would be mauve. But yes, Africans just like all human beings get depressed.

The story starts out like a Rom-fiction. But things gradually get dark. Were you going for  that? Would you say Spider King’s Daughter is a romance fiction, thriller, or a romance thriller?

None of the above really. You’ll have to come up with a few more.

I think it’s awesome. It’s fun to see what Abike and Runner G leave out or include in their separate accounts of a particular event. You did a good job of not making the telling and retelling tiresome for the reader? How did you do that?

Abike and the hawker are very different people. If my sister and I tell the story of the same event, the second time will definitely bore you but the hawker and Abike notice different things and they lay emphasis on different things because their experiences of life are so different.

Abike and Runner G definitely have great chemistry. But would you say that their romance was pretty PG-13? Why didn’t you give us a bit more steaminess? I don’t mean a 50 Shades kinda steamy. Just a bit more touching, kissing, making out, etc.

It seemed an accurate amount of steaminess to me. From what I remember (and it wasn’t that long ago), secondary school relationships in Nigeria were pretty vapourless. I don’t  know about your school but in my boarding school, kissing your boyfriend was quite a big deal. It didn’t often happen when you were ‘having something.’  You would normally wait until you were officially going out. One of my very close friends who was four years my senior, told me before he kissed his girlfriend for the first time. He planned it a couple of days in advance. You had to be quite savvy about these things and find a private place because there were always teachers prowling around who would swoop down to separate couples if they saw them holding hands for too long.

The ending. Wow! What can I say? I didn’t see it coming. The story takes a rather unexpected turn, leaving things a bit unresolved. Is there going to be a part two?

No part two or at least none is planned.  Even though I refer to Nollywood and borrow some techniques, this is not a Nollywood production.

Read Brittle Paper's review of The Spider King's Daughter

Chibundu Onuzo started writing novels and short stories at the age of 10 and less than a decade later, she became the youngest woman ever to be signed to Faber and Faber, which has published books by 12 Nobel Laureates and 6 Man Booker prize winners.

Sola Alamutu: GCLF Facilitator

Sola Alamutu is the brain behind Children and the Environment (CATE), an organisation that creates awareness in children about the importance of the environment. She is a co-author of CATE Saves the Ikopi Rainforest, a children’s book that won the 2004 ANA Prize for Children’s Literature. Alamutu, author of two activity books for children aged four to eight and nine to fourteen.

She will facilitate the Children Creative Workshops at the GCLF, along with Polly Alakija. 

Guest Writer: Lola Shoneyin

Lola Shoneyin is the author of So All the Time I was Sitting on an Egg, Song of a Riverbird, and The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives. Read her poetry on Sentinel Nigeria. She lives in Abuja, where she teaches English and Drama. Lola is married, with four children and three dogs.

Guest Writer: Veronique Tadjo

Véronique TADJO was born in Paris and grew up in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. She has a BA in English from Abidjan University and a doctorate degree in African American Literature and Civilization from the Sorbonne. In 1983, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to Howards University in Washington, D.C. and then went on to lecture at Abidjan University.  She has travelled extensively in Africa, Europe and America and has lived with her family in Lagos, Nairobi and London.

Tadjo’s work includes two collections of poems, Laterite/Red Earth, which won a literary award and several novels among which The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda which bears witness to the genocide and Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifice based on an ancient Akan myth. It was awarded the prestigious prize, “Le Grand Prix Littéraired’Afrique Noire” in 2005. Her most recent novel, Far away from my Father is a story set against a backdrop of looming civil strife in Côte d’Ivoire that highlights the tension between tradition and modernity, between faith practices and scientific truth, as well as the deceptive legacy of polygamy. Each of her novels explores the dynamics of an individual’s most intimate relationships and the social contexts that shape them. She is also a writer of children’s literature, an illustrator and a painter.  She has facilitated writing workshops in several countries namely in France, Mali, Haiti, Rwanda, South Africa and the Benin Republic.

Her work has been translated into many languages, including English, Swedish, Italian, German, Vietnamese, Xhosa and Afrikaans. She was a judge for The Caine Prize for African writing and for the European Union Literary Prize for South African writing.

Guest Writer: Chibundu Onuzo

Chibundu Onuzo started writing novels and short stories at the age of 10 and less than a decade later, she became the youngest woman ever to be signed to Faber and Faber, which has published books by 12 Nobel Laureates and 6 Man Booker prize winners.

Chibundu, the youngest of four children, spent 14 years of her life in Nigeria before moving to England to continue her secondary education. While at boarding school, she started writing ‘The Spider King’s Daughter,’ with her home city of Lagos serving as inspiration. The novel is part of a two-book deal with the publishing powerhouse and charts the unlikely relationship that develops between a poor street hawker and a sheltered rich girl who meet on a street in Lagos.

“I love telling stories. It’s really that simple.”

Since its release in March 2012, the book has garnered a 4.5 out of 5 star rating on Amazon and a 4 star review from The Metro. It has even earned her a place alongside a Booker prize-nominated Oxford professor on the longlist for the £10,000 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novelists.

Chibundu has given readings at the South Bank, The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival and Cambridge Wordfest and recent media appearances include BBC Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’ and BBC Scotland’s ‘The Book Café.’ The Times describes the book as ‘a dark, tense, gripping first novel, peeling back layers of Nigerian society.’ The Observer calls it ‘an energetic thriller debut’ and the Financial Times writes, ‘there are promising flourishes here that catch the eye.’ In other parts of the world, The Strait Times, Singapore’s leading newspaper, describes the book as a ‘deliciously layered tale of corruption, revenge and coming of age,’ and the South Africa Times writes of Chibundu, “kill me dead. This girl has skills.”  

21-year-old Chibundu has also been profiled by CNN; The Observer recently named her as one of the Authors to Watch Out For in 2012.

“I don’t see success as a personal achievement. It’s not like I woke up and educated myself.” She says.  In June 2012, she was listed as The No. 1 Black Student in the U.K at an awards ceremony held at parliament. This year also, she finished a History degree at King’s College London where she obtained a first class. She plans to complete a Masters in Public Management and Governance and, if the success of her first book is anything to go by, her second will be another literary delight.

 

Guest Writer: Noo Saro-Wiwa

Noo Saro-Wiwa was born in Nigeria in 1976 and raised in England. She attended King's College London and Columbia University in New York and has written travel guides for Rough Guide and Lonely Planet. She currently lives in London.

GCLF 2012 Guest Speaker: LIZZY ATTREE

Lizzy Attree is the Administrator of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She will appear on a panel at GCLF 2012.

GCLF 2012 Guest Artist: DOREEN BAINGANA

Doreen Baingana is the author of the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning collection of stories, Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe. She will facilitate the fiction workshop at GCLF 2012.