Chuma Nwokolo: On Writing His Stories

The idea for a story comes from the tale itself. I work like an amateur archaeologist. I usually stumble across a single bone. My first 'Waterside' story, "The Destitute" [African Tales at Jailpoint, 1999], came that way. 

Which bone I found? the first sentence: 

In the morning they found him lying by the roadside, not ten metres from Ma'Comfy's buka.

Pedestrian words, true, but one can never begin the reconstruction, until one feels, relative to any arrangement of ‘pedestrian’ words, the same breathlessness archaeologists must have felt when they first beheld the fossil of the feathered dinosaur, Archaeopteryx. When those words - and the image they evoked - first occurred to me, they felt electric and textured, so pregnant and portentous that I willingly submitted myself to the term of imprisonment that writing inflicts on its practitioners.

What I visualised in that sentence was a fellow lying on an untarred street, decent but well-worn clothes, a one-week stubble, that sort of thing. It was already clear to me that it couldn't be a Lagos street. For a start such a fellow would not make the evening news on a Lagos street, how much more the bookshop. It therefore had to be a tale from rural Nigeriana. Hence Waterside.

My investigation continued. Why was he lying by the roadside. Where was he going, where was he coming from. I decided straightaway that those last couple of questions were red herrings, completely irrelevant to a short story (which is the species of literature to which I had decided that this bone belonged). The relevant clue was 'Ma'Comfy's buka'. The woman and her buka were clearly key to the story. Writing a short story is like leaping off the bank of the Niger to dive for a gem at the bottom. You take one deep breath and go. Once you're in the water you don't have the time to mess around, you just take your single gem and go. A short story is like that. There's no time to follow every thread like a novelist who has his reader by the nose and trails him through Hell and all her Dominions... I promptly discovered Ma'Comfy right inside the crowd that had gathered around the man in the meantime. (Nobody had paid any attention to the fellow until he started to weep). Listen:

I just hate to see grown men crying.' - that was Ma'Comfy. She was the shortest person in the crowd, but she was also the fattest. She delivered her opinion, her cross-eyes looking at no one in particular, and she turned and pushed her no-nonsense way out through the press.

Now as soon as I wrote those words, I realised that although true, they were a skewed portrayal of a woman whose essential dignity could be traced in her no-nonsense manner and the fact that she had a buka to her name. I thought that to depict her essence by a superficial reference to her shortness, stoutness and the alignment of her eyes was akin to describing Nsala soup to a non-Nigerian by giving him a pepper. I then devoted some thought and pages to shading in the nuances of a essentially noble character who had somehow become more central to my story than the fellow on the roadside... the plot thickened. For a bustling street scene in a short story, one could hardly afford the privilege even of creating caricatures for every person with an opinion. So I caricatured the crowd itself, dispensing with individual characters in favour of one multi-tongued personality. This was how the dialogue went:

Although it had sympathetic voices, it wasn't a totally sympathetic crowd. A female voice was asking: 'Is he sick? is that why he's crying?' The crowd was not lacking in opinion. From here and there, the voices came.

'Even if he's sick, is that the reason for him to block the road? Is he the only one that is sick?'

'Me myself, does he know my own sickness? If I tell you my own sickness, now, all of you will start crying.'

I liked how it panned out, and decided to use that device further down the tale. By this time, I knew enough of the skeleton to show anyone peeking into the reconstruction chamber that my destitute had been well and truly rehabilitated by Ma'Comfy's peppersoup and by her dignified patronage. It was night time, the motley crowd was gathered around Mentu's suya brazier, but they were not interested in the grilled mutton, they were interested in the gist. What it was? You‘ll see. I identified one character, caricatured him, and cast him loose in the multi-voiced crowd:

That night, it was the passion of the discussion that welded the crowd together. What infuriated them most was the issue of the wrapper. No one was more incensed that Ntume the carpenter. he still recalled two years before, when bus-corner ankara first became the vogue. He'd had to sell his prized electric lathe to buy his wife's ankara in order to head off divorce. 'Kai! her own bus-corner

wrapper!'

`A beggarman to wear a whole councillor's wrapper!'

`That she wears on her own body!'

`Is black magic, nothing else.'

`You're right, only juju can make Ma'Comfy crazy like that.'

`Nonsense, there is nothing like juju in this matter, Ma'Comfy is

just a good Samaritan, that's all.'

`Hah! Good Samaritan indeed! Then why hasn't she mercied me all these

years I've been begging for her pepper-soup on credit? 

Of course there's a limit to the archaeology in literature. It is after all, more art than science. It is in the fleshing out that the art come into its own. Sometimes a bone will show stubbornly how it belongs in the prolix pages of a novel and I, unwilling to pay the terms of imprisonment for a novel, will snip it into a short tale. At other times, the What, Who and Why of it all begins to draw the story off into the tracts of a genre alien to my skill set and the inventor in me has to trump the archaeologist. It's my time and energy after all, and someone has to keep an eye on the game plan. Yes the story belongs to the bone, but in the end I must like it well enough to have its reconstructed beast sitting on my desk, answering to my name…

Every bone has an inherent integrity and my inventive efforts to make it interesting, funny, or modern may produce an unpersuasive Pterodactylus… the flying reptile that is neither bird of the air nor beast of the earth… It may rebel against my invention, preferring its own skin. For my own part, I might be repelled by the emerging identity of the tale (ie, Sorry, Bone, I don't do Hate tales…). At that point, I turn to my delete button, while my erstwhile inspiration returns to the lap of her muse, to seek a worthier writer.

Nwokolo is a writer, advocate, and publisher of African Writing. His books include Diaries of a Dead African (novel in 3 diaries) and Memories of Stone (Poetry Collection) and Ghosts of Sani Abacha. You can buy his titles here.