Onyeka Nwelue: On His Writing Journey

I became a writer before I knew I was a writer. It started when I was eleven years old, back in the seminary, where my parents sent me to fulfill their wild dreams for them: they told me that they promised their God that I would serve him. I had no right to argue with them. I joined forces and went to the seminary. After six years, when I was supposed to head to Trinity College, Okigwe, I headed straight to India, to write.

In India, I was attending the International Writers’ Festival. I was 18 years old then. I knew no one in India and I had no family, but I was determined to survive. I flew from Lagos to Mumbai. It was a direct flight. By the time I was in Mumbai, I took another flight to Delhi and when I got to Delhi, I took a taxi to Kurushektra, a state in the northern part of India. There, I met Abha Iyengar, one of India’s finest writers, who brought me back to Delhi and put me up in her home. I lived with her mother who found time to read every single thing I wrote. She treated me like her son and she reminded me that I was her son. 

Months after, I left India, I travelled down to Ethiopia and then I was back in India, depressed and broke. My father was happy to see me. My mother cried the day I walked into the house. My aunts and uncles hated me. They whispered to themselves: “He just went abroad to waste money we don’t have.” They annoyed me, because they didn’t give me any money. They annoyed me, because they didn’t say these things to me. Only one did an honourable thing: she threw me out of her house in Lagos honourably, by waking me up one early morning and saying, ‘Take this money. Go to your parents.’ I left.

My father invited me for a talk. We talked about India and slowly, we started talking about university education. I saw reasons with him and wrote JAMB, then got admission into the University of Nigeria, Nsukka to study Sociology & Anthropology. I was going to live with a professor and his wife. They are cool people. I had no problem living with them. They even started making me uncomfortable, with their pampering. I don’t like to be pampered. I left their house, without them knowing. I just packed out. I stayed on campus with some friends for a while. Same time, I was working on my novel, The Abyssinian Boy, rewriting pages and chapters, forcing the manuscript on my friends, Eromo Egbejule and Osondu Awaraka. They read and made delicate notes and since I had set my mind on getting my book published while in the university, I constructed a positive mindscape that I lived in. 

One day, while sitting in Osondu Awaraka’s room and arguing about religion with his roommates, Ayodele Arigbabu, publisher of DADA Books called me from Cape Town. He wanted one thing: to buy the West African rights to my book. He said he loved the book. I was more than excited. Was it not better to sell every right to him? I couldn’t control my excitement. We started work on the book and good things started happening. 

On the 24th of January, 2009, The Abyssinian Boy was launched in Lagos to a handful of Indians and Nigerians. Politicians made promises they couldn’t keep. I forgot about them. My father spoke to the audience and told them how elated he was. He was proud of me. I was also proud of him. My aunt that gave me money and threw me out of her house was there too. She was also proud of me. I was also proud of her for throwing me out bravely. At least, one dream had come true.

I’ve met everyone in The Abyssinian Boy. I have, at least, been to many of the locations I wrote about and everything that happens in it I imagined, but my imagination doesn’t deny the fact that they were inspired by things that happened to me. I created a people, a society that are at once, believable and magical realist. Wading through the streets of Delhi in real life, I needed to recreate the streets in the book; at first, I wanted to make it look like they are in real life, yet description in fiction is one thing you need to be careful with. For me, there was no single negative review of the book when it was released. Everyone loved it. Reviewers hailed it as ‘out-of-the-box’ and many people compared the style to that of Salman Rushdie. I was humbled. I knew I had been challenged. Why? My second book is expected to be better than the first. 

The Abyssinian Boy blessed me. And also cursed me. It brought instant fame that I didn’t imagine could come with a first book. I won some awards, prizes and nominated for another major youth award. I made radio and TV appearances. I spoke to high school students who were not interested in creative writing and kept begging them to accept writers and love them. I travelled from Nsukka to Kaduna to Abuja down to Awka and all over Nigeria. I met politicians who told me they were proud of me, but I knew they were mocking me. 

As the perfect opportunist that I am, I took advantage of the love people showered on me and moved on. The CEO of Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA), Peace Anyiam-Osigwe blessed me years after, by then, The Abyssinian Boy had been republished in India by Serene Woods and asked me to direct the first edition of Bayelsa Book & Craft Fair. It was a huge and challenging event. I was under a storm. I was not going to fail. I was going to host a community of writers and writers are not people you can please at all. What almost hampered me was my age: each moment I tried to do something, I thought about my age, but that was the greatest opportunity I ever got to ride on the back of success and I grabbed it. I organized the event in Yenogoa and the writers had fun. They went home, wrote about it and praised me so much. I almost cried. I was proud of myself once again. I felt like Pablo Ganguli, the organizer of Liberatum Festival, which hosts the biggest names in the arts and culture industries in the world. 

Back in Lagos, I became the editor of Film Afrique, the online film magazine. Sitting in my spacious office, I began to reach Pontas and today, I am signed to one of the biggest literary agencies in the world, Pontas Literary & Film Agency in Barcelona. But, I had to travel to Barcelona to sign. It was a beautiful experience. I went to Barcelona to sign my two year contract, not as a Nigerian footballer, but as a writer.

Sitting in my spacious office, I got my admission letter into the prestigious Prague Film School in the Czech Republic. I am writing this from my apartment in Prague, so believe me, this story, as simple as it sounds; it has not been an easy journey.

Onyeka Nwelue was born in 1988 in Nigeria. He has contributed reviews to Farafina magazine and other publications. His writings have appeared in The Sun, Wild Goose Poetry Review, Kafla Inter-Continental and The Guardian. He is the editor of Film Afrique, a primer on African film initiatives, he manages Blues and Hills Consultancy and is currently studying film making and directing. He was nominated as artist of the year for The 2009 Future Awards. The Abyssinian Boy is his first novel. He tells us about his favourite five books!