Author of ‘Books as Ammunition: How I Found Solace in Rereading Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen’, Ope Adedeji, believes a common misconception about African writing is that it is only writing that explores heavy themes through a limited set of genres: ‘This misconception attempts to streamline what African writers can write and publish. It’s a Western definition, which amounts to gatekeeping, and is often held by people with publishing power.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
I read all kinds of things growing up. Because I was born in a Christian home, it started with Christian comic books and Bible stories. Then there were magazines which I loved staring at even when I couldn’t read. My father is an avid reader and buys all kinds of books. Between the time I was three and six, I read Ladybird classics like The Gingerbread Man, Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, Chicken Licken (a personal favourite). I would save up money in primary school—gifts from uncles and grandparents—to buy Enid Blyton titles at book fairs because everyone was talking about them.
I was in the art club of my primary school, so it was essential to have read the cool books. My primary school also had a library where I first discovered Koku Baboni and Sugar Girl by Kola Onadipe. I never finished Koku Baboni, though, because we were never allowed to take books out of the library.
2005, when I was in secondary school, was a defining year for me, because it was the first time I tried reading my father’s books. I remember that he had a table full of books in the parlour. I randomly picked one up and it happened to be The Street Lawyer by John Grisham. I finished it in a few days. While I was reading literature texts like Agbo Areo’s Mother’s Choice for English classes in school, at home, I was exploring thriller novels that my father kept lying around. I discovered Sidney Sheldon, whose books my father loved, Jeffery Archer, Robert Ludlum, and Nora Roberts.
At this point, I knew there was no actual limit to the kind of books I was interested in; as long as it was fiction and I could afford it or could find it in my father’s library, I would read it. From Chronicles of Narnia to Harlequin and Mills and Boon romances, I read everything.
How old were you when you first read Buchi Emecheta and what was that first encounter like?
In 2011—my first year in university—I discovered a table full of African literature behind my faculty at the University of Lagos. A man and woman sat at the table selling these second-hand, and sometimes pirated copies of African novels and stationary, mostly for the students in the art faculty. I had been a student for a few months before coming across them one evening as I tried to find an alternative route home. To use a cliché, I felt I had struck gold.
Because I’d already discovered Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, randomly tucked inside my desk, Buchi Emecheta was the obvious choice for me to buy with my limited funds. I remember spending a hot Saturday reading Bride Price, stopping only to drink bottles of cold water. Her words fed me.
What’s one way the pandemic has changed your reading tastes/habits?
About a year or more before the pandemic, I became invested in the short form. Earlier on in my writing career, I did not understand short stories. The world they created felt too compact and narrow—incomplete even. Then I decided to give them a chance and started writing and reading them online in blogs and literary magazines. Soon, I began to understand the liberties of the form. In the short story form, writers compress worlds and narratives into a few words, and readers are allowed to take the rest of the story and do as they please, imagining what happens next and what happened before we entered the world of the story.
The short story form allows readers to be writers and creators themselves.
I became twice as interested in collections of short stories and anthologies during the pandemic, almost wholly abandoning novels. I would start a book and drop it halfway, not because the plot was no good or the writing was terrible, but because I couldn’t focus on long stories and follow the characters’ lives for too long. Books like Black Sunday by Tola Abraham, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, and The Friend by Sigrid Nunez were exceptions. Still, I found myself wanting to be confined to the ‘incomplete’ world of a short story and complete the rest of the narrative myself. I’m a slow reader, so I couldn’t stand the thought of returning day after day to discover what’s happening to characters I’d come to love in novels.
This might have little to do with the news revolving just above our collective heads and often affecting us personally. Every night, I was on Twitter to check COVID-19 stats, and fear crippled me. So, it was and is still satisfactory to read short stories that remove me from reality, gives me enough material to be a god in my own right. It’s similar to what writing gives me, but short stories give me more to work with. I couldn’t and can’t control COVID-19, which felt, in the beginning, unreal, but I can control fictional worlds in my head. So I read books like Better Never Than Late by Chika Unigwe, Heads of Coloured People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. I was also reading a lot of these online.
What’s a short story someone thinking of exploring the form should read?
Read Pemi Aguda’s ‘Manifest’ three times. You’ll find something new each time you read. That’s the power of storytelling. It’s how Pemi deliberately draws us into this eerie world in which everything is relatable and yet so surreal, where every word is performing a function, like building blocks in the skyscraper.
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, a story in which an entire family dies should be studied. The story is typically credited for the power of its dialogue, but it’s the characters I find most fascinating. Flannery O’Connor pieces together several layers of complexity and at certain times, keeps them away from us. A few powerful ideas about short stories come through in her work: you can hide several themes in plain sight within your story, stories mean different things to different people, good short stories allow you participate in the telling—you wonder, what happened before this story started and what’ll happen after?
Earlier on in my writing career, I did not understand short stories. The world they created felt too compact and narrow—incomplete even.
What’s a common misconception about contemporary African/Nigerian Literature?
The idea that African writing is limited to narratives that explore heavy themes through specific genres upsets me. This misconception attempts to streamline what African writers can write and publish. It’s a Western definition, which amounts to gatekeeping, and is often held by people with publishing power. The misconception eliminates speculative fiction and experimental forms and questions whether they qualify as African literature. Books that explore less ‘serious’ themes like love and heartbreak are not given requisite attention if they don’t pass on a heavy message about race, migration, sexual abuses, patriarchy, etc.
African writers should be allowed to write whatever they like.
What’s your writing process like: edit as you write or write a draft first, then edit?
I’m a very meticulous writer. I mostly edit as I write because I need to feel good about why I’ve written. If a line doesn’t look good, I will nit-pick at it until it becomes semi-perfect. This is often counterproductive because once I’m done with the first draft, I still rewrite and eliminate sentences I thought were great. I work on a bunch of rewrites while at the same time, researching ideas.
What was your process for writing ‘Books as Ammunition’?
After reading Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen, I sighed long and loud because it felt like a burden had been lifted off my chest. I wore Adah’s burden throughout the reading experience—which is what a good book does to you.
Because I knew I would write about it before I wrote it, I had several possible angles to explore, even though I’d already sent in a pitch to The Republic. I arranged my ideas on a priority scale and decided to go with the strongest, which eventually was a mix of the different themes the book explored: migration, feminism, patriarchy, race, life in the 60s, etc.
After deciding this, I wrote down a basic outline of the story I wanted to write, especially considering the parallels I could draw in my personal life. While reading the book, I’d kept a diary of my thoughts and experience. This made the writing experience somewhat easy for me, even though I still had to refer back to several chapters and paragraphs along the way to articulate my thoughts as I wrote.
I wrote the essay over three days. I’m one of those writers who can’t move on to a new paragraph if the previous one doesn’t look clean enough. So, at various points, I would go back to read what I had written so far and correct the issues I found. This approach has its downsides. It’s not very productive because it’s time-consuming. I had to let go of a ton of distractions like social media to meet my deadline. I did listen to music. I find that listening to music that reflects the time in which my story is set helps me write. So, I shuttled between Onyeka Onwenwu and Ebenezer Obey because Buchi Emecheta’s book was set in the 60s, and I listened to indie rock like Bon Iver and Florence and the Machine, which I was listening to when I first moved to Norwich.
Whenever I felt slightly blocked, I’d take a walk or go back to essays by writers I aspire to. I read Adebola Rayo’s Republic essay, ‘What Can a Woman Do’, which explored Flora Nwapa’s Efuru. It was helpful to me on a sentence level, her words are musical and so grounded, but it also helped me understand how to use your story’s structure to welcome your reader into the life of your work. I also read poetry when I’m stuck. Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese and ‘Peonies’ are a comfort for me.
After writing, I began the gruesome work of rewriting: chasing away the sentences that I loved so much but had no place in the story, digging through the layers to find the ideas I was trying to portray. I did this for about a day before I obsessively read and reread, looking out for grammar errors, syntax issues, and generally, any way to make the editor’s life easy.
After reading Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen, I sighed long and loud because it felt like a burden had been lifted off my chest. I wore Adah’s burden throughout the reading experience—which is what a good book does to you.
What’s one thing that surprised you about writing the essay and/or reactions to it?
It stirred a change that I didn’t see coming. The reflection—which is what I call it—shows me how far I’ve come and since then, I’ve sunk far into the knowledge that I’m where I’m supposed to be. Outside of myself, so many people could find something of themselves in it and have been encouraged to read not just Buchi Emecheta, but some of the classics, beyond a surface level to see what they can learn about writing.
And what’s something you’d like people to do better when they discuss the works of female African writers?
Women have range. We’re no longer in a world—especially as black women—where women are relegated to writing certain themes or certain characters. It’s okay to write crime like Oyinkan Braithwaite did in My Sister, The Serial Killer or speculative fiction like Lesley Arimah did in What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. The same way Black writers are required to touch on hard themes, women are required to not be light-hearted in the way that men can be. It’s an idea that goes into the way we view work by women, groping for political ideas where there might not be. And that’s not to say that women cannot write hard themes if they wish to. In a similar vein, and perhaps, this is useful for all kinds of writing, never assume that fiction is based on the author’s life, except they say so. It’s disrespectful in a way we rarely talk about. The assumption is typically borne out of a good place—the story is so rich, vivid and real, you can’t imagine the writer thought of it. They had to have experienced it.
I’ve heard it used a lot in reference to work by women. Writing isn’t just the act of sitting down and stringing words together. It requires creative energy. The creativity is a work of imagination: creating events, characters and worlds, moulding and weaving them into a narrative. To assume that every story is based on the writer’s life is to detract from the creative work required to bring a story to life.
Writing isn’t just the act of sitting down and stringing words together. It requires creative energy. The creativity is a work of imagination: creating events, characters and worlds, moulding and weaving them into a narrative.
Who is an author you wish you had discovered earlier?
I wish I read more of the classic authors like Amos Tutuola in my childhood years. I would have known then that writing as a young Nigerian was possible and reflected my reality in my stories. It’s amazing how good my writing got when I started reading more African writers.
Even importantly, I would have known that there’s no one way to write as a Black person. It’s perfectly okay to defy any expectations about how to write and what to write. People say this all the time, but they rarely mean it. You find a reflection of this in the stories or books that win prizes, the African books published by the big five, or the way stories by black writers are edited.
Amos Tutuola’s Palmwine Drinkard was one of the first books to show me that it is okay to break all the rules.
What is your favourite topic to write or read about these days?
I write about what I read, and I read about what I’m interested in.
At any given time, my reading list is a combination of varied interests. For example, I’m currently reading short stories published online while also reading work-related articles about being a better editor. The short stories are particularly relevant because it’s that time of the year where a lot of short stories are being released. A favourite set of short stories I return to every year is the Commonwealth shortlists — I return to older shortlists and the new ones. The Ako Caine Prize for African Writing also released their shortlist recently, and I’m making my way through that list. I will be sharing thoughts on them in my newsletter, too.
I consume my other storytelling interests via podcasts, mostly because I’ve done a lot of reading in the past year, and my eyes are exhausted. Throughline’s History of Banana’s is a favourite. How can something so overlooked in everyday life have such a fascinating history? I enjoy stories that track our collective and personal histories in very complex and nuanced ways. This podcast about Juan, an undocumented immigrant who moved to the United States when he was 17 and lived in a trailer home with his big family, gives me the same vibe. Twenty-five years later, he’s on the road to becoming a legal citizen and has his own company and a small family.
Other interests include productivity, leadership, giving feedback, storytelling. I read and write about them. For context, editing goes beyond correcting grammar errors and improving the story. It’s helping writers become the best writerly version of themselves and having a full grasp of storytelling. To do that, editors need to be equipped with other skills like how to be productive, give feedback, etc. One of the reasons I’m about to start George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.
It’s amazing how good my writing got when I started reading more African writers.
What can we expect you to write about next?
For the first time in a long time, I’m working on a long project (novel or novella.) The ‘book’ (even though I’ve only written the first chapter) explores mother-daughter relationships. It’s an interesting theme to explore, but what’s more interesting is the genre. At the risk of putting the work in a box, it’s speculative fiction that uses elements of science fiction and magical realism—Yoruba myths. It attempts to paint painfully real relationship dynamics in three generations of women against the backdrop of themes such as love, religion, tradition, and technology. It’s a lot of intersections, but I’m excited.
Question from Ayisha Osori: If your work would never be published, would you still write? Explain your answer
Writing is personal to me. While it’s great to be read and to have people appreciate or relate to the experiences and realities I create through new worlds and multidimensional characters; writing helps clear my mind. It’s a chaotic world. I just want to journal, create to-do lists, document my goals and ideas without the burden of constantly thinking about ‘who will read this?’ or ‘where is it going to get published?’
But I guess at the core of this question is, what does it mean to be published? Doesn’t a tweet—280 characters of flash fiction—in a sense, qualify as writing and being published?
It’s a tricky one, but in the traditional sense, I’m inclined to say that if my work would never be published again, I’d still write. Perhaps this would even give me the liberty to experiment with several formats that I’d share with my family and close friends.
Bonus: Please suggest a question for a future author’s First Draft.
Why do you still write?⎈
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