Author of ‘Who’s Afraid of Nigerian Literature?: The Resilience of Nigerian Writing’, Kéchi Nne Nomu, has been reading science writings and creative nonfiction lately: ‘I think the world of science and the literary world need to meet more often. I like books or texts where that interaction is happening.’
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?
Books were very present in our house and my mother taught literature for years. My mother was a Pa Amata theatre troupe girl. My childhood entailed listening in on conversations about Wole Soyinka, Okot p’Bitek, Ama Ata Aidoo, Thomas Hardy, Christopher Okigbo, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot and Buchi Emecheta. I also got to watch productions of The Trials of Brother Jero, saying a Brother Jero line to mimic the actors, ‘I am a prophet. A prophet by birth and by inclination,’ around and about. I had access to a good school library and read everything: To Sir, With Love by E. R. Braithwaite, Abimbolu by Jean Jacoby, God’s Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène, The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon, as well as books by Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa. The library was where you went to impress a crush, so we mainlined books, passed them around, and stole them. I’m lucky to have had that.
If your life so far was a series of texts, which text (fiction or non-fiction) represents you at this moment?
I’m reading The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa translated by Sawako Nakayasu. Sagawa was a 1920s-30s literary figure in Tokyo. The book has essays, poems and bits of her diaries. I highly recommend the two-page essay, ‘When Passing Between Trees’. Everything in the book, really. It’s a lesson in making associative leaps and writing freehand. The words appear on the page as if the forms and colours and meanings of the visible world are made apparent if we stay still enough. It’s helpful for getting out of your own way when writing.
What’s the last thing you read and disagreed with?
How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. I agree with parts of the book. But I went to it looking for a scope that was not there. That is, the way that it imagines what a useful revolutionary stance in the global South against Big Oil should look like and its declaration that people in these places are not smart about the issues enough to connect the dots because there has been a ‘general demise of revolutionary politics’. It rankles when the epicenters of climate disasters get a treatment like ‘oh, you are just side dressing’. Like sit-ins and vandalized art and protests and ‘grand property destruction’ are strategies, but that will not work everywhere. Especially in heavily militarized places...
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