Writer and author of ‘Iyibo My First’, Edwin Okolo, wishes more people realized the novelty of adolescence: ‘I wish more people understood that boarding schools merely compound a cardinal problem: adolescence is a relatively young concept. As early as 150 years ago, you were a child, and then became an adult.’
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 were on your secondary school reading list/curriculum?
I went to a unity college with an impressive library thanks to a British Council grant. Classes were boring so I hung out at the library a lot and entertained myself with the beautiful illustrations of exotic animals in the library’s American biology textbooks. I spent the next few years working my way through the library’s fantasy section, devouring the unabridged version of Arabian Nights with the complete 1001 stories, Thomas Harris and his Hannibal Lecter series, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and the collective works of the Brothers Grimm.
We were only allowed a few hours in the library each day and were not allowed to take the books out of the library. So, eventually, I took to ‘borrowing’ the books for the long holidays. I think I still have a few of them at my house somewhere.
What other books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
One of my most reliable sources for diverse and compelling storytelling was Selwyn Hughes, the author of the Everyday With Jesus bi-monthly devotional and the Our Daily Bread annual devotionals. I would sneak off and devour the stories in the devotional usually within the first two days. I’m yet to find a writer as skilled as Selwyn.
I went to a private primary school run by a community of Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian and Estonian wives who married Nigerian diplomats and soldiers to escape the USSR in the 80s. My primary school had an impressive library, full of age-appropriate mystery books. I remember one in particular about a group of child detectives, one of whom had dark hair and wore glasses, who solve a mystery by discovering the criminal’s typewriter had a defective letter. That book also taught me about pangrams, sentences that have all letters of the alphabet. If anyone can tell me the name of the series, I’d be eternally grateful.
What’s one book everyone should read before university?
The one book I would recommend everyone reads before university would be The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. Bank wrote it over the course of eleven years as a series of short stories. Reading it and talking of my love for Jane Rosenal, its unforgettable protagonist, has brought so many powerful and kind women into my life. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
My primary school had an impressive library, full of age-appropriate mysteries. I remember one in particular about a group of child detectives, one of whom had dark hair and wore glasses, who solve a mystery by discovering the criminal’s typewriter had a defective letter. That book also taught me about pangrams, sentences that have all letters of the alphabet.
If you could rewrite a classic book/text, which would it be and why?
I don’t know if this counts as a classic, but I have always thought that the ‘Fig Tree’ quote from Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar is an excellent metaphor for adolescence and an excellent premise for a novel. It goes:
‘I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.’
I’d love to tackle Plath’s idea of the fig tree using the characters from ‘Wild’ by Lesley Arimah from her anthology, When A Man Falls From The Sky. ‘Wild’ is one of the few Nigerian short stories that brilliantly explores the complexities of being a teenage Nigerian girl, a paradox where you are burdened with unrealistic expectations and punished for not adhering, yet your very existence is dismissed as trivial and of little consequence by everyone else in your life. ‘Wild’s’ fully realized protagonists deserve the novel treatment, with the ‘Fig Tree’ as its premise.
What’s one way the pandemic has changed your reading tastes/habits?
The pandemic made me get back into comics. I avoided comics for most of my life because the major comic franchises were so large and complicated that I got overwhelmed just thinking about how much backstory and alternate timelines I’d have to read up on just to enjoy a current issue. Thanks to the pandemic I discovered indie publishers with small catalogues that I can obsess over. I am still not over the Saga comics, and I am joining the hundreds of petitions asking them to return from their hiatus.
Who is one comic book character more people should know about?
Weirdly enough, I’d probably cast my net a bit wider for this and recommend Sakura from the Naruto manga. She is a compelling character who is misunderstood and underestimated all through the series, even by the writers, but eventually redeems herself in the manga’s most important battle (in my opinion, sue me) that sees her collaborate with an elder and bring closure to two generations of a fractured family.
I avoided comics for most of my life because the major comic franchises were so large and complicated that I got overwhelmed just thinking about how much backstory and alternate timelines I’d have to read up on just to enjoy a current issue.
What’s a recent book/text you disagreed with, and why?
I recently disagreed with many of the dissections of Chimamanda’s now infamous open letter. I understand why a lot of Nigerian literary heavyweights felt compelled to weigh in, either via Twitter threads or actual essays, but I found it all needless. None of these rejoinders elevated the points made by Chimamanda. Instead, each salvo dredged up a tired topic and exaggerated its relevance while ignoring more urgent topics like accusations of inappropriateness in literary circles, targeted at its most vulnerable.
What’s the last book you read that changed your mind about something?
It was actually a series of essays, not a book, that changed my mind about activism and how our current systems are designed to fail, and worse, punish and ostracize the best and most brilliant minds in activist movements.
I discovered the essays ‘Thrashing’ and ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ by Jo Freeman from a Youtube video essay on cancelling by trans researcher and ‘Breadtube’ pioneer, Contrapoints. Freeman’s essays, written in the 70s, were revelatory for me, providing practical answers about why the #EndSARS movement failed, the backlash towards the FemCo group and why a lot of activist movements fail despite their best intentions. Apart from the brilliant ideas she espouses, discovering her reminded me that very few of our struggles and epiphanies are new, and there is much to be learnt from seeking out the work that our predecessors have done.
What’s one thing you think the #EndSARS protests failed at?
Structurelessness.
EndSARS, and specifically the women of FemCo, conflated their position as elites with social capital and privilege as a right to become de-facto spokespersons for the #EndSARS movement. They shirked that responsibility when they chose to include LGBT persons without prior consultation in their fight, a pledge they then recanted following pushback. It was a symbolic misstep that spread to other aspects of the movement, tarnishing its collective goal. If #EndSARS hadn’t insisted so strongly on theoretical structurelessness, perhaps it would have had more sustainability.
Discovering Jo Freeman reminded me that very few of our struggles and epiphanies are new, and there is much to be learnt from seeking out the work that our predecessors have done.
What is a common misconception about writing nonfiction?
Very few people acknowledge that it is much easier to indulge your bias in non-fiction than it is in fiction. The stakes are higher, and as a narrator, we have the privilege of providing context for our actions and tempering the consequences of those actions with our often good intentions. It is much harder to cast one’s self as a villain, or at the very least, complicit, when the story we are telling about ourselves is complicated, or its outcome is tragic.
My solution to this is to focus less on details and outcomes and more on preserving the emotional integrity of the story. If I can accurately transport my reader into the moment of the action, to guide them through the events as they happen and lay bare my mental state, I believe they can come to their own unbiased conclusions.
What’s your writing process: edit as you write or draft first, then edit?
Before I write a story, I spend months, and sometimes years ruminating on the details. My mind works like a giant Gutenberg printing press, with word plates that I shuffle around as I find the best fit for the sentences. When I feel the words have finally settled into a shape I like, I transcribe the entire story or chapter onto paper or a Google doc I’m working on. I rarely rewrite, I might add or remove sentences, and shift paragraphs around, but the form and shape of the story usually stays the same from the original draft.
When I work with an editor, I rarely question their suggestions, because I believe stories take on a life of their own once they have been transcribed into existence, and unless an editor asks for drastic edits that show they don’t understand the point of the story, a good editor is like a skilled gardener, whatever they prune makes the story better able to navigate the world as a sentient thing.
What was your process for writing ‘Iyibo My First’?
I wrote the first draft of ‘Iyibo My First’ during the lockdown in 2020. OluTimehin Kukoyi had made a call for anonymous stories about queerness and queer encounters for her ‘Quietly Queer’ series. I had thought about writing about Iyibo since 2009 when I first started writing, but every time I tried, it felt I hadn’t created enough distance between myself and what happened to write about it objectively. That lockdown felt like the end of the world, which was the motivation I needed to stop being precious with the story.
I wrote a simple draft then, and sent it. It didn’t quite fit for her project, so I sat on it for a year and re-entered it for The Republic’s Black Atlantic series. It got accepted and Chika Oduah, whose care and gentleness with stories is only rivalled by Helen Moffett of Short Story Day Africa, guided me through expanding the story into the form it holds today.
What’s something you wish more people knew about Nigerian boarding schools?
I wish more people understood that boarding schools merely compound a cardinal problem: adolescence is a relatively young concept. As early as 150 years ago, you were a child, and then became an adult.
Adolescence was ‘created’ as a response to collective guilt for child labour, but the people who created it never really bothered to find something to occupy the space that work used to occupy for former children. As a result, apart from school, which I am learning in adulthood is essentially a cosmetic waste of time, young people are bored. When they are not constructively occupied, adolescents find ways to entertain themselves, usually through enacting oppressive social hierarchies. My latter teenage years were some of the most restorative years of my life, because I had a mentor, Mr Femi Adelana, rest his soul, who never dismissed my teenage angst and rage, and found constructive, collaborative outlets for it. I wish everyone gets someone like that.
A good editor is like a skilled gardener, whatever they prune makes the story better able to navigate the world as a sentient thing.
What’s a misconception about African queerness or queerness in Africa?
That queerness is monolithic and consumed with oppression. Queerness has always existed in Africa. It was labelled differently and accorded multiple functions within pre-colonial societies, some religious, some cultural but always diverse. Deviance is a very limited and myopic way to engage something so wonderfully complex.
What’s the most meaningful piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
I wouldn’t exactly call it advice, more like an observation from Imobong Emah, my longest writing partner and OG literary husband (we wrote seven books together during our active phase) that helped me understand and truly love my writing style. I’ll just quote him verbatim.
‘Nothing ever just happens (in your writing). It’s like if we wanted to plant a seed. I’ll dig a hole and shove it into the ground. You’ll first get a vat of gunpowder and load it into the back of a shotgun shell, which you spent three hours taking apart so you replace one of the pellets with the seed. There would then be a 15-minute long march past celebration, during which Gwen Stefani will perform “Hollaback Girl”, and then you will ceremoniously approach the planting site, sprinkling fermented manure-soaked brine after a ritualistic earth dance, before shooting the bullet into the floor. What is brilliant about it, is that you somehow keep me invested through all of that.’
Who is an author you wish you had discovered earlier?
Adam Rapp. His young adult novels, Under the Wolf, Under the Dog, Punkzilla and 33 Snowfish are some of the most polarizing books I have ever read. I found them in my early 20s and it gave me so much comfort to read about teenage characters that go through unimaginable horrors without their experiences being presented in trivializing or voyeuristic ways. But I mourned that I didn’t find him when I was a teenager going through unimaginable horrors of my own and needed to read that I wasn’t alone in feeling the way I did.
Finding Rapp showed me there was space to write characters that are charismatic yet extremely unlikeable, there was an audience who needed to see themselves reflected in those kind of stories.
What is your favourite topic to write or read about these days?
I have become very fascinated with the dynamics and politics of interpersonal relationships and how those influences play out in the real world. I have written a few essays about what I have learned so far and I am currently ruminating on more. I don’t really have a book to recommend but I think you’ll find the video essays by ‘Lindsay Ellis’ and ‘Contrapoints’ very illuminating.
Finding Rapp showed me there was space to write characters that are charismatic yet extremely unlikeable, there was an audience who needed to see themselves reflected in those kind of stories.
What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on two manuscripts. One is fiction about the unravelling and ultimate end of a three-year relationship between two privileged, upwardly mobile and terribly mismatched men, and the other, a speculative climate fiction about a boy and girl who become trapped in a militarized Eko Atlantic City after Lagos is consumed by an apocalyptic flood and try to escape it and find a commune that is rumoured to have survived the flood.
Question from Paula Akugizibwe: What book made you feel seen in a way you hadn’t before?
White Oleander by Janet Fitch. The book’s main character, Astrid Magnussen, sees her life spiral when her mother, a gifted but sociopathic poet, kills a lover who scorns her and is sentenced to life in prison. Astrid survives seven brutal years in foster care before finding independence and salvation through her art. White Oleander was the first book I read where the protagonist’s art remained constant and separate from the turmoil in her life, and eventually, the work saved her.
It was a revolutionary idea for that me, that my writing/artistic talent didn’t need to be informed or validated by my experiences or mental state. The work would always be there, something separate and sacred, and valid, no matter whether I succeeded at it or not. It only had to matter to me.
Bonus: Please suggest a question for a future author’s First Draft.
What is the most insightful criticism you have gotten about your work as a writer and what did it reveal to you about yourself?⎈
We want to hear what you think about this interview. Submit a letter to the editors by writing to editors@republic.com.ng.
