‘My fear of writing in pidgin English stemmed majorly from an anxiety that foreign readers might not understand my work,’ the author writes. ‘But everything changed after I read Vagabonds!. I now know that I have a responsibility to write in my most authentic voice.’
When I first started writing, I avoided allowing my indigenous language, Yoruba, to ‘interfere’ in my work. I struggled through the process of explaining in English what I could easily have expressed in Yoruba. If I had to use a word like garri, I would spend the next few sentences explaining that garri is a food product extracted from cassava and either eaten plain with cold water or prepared with hot water to make eba. I would then also launch into a long-winded explanation of what eba was.
This tendency to over explain was influenced by the kinds of books I read growing up. Until I started reading books by African authors, there were things I mixed-up, such as using ‘high school’ when I really meant ‘secondary school’ in my writing. In some books I read, high school students didn’t wear uniforms and left the class immediately after the bell rang. In Nigeria, secondary school students wear uniforms and do not leave class unless the teacher does. I would also contest the usage of certain words, such as when I argued with my brother that his use of the word ‘flushing’ was wrong because ‘Flushing’ is a place in New York. At the time, I was reading Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine.
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