Doctoral researcher and author of When Lemon Grows on Orange Trees, Diekara Oloruntoba-Oju, believes that urban youth cultures in Nigeria emerge from the margins to shape mainstream culture: ‘Whether it is Afrobeats, shadow boxing or thrift market fashion, urban youth cultures in Nigeria generally start from a marginalized place and then go on to define the culture (national or global) for everyone else.’
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?
As the youngest child, I was lucky to be born in the surround of an already rich archive of family books. Our shelves were filled with children’s books (by Enid Blyton and Lantern publishers), the African Writers’ Series, Western classics (by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Arthur Miller), revolutionary books, and academic texts in my parents’ fields of language and literature. My mother, a professor of African and African American literature and theatre, had the biggest influence on the books I read. Growing up, she had me read Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Femi Osofisan’s Morountodun and many others by Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head and others. My dad, a scholar and activist, was a quieter influence. He never quite gave me things to read (except gently nudge me to read D. O. Fagunwa to improve my mastery of Yoruba) but his books—more abstract and often revolutionary—called to me themselves. So, I ended up also reading Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Wole Soyinka’s prison memoir, The Man Died and other revolutionary works. Then, my sister was into Christian popular fiction, so I also picked up a lot of Francine Rivers and Frank Peretti. Eventually, my own taste developed a bit eclectically along the lines of everything but finance and self-help books.
What’s the last thing you read that changed your mind about something?
Barbara Celarent’s review of Leopold Sedar Senghor’s African Socialism. Before reading this review, I thought Senghor’s Negritude was flat and essentialist, particularly with respect to his views on emotion and rhythm as the core of Black identity. I always felt like Senghor created a false dichotomy between rhythm (as a feature of Blackness) and reason (as a feature of whiteness). Celarent’s review has recently helped me read Senghor’s work with fresh eyes, to understand better how he was using the concept of emotion as a complex framework for sensuality, intuition and embodied meaning. His idea of emotion does not preclude or contradict reason but critiques a particular model of positivistic reasoning (which he ascribes to whiteness) that denies the place of emotion in making knowledge. Senghor suggests that the emphasis on lyrical and intuitive explanations in African cultures is worthy of universal emulation. Of course, his conception of emotion as intrinsically embedded and distinct in African life is still debatable. Yet, the review has given me fresh perspective on and interest in Senghor’s Negritude.
You earned a bachelor’s degree in German and French before going on to earn a master’s degree in African studies. What inspired the switch?
This is funny. My grandfather constantly teases me with a cheekier version of this question. ‘Why did you study German and French in Africa and then go to study African studies in the UK?’ I’ll answer yours. So, over the course of my bachelor’s degree, I gradually lost interest in the foreign languages and cultures I was studying. I encountered such a robust archive of culture and history in European studies that was interesting but not really mine. The shift happened in my third year in the university when I attended an African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) conference in Ibadan with my dad. It was their first conference and scholars had come from across and beyond the continent to speak to the theme ‘African Studies in the 21st Century.’ I only have faint recollections of the content of the conference, but I remember feeling deeply stimulated by the discussions and telling myself ‘This is it! This is what I want to do.’
I think I switched because I wanted to learn more about my context and history, which I thought had a comparatively thin archive (I still believe so). The perennial gap between knowledge production in and of Europe and in and of Africa has since become a driving motivation for my life’s work. Ultimately, one finds that histories and cultures are entangled in time, that there is no European studies without African studies and vice versa. But the point of the switch was that I preferred to take Africa (my small place within its many spaces and imaginaries) as my starting point.
I always say that when Black women writers of the civil rights movements foregrounded love in their storytelling as an alternative to the direct revolutionary focus of many men of the movement, they knew exactly what they were doing.
You are currently a doctoral candidate in Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies with a primary field in anthropology, researching ‘contemporary urban youth cultures and subcultures in Nigeria with specific attention to themes of resistance, textuality, embodiment and intimacy.’ What is the most interesting/memorable thing you’ve learnt about urban Nigerian youth cultures and subcultures?
This is a bit difficult to answer because what we call ‘urban youth cultures’ is a host of practices and realities that are so radically plural, differentiated and unequally represented that they are often extremely difficult to pin down. What makes a youth culture is not just what young people do or create in a city like Lagos but also how these practices are seen, taken up or disavowed by others.
That said, if I allow myself to be generalist for the purpose of answering this question, I will say that what fascinates me the most is the paradox between transience and durability that urban youth cultures offer. On the one hand, there is something fast-paced about the way youthful practices emerge in the city—a new hit song, a fashion trend, a slang. In the context of immense uncertainty, young people in Nigeria (like in many other countries across the continent) have to be quick on their feet, ready to jump on a new trend, take up a new space, join an impromptu movement. There is always the fear that what is created under such rushed conditions must necessarily dissipate quickly, but on the other hand, there is a certain staying (and spreading) power that they manage to achieve. Take street pop, for example, these songs often emerge from economically fringe locations and highlight the realities of a marginalized youth public. But over time, they have become mainstream. Whether it is Afrobeats, shadow boxing or thrift market fashion, urban youth cultures in Nigeria generally start from a marginalized place and then go on to define the culture (national or culture) for everyone else.
What was your process for writing your essay, ‘Historical Fabulations and the ‘‘Potentially Queer’’ in New Nollywood Epics’?
I started by brainstorming over the driving question: Do new Nollywood epic films erase queer realities? The affirmative seemed like the obvious answer, but only on the surface. It was important for me to scratch beneath the surface of what we take for granted as ‘queer’ in presentist terms. In mainstream discourse, queerness is often reduced to sex—as resistance, as identitarian framework, as politics. It was important to me to complicate this analytical bias and pursue a more expansive (and inclusive) account of queerness, that accommodates the erotic but only as one of many routes to waywardness, deviancy and the unsettling of hegemonic orders.
To do this, I watched some new epic films in Nollywood and took note of moments that unsettled the social order, characters whose bodies became the subject of gossip, speculation and moral anxiety. I then read the characters and moments from the films in conversation with works in Black and African studies that have developed robust analyses of queerness that centre Black/African life. Reading these characters and texts together helped me to piece together an account of queerness that is not about fixed or clear identities but about the numerous potentials of disruption that bodies inhabit.
I also got a lot of feedback from my partner as I wrote. I’m generally such a shy and vulnerable writer that never shares anything half-done except with him or my mum on occasion. He gave me such great ideas about how I could develop the metaphor of the rainbow in the essay, so the text was inundated with that too.
What inspired this essay?
Well, I was invited to give an expert commentary on the subject matter, so the theme was guided by a prompt, but what really inspired my approach was my longstanding interest in what we can call the African studies–queer studies debate. Simply put, there appears to be a reciprocal dismissal of the other in both spheres of knowledge production. African studies largely pretends that queerness is a Western import, and queer studies remains, in Keguro Macharia’s words, ‘indifferent to many of the conceptual frames in African studies’.
To sit in the middle of two worlds that are seemingly at odds and show that they in fact cohere is no mean feat, but it is extremely worthwhile. To say that queerness is possible and human, while insisting on articulating its realities from an African vantage point is the complex impetus that drives some of my work. It is difficult to navigate because it means setting oneself not only against heteropatriarchal African nationalists who deny the Africanness of queer Africans, but also against queer studies purists who remain moored to neo-colonial frameworks and the fluencies of queer modernity propagated by Western NGOs.
I am inspired by the need to develop a more organic and inclusive account of queerness that has regard for the everyday practices, the collective (if contested) values and the intellectual labours of Africans. I truly believe that this kind of work is necessary to address the gross inequalities of knowledge production between Africa and the West.
How did your approach change in writing your latest essay, ‘Four Women and Adichie’s Feminine Utopia’?
Four Women was generally a more playful piece because fiction always affords a space for fun that is often excised from academic writing. It was a book review, so I had to do a close reading of the novel and make notes. Then I listened to Nina Simone’s ‘Four Women’ on repeat because that was the first imagery the book evoked for me. A lot of feeling was at play while I wrote—feelings about the shifts in my perception of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s writing and politics, my own experiences and popular debates about themes in the book. I felt, for instance, a lot of personal affinity with the stories of Black womanhood, and so it was easy to describe the characters as if they were my interlocutors, friends or sisters.
For this piece, I did not draw on a lot of complex theoretical feminist texts as I may have been inclined to do for an academic piece. It was sufficient and more appropriate to rely on feminist folk wisdom, Adichie’s own trajectory as a feminist writer, online banter from Adichie’s fanhive, and the metacommentary of the characters about feminism. I wrote as I thought and sought feedback, afterwards, in the usual places.
Your debut novel, When Lemon Grows on Orange Trees is a ‘story of loss, death and grief…family, friendship and the will to survive.’ What inspired you to write this novel?
I started writing the novel just after secondary school. There were two major things that shaped how I thought about the novel. First, I was going to start university, and I understood that period to mark the beginning of my entry into adulthood. Second, I was cooped up in the house, reading newspapers with awful headlines about violence and death all the time. My dad always came home with the daily print copy of The Nation that reported 37 killed in… or 11 injured… So, I found myself writing from a place where I was wondering what it meant to be an adult (responsible for one’s life and possibly others) in a place marked by so much grief and loss.
Ultimately, one finds that histories and cultures are entangled in time and that there is no European studies without African studies, and vice versa.
What is the most meaningful piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
‘Write and be damned… Collect your rejection slips, throw them away and keep writing.’ This advice has taught me to navigate between the paradox of the almost-solipsistic intimacy that writing entails and the requirement of publicness conferred on it once the work is finished. At first, it feels like writing is only a quiet whisper between your mind and your words, but as soon as the writing is done, the reading public matters and the brokers (publishers and agents) between you and the public become so central to how you start to feel about a text you once loved. Rejection can be a harrowing, even crippling, thing, but this piece of advice taught me the courage to always return to my quiet place and keep writing.
What’s a book you never want to read again (and why)?
I had never thought of this until now, but I would say Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I have had a fraught relationship with the text. As an eleven-year-old, I wanted to read the book because it was lying on the shelf, and I liked the title. I stopped reading after the first few pages when I tried because it was too difficult a read for me at that age. When I picked it up later as a 20-year-old, I understood it perfectly, but it broke my heart. Sethe’s trauma-induced murder of her own child, Beloved’s haunting and the impossibilities of love in the face of such despair. I read it again some two years ago, and the repeat read was still as gut-wrenchingly sad as the first, so I don’t think I want to read it again.
What book from Nigeria do you feel has not yet received the attention it deserves?
Sola Olorunyomi’s Afrobeat!: Fela and the Imagined Continent.
Which three books on urban Nigerian youth culture should everyone be reading at this moment?
So many but I will highlight three academic texts:
Abosede A. George’s Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labour, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos. 2014
Daniel Agbiboa’s They Eat our Swear: Transport, Labour, Corruption, and Everyday Survial in Urban Nigeria. 2023
James Yékù’s Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture and Performance in Nigeria. 2022
And who are the Nigerian authors/academics you’re most excited about today (and why)?
There is a long list of them but in specific relation to my current research, I would say professors James Yékù and Taibat Lawanson. I appreciate the conceptual depth in Yékù’s work as he works through important questions about the tensions between digital affordances, territory and identity. Lawanson is a professor of urban management, and her work offers really thoughtful accounts of urban inequality in Lagos and how to address them. She has also curated documentary films and community-based projects that highlight the realities of urban exclusion and raise important questions about citizenship and belonging.
What’s one thing readers should be aware of when reading about urban Nigerian youth culture and subcultures?
It’s hard to say, really. My instinct is to suggest avoiding what Eve K. Sedgwick describes as ‘paranoid reading’, which is simply an approach to reading that focuses on suspicion, and depending on what vantage point the reader is coming from, it could be suspicion or moral judgment over youthful practices or suspicion over institutions (the state, religious bodies, NGOs). Instead, reading with an open and critical mind would help understand the conditions (historical, social and political) under which these cultures emerge. Such a reading would also likely reveal that institutions and youth cultures (particularly, countercultures) are not necessarily diametrically opposed even if/when they are seemingly in conflict and neither is ever fully bad or fully good.
What’s a book that brings you joy?
It is tough to pick a single one because it has been many different books (of different genres) over the years, from Yemisi Aribisala’s Long Throat Memoirs to R. F. Kuang’s Babel to Sarah Jaffe’s Work won’t Love You Back. Most recently, it has been Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity. It is this great book about the paradox between the desire for secure love and for the almost-reckless erotic. It is funny because when I think of it, I realize that it is a self-help book in many ways, but it is one that definitely brings me joy. You know that joy that comes from reading something that feels like it was written for you? I think she wrote that book for the idealist who believes that love and desire can positively inhabit the same affection, the one who earnestly pursues permanence and vibrancy in the same instance—a desire that ages but does not wither. I’m that idealist.
What is your favourite topic to write or read about these days?
Intimacy—the mutuality, care and anxiety that comes from being in proximity with others. It is a recurring theme in my academic and creative work. The question of intimacy offers a wellspring of narrative possibility. I always say that when Black women writers of the civil rights movements foregrounded love in their storytelling as an alternative to the direct revolutionary focus of many men of the movement, they knew exactly what they were doing. Audre Lorde tells us that ‘the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.’ I think many of these writers understood not only the potential intimacy holds for survival and repair, but also its central role in political questions of power and resistance.
African studies largely pretends that queerness is a Western import, and queer studies remains, in Keguro Macharia’s words, ‘indifferent to many of the conceptual frames in African studies’.
What are you currently working on?
I am currently writing my thesis, titled ‘Bodies in Proximity: Youth, Space and Intimacy in Urban Nigeria’, towards the completion of my doctoral degree. I am also in the process of editing my fiction manuscript, Castro’s Ghost.
Question from Onyi Nwabineli: Which author living or gone would you sit down with, and which of their works would you discuss?
Hmm, I think it would be Bessie Head. We would talk about A Question of Power. I remember struggling to understand the text but being deeply drawn to the courage it must have taken to narrate such troubled interiority. It was perplexing and beautiful. I would want to sit with her and listen to her talk about consciousness, memory, rage, identity and survival.
Bonus: Please suggest a question for a future author’s First Draft
What writer have your feelings changed about (for better or worse) over time? Why and how did your feelings change?
Who should we interview next?
Panashe Chigumadzi. She is a Zimbabwe-born writer, scholar and journalist who writes about memory, ontology colonial violence and Black political thought⎈
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