Growing up in Canada, author of ‘Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys Of Motherhood: A Precursor To Contemporary Nigerian Feminist Texts?’, Mobólúwajídìde D. Joseph, used to feel inauthentic as a Nigerian writer: ‘Unlike my parents I didn’t grow up deep in Yorùbá land and I don’t speak the language as well as I could. I’ve consequently always had this apprehension about being read as inauthentic and performative.’
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 think that could be answered in two ways: books I wanted to read and books that were foisted upon me by my parents, especially my dad. For the former, I was a massive fan of Enid Blyton’s work, also Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson. And then, as my tastes evolved, everyone from Chinua Achebe to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Flora Nwapa to James Baldwin. For a massive stretch of my formative years actually, Adichie’s Purple Hisbiscus and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird were my two favourite books. I reread both books so many times and fell in love with the bildungsroman as a form. I was also a fantasy and sci-fi fan. Ursula K. Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, Rick Riordan, Eoin Colfer, and even secretly the entire Harry Potter series (they were forbidden to me so I did not read them till much later). I can’t possibly recount every book I read growing up, in part because there was no moment I wasn’t reading a book. It was all I did for years.
As for the latter category of books I read growing up, at my parents’ insistence, I read autobiographies and biographies of everyone from Ben Carson, to Barack Obama, to the entire God’s Generals series. And then there was the odd theological expository every time my father wanted to impart some life lesson, as well as the obligatory 17 Secrets of High-Flying Students, Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Who Ate My Cheese, which is funny because I grew up to become quite sceptical of motivational speak.
What’s the last thing you read and disagreed with?
Lately, I’ve become concerned with futurism as a form, particularly how futurist texts elide temporal divisions. They are ostensibly about what is to come, but they are often warnings about our present that reflect lessons gleaned from the past. And so, Afro/Africanfuturists are sort of straddling this threeway line between diviners/augurs, historians, and political commentators on Black experiences. In the course of reading up on commentary/scholarship on this I was recently directed towards Hope Wabuke’s essay for the LA Review of Books, which has provided me with a list of books to read and perhaps revisit as I think more on this. Anyways, I disagreed with a distinction Wabuke made in that essay that differentiates between Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism by positing Africanfuturism as divorced from the White gaze. I disagree because I see Africanfuturism as a postcolonial response, and I am unsure that even in moving beyond 1619 and the creation of the Black Atlantic, any Africanfuturist writer can be said not to in some way be resisting White supremacy. However, it is a qualified disagreement, because I could be quite wrong of course, and with literary critique, there’s never really something as simple as a right and a wrong perspective.
What’s the last thing you read that changed your mind about something?
My response to this is really ironic because I recently wrote a review criticizing the book from which this essay comes, and I was not particularly kind to this essay even. Nonetheless, it’s Esi Edugyan’s ‘Canada and the Art of Ghosts’ from her collected Canadian Broadcast Corporation Massey Lectures, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling. In this essay, she looks at ghost stories as important ways of memorializing the past, and the relative lack of ghost stories that centre Blackness in Canada as a symptom of the systemic erasure of Black-Canadians from the Canadian imaginary. And even though I am critical of the fact that this is in essence yet another essay about how Black people are erased, she was successful in getting me to see ghost stories as important and necessary and valid texts for critical engagement. Which was a mental switch because prior to reading that essay I’d sort of seen ghost stories as empty and pointless. Just things people said around campfires.
Should we all be critical about texts on Black erasure?
When I say I’m critical of texts around Black erasure, I’m not necessarily saying that I disagree with these texts. Only that the idea that Blackness is systemically erased is a well expounded theoretical position that has been spoken about at length. Even more so in the Canadian context where slavery is positioned as outside the frame of the settler-state’s establishment and the standard response to anti-Black racism critiques is ‘that doesn’t happen here’. There’s been a lot said about that, and my criticism is more a question of ‘what more’ or ‘what else? I think the discourse needs to move beyond that into the other ways anti-Blackness manifests, and crucially the ways in which there is active resistance to it. And from such a prestigious voice and stage, I’d like to see more rigorous engagement.
Lately, I’ve become concerned with futurism as a form, particularly how futurist texts elide temporal divisions. They are ostensibly about what is to come, but they are often warnings about our present, that reflect lessons gleaned from the past.
What is your writing process: edit as you write or draft first, then edit?
It depends on what I am writing. If it is an essay, then I tend to write as I think and then come back to edit later and reconstruct and move things around. If it is fiction then I am editing as I write, and if it is poetry I write it all out and then abandon it for days or weeks before I begin to edit. I almost never draft an outline on paper. I sort of draft the outline in my head by thinking about what elements would work and what possible configurations they could go in. Then I sit down at a computer and bang it out. I don’t like to write down an outline because then I lose all excitement once I do and it becomes impossible for me to try and fill it out. Sometimes I read aloud portions to my friends, or I pester my roommate for their opinions. If I really want critical feedback though, I send it to some other writers I’ve studied under or worked with. I tend to find that I do my best work when I feel linked to some sort of community.
What was your process for writing ‘Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys Of Motherhood: A Precursor To Contemporary Nigerian Feminist Texts?’
At the time, I was interested in writing a different essay on the construction of public moralities and national film boards and was wondering where I would be able to publish something like that. A friend of mine, Kemi, pointed me towards The Republic which is where I saw the call for submissions on Buchi Emecheta. I remember thinking oh I don’t know what I could write for that. Except, the next day, I came across one of my older tweets from 2020 talking about how someone ought to write an essay linking Stay With Me, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, and The Joys of Motherhood and I realized the call was speaking directly to me.
So this was rather a delayed effort with a pin stuck through it that resurfaced as something necessary, especially in that moment when so many of my feminist friends were wrestling with the possibility of the US Supreme Court dismantling Roe v. Wade. I decided that so much of that discourse was dominated by this Western polemic, and that books like Stay With Me, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, and The Joys of Motherhood were really a way of thinking through our own cultural context with reproduction and societal pressures.
And even though I was sort of nervous about being a man taking up so much space in something that was more theoretical than embodied and lived, I have always felt that being a co-conspirator means you can’t only show up when it’s uncomfortable. Once I started writing the words just came and it was a good frame for helping me wrestle with a lot of those thoughts. I remember praying too for clarity (in my mind I was Jacob wrestling with the spirit of this essay) and fretting about how it would be received. The editing process with Mardiya Siba Yahaya at The Republic was good for helping me refine and hone my arguments, and I was grateful for that. Somewhere between drafts four and five, I stopped feeling so anxious about the reception.
Why do you think Buchi Emecheta’s works resonate with so many readers?
I am not sure I can answer for everyone else, but for me, Buchi Emecheta resonates because she’s so unflinching and honest in her storytelling. I read The Joys of Motherhood at a time when most of the texts I had previously encountered were these simplistic didactic narratives. Like be a good child, obey your parents, go to school, that sort of thing. Which I have a number of thoughts on because the way the Nigerian literary curriculum infantilizes its students is so frustrating. When I first encountered The Joys of Motherhood, I wasn’t sure about the novel because it was so old. After I finished reading it, however, I was so gobsmacked by it. This was about real and complex issues in a way that I had never considered them before because I had no frame of reference for them. I could relate in some ways to feeling the weight of societal expectations on myself, but it was hardly comparable. I mean sure, as an only child I am expected to have a family at some point in my life regardless of how I feel about it. But Nnu Ego’s desperation was profoundly foreign to me as a young boy then, and even now as a man it’s still rather unfathomable. I credit so much of my modern-day ‘feminist’ stances to that book. Part of that is because Emecheta wasn’t really being didactic about it. It wasn’t immediately obvious in the way morality texts are: good children study and are obedient, bad children party and are stubborn. Instead, she was interested in telling a story in as blunt and straightforward a way as she could, pulling absolutely zero punches. And when you are confronted with something like that, it leaves its mark even if you don’t have the language or critical skills to resolve its impact until you’re much older.
I have always felt that being a co-conspirator means you can’t only show up when it’s uncomfortable.
How has living in the diaspora impacted your writing and reading?
In many ways for the better, I think. Academically and politically, I’m interested in projects that bridge Black stories on both sides of the Atlantic. The first essay I published, ‘Homecoming’ in Existere, I started writing in 2017 after returning home from school in Canada. I didn’t finish it till 2020 after the #EndSARS protests which followed the George Floyd protests, and the apparent connections between police brutality across these very different places was the lightbulb moment where I realized that the white supremacist empire’s legacies were cross-continental. And it is because I live in the diaspora that I am able to have that perspective.
Additionally, I’ve always struggled with questions of authenticity. Unlike my parents, I didn’t grow up deep in Yorùbá land and I don’t speak the language as well as I could. I’ve consequently always had this apprehension about being read as inauthentic and performative. And then I had this course in my undergraduate degree where I believe it was the brilliant Canadian writer, Pasha Malla, lecturing on how diasporic storytellers get the freedom to negotiate our own connections back to our indigenous roots. Once I heard that, it felt like this existential weight to be the most authentic storyteller was lifted off me. It’s really interesting because authenticity itself is a well criticized, problematized and contested concept, and I had no business trying to contort myself to fit some frozen image of the authentic Nigerian writer. Living in the diaspora clarified that for me.
What is the most meaningful piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
That would have to be from one of my cousins. We were talking about knowing when a piece is ready, and he was saying that part of that is cultivating the ability to smell one’s own bullsh*t. By which he meant learning how to be critical of one’s own work. That can, of course, only come from constantly elevating one’s own taste levels by reading other works, while at the same time figuring out what you want your own voice to be. To be honest, it is probably not that profound when said out loud, but it is a project I’ve become invested in. I think part of being a great writer is learning to be a strong reflexive editor. You have to be good at ‘killing your darlings’ when they’re extraneous, and becoming the strongest critic of your work that you can be.
Academically and politically, I’m interested in projects that bridge Black stories on both sides of the Atlantic.
Who are the authors you’re most excited about today (and why)?
That depends on the genre. For poetry, it’s Jericho Brown and Amanda Gorman. I loved both of their latest anthologies—at least what I’ve read so far. They’re both drawing on these rich traditions, forgive the pun, that they’ve made theirs and are using to speak to our present day political realities. I think poetry is at its best when it is a town crier in the public square and that’s how their work arrives with me. With prose it has to be N. K. Jemisin, David Chariandy, Zalika Reid-Benta, Teju Cole and Nnedi Okorafor. Jemisin is the finest Afrofuturist out there and Okorafor likewise is such a strong figure in Africanfuturism. Like I noted earlier, I’ve become interested in what Wabuke calls Black Speculative Literature and I think both writers are contemporary vanguards in this. For Chariandy and Reid-Benta, I am so appreciative of their love letters to my current home, the GTA, and Chariandy is my personal favourite Canadian writer. I am a huge fanboy of his work and I think everyone should read Brother. Teju Cole’s blending of photography and prose is also a soft spot of mine, particularly his attention to urban scenes from Lagos to New York. As an urban ethnographer, I am just blown away by how Cole’s work straddles the academic and the poetic.
What is your favourite topic to write or read about these days?
Currently, it has to be Black Speculative Literature. I believe I’ve begun to detail why above, and I don’t want to belabour the point. I will add that I love how the form is working to subvert and upend our expectations of what is literary fiction. There used to be this divide between literary work and genre work. Literary work was for high minded intellectuals, and genre fiction was for the laypeople masses. Today, however, we have works like Jemisin’s Broken Earth series, Ta Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer, and Okorafor’s Lagoon dismantling such elitist views and showing that the speculative can be serious, political and urgent. Which pushes back against these false notions of what storytelling can look like.
Poetry is at its best when it is a town crier in the public square.
What are you currently working on?
Honestly, at this moment I am largely trying to write my masters thesis. Like every other frazzled graduate student out there these days I subsist on anxiety and short panicked bursts of writing. Broadly, my work is attending to the realities of the policing and surveillance of racial others in Toronto, particularly Black people in public space.
Question from Elizabeth Ben-Iheanacho: How do you resolve author/editor conflict in the evaluation of your book/article?
That is a good question, doubly so because I am an emerging writer, and I don’t have the benefit of years of experience. I tend to follow the advice of a writer I look up to, Pasha Malla, who graciously offered it after I submitted a poem to a leading literary magazine. He said something to the effect of remembering that I always have the right to say no to an editor’s suggestions irrelevant of how prestigious the venue of publication is if I feel it defeats the spirit of what I am trying to say. Which was really helpful to hear in part because I tend to avoid conflict and as a first-time author I was ready to bend over backwards for the chance to be published.
My general approach is to ask ‘is this something that defeats the spirit of my message’ if yes then I say no and stick to it. If not then I either accept the recommendation and/or try to provide my rationale for why I made that original stylistic/content choice to see if that changes things. I see editing as an exercise of consent making and negotiation around boundaries, needs and desires. To do that, you have to have trust and mutual respect in each other and fall back on that once things get hard. However, if that trust and mutual respect is not present then it might be best to move on.
Bonus: Please suggest a question for a future author’s First Draft
How do you reconnect to the joy of creating when you come up against a bout of writer’s block?⎈
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