‘My Favourite Books Are Those That Tackle Powerful Subjects With Elegant Prose’ Ijedike Jeboma’s First Draft

Nigerian writer and author of ‘Identity Formation in Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde’ Ijedike Jeboma, decided to read all of Emecheta’s works and noticed a shift in her 1994 novel, Kehinde: ‘Emecheta’s legacy is often discussed in terms of the womanism-feminism divide, and I thought Kehinde marked a shift in her oeuvre that I hadn’t seen much commentary about, so I wrote it myself.’

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 read every book I could get my hands on while growing up. Members of my nuclear family were avid readers, so I grew up in the kind of home that had shelves full of neatly organized books and numerous Ghana-must-go bags of all the other books stuffed into spaces above wardrobes. As a child/pre-teen, I basically read every book in the house that older family members had bought, borrowed, or misappropriated. There ​​was my father’s literary fiction, politics, and history books of which my favourites were Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and the published collection of Drum Magazine Nigeria articles from pre-independence to after the Biafran war. ]

My mother’s books were more religious and/or self-help books: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, 4 Hour Interviews in Hell by Yemi Bankole, and so much more. My older siblings were into horror, thrillers, Christian fiction, and commercial romance, so there was a lot of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Ted Dekker, Francine Rivers, Danielle Steele, and literally a million Harlequin and Mills & Boon novels during that period.  

Of course, there was a lot of Nigerian literature both at home and at school. I read a lot of Cyprian Ekwensi, Chinua Achebe, and Buchi Emecheta. Some of my favourite novels at the time were Festus Iyayi’s Violence, Gracy Osifo’s Dizzy Angel, Chukwuemeka Ike’s The Bottled Leopard, and Onuora Nzekwu and Michael Crowder’s Eze Goes to College.  

I also remember loving Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital.  

f your life so far was a series of texts, which text (fiction or non-fiction) represents you at this moment? 

Maybe Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis?  There have been a good number of fortuitous events and work in the past, possibly in my flop era, but I cannot claim that current events aren’t hilarious...