‘Every Time You Decide to Write, What Is at Stake for You?’

Our questions are italicized.

There are ways in which a place can only be known in childhood, when the narrow walkways are still broad enough to run through and everything out of reach, as most things were, required hasty and impressive abuses of the imagination—the upturning of chairs, the displacing of tables, the recalling to light of those objects which, long sentenced to dormancy, suddenly appear to the excited mind as having existed for the very moment of its need. As with Tranströmer, my method was Linnaean: discover, collect, examine. The house in which I spent my formative years had three pleasures in abundance: books, paintings and objets d’art. My untutored interactions with these, I suppose, gave my mind its earliest and most enduring character.

Being a quiet child, books presented the strange and exhilarating opportunity to experience language not through speech first but through visualization. I learned to perceive the texture of words in mental images before I could locate their phonetic metre. Hence, my enjoyment in reading dictionaries, thesauri and encyclopaedia was always twofold; though, of course, then, I could not understand why. From foreign lifestyle magazines, I learned about advertising and the invocation of enticement. Afterward, I read novels. Crime fiction/spy thriller, mostly. A lot of Robert Ludlum, regrettably. Some Frederick Forsyth. The world of espionage held a great mystique for me. And I believe something in the shadowed, polyvalent nature of spy craft prepared me for poetry. I began with the English Romantics, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake. I was eager to read the mystics who came after, T.S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Khalil Gibran. I wanted transcendence.

An essay that seemed to argue that the flamboyance of a few men was somehow doing serious work to undermine violent notions and expressions of masculinity in Nigeria. The pervasiveness of such ideas is due, I think, to two particular attitudes of our cultural moment: an often uncritical anarchical bent, which makes ‘redefining’, ‘dismantling’, ‘unlearning’, ‘abolishing’ seem like obvious and straightforward approaches to solving deep-rooted problems; matched, unfortunately, with a fetish for symbolism, for the codes and signs and manners of progress or rehabilitation, employed however glibly, where none actually exist.