‘Are the people in this story I’m telling recognizably human?’

Our questions are italicized.

I was a voracious reader as a child, especially of fiction, and read everything from Nancy Drew and Ola Rotimi’s plays to D. H. Lawrence and John Donne. I am the last of four kids, so there were a great many books in the house belonging to my siblings and my mother. Thankfully, I had a lot of stories to choose from. My main requirement was that the stories were engaging and rang true and human. I would say that I’ve held on to that over the years.

Human stories, for me, are those that dare to be specific in their context but universal in their themes. Whether you’re talking about fishermen on the Bosphorous or hairdressers in Harare, stories are pretty much about humans ‘humaning’ in this very specific context and how their ‘humaning’ shapes the dynamics of others trying to human, too. That humanity in stories is what allows us to see ourselves in stories and challenges us to imagine lives and futures other than our own. That is how stories, arguably, make us better people.

Stories are an examination of humanity in all its dubious glory; and to tell stories effectively, we have to let humanity shine through. This means approaching the stories we tell with nothing less than curiosity and honesty. I started the online archive Testimonial Archive Project (TAP) in 2014 to document and share stories of survival from parts of north-eastern Nigeria facing insurgency violence. When sharing stories on TAP, I try to look beyond the mere horror of the stories being shared and highlight the fact at the root of each story are people who care about their families and want better for them, care about their communities and want peace. What’s more human than that? In a lot of the reporting on the insurgency at its height, we saw how flattened narratives turned real human beings into political tools. Instead of asking ‘how are communities being affected by the conflict?’ and ‘how can we help?’ the predominant question was ‘how is this going to affect the president’s chances in the next election?’ and ‘how are these people going to vote?’.

There is horror and there is pain and there is dysfunction, but there is also humanity and it is from this well of humanity that we can all pull together and seek more and better for others. That is why I thought to start TAP in the first place, and it is why I never forget to ask myself: are the people in this story I’m telling recognizably human?

Good question! One of my favourite novels ever is Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. She was writing about high society in pre-Great Depression New York, but it felt so fresh and modern, her observations so illuminating and real that she may as well have been talking about high society Lagos in the late 2000s. I would not so much rewrite it as place it in a more modern time. Here, now, in Nigeria. I wonder what that would read like.