‘Writing never dies.’
Author of ‘A Post-Coup World’ and ‘Looting as Cartharsis’, Promise Frank Ejiofor, grew up on books. ‘I grew to love literature to the point that I feared that I would go mad if I did not read or write something every week.
By Promise Frank Ejiofor
March 5, 2021
Promise Frank Ejiofor. OJIMA ABALAKA.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
I was raised by parents who adore the life of the mind. Reading was part and parcel of family culture. This meant that there were lots of books littered around the house―textbooks, dictionaries, novels, and so on.
My mother―who, in fact, is an English teacher―required me to read all the novels she bought and to provide her with summaries of the recurring motifs and expressions. As a kid, those summaries were anything but enjoyable and I dreaded not being able to produce them whenever my mother asked to see them.
When I complained that I did not understand some words in the novels, my mother asked me to look up the words in the dictionary―and most importantly, to check their usage in different contexts. There was no escaping from the summary tasks.
Gradually, I grew to love literature to the point that I feared that I would go mad if I did not read or write something every week. This habit has remained with me. My favourite authors included―in no particular order―Buchi Emecheta, Charles Dickens, William Boyd, Mario Puzo, Chinua Achebe, George Orwell, Cyprian Ekwensi, Wole Soyinka, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir H. Rider Haggard.
I discovered the power of creative writing to arrest our imaginative capacities after reading
The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta, an exquisite novel that provided a glimpse of the challenges of motherhood in Igboland. Nnu Ego―the protagonist―single-handedly gives her best for her children, ensuring that they had a good education with the hope that they would take care of her if they became successful.
But, this dream did not materialize: with two sons abroad and two daughters married, Nnu Ego died a lonely death in the village. The monies that her children never spent on her when she was alive were channeled to her funeral―a lavish funeral at that. I remember weeping bitterly after reading this excruciating story.
To a large extent, the story is an irony: the joys associated with motherhood seem to be sorrows but Emecheta tries to suggest to the reader that, despite her sad ending, Nnu Ego’s life was a very fulfilled one. Her children’s successes are hers. Motherhood, Emecheta seems to suggest, is a conjunction of pleasure and pain pulling in different directions at different phases of a woman’s life. To ignore the challenges intimately connected to it is to wallow in opaque fantasies bereft of any meaningful engagement with the messy world. Whilst this is a fictional story, it captures the plight of some Nigerian―and, dare I say, African―families where women are the breadwinners.
The preponderance of patriarchal ideology in traditional and modern African societies tends to portend the ideal family as one wherein men are the ‘head’ and women are the caregivers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, in some Nigerian families today, women engage in multifarious activities beyond the ones socially ascribed to them: they are life-givers, caregivers, home keepers, breadwinners, and so on. Emecheta’s novel counteracts the extant narrative of femininity and womanhood.
For crime novels―and this is largely due to the fact that my father had a collection of Puzo’s novels―I enjoyed Mario Puzo’s depiction of the Sicilian and Italian-American Mafia in
The Godfather and
Fools Die. I was very much glued to our television when I discovered that
The Godfather had been adapted into a film: I saw it many times and never had enough.
Whenever I asked mom for more food she would quote a popular line from Charles Dickens’
Oliver Twist―‘Please, sir, I want some more’―and we would have a laugh about it. And the concatenation of William Boyd’s
Restless, George Orwell’s
Animal Farm, and William Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet meant that I was introduced to themes around love, espionage, and politics.
Writing is an art so that what matters is not what is communicated but the way it is communicated―that is, the style. Great authors are defined not so much by their voluminous writings but by their inimitable and spellbinding writing styles. These novels were profoundly critical in my formative years.
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