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When Eloghosa Osunde was working on her debut novel, VAGABONDS!, she learnt that writing it was the easy part: ‘Writing a book changes you. At the idea stage of any work, there are all these plans you have for what you will do with a story—all valid!—but I’ve learned that every piece of work I see to completion has its own intentions for me, too.’
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?
Growing up, books were my most reliable way to get Somewhere Else, and Somewhere Else is where I wanted to be a lot of the time, so I read way too many books to count. I preferred reading to watching anything, so I missed out on films and tore through adventurous books about escape, with stubborn protagonists, worlds far away from my life: everything by Jacqueline Wilson, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Lemony Snicket, Louise Rennison, Judy Blume, Ann M. Martin, Mallory Blackman, the Archie Comics, Bible stories, etc.
But this question helped me remember that some of my favourite reading memories growing up were communal. The group of friends I was part of in secondary school passed books around and it was a solid generosity I’m still thankful for.
When I was 13 or so, an erotica book went around by an author with the pseudonym Zane. (I looked her up, writing this.) I read and loved the book, then passed it on to a friend who passed it on to another friend until a teacher found it. The whole class got punished over this, because no one would say where or who it came from. Some people didn’t know and those of us who did would rather kneel for two hours than submit the name. We just knew that a story about touching, which belonged to someone’s mother had found and changed something in us, and we weren’t going to betray that for anything. No one would go under the bus without the rest of us. I think it’s beautiful that no matter what I forget, this stays in my mind: the image of teenagers in Lagos heat smuggling books into each other’s school bags, like ‘here, take this. I’m trusting you with it’.
My memory of books is also linked to lasting love. My first best friend, F., and I had a separate ritual of spending hours discussing our thoughts on characters and I think it tethered us to each other. She never stopped being one of the best parts of my life and we replicate that still, whenever we’re reading the same thing. But the books that really transformed my reading experience are books I found in my late teens and early twenties: Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, Aminatta Forna’s Memory of Love, Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sister’s Street, Tsitsi Dangaremgba Nervous Conditions; Sefi Atta’s Swallow and News From Home, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Edwidge Danticat’s Krik! Krak?. Finding stories that weren’t about white girls literally changed my life and shaped my road as a reader. There’s a before and after as far as what I believed stories could do, how close to my life they could get.
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About the Author
is a writer and artist. Her debut work of fiction VAGABONDS! will be published in 2022 by Riverhead Books (US), 4th Estate (UK) and Farafina Books (NG).
Nigerian novelist, poet and author of Graceland, Chris Abani, does not believe ‘Nigerian literature’ exists as a category: ‘It is a common misconception that there is a fixed category that can be read as essentially “Nigerian literature”. Nigeria has 500 nations, 500 languages and about 2,000 dialects. While culture and language can overlap, the level of diversity is such that Nigerian literature cannot be easily narrowed down.’
For the co-founder and publishing director, of Cassava Republic Press, which marks its 20th anniversary this year, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, it is telling that African literature is often pronounced dead in recent years, when more women and queer voices are becoming more prominent: ‘The loudest obituary writers about African literature tend to be men. These elegies seem to come from a tacit sense of personal or generational displacement rather than from the actual state of the field.’
Nigerian poet, novelist and author of Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-Hearted, Ben Okri, argues that Nigerian literature doesn’t always have to be about Nigeria: ‘Nigerian literature limits itself to Nigeria and then limits even the ways in which the country can be written about. What we want is a vast literature, a great literature…that speaks to all humanity.’
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