‘My Practice and Method of Writing Are Obsessive’

First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.

Our questions are italicized.

Our house was a house of inherited stories and hand-me-down books my mother used in school, and these were the first books I read. The culture then was to save all your textbooks and notebooks for your younger ones. My mother took this a step further by ensuring she got these books back from her younger ones when they were done using them. So in my childhood home, before I was born, she turned a cabinet with heavy glass doors into a bookshelf and added two locks on it. In this bookshelf, she stored all the books she read in secondary school. Everything from Anezi Okoro’s One Week One Trouble; to Cyprian Ekwensi’s Trouble in Form Six and The Drummer Boy; Eddie Iroh’s Without A Silver Spoon; Charles Dicken’s Bleak House; William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and King Lear; an Atlas of the world; a Geography textbook; and long-note exercise books with her writing that slanted to the left. The list was endless, and these books could be found browned and with that dusty woody smell books have when they have been left alone for a long time on a bookshelf. I read most of those books, especially the African titles. I even read some of them more than once. When I was seven, my mother who had noticed how much I loved to read, bought me my first books—a copy of One Good Turn by Chinelo Ifezulike from the Lantern series and a copy of No More Courts by Egbuna Akpa, a play. After I was done reading each book, I made her sit with me for hours while I narrated how interesting the book was. She loved it.

If my life right now was a series of texts, it would be somewhere on the pages of Pet by Akwaeke Emezi and I would be living in Lucille with a family of friends and relations that listen. For a decade now, without intending to, I have nurtured one of the safest spaces of finely picked relationships just by gravitating towards people whose company I felt safe in. I remember reading Pet and even while knowing it was fiction—not just fiction, speculative fiction—I found a lot of the dialogue to be very relatable. I knew it was where I was, and I wished and still wish many people could get there.

The last profound change of mind I had after reading a book was in 2022 and the book was Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. However, it was not as much a result of reading Homo Deus as it was a chain result of other books I had read coming up to that moment. Two very unlikely books that helped this shift were The Faith Explained by Leo J. Trese that I had read in 2018 and Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi that I read in 2021. The Faith Explained showed me the beauty of the Christian faith I was raised in at its finest. It had logic and it was beautifully written, and I read it at a time I needed to read it. A few years later I read Freshwater and it felt like coming home. In Freshwater, everything converged, the faith of my ancestors and that of my parents, which Trese had done a good work defending and explaining to me three years earlier. Freshwater was familiar. I loved that Emezi did not commit the blunder of picking one religion and writing about it like the other religions do not affect some of us simultaneously. By the time I read Homo Deus, my questions had been answered and I was comfortable enough in my skin to say ‘these faiths, however beautiful, cannot apply to me if I don’t want them to. And if I do not want them to, the world/my world will not end.’

I like to think that Arundhati Roy exists to remind the human race that how a text is written is where its power lies. The subject is important and can be helpful, but how this subject is written is what determines how powerful the text will be. I remember how I felt when I read The God of Small Things by Roy. She had a way of bringing you to your knees with each paragraph with such subtle things like ‘emphasis’ and ‘repetitions’.

I used to write, then edit. But recently, I have had to edit as I write for want of time.

I will always think of the writing I did in ‘Nigeria vs the South East: The Glaring Igbophobia of the 2023 Elections’ as ‘documenting’. It was different from anything I had ever written. Writing this piece involved taking long walks and long baths to clear my head. I was also talking to myself a lot in an effort to make sense of the piece. I did not discuss it with my friends because I needed to capture the different emotions I felt about those events as clearly and originally as possible. I dug into profiles on Twitter that I would ordinarily avoid for endangering me and my people. I needed to clearly say: ‘we do not have a victim complex, you have hurt us and continue to do so, you do not like us and here is proof for when all this is over.’

The bigotry of the just concluded election season was the Nigerian experience of most Igbos that the rest of Nigeria denies and gaslights. It needed to be talked about. Nigeria has committed so many undocumented crimes against Igbo people that the only proof that these things happened in the ways we were told they happened are in the traumas they left behind, the oral stories we heard at home, and the ease with which crimes like the ones committed in the last election season against Igbo get committed even in this age and time. As someone raised in a house full of many inherited stories, some of these stories being historical were about the war, about Ọsọ Abiola (when Igbo people had to flee different parts of Nigeria to Igboland in the wake of the protests of the annulment of the June 12 election), about families that got separated during these tragedies and family members that never returned from them. I felt from a very young age that there was something unfortunate about being Igbo in Nigeria. Knowing this as an Igbo person is not the difficult part, proving it is. The piece was me telling the world: ‘See what we mean when we say that Nigeria has an Igbo problem’.