‘Art Forces Us to Look At the Past’

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

Our questions are italicized.

I ate books, and I am not being dramatic. ‘Voracious’ doesn’t properly describe the kind of reader I was as a child. I enjoyed the usual school texts like. I enjoyed the usual school texts like, Eddie Iroh’s Without a Silver Spoon, Cyprian Ekwensi’s The Drummer Boy, Chinua Achebe’s Chike and the River, Michael Crowder’s and Onuora Nzekwu’s Eze Goes to School, Kola Onadipe’s Sugar Girl but it wasn’t enough. I got tired of re-reading and that was why I started to read from my cousins’ stashes. I lived in a family house with a lot of my older cousins who owned books that I should not have had access to at that age, but there was no one to stop me and I was too good at making it look like I was reading school texts. I read all the romance and thrillers. In hindsight, I really should not have been anywhere near Mills & Boon or James Hadley Chase but those were my foundational texts. I read the magazines like Readers’ Digest that lay about. Remember, Hints and Hearts and Better Lover? I gobbled them up. My mother worked at an international school with a pretty good library, and I remember her telling me that the earlier I finished a book, the sooner she could bring more. That was how I trained myself into becoming a fast reader. I am now realizing that this is why I enjoy reading young adult books as an adult. I did not indulge in them when I should have.

I feel this way about all the books I love. It is not envy. It is sort of a craving to want to emulate, feeling your way inside another mind and perceptions. But the truth is, you cannot write anybody else’s book—you can only write your own. Still, I wish I had written The Concubine by Elechi Amadi. I read it when I was 17 or 18 and it made a strong impression on me: the heightened tension between the characters, the formality and humour of the sentences, how simple and mysterious the story was. It is an underrated classic.

A series of texts, actually. They didn’t exactly change my mind, they made me aware of how much countries would rather hide atrocities than acknowledge the wrongs they have committed or endured. I read The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang and Human Acts by Han Kang in the same month. I highly advise you not to do that. These books made me so incredibly frustrated, not just because of their contents but also the fact that nothing has changed. Even though art forces us to look at the past, nothing ever changes. So, I wonder, will anything stop this cycle of destruction?