‘Fiction Always Affords a Space for Fun’

Doctoral researcher and author of When Lemon Grows on Orange Trees, Diekara Oloruntoba-Oju, believes that urban youth cultures in Nigeria emerge from the margins to shape mainstream culture: ‘Whether it is Afrobeats, shadow boxing or thrift market fashion, urban youth cultures in Nigeria generally start from a marginalized place and then go on to define the culture (national or global) for everyone else.’

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?

As the youngest child, I was lucky to be born in the surround of an already rich archive of family books. Our shelves were filled with children’s books (by Enid Blyton and Lantern publishers), the African Writers’ Series, Western classics (by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Arthur Miller), revolutionary books, and academic texts in my parents’ fields of language and literature. My mother, a professor of African and African American literature and theatre, had the biggest influence on the books I read. Growing up, she had me read Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Femi Osofisan’s Morountodun and many others by Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head and others. My dad, a scholar and activist, was a quieter influence. He never quite gave me things to read (except gently nudge me to read D. O. Fagunwa to improve my mastery of Yoruba) but his books—more abstract and often revolutionary—called to me themselves. So, I ended up also reading Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Wole Soyinka’s prison memoir, The Man Died and other revolutionary works. Then, my sister was into Christian popular fiction, so I also picked up a lot of Francine Rivers and Frank Peretti. Eventually, my own taste developed a bit eclectically along the lines of everything but finance and self-help books.