E.C. Osondu was born in Nigeria. He won the 2009 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, and he received his MFA from Syracuse University. He currently teaches at Providence College in Rhode Island.
There have been renewed conversations going on for about a month now about the validity of Nigerian Literature: if the tag exists, whether it is still bubbling, if it is outright dead. I quipped in one of my tweets weeks ago, and in personal conversations with writer friends, that Nigerian Literature is blossoming better away from home. I predicted that with the overexposure of Nigerian writers to American literary tenets, styles, and culture, Nigerian Literature might soon become “Nigerian-American Literature.” There is that sense of alienation – if I may borrow your words – in today’s literature where the Nigerian writer is flourishing more outside of home than in it, what with the availability of MFAs and residencies in the US. What is your opinion on this conversation, especially in relation to the literature in Africa?
The idea that Literature is dying or dead is a perennial form of anxiety among writers. About every ten years in the United States, an article appears in one of the leading journals posing the somewhat tired question — is American Poetry Dead? Typically, there is a huge uproar and conversations back and forth on the well-being of the art form and what new forms of medications, injections, and therapies should be administered to Poetry which is assumed to be lying etherised and comatose. After a while, the hubbub dies down and everyone returns to the business of not reading poetry.
Nostalgia is a pretty strong human sentiment. Of the three forms of nostalgia — past nostalgia, present nostalgia, and future nostalgia — the nostalgia of the past seems to be the strongest. There is of course the fact that many who dabble into these conversations are sadly under-read, and so the conversations are even more sadly under-theorised. Quite a few believe there was no Nigerian Literature before the founding of Facebook. Literary works are always in conversation with each other. Okigbo was influenced by the Modernists including Ezra Pound; Achebe’s Things Fall Apart takes its title from “The Second Coming” by WB Yeats, and so forth and so on.
Let’s face it— the American poetry world is quite insular and not particularly waiting with open arms to welcome newly-arrived poets fresh off the boat from Africa. I am waiting for a Nigerian poet to win the Pulitzer and the National Book Awards. Aside from Wole Soyinka and myself who have won it in the past, I don’t know that Nigerian-American poets have been winning the Pushcart Prize. We hear announcements of their nominations and after that, silence.
There seems to be a tip-toeing by many Nigerian writers who aren’t exactly sure where they should stand, what themes to tackle in their books, and, especially what the Western editors, agents, and publishers want to read and market. There is a focus on Big Brother West which provides a solid structure and readership for many Nigerian and African writers. It’s a tough position to be in as a writer, I must say. What, to you, then, is the current identity of Nigerian writers? Where is Nigerian Literature now in the context of global literature, in particular, American Literature?
Any writer who is waiting on Western agents and editors to give them a direction/directive on what themes to explore in their work is a non-starter — in short the person still dey learn work. I can tell you this for free, though — I think editors and agents are looking for the next big writer from Africa/Nigeria. You see, we have only one major slot, and they can only crown one writer at a time. At AGNI, the Boston University literary journal where I am a Contributing Editor, we look for work that reads as if it could only have been written by one person. Good writers have their own unique way of looking at the world — more of a solo than an orchestra but a solo that sounds like an orchestra.
As a Nigerian writer living and teaching in the US, what has been your experience writing and working away from home? Is the feeling any different? And I’ll tap here into Alien Stories. Is there any sort of alienation you feel doing your writing away from home, branching far away from your roots? Had there been a moment of “I’m not meant to be doing this here”?
Not really. Maybe the question is not clear. Do you mean as a writer living in the U.S.? Do you mean as a professor teaching at a U.S. University? Let me try and respond to writing away from home. I think there is a certain clarity that comes when you step out of the scene. There is, on the reverse side, a certain opaqueness that muddies the water when you are writing from within. Let me say this, though, Nigerian readers get my work.
Teaching in America is great. All the tools are there. My students are motivated and eager to learn. Nobody is forced to take a Creative Writing class. People take it because they want to be writers. I teach a colloquium titled “Africa.” Students take the class either because their parents are from Africa, the African Diaspora or because they are curious about Africa.
I read your novel, This House is Not for Sale, about a year ago. I was intrigued by the mysterious family patriarch in the story; by how he wielded such power over his household, and over life itself. What inspired you to create this character and use him the way you did in the book?
Grandpa, the protagonist of the novel, is a complicated character like the best of us. He embodies many Igbo ideals. He believes that no human is irredeemable. He believes in money-making. He believes in the apprenticeship system. He believes in the idea of onyeayananwanneya (leave no man behind). Yet he could be cruel and ruled the Family House with an iron fist and a jackboot. Of all the characters I have created, he has remained with me the most.
What has been your primary philosophy about literature and writing?
In a keynote speech I delivered at the Brisbane Writers Festival in Australia, I spoke about how Literature is a magical and amazing land that has laid out a table to which all are invited to bring a plate. No matter their nationality or ethnic origin or orientation, all are welcome. Sadly, there appears to be a lot of gate-keeping and denial of access, and outright curtailment and banning these days. I hope we don’t lose that ideal.
Let’s go back to 2009, with your winning of the Caine Prize. You’ve spoken a number of times about prizes and their relevance to writers. What did that win do for you, considering how far and well you’ve fared fourteen years after?
It has been a means of showcasing and introducing African writers/writing to the world. It has also done something or even a lot for short fiction in the sense that it is a prize that privileges the short story. Before I won the Caine Prize I was already represented by the Wylie Agency and was already on the professoriate track. Having said that, a part of me is also happy the Caine Prize is no longer the only rodeo in town for African writers, and that there are now in the continent many prizes for the short story. To quote Mao Zedong, let a thousand flowers bloom.
You raised a rather interesting point about memory in a 2021 interview with Kasimma. You described memory as “…the only thing we bring along with us when we are stripped of all we have.” Like in your short fiction, “Memory Store,” I, too, have found memory an important agent in my fiction and nonfiction work. It’s pretty much, for me, the mediator between creative truth and untruth. How has the power or limitations of memory played out in your work over the years?
Writing is usually a form of recollection and is rarely if ever, created in situ or in the moment. So we rely on memory to create art. We manipulate memory. We sift memory. We adorn memory. We may even distort memory in the process of creativity. In that particular story, I was interrogating the idea that as African writers, we may actually be selling our memories. But are we selling counterfeit memories?
Alien Stories was published in 2021. Tell us about this book, especially the inspiration behind it.
Alien Stories won the BOA Fiction Prize as a manuscript and was published a couple of years later after winning the prize. It is a linked collection of stories that uses the concept of aliens to look at the idea of aliens as foreigners, and aliens as extra-terrestrial beings. It plays around with the popular tropes of science fiction to ask questions about colonialism, and especially racism of the American kind, or what I call “bottomless racism.”
Considering the fact that you’ve mentioned that you are sometimes viewed in America as someone from a different planet – “an ET rather than an EC” – to what extent can you say Alien Stories is a reflection of your own diasporic reality? Possibly, that of your living and working in the US.
Not entirely. I am privileged in certain respects. Still, racism is an equal opportunity/phenomenon. Nothing protects anyone from anti-Blackness. Not money, not fame, not accomplishments; not even the presidency of the United States.
What distinct, unique experience of your art and literature has living in the US opened you up to?
As the world shrinks, there are fewer things that are particularly inaccessible to people living in other parts of the world. Let me illustrate. In order to read issues of GRANTA Magazine when I lived in Nigeria, you had to go to the offices of the British Council Library. Now you can read the same journal on your phone in Enugu or Nsukka. You know, this interview would have been more cumbersome a process before the Internet, etc.
At what point in life did you know for certain that writing was for you? Was there a Eureka moment?
I have always been a reader, a super huge reader, and oftentimes there’s a natural progression from reader to writer.
What living African writer inspires your work the most?
When it comes to writers, the distinction between living and dead does not really make much of a difference. We primarily relate to writers through their works. Achebe, Soyinka, Ahmadou Kourouma, Naguib Mahfouz, Ben Okri.
Are there any upcoming book projects in the pipeline?
I am turning my attention to Non-Fiction/Essays.
What book are you currently reading?
The Rub of Time by Martin Amis. He passed away recently.
If you were to write a letter to the past, what would you say to E.C. before a part of the world perceived him as E.T.? What should pre-alienated E.C. Osondu know from this one?
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This quote from Hamlet by William Shakespeare is perhaps apropos.
