Living words

I was born in Kaltungo, a village in Gombe state in northeast Nigeria. It was 1967, the year the Nigerian civil war started. My father went to fight and my mum went back to the village to give birth. Back then, everything was in flux: Nigeria only became independent in 1960, before there was so such thing as being Nigerian. It was all about who was in your tribe or from your village. When the war ended in 1970, Nigerians had to begin to learn to live together as a country.

“Our politics and education systems were shaped by the British colonial era”

We spoke English at school but my first language was Hausa so I always saw the world in a dualistic way. I was deeply influenced by the folk tales told by women. This oral storytelling was our informal education. We lived in a big compound with other families and the children would gather outside under the electric light and listen to the stories. Women would tell folk tales about animals. It was like theatre, with singing and dancing. They’d adopt different voices and facial expressions.

Then at school I’d face the complex task of processing all this imagery into English and trying to make sense of it. Our politics and education systems were shaped by the British colonial era. I had the English world-view imposed on me, reading and learning about things I had never experienced, like snow and ice. Storytelling taught me how to travel in my imagination and made me hungry to see other places and cultures. I was mostly a quiet child and spent lots of time alone reading books in English.

I remember seeing soldiers on the streets, coming back from war. But the first time I really understood politics was at the Jos University, where I studied English literature. There I read books like Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, alongside books by Charles Dickens and Edward Said. I started to question the meaning of colonialism and race. I first learnt about these things in an abstract theoretical way and met them, first hand, when I moved to Lagos. These were days of tension amid the pro-democracy movement. There were protests and fighting in the streets. I started working as a journalist in a country that went from military dictatorship to military dictatorship.

I started writing fiction in school and first published stories in magazines when I was in university. I knew I wanted to be a writer. When I moved to Lagos, I had the opportunity to publish short stories and poems in newspapers. It was my first time in the big city and my mind was opened up by conversations about art, literature and politics. I also won an important poetry competition and wrote my first book, a collection of short stories called “Prison Stories”.

One of those stories won the Caine prize for African literature and I later turned it into the novel “Waiting for an Angel”. The book explores anti-military themes, like how the military and violence can suppress imagination. It tells of a young man who was imprisoned because he's a journalist. This came from my working life: I had seen newspaper houses get closed down, journalists being arrested - and some were later killed. These were awful things to experience but provided material for a young writer.

I left Nigeria after I won the Caine prize and was awarded a fellowship at the University of East Anglia in England. I moved to Norwich with my wife and we had a complete culture shock. I couldn’t understand the way people spoke English, the food was totally different. And the weather! It was good for writing, but little else. The UEA exposed me to new mentors but I also found myself in a racial minority for the first time. It was an education in terms of the politics of race and home and place.

It was in the UK that I wrote my second novel “Oil on Water”. I was then invited to the United States as the Chinua Achebe fellow. I arrived in 2007 amid the rise of Obama. Hope and optimism was everywhere. I moved to Germany for one year in 2013. This resulted in the book I published in 2019, “Travellers”, which was inspired by the many people I met and stories I heard.

“Sometimes it takes time to process and reflect”

I continue to teach creative writing at the George Mason University in Virginia, USA. Right now we are seeing new political times in the form of Trump's backlash. I've experienced this extreme political shift but I haven’t been able to to write about it yet. Sometimes it takes time to process and reflect on things.

In 2024 I travelled to Berlin to create the International literature festival. I’d never done anything like that before. I invited the kind of writers that I read: Writers from a range of continents who are not scared of touching topical issues; writers who are conscious of their position. The central theme of the festival was “Strange New World”. Right now we have to use what I call the “Instrumental aesthetic”. In this political climate, written works have to be like instruments.

As told to Jess Smee
Translated by Julia Stanton