In just two decades of serious creative writing and literary scholarship, Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo has achieved what many won’t achieve in a lifetime. With over fifty published creative works in all genres of literature, sixty academic papers and a shelf teeming with prestigious literary and merit awards, including the Nigeria Prize for Literature and ANA/Cadbury Poetry Prize, she is simply ahead of the game.
Besides, next month, she will be made a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters in an investiture, the highest qualification an academic in the humanities will get in Nigeria, which is a culmination of her academic achievements. In this interview with HENRY AKUBUIRO in her office at the University of Lagos, Akachi Ezeigbo discusses her literature, awards and feminism. Your writings limn gender, politics, love, mystery, culture, child and sex trafficking, and what not. How does a story idea come to you –through a voice, an image or a flirting character? It comes to me in various ways.
Sometimes when I hear people say something, it might trigger an idea that I would like to develop. It could be something that I have read that fascinates me, and I want to develop that idea. It could be something that just comes to my mind –something imaginative. I always carry a notebook with me so that, when an idea comes, I just put it down, even when am in a market, because, if I don’t, I will forget it. Ideas come in various ways and sources, and I am always on the lookout for them.
The Umuga trilogy, which includes Last of the Strong Breed, House of Symbols and Woman of the Eagle, established you as a strong voice in Nigerian fiction. Tell us about the research. These novels are historical. In researching on them, I had to go back to my village and dig into our history and talk to some people. I had to change the setting from the original Uga Town to Umuga in order to create a kind of fictional difference. Some of the characters in the novels are modeled after some members of my family. For instance, some aspects of the character traits of the Eagle Woman in the trilogy are those of my mother. In that trilogy, one finds powerful female characters who impacts on societal convulsions.
How realistic are these character portraitures vis-à-vis the original history? The first novel in the trilogy, The Last of the Strong Ones, has very strong female characters, but those women really existed: they belonged to a group known as Oluada (the voice of women). Even today we still have them. We have Umuada (the group of women in the town), while Obuofo means women leaders. Do you know that every December 26th is dedicated as Obuofo Day by our people to commemorate the twelve men who were forcefully taken away by the white men?.
That trilogy is real, but the characters, of course, have been fictionalized; they are not just the way they were in the original story. For instance, the woman in the trilogy called Ejimnaka, the number one leader of women in that novel, has a real name, Akarigba, in history, and she hailed from my extended family. And when you look back, even though women had their challenges, and were often marginalized by patriarchy, they were still strong in matters concerning them. For instance, they had their own associations where they took care of their own affairs, like the Association of Wives, which was called Alutaradi; or the Association of Daughters, which was and is still called Umuada.
These associations were very powerful in the past. They may not be as powerful today, but they may still contribute to the development of the Igbo communities wherever they exist. In my town, the Umuada are in the forefront of making peace, which has some problems. But those powers welded by women in The Last of the Strong Ones are almost unfettered. Is that a model of what the feminist theory, complementarily, entails? If you look at that novel, you will notice that complementarity is part of it. In history, there were male and female Obuofo (the inner council of elders that ruled the town at that time).
They consisted of four female representatives and sixteen male representatives. My town had four villages, and each of the Oluadas came from the four villages; however, the men had four representatives per village, and they outnumbered the females, and all of them formed the council of Obuofo. They existed and were allowed to participate in the Obuofo, because they represented the women. Some people have described the Igbo society as democratic, but I do not completely agree that it was democratic then, because there were injustices that thrived in that society. For instance, the Osu outcastes were not highly regarded in society, and the men who took Ozo titles were more elevated than ordinary men.
So, I cannot describe such a society as democratic in the real sense of it. But, to large extent, people were allowed to have a say. It was not like in some parts of Nigeria that had kings and obas, who were so powerful that they could take decisions that affected everybody’s life. It wasn’t so in Igbo societies, because the elders and families could reach a consensus and take decisions on things affecting them.
So, there were no kings as such that time. Women were allowed, especially when it came to their own affairs, to organize themselves in the extended family. The married women had their own associations, as well as the daughters, who had powers in her father’s lineage and husband’s place, though her power was less in her husband’s place. But their powers derived from the associations of women, because they could come together as a force as Alutaradi and challenge the men. Even as a child, I saw women going en masse to a man who maltreated his wife to sit down in his house in protest. It is called Iwusara mmadu in my dialect.
It meant camping in his house, eating his yam and chicken, killing his goats to cook food and going to his obubu (little garden) to defecate if the need arises. Often, after a day or two, they embarked on that mission, the man would come and beg them, and they would give him conditions to take back his wife. They welded such a big power then. Then, what led to the erosion of those powers afterwards? There is no doubt that, with the coming of the white men to Africa, some of these powers were lost.
When the white people came, they introduced new laws, which replaced the existing laws. It was not only women who were affected. Men were also emasculated by the new laws during colonialism. African men lost their powers just as the women.
In fact, the women were worse off –they lost powers in the face of European colonization and also in the face of patriarchy, because, when the men lost their powers, they descended heavily on the women. It was like the kind of thing that happened in America, when the slavery emasculated the men, the women became worse off. In the last of the trilogy, The Children of Eagle, the supposed loss of an only male child in the family sends all grieving. Does it mean all is lost with that single probable loss? I don’t see it that way. The child didn’t die [eventually]. That story is a realistic one. In Igbo culture at that time (things are changing now), if there was no male child in the family, it was a big problem for the woman and the entire family, because women were not allowed to inherit property from their parents in Igboland.
It is still practiced in many parts of Igboland. But, now, a man can give his daughter a plot of land in cities like Enugu or Lagos, but, can he do it in the village? It is not likely. In the village, if you have only daughters and no males, your daughters cannot inherit that village land. The land will go to your uncle or brother or your nephews. For instance, I can’t inherit my father’s land in my village. If I want a plot of land, I had to buy it and sometimes they don’t even like to sell land to women –you have to go through your husband or brother.
Children of the Eagle has that kind of storyline. Here is a family with five daughters who are all educated, holding down important jobs in academics, clergy and the media, but they don’t have a say in their father’s compound, because they are merely seen as women who would live their father’s compound and go and build other people’s homes. In that novel, one of the daughters of the man had an illegitimate child, but the mother pretended to have born him. Though he is only 14, at the time the story is unfolding, he is the most valued person in that family.
His life is like an egg that must never break. When he has an accident, and they think he has died, some people were even suggesting that the youngest daughter of that man, who was dating a white man, should abandon him and come and stay in his father’s house to procreate male children for her father. So, when the novel is coming to an end, it is thought that the boy has died, but eventually he survived the accident.
Interestingly, while everybody was thinking the boy had died, the other daughters of the man resisted that their sister should abandon the white man she was in love with and whom she was planning to marry to come and stay in the village and procreate male children for the father. They also insisted that, in the event that the boy died, they would inherit their father’s property both in the village and elsewhere.
They were determined to go to achieve their purpose before the boy survived. Given the validation by the NLNG in 2004 with the House of Symbols, one of the three books on the shortlist, do you consider it the best of the pick of the pack? It is difficult to say. So many people say it is The Last of the Strong Ones that is the best among the trilogy. It is very difficult for me to judge on this. But I like the three books, because each of them is unique in its own way. House of Symbols, I think, is a formidable book. It captures a moment in the history of my people and Nigeria, because it is set at the intersection when colonization had been properly established and just before independence, especially the politics of that time, as well as the experience of the people in their homes and family and marital relationships.
How do your experiences form part of your fiction, because in your latest fiction, Roses and Bullets, for instance, you played a role during the Nigeria civil war, and yours is a war narrative…? Yes, I was a special constable. We were given military training, actually. I was in secondary school when the war started and some of us were trained as Red Cross personnel. I was trained as a special constable. But we did not go to the warfront. What I did was to take part in security and train other constables. I also worked in a refugee camp when I finished my work as a special constable. So, how did your experiences form part of the fiction? Well, I used part of my experiences to explore some of the issues in the novel. I didn’t go to the war, but I had relations who went to war and told us the story. It was so traumatic during the war; people had to cross the enemy lines, and they lost their lives sometimes.
I also explored my training as a special constable and trainings of the militia in the novel. The activities of the youths who were organizing entertainments to help raise some money for the army were also explored in the novel. But there is a growing disenchantment that the war theme is being over flogged in Nigerian literature… I must tell you that writing on the Nigerian civil war will not cease. Historical experiences will always continue to inspire writers, even future writers who have not been born today. Take for instance, the American writer, Stephen Crane, who was not even born during the American civil war (just like Chimamanda Adichie who wrote Half of a Yellow Sun without experiencing the war), and, many decades after, wrote what has been considered the best in the American civil war fiction, The Red Badge of Courage.
So, the Nigeria civil war will continue to inspire people. More people are going to write about it. I just heard that a Nigerian writer living abroad, one Chinelo Oparanta, is bringing out another narrative based on the war. Writers can always approach it from different angles: somebody could approach it from the perspective of children in the war, soldiers in war or the civilians. If you were to rewrite Roses and Bullets, what do you think could make the difference, especially considering the dismissal of the novel as a highly put-down-able book by the controversial critic, Ikhide Ikheloa, despite rave reviews it has garnered recently? (Laughs) That’s his opinion. I think Ikhide sometimes has these funny ideas about books.
At times he makes some good points and at other times he is carried away and becomes emotional about his criticism. But criticism is not something you have to become very sober when you are critiquing a book. You cannot critique a book you haven’t read. In the university, we teach our students that they must read a book thoroughly before talking about it. Even if the book does not interest you, if you want to write a good critique about it, you have to read it properly, and there is no book that is totally bad or good. So, I don’t regard his comment as a very serious one. Of course, there are hundreds of people who have read Roses and Bullets and loved it. Already, many students are basing their PhD on it. I get enquiries from all parts of the world, and I refer them to buy from Kendo on Amazon.com.
It has just been longlisted for the Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa alongside fourteen other books. I understand they had more than four hundred submissions from 26 African countries. If Roses and Bullets could be longlisted for such a prize, from the massive entries, what are we talking about? Reading is a subjected art –it depends on who is reading. Besides, I don’t even like talking about my book. I always like my critics to read and make up their mind. As I tell my students, read the book yourself, form your own opinion and don’t allow other people’s opinions to sway you. As a scholar and a critic, that’s what I do.
In your ANA/Cadbury award-winning poetry collection, Heart Songs, two years ago, you valorized the song motif. What defined your bent? For me, poetry is primarily a song. Even before the written culture emerged, poetry was song in the traditional society. Our people were fond of singing when they were working in the farm, when they sang lullabies to children, etcetera. Those songs were all poems. I gave it that title before I see poetry as primarily a song. Every poem in that collection is seen as a song; it could be a song that causes sadness, brings sorrows or nostalgia, even the satirical ones among them are all songs.
You dedicated the poem Muffled in your recent poetry volume, Waiting for Dawn, to wives of Boko Haram sect, and it is quite revelatory… I read an interview in a newspaper featuring one of the wives of the Boko Haram sect members, and what she said was an eye-opener to me. It showed that some of them were ignorant of what their husbands were doing. That struck me, and I thought about the fate of women in the war, because some of their wives could even tell them not to do what they are doing if they knew. The wife in that newspaper lamented that their husbands sometimes sent them home whenever they wanted to carry out their operations. They don’t have a say in cautioning their husbands from what is bad.
The technique of “self narration” features in some of your fiction. What is fascinating about this technique? It is not always that I use it. In The Last of the Strong Ones and Children of the Eagle, you can notice that I deploy the multiple narrative technique. I use both the first person narrative technique as you are saying, as well as the omniscient narrative technique. I love that multiple narrative technique because it is very comprehensive. Also, it gives you a wider perspective when you see people reporting about their own experiences. And in Trafficked, it is the same. In Roses and Bullets, again, we have a narrator.
However, using a first person narrator makes the narrative vivid and dramatic, because you are hearing from the person who experienced the story. The scenes seem more believable and probable. We also have the confessional mode or what Isidore Okpewho calls collective evidence technique, and the verisimilitude in this type of narrative is very high. It depends, again, on the ability of the writer. Any of the narrative techniques can be used to create a memorable work. Again, some stories are better realized using the first person, while some are better realized using an objective narrator. How successfully do you think you detach the adult in you from your juvenilia? When I am writing for children, especially when I am creating children characters, I normally put myself in their positions. I listen to children also when they talk, and that helps me to get an idea how they talk; and having had children of my own, that’s a good experience.
Do you feel more at ease writing for children, considering the overwhelming tilt of your oeuvre towards children’s literature? At a particular time, I am inspired to write on a particular genre. I got a fellowship to write a novel in London few years ago, but when I got there, the inspiration couldn’t come. From nowhere, I began to have an idea for poetry, and it was profuse writing poems daily. After two or three months, the idea for the novel came back, and I began to write it, finishing the first draft of Roses and Bullets in the next three months. For me, it depends on the mood in which I find myself, the urge in my mind.
Sometimes it is a short story; sometimes it is a play; sometimes it as an academic essay (I have published over sixty academic essays in local and international journals). I am always perceptive to things happening and what my mind perceives. Whichever genre is presenting itself, I tackle it. You have published a couple of plays recently. Don’t you think you are forcing yourself to be a playwright? Incidentally, the first thing I wrote when I was in secondary school was a play, because I was the president of the dramatic society in my secondary school, and I wrote a play for the drama group and acted roles in plays.
I started out in drama; now, that I am coming back to it, it is nothing strange. In fact, I have some unpublished plays. How do you marry your writings, academic and being a mother, because you are always on the move and on the spotlight? Now that my children are all grown, I have more time for my writings and I have a personal assistant I employed working for me in the house. So, I have more time to mentor my students; I have seven PhD students I am supervising. I still write academic papers; I am invited to give lectures and mentor secondary school students, too. In the 1990s, when my children were growing up, I slowed a bit. Indeed, my serious publishing career began in 1992. It appears the tenor of feminist discourse has toned down in Nigerian literature. Is feminism running out of steam?
No. You can see I have just brought out a long essay on feminism “Snail-sense Feminism”. It is my own brand of feminism. I first presented this theory in Germany in 2002 at an international conference in African literature at Hamburg University, Berlin. I have just published it in a monograph, and people are very excited about it. What’s the thrust of this theory? It is based on the Igbo world view about the snail. We have a proverb that says that ire-oma k’ ejule ji aga n’ogwu, and I think that’s what women do in Nigerian society. Women have to really negotiate with men to have a stake in this country, because our society is very patriarchal and women don’t really have many chances to make progress if they don’t have the co-operation of men.
The snail dialogues with its environment, that’s why the snail is able to climb over rocks, hilly terrains, and over all obstacles on the way with a lubricated tongue without being destroyed. It crosses over them peacefully, because it negotiates with its environment. So, my idea is that women need to be like snails to acquire that kind of habit. Some people might interpret it that the snail is too slow. However, it is not the sluggishness that is being emphasized in this theory, but the snail’s sense (intelligence) to live with its environment with negotiation; it is another way of saying complemetarity. Dialogue has to exist between men and women for society to move forward. Are you, by this, jettisoning your attachment to complementarity?
This is also a form of complementarity. It means men and women have to sit side by side. Though there are obstacles on the way of the snail, they don’t stop it from existing in its environment, because it has negotiated with them –and that’s what complementarity is all about: men complementing women; women complementing men. I think that all the African theories that have been conceptualized about women are all related to our culture. It is a universal thing, and you have to key in into your own culture. I believe so much dialogue and negotiation –that has been the way I have lived my life.
I don’t believe in confrontations and unnecessary aggression or one being opinionated about everything. But you are not comfortable with Professor Catherine Acholonu’s Motherism feminist theory… What I am worried about that theory she has conceptualized is that she privileges the rural woman to the detriment of the urban woman. She feels that it is the rural woman who really owns the home or society. But my idea is that the rural woman has some disadvantages and constraints. The first is that she may not have the education that is required for her to make progress in today 21st century. For me, women need education to succeed in this country or elsewhere. I, in particular, encourage women to be educated by ensuring that my daughters are all educated, and I help the female students in this university (Unilag) to achieve their full potentials, because women have problems –they are likely going to be the ones to have low self-esteem more than men. It is not that I am being sexist.
Are you not alarmed that in the next ten to fifteen years the feminist movement will die, because up-and-coming writers are no longer professing feminism? What you ask yourself is: what is feminism? Feminism is simply the idea that women should be given opportunities to grow and be developed in the society. Is that not what the new female writers are doing? Didn’t they empower themselves to be able to write? They still delineate female characters in their efforts to improve themselves and survive. For instance, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Adichie, Promise Ogochukwu, Unoma Azuah, Chika Unigwe, Lola Soneyin or any other female writers, are all writing about women, empowering them and pointing out those areas where they have been marginalized, trying to raise the consciousness of women –and that is what feminism is all about. Feminism, in the African sense, is not aggression, quarrelling or fighting for superiority –it just wants women to rise and be empowered.
So, I think that idea will never die. Rather, it will get stronger. Women can achieve whatever they want to achieve, but not through aggression. That’s what Snail-sense feminism is all about. So, if any younger writer is saying that feminism is nothing to her, that person is deluding herself, because what she is writing ultimately is empowering women in her works and showing them how to survive as workers, mothers, teachers, and whatever. It is only when people begin to see feminism as a slight, women who want to be superior to men or replace them, that they really miss the point. If that is so, where do you place Buchi Emecheta’s brand of feminism where the archetypal antagonist is often a demonized man? I think many people misunderstand Buchi Emecheta and what she was trying to do. People always think her feminism is combative, but I don’t think so.
I have studied Emecheta and read all her novels, including her autobiography, Head above Water. I have written and presented many papers on her at different fora within and outside this country. I have found that many people misunderstand and demonize her for nothing. Why she is seen as being too vocal about this thing is because, in her own time, marginalization was too obvious. But, today, women are really coming up and leaders are actually going out of their way to bring women up in governance. For instance, President Goodluck Jonathan has just appointed a female judge in Nigeria and United Nations has dedicated an international day for women, March 8, every year, and they are also talking about empowering women in the rural areas and encouraging sustainable development.
When Emecheta wrote her novels, her personal experiences came into them: her experiences in marriage as a little girl growing up and how she was devalued were recreated in her fiction. That does not call for demonization. Rather, she was trying to be realistic about the experiences she had. I interviewed her in London in 1990, and she loved the family; she believed in the family. But her idea is that the family must not marginalize women or destabilize them and that the family should rather encourage women; and I believe that is what she may have done with her children. You have yet to publish your first attempt at creative writing back in the day.
Considering how prolific you have since become, it is quite a surprise… I wrote it when I was an 18-19 year old. To publish it means I have to rework it, and I don’t have the time. I find it difficult going back to rework things like that. Some people have advised me to rework it, and I might some day. I don’t think it is bad, but the main team is something many Nigerian writers have written about –Osu caste –and I don’t think I will go back to write a book on Osu at this time. But there is always a new perspective to every theme… Maybe some day I will revisit it, but my time is so limited that I prefer to use it to do new things than going back to old things. What’s new? I am working on a collections of poems, which will come out soon.
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