by Okey Ndibe
I nodded in his direction but felt too excited to utter a word. I had met few writers at close quarters, and anybody who’d written a book held an allure of magic. But shortly after the plane lifted into the air, I found my voice.
“I am a fan of yours,” I said in a shaky voice.
“Lovely,” he said with English reserve, but breaking into a smile.
I let a moment pass, and then announced that I was a journalist.
“What paper?” he asked, his tone revealing more interest than I expected.
“African Guardian. A weekly magazine.”
“Of course,” he said with palpable interest. “What’s your name?”
I told him my name. His smile widened. He told me that he knew and enjoyed my work.
I thanked him and lifted a book halfway to my face, pretending to read. In reality, I was still hoisted on a crest of excitement. Here was a bona fide writer, and one who spoke English as proficiently as the very originators of the language, and he knew who I was, down to being familiar with my writing. A few minutes later, from the corner of my eye, I caught the writer looking at me.
“You must be writing a novel, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, like a programmed machine, before I had had time to think.
“Do submit it to Delta,” he said. He had just set up the publishing company in Enugu.
I pretended to turn once again to the book, to discourage him from probing about my so-called novel. Moments later, I felt I could speak with calmness.
“How did you figure out I was writing a novel?” I asked.
“Oh, your writing style. Whenever I read you in the magazine, you have that novelistic style.”
Slowly, unobtrusively, I took a deep breath.
I returned to Lagos and set to writing what I imagined was a novel. It was the story of a university-age Yoruba girl disinherited by her rich father after she reveals her love for an Igbo man from a wretched background. Then, once the man graduates as an accountant and gets a lucrative corporate job, he ditches her—for an Igbo bride. The Yoruba woman, rejected by her father and jilted by the man she loves, is bereft and heartbroken. In her loneliness, she turns to her paternal grandmother, the only person still willing to open her arms in a gesture of unconditional love.
I wrote the manuscript in longhand, on foolscap sheets. In less than two months, I was done. I handed it to one of the typists at the magazine to type it for me, for a fee. He had not finished when Achebe invited me to the United States to edit African Commentary.
A week or two after my arrival in the United States, I realized—in a hard, sobering way—that I had not written a novel. At best, I had taken what should have been a short story and stretched and stretched it to answer to the name: “novel.” You want to know how I figured that out? Let me tell you.
In Nigeria—in the late 1980s—few, if any, bookstores would allow a wandering customer to thumb through the pages of a book for more than a few seconds. Books belonged on shelves. Browsing customers could look at the book-lined shelves as long as they wished, but they were not permitted to pull out a book unless they meant to pay for it. If a customer lingered over a book, the salesperson was bound to order, often brusquely, “If you’re buying, buy; if you’re not, put it down!”
Then, arriving in America, I beheld the wonder of the bookstore equipped with couches. It was hard to believe that I could pull out several magazines and books, lower myself in a couch or comfortable chair, and read to my heart’s content. And I could do this day after day, and no staff of the store was going to give me an evil eye much less order me to buy the book or magazine already—or put it back. Americans had taught me the saying, “There’s no free lunch.” I was more than pleased to take free reading!
Many an evening, I went to one or another of the bookstores in Amherst. I would scan through the fiction section and pull out novels and other texts whose titles caught my fancy. I remember harvesting books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Wideman and Toni Morrison and Carlos Fuentes and Andre Brink and some ancient greats like Sophocles and Homer. Then I’d find a place to sit and start reading them. As I read, I had this awakening: the manuscript I had finished in Nigeria was nowhere near the quality of writing and dramatic complexity of these novels.
A year later, I had my first opportunity to visit Nigeria. The typist handed me a bundle, both the handwritten and typed versions of my ostensible novel. In a flash, gripped by an access of rage I would later regret, I tore it all to shreds.
Four years later after my conversation with Onyeama, John Edgar Wideman would echo the Nigerian writer’s question. Once again, I was left no choice but to lie. And, having lied, I had to start (again) writing a novel.
That night, I began to scribble. I wrote with a measure of desperation commensurate with what was at stake. I had no subject, but I chose a madman to be at the center of the narrative, as my protagonist.
Ever since my teenage years, the insane had fascinated me. What was their history? When did they turn mad, and how? Was there some symmetry and logic to their thoughts and actions?
Growing up, I had known several madmen and -women. I used to spend long hours trailing them, observing their idiosyncrasies, eavesdropping on their utterances. Sometimes, I would speak to them, try to coax them into a conversation.
There was the reedy woman, Ugoada, who daily traversed a road that cut my secondary school in two. She would often stake out a position outside the school’s kitchen, bowl in hand. She would plant herself there until one of the kitchen staff gave her two or three scoops of akamu, a hot porridge made from ground fermented corn.
There was “World Man,” distinguished by his bloodshot eyes, dreadlock hair, and scholar’s goatee. He walked with a limp and wore his shirts unbuttoned, so that they fluttered when the breeze blew. He haunted a busy junction in my hometown, Amawbia. He would weave through gaps between cars trapped in traffic. Then, pausing beside a driver, he’d hold out a hand and speak his signature phrase: “Oko [buddy], give me money.” It was said of him that he’d been a bright student but had smoked something illicit that fouled up his brain.
There was another madman whose right foot was missing two toes. He always wore shorts as he trolled homes, including the postmaster’s quarters where we lived, asking for money and food. He declared himself to be Jesus and promised salvation to those who gave him money. He loved the thrill of a moving vehicle. Once he’d collected some money, he would hop into a commuter vehicle. He would pay for the terminal destination in either direction, either Onitsha to the west or Enugu to the east. “Uto motor, uto ebe!” he’d exclaim as he settled in a bus (“The sweetness of a car ride, sweet indeed!”).
I was going to make the mad people I knew grist for my would-be fiction. I was going to attempt to imagine not only their language but also the inner landscape of their minds. I had confirmed Wideman in his impression that I was working on a novel, and I had to put up. I wrote, resolved to capture the churning, chaotic, unpredictable mind of a madman.
Each step of the way, the writing was dogged by self-doubt, hampered by a sense that it would all end in futility. I couldn’t tell whether what I was setting down resembled fiction in any form. All I could go on was the fact that I had read voraciously at that point in my life. And, in particular, I had read a lot of novels, from different parts of the world, on different subject matters, in different styles, different periods. Yet, that experience, I realized, was no guarantee that I could write a novel. At best, it meant I was able to say which writers and styles I liked, which I didn’t. Yet, if one was able to make aesthetic judgments as a reader, it did not follow that one could write a novel. Not even one patterned on one’s favorite style.
Were the circumstance different, perhaps doubt would have crippled my endeavor. But the stakes were too high. I could afford to give Wideman some weird draft he would not recognize as fiction; but I d
idn’t have the option of handing him nothing. He and I lived in Amherst, and there were good odds we’d run into each other again. How would I explain not showing him a section of my manuscript when he had said he might help get me into UMass’s MFA program?
Over the weekend, my labor and ardor yielded twenty-three typed pages. I dropped off the harvest at Wideman’s office at Bartlett Hall, University of Massachusetts. Two days later, he rang me.
“I found your writing fascinating,” he said. “It reminded me of the fiction of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.”
I was not only relieved that I hadn’t produced work that made a fool of myself; I was, in fact, flattered. The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was one of my favorite novelists of all time. And I admired his social commitment, his advocacy for the peasants and poor of his country, an activism that earned him censorship, detention, and exile from his native country.
Wideman and his friend Michael Thelwell arranged for me to take the Graduate Records Examinations (GRE). And then, true to his promise, Wideman found funds to enable me to register for the MFA degree. Unable to secure my transcripts from Nigeria, I could not register until the next academic year, 1993.
Years later, Ngũgĩ and I were together in Nairobi, Kenya, to attend the Kwani Literary Festival. Over breakfast, I told him how I had lied to become a writer. He laughed for a long time. And then he told me that he, too, had done something similar.
As a student at Makerere University in Uganda, he had one day chanced upon a senior student who was the editor of the university’s literary journal. The editor was something of a star on campus, especially among students in the humanities. Ngũgĩ said he had very much wanted to hold a conversation with the man but wanted for a handle, a topic that would make the editor pause and deign to talk.
On an impulse, he told the man he’d written a short story. He feared the man would brush him off and continue on his way. Instead, the editor paused, flashed a smile, and asked him to submit the story.
Ngũgĩ rushed off to his hostel and began writing what became his first story—and the beginning of an illustrious literary career.
Once I enrolled in the MFA program, the manuscript I had handed to Wideman began to mutate. Its working title changed from Dry Dreams to Spikes of Rain and, finally, to Arrows of Rain. After writing close to sixty pages in the voice of a madman, I became scared about the health of my own mind. I decided to write, not about a madman as such, but about a protagonist who, on the exterior, looks the part, but, on closer scrutiny, as the dramatic events unfold, reveals himself as frighteningly sane.
I treasure telling audiences, especially of aspirant writers, how a lie offered me a path to a vocation as a writer. I always end by underscoring the moral of the story: Lie about being a writer, if you have to, but have the courage, grit, and stamina to turn that lie on its head, make it spell truth.
Writing, Reading, Food, Some Ass Kicking
T he MFA program at the University of Massachusetts opened my eyes to new ways of growing as a writer. Many writers and scholars quibble about whether writing programs advance or hamper creative work. In my case, I learned a lot, about reading and writing and about people, in the classroom—and outside of it.
When I look back on that time, I think of one word: “banquet.” I had never had an experience that remotely resembled a writing workshop. Each session sustained the impression that one was at a banquet. Stories were at the center of the communion, but food and drinks were also inseparable parts of the ritual.
The literary parts of the banquets were hardly ever smooth, hitch-free affairs. Every now and then, the discussions got contentious, stories received bruising comments, tempers flared, and the atmosphere became charged. But even those difficult shifts seemed to me indispensable and necessary. They helped keep the literary banquets exciting, served as payoffs for those moments when everything was in sync, no voices were raised, nobody colored red or choked up, no nerves got tested.
I had read a fair number of novels, short stories, and plays, but I went into the writing program with some pretty bad writing manners. I was a consummate overwriter, a splurger on sentences. I never could resist the temptation to write five sentences when one would do. As a reader, I liked fiction and poetry that incorporated ellipses and other forms of gaps, works that invited me to be an active reader, indeed challenged me to be a cocreator of meaning. Yet, I wrote in a manner that spelled out too much, handed the reader everything, if I could manage it. In workshops, I began to learn that less was often more, that narrative economy could be a mark of genius, and discerning when and how to hold back could translate into offering your reader whole new universes to discover, explore, be enchanted by, play in.
Despite my experience as a reader, I hadn’t divined how dialogue worked in fiction. I took fiction, which can be a serious matter, too seriously, almost like a grave, joyless thing. The characters in the first drafts I offered for workshop spoke like philosophers. It was just that their speech was often that—speech. They spoke in a ponderous manner, their diction appropriate to a gathering of book people who had forgotten how to speak and connect like humans. I said my characters spoke like philosophers; I lied. They spoke like bad imitators of what bad philosophers might sound like—if such a breed existed. They used words like “profound” and “verify” and “incumbent” (as in “It’s incumbent upon you”) and “expatiate” and “egregious” and “phantasmagoria.”
Therein lay my biggest challenge as a student of fiction. I had to learn how to “normalize” (I didn’t want to use the word “naturalize”) my characters’ conversations. It took me most of the three years in the MFA program to finally figure it out. I wrote and rewrote dialogue, as if my writing life depended on mastering that technology, which it did. I became a collector of conversations. Wherever I was—on a bus, in a train, in a restaurant, on campus, at a bar—I eavesdropped on people’s conversations. In time, dialogue became my suit.
For me, it was extraordinary to take workshops with writers as varied in their style of writing and teaching as John Edgar Wideman, Jay Neugeboren, George Cuomo, and the Hungarian émigré Tamas Aczel. Wideman was the star of the department, and his workshops were the first to fill. His classroom style was quietly mesmeric. A former college basketball player, he still retained a tall, spare physique. As he spoke, he moved his hands, his long fingers spread apart, molding invisible shapes in the air. It was as if he were conducting his own speech. His ethic eschewed prescriptiveness. Instead, he would focus on the “spirit” of the story. Using a multiplex vocabulary, drawn from psychology, philosophy, history, popular culture, and myth, he would ask a series of questions of or about a story. You emerged from his workshop with the sense of having undergone a quasi-spiritual immersion. He challenged you to think about fiction’s fecund facility for slipping on different masks, touching and even changing us in predictable and unforeseen ways.
Neugeboren had a keen editorial nose. He was quick at sniffing out verbose, loopy, self-indulgent writing. In fact, he had this ability to sift through a page of a story and point to the two or three sentences that had done the job. He became the great tamer of my verbiage, the nurturer in me of a tighter register of language. When he didn’t like a story, he was wont to speak candidly. Yet, as his handsome, youngish face seemed forever lit with a smile, his critical judgments never came across as mean-spirited.
As I remarked earlier, food was an important feature of my experience at UMass, a delectable companion to the cerebral part of the banquet. Each year, Wideman hosted a party at his home in Amherst. Neugeboren did the same, at his creaky home in Northampton.
Cuomo did not wait till the end of the school year to throw his own parties. Our workshop met at his home, tucked into the center of a salute of trees. Each session was a combo of culinary feast and literary excursion, as if he had discovered a potent ancient secret derived from juxtaposing food and fiction. For each workshop, he provi
ded drinks—soda, beer, wine, even the occasional liquor. He also scheduled students to take turns bringing food. Most of my classmates would provide varieties of chips, cookies, vegetables, and dips. When it came my turn, I decided to (literally) spice things up. I made a spicy chicken and tomato sauce, a spicy black-eyed-pea porridge, and white rice. As they ate, my classmates sniffled, daubed at their teary eyes, and wiped their sweaty faces and heads. One of them, an Irish American, was so beset that he glowed deep crimson. When he was able to feel his tongue, he pronounced that it was the spiciest food he had ever let into his mouth. Everybody roared in laughter when I described the cuisine as delicious agony. Cuomo loved the food, particularly because of its heat index. He accepted my offer to keep what was left, which was sizable.
His workshop style was more laid-back and homier than the ones that came before and after. An architectural acumen seemed to be at the center of his perceptivity. Where Wideman searched out narrative spirits and Neugeboren took a scalpel to flabby language, Cuomo had an eye for design flaws in a story. His questions probed deep. He was the kind of teacher who wanted to know why you put this block here, placed that one there.
Cuomo and Tamas Aczel had a kinship, their fascination with the epicurean dimension of creativity. Food and drinks also featured in a fiction workshop I took with Aczel during the spring semester of 1993. What stood out for me was a humorous encounter with the teacher. It became one of several turning points in the evolution of my confidence as a writer.
Aczel’s teaching style—in academic lingo, his pedagogy—was the first thing that got me hooked. By “style,” I don’t mean anything quite so high-minded, nothing to do with what scholars might call discursive practice, nothing that pertained to the way he deconstructed narratives or plumbed texts. No, I refer to something rather primal, basic.