‘Why I deliberately worked violence into my novel’
Your book ‘Sterile Sky’ is about religious violence. In portraying violence in your novel, did you debate about just how much of this violence you wanted to portray? Were you conscious of the impact this would have on readers?
Violence is one thing that powerfully grips my imagination. I have been, all my life, awed or scandalised by human capacity to unleash violence. Imagine if humans would divert all the energies, all the time, all the facilities, they put into making and sustaining violence into something more constructive, how the world would have been much better. My perception of violence has been there from childhood, from the point of innocence, having witnessed a lot of it as a child. You can imagine the impact that would have.
‘Sterile Sky’ is a token, so to say, of that perception. In the novel, I wanted a quantity of violence that would sting the reader, challenge her complacency, cause her nausea. So I consciously worked violence into the novel at different level: personal, familial, societal, national, even international. But I had hoped, and still hope, that the impact it would have on the reader would be such that it would not undermine the force of my thesis, namely that humans on earth are chained by violence and would remain so until there is the courage and the will to change the world order. Most of our traditions, religions, ideologies, education, etc are founded on systems of violence. And we will continue to live with it for a long time.
Speaking about religion, it is important in the novel, as we see through the life of Murtala’s mother and in the sectarian violence it unleashes, but there are always points of convergence between the faiths. Was Imatum’s relation with her Muslim lover an attempt to portray the other side to the conflagration?
That is the point. Imatum is the kind of character I would refer to as an improviser, someone willing to embark on mobility out of the enclosure of the tradition; that is, the will, the agency, to want to break out of the box, to fulfil a dissident desire. It is only with such characters that religion could be properly put in place. Perhaps one of the points I try to make in the novel is that staging religion is one of the problems we have. Religion, in my view, is not to be staged, not to be thingified, not to be made so ostentatious that it overwhelms simple reasoning. I am also interested in pointing out the contradiction that a society that is the most religious (something that should suggest peaceful co-existence) is the most violent.
Interesting. Murtala dreams of the people he knows who have been killed like his brother and his classmates, who were also the closest persons to him. Was this a ploy to explore the issues of trauma in your novel? Do you think trauma has not been addressed enough in literature?
Trauma is there, is always there, in creative works or artistic production. In point of fact, imaginative expression, for quite many people, is a way of expending traumatic feelings, what Jeffrey Alexander, a social trauma theorist, calls a “trauma process”. Writing Sterile Sky was a way of working myself through a trauma process, purging myself, as Religion, in my view, is not to be staged, not to be thingified, not to be made so ostentatious that it overwhelms simple reasoning. I am also interested in pointing out the contradiction that a society that is the most religious (something that should suggest peaceful co-existence) is the most violent it were, of the nightmarish trauma bottled up in me. I think every writer, in each imaginative piece, goes through a similar experience. What is grossly insufficient, in my thinking, is literary scholarship that focuses on analyses shaped by theories of trauma. As literary scholars, we need to construct theoretical frameworks based on the possibilities of not just representing trauma in literature but also seeing trauma as an instrument of resistance.
By representing my trauma in writing, for instance, I could be constructing resistance against the very condition of possibility for that trauma. Trauma theories in literature are relatively new; it is an area we expect African literary scholars to explore given the traumatic conditions backgrounding most of our imaginative writings.
Talking about a writer investing himself in his work, Sterile Sky is somewhat autobiographical because you and your family have lived through sectarian violence in Kano. How difficult was it for you to document these things?
On the one hand, it was not really difficult for me because I seemed to have had something like a ready-made material for fiction; on the other hand, I had to struggle to strike a balance between fiction and autobiography. That is to say, I had to constantly remind myself that I was writing a novel, not an autobiography. This, itself, is difficult. And I can’t say what I have made of it; I think the readers would give a better opinion.
It is your first novel. Do you think that the common assumption that first novels tend to be autobiographical holds true?
I think so. I also think that all novels, all imaginative works, are - forget authors’ pretences - autobiographical. There is an element of autobiography in everything a writer produces. As a matter of fact, there is just a thin demarcation, easily blurred, between fiction and non-fiction so that all narratives claiming to be non-fiction have something of fiction in them, and vice versa. Writing is writing, necessarily
subjected to tropological figuration, and as such the language of any writing has a way of fictionalising the fact of the writing.
Incidentally, your novel ‘Sterile Sky’ was the last book to win the Commonwealth Writers’s Book Prize in 2013. How do you feel about that? Are you sorry to see that the prize is no longer being awarded?
Oh yes, Abubakar. I’m quite sorry about it. When I was told in Bristol, UK, that the prize was packing up, I felt really sad. It was such a prestigious prize that didn’t have to sink like that; it could have been rescued.
Did winning the prize feel like a validation, especially having had your work rejected by publishers in Nigeria?
Precisely. I had even told myself that if I didn’t get that kind of validation - I mean if no institution, no individuals recognised the book, I would give up writing fiction. Fiction, for me, is a very difficult thing to produce, and one shouldn’t take all that trouble only to produce what is not worthwhile.
It has been years since the publication of your debut novel. What has EE Sule been cooking in the intervening period?
Well, well, well. You know, it’s not easy being a scholar and a writer at the same time. Scholarship is as demanding as literary writing. So I often found myself jealously pulled at both ends. But I have made the best of that jealousy. For instance, any time scholarship takes me out of this country, I ensure that I use some of the time to concentrate on writing fiction, and vice versa. So, I have good news for you. There are three of my works with publishers now: my second novel, a literary biography of Niyi Osundare, and a critical book on Nigerian literature. So, you see, a lot has been cooking.
That is good news indeed. When are these likely to be available to the public?
I hope three of them would be out in the first half of next year.
As an academic and a writer, should creative writing be offered as a degree course in Nigerian universities?
It should. It definitely should. And I am working on curriculums that I would present to my university for programmes leading to the award of postgraduate diploma and a master’s degree in creative writing. English departments in Nigerian academic system have been, hitherto, reluctant to grant what you might call a degree status to creative writing because some traditional scholars (traditional in their quaint way of thinking) have undermined the skills of creativity. Blessed with great writers and cultural artists, Nigeria needs to give creative writing a prime place in our education system.
As a writer and a critic, what would you say is behind the resurgence in Nigerian literature that we are witnessing?
A number of factors. The relative democratic freedom we are having, against the decades of military despotism that nearly deadened creativity in the past, is one factor that must be reckoned with. Related to that is the dispersal, exilic and migration phase necessitating what today you may see as the diasporisation of Nigerian literature. Not unrelated to that, of course, is the publishing and publicity capital, prizes and all, in the West that has triggered the resurgence.
The Caine Prize, for instance, has a powerful influence on emerging voices in Nigeria, nay African literature. But that is one part of the story. The other part is that the Western capital almost controls the dominant taste of our literary and cultural production in such a way that it seems to me our literature is being colonised, or recolonised, when it is supposed to be an instrument for fighting imperialism. How
Do you think this is a particular African concern that literature must champion social causes in order to have any relevance?
Championing a social cause, itself, does not imply that language and aesthetics have to be undermined, sacrificed. Most great writers (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nadine Godimer, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri) all have a social cause, are socially relevant, do actually pursue goals aimed at improving the condition of humanity in their works, in their lives. And yet their works are distinguished by the fire of their language and aesthetics. The point is that a piece of writing is not literature without a solid literary language. So, those who are incapable of literary language or enchanting aesthetics are simply not cut out for creative writing. Most times, such people explain away their incompetence by saying they are more concerned about the message, the cause, than the language. I believe that literature cannot escape championing a cause; that is to say, all literature is political, but the writer’s chief preoccupation is to use literary language to veil the politicalness of her writing. This is what makes a great writer.