My process of composition is a long and sinuous one: first an idea comes to me, usually by serendipity. I can now allow the idea to incubate and grow into a fully formed piece—a novel or a short story. That period of incubation is often long, but when the story spills onto the page I am often satisfied because it has been a long time forming. But in 2011 when I completed the novel I had been writing since 2009, I felt that the narrative perspective was not right. It wasn’t a third-person narration; I had already tried that. It wasn’t a simple first-person narration; I had already tried that too. So what then? I left the book in frustration and began writing other things until I flew to Nigeria that summer. It had rained on my way to our house in Makurdi, but on arriving, the sun was shining and it had turned hot. I took a quick shower and lay in my old bed, now occupied by my younger brother Benjamin, who was nine at the time.
Benjamin had been waiting for me to come to the room so he could talk to me alone. He was taller than I had thought he would be—I hadn’t seen him in three years. He had a small scar on the side of his head, and even in the heat, he’d put the new cheap shirt I had bought him over the soap-worn one he was wearing. He was happy. He was talking, wanting to fill me in on the happenings since I was gone. Did I know that there have been changes in the neighbourhood? A new supermarket had been built just two blocks from our house—did I see it? I nodded, yawning. The family next door, who lived in the shack that formed this big contrast with our concrete, gated house, lost their dad last year—did I hear about it? I perhaps didn’t answer. I was tired from the 16 or so hours travel, falling asleep.
“Eh, brother, you know last week there was this boy, he was big. He was beating every-body, like a superman... but I fought him and beat him!”
These were words said in between some longer narrative, to which I was murmuring only mhmm, oh, while thinking of Cyprus from which I had just arrived, the friends left there, my apartment, and the new position the university was offering me. But now I was shaken awake. “There was even that new house with that blue roof. They have these two boys, twins. Ah, they can run really fast! That one, Ignatus—he can run. They are rabbits! And, they even go to that public school with many children... they are ants... they are all doves!”
A boy was a superman. Two boys are rabbits. Some schoolchildren are ants. Some adults are doves. These are not comparisons in the way I was used to, but associations. Benjamin, at only nine, did not have the ability to understand complex phenomena like violence, the absence of his older brother, marriage or things beyond his comprehension. So, he attempted to make sense of them through associations with thing she understood better—comics or animals (he owned an encyclopedia of animals that he treasured). This was why, when a boy bigger than him beat him, he could only explain this defeat as having fought with a “superman”. If kids can run so fast in the case of the twins, they must be “rabbits”. I knew at once that my younger brother’s childish babbling had opened a door that I had been banging at for many months. That night, I rewrote the entire novel, recasting the story of this fractured family through the lens of the youngest of four brothers, Benjamin, nine, who narrates the story by comparing everything to animals: “Father was an Eagle”; “Ikenna was a Python”; “Mother was a Falconer”; “Boja was Fungus”.
It was easier to make the choice on how to tell the story in the second novel. But later that year, I wrote a short story in which I faced a similar struggle. I had written it this time in the form it should be, but “The Strange Story of the World” lacked a narrative core. My father was visiting the US, and we were driving from Nebraska to Michigan. We had been in a debate about Christianity in Nigeria—my father defending the modern form, me arguing that it was corrupted and doing much harm. We stopped at a rest place and when we got back in the car, he wanted to change the subject. So, he began singing a song I hadn’t heard him sing in years, perhaps, in two decades. It was a song about hope being something that must be preserved. For some reason, this song—even though I hadn’t heard it in a long time—felt like the background music of my childhood, of my family story if it were to be made into a film. And as the cars stirred back to life, it occurred to me that the story of the family I was telling in the piece must revolve around a song.
We took a turn once this epiphany happened and I looked at my father, concluding his singing, and said to him, “Daddy, thank you for that!”
“What?” he said.
Years later, I began work on a new novel about the Biafran War of Independence. My mother was born in 1961, and only nine when the war ended. She knew that an uncle went to fight and never returned, and that one of her older brothers fought and survived. She knew about the hunger, the drills, the death she witnessed and heard about. At first, she wondered why that war, why was it a thing to be written about? She did not get it, I argued, plus it was too late. I had already finished what I believed was a complete draft.
We were sitting on the porch of her house in a town near Umuahia, and she was gazing at the sun shining through the palm trees, picking her teeth with a chewing stick. She sighed, looked at me and said, “OK, but there is something you should know about telling stories of wars.”
“What?” I said.
“Wars are meant to produce large-scale deaths,” she said in Igbo. “So, its primary subjects are often dead people, I fu go?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But, when stories of wars are told, they are told only by who? The living! Ha, but that is never complete. If the story of a war must be truly and fully told, it has to be told by both the living and the dead.”
My mother went quiet as my unwitting collaborators—my brother, father, and now mother—often did after unknowingly changing the shape of a project.
In the silence I could hear only bird cries. Two of them were floating just overhead on a thermal, the sun on their wings. I knew, watching them and with my mother’s words in my head, that the novel I had just finished would have to completely change.
