December 2009


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At Home in Exile

Funso Aiyejina was in Nigeria in July 2009 to deliver the CBAAC Annual Lecture. Olu Obafemi, a former school mate of his, posed a number of questions to him. This is an edited excerpt of the conversation.

Funso, without doubt, you are one of the very accomplished Nigerian writers in the Diaspora. What has been the major impetus for your writing? What stokes the fire of your creative imagination?

Personally, I think of myself as a minor writer. And I am not trying to be modest. True, my poetry has won a number of prizes, including the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry prize and my fiction has won the Commonwealth Prize (Africa), but when you compare my productivity with some of the other writers of our generation, my harvest, while being qualitatively healthy, is meager.

Although I have been living away from Nigeria for the last 20 years, Nigeria continues to be the main impetus for my writing. I am very passionate about Nigeria. I carry Nigeria in my head wherever I go. I have developed rituals to ensure that this is the case: I listen compulsively to Nigerian music; I create near equivalents of Nigerian cuisine; my wardrobe is essentially Nigerian; and I consciously and subconsciously think in Nigerian languages and images. My writing continues to be a conversation with Nigeria either as the land I have always loved as the inspiration for what I am or as the land that I have grown to hate for failing to become the great country I think it has the potentials to become. Nigeria is the land of missed opportunity, the land of the always coming but never arriving nirvana. Nigeria is a culturally vibrant society, with many courageous citizens who, with the ideal climate, could achieve great things in life. Nigeria remains the home of the many people I call friends, people I went to school with, people who shared a hope of a better future with me as children, adolescents and adults. Nigeria means the world to me and has remained the primary source of my creative materials. Even when I write about other places or topics that may be non-Nigerian, my informing vision is always Nigerian. The centrality of Nigeria to my imagination has now become even more obsessive. I am at that point in life when I feel that what I will do in the future is no longer as important as how I interpret the past I have lived and how that interpretation helps me to understand the quality of my lived life. You know you are growing old when you become more interested in going to visit the landscapes of your past than in visiting new landscapes. I find myself doing a lot of that these days—anxious to visit my childhood landscapes either imaginatively or physically.

What has been your experience as a Nigerian writer living abroad, and in the West Indies in particular? What are your regrets and what added values does living abroad give to your creative enterprise?

Exile concentrates the mind on home. Exile accentuates the good, the bad and the ugly about home. I am constantly doing a comparative assessment of situations—placing situations abroad side by side with situations in Nigeria.

What are my regrets? First of all, because of the primary reason behind my relocation to the West Indies, I do not have too much of what one may call regrets. While my decision to relocate out of Nigeria was in part informed by the sociopolitical and economic mismanagement of Nigeria and the obvious fact of the harassment of dissident intellectuals by the military dictatorship which governed Nigeria, my choice of Trinidad and Tobago as a place of refuge was informed by the fact that my wife is from Trinidad and Tobago. Either way, one of us would have had to live away from his/her home country. She had lived in Nigeria for eight years before we relocated to Trinidad and Tobago so I did not see anything strange in my going to live in her country. What I find painful is that the choice was necessitated by the failure of Nigeria and was not an entirely voluntary choice. I do not it was a choice dictated by the failure of Nigeria. One would have loved a situation in which one could split one’s time between the to countries. My children have no relationship with Nigeria more so because their mental picture of Nigeria is influenced by my very unromantic assessment of Nigeria. I once asked if they would like to visit Nigeria and one of them said no thanks, not after all the things they had heard me say about Nigeria.

What do I miss most about Nigeria? I miss the writerly camaraderie that we had developed and that was driving our productivity in the ’70s and the ’80s. I miss the intellectual quarrels and the literary banters; I miss the dialogues that existed between Ibadan, Ife, Ilorin, Zaria, Nsukka, etc.

But the special aspect of my exile that has been a bonus for me is informed by the fact of my place of exile—the West Indies. Africa is very present in the West Indies and, as a result, I have a feeling of being at home there. My involvement in the culture of the West Indies has been very deep and that has made it easy for me to feel at home there. I am aware of the deep seated influence that West Indian literature has had on my own writing. I am sure that if some scholar were to do a serious study of my work, they are likely to come up with an understanding that whatever depth there may be to it my work owes a lot to the combined influence of the best of African literature and culture and the best of Caribbean literature and culture.

What has been the general level of reception of you in the West Indies? Do you feel like an alien? Are you alienated?

As a person, I have been embraced by the Trinidad and Tobago society. I am a much favoured son-in-law. Much of that, if I may say so myself, has more to do with my own willingness to embrace and respect the society than the fact of my being Nigerian. I feel very much at home in Trinidad and Tobago. Not too many people know me as a writer in Trinidad and Tobago. I have to take some of the blame for that though. Friends have accused me of being too selfeffacing. I think there is some truth to that assertion. Most people know me as a facilitator of creative writers. I am a co-facilitator of one of the region’s major writers’ workshops, The Cropper Foundation Creative Writing Workshop which will be celebrating its 10th anniversary next year. Along the same tradition that I had started at Ife, I also introduced a tradition of public readings for Caribbean writers through a project called Campus Literature Week which has now run for 11 years and which led me to eventually introduce a postgraduate degree programme in fiction writing (Master of Fine Arts) which has already graduated a number of fiction writers. For Campus Literature Week, each year, a major writer is invited to come on campus as Writer-in- Residence for two months.

Long before you left Nigeria, you had been a socially committed artist, involved in the struggle for social justice within the academia. In fact, we both suffered detention as union leaders. What is the place of the creative writer in the political fortunes of his country? What should be the level of social and political commitment of the writer?

I believe that every human being should stand for something. What you stand for, however, will be dependent on your upbringing and the level of your personal courage and intellectual sophistication. I don’t expect everyone to be a Wole Soyinka who can work effectively with groups or as a one-man army. But every one of us is capable of contributing something, no matter how small, to facilitate the demise of dictators and corrupt leaders. I am impatient with those who surrender their future to some external power. I believe in helping external powers, no matter how omnipotent, with realizing whatever miracles they have designed for us. I believe in plowing the land and planting the seeds at the appropriate time before kneeling to pray for good harvest. Of course, because of the writer’s command of the means of verbal and literary communication, we would expect that he/she would speak for the voiceless and centre-stage the voices of those who have been consigned to the margins by our men and women of power and wealth.

Are you looking forward to a return home or is it exile forever?

Home for me is where my family is. In that sense I am very much at home in Trinidad and Tobago. Will I return to Nigeria to live on a permanent basis? I doubt very much. When I retire in about five years’ time, I can see myself returning home for short stints to teach or run creative writing workshops, especially at Ife, a place with which I have deep seated connection.