Tag: Moshood Abiola

Chigozie Obioma is an award-winning novelist whose novels “The Fishermen” (2015) and “An Orchestra of Minorities” (2019) were finalists for The Booker Prize and have been translated into 30 languages. His third and latest novel, “The Road to the Country,”  takes readers on a journey of love, guilt, brotherhood, courage, and fate against the backdrop of the Biafra War. This civil war, which occurred in Nigeria from 1967 to 1970, pitted the federal government of Nigeria against the Republic of Biafra, a secessionist state, leading to the death of over one million Igbo people and other Easterners, as well as long-term intergenerational impacts.  

In Obioma’s third book, readers follow Kunle, a university student in Lagos, who sets out to find his missing brother but is instead caught in the midst of the war. 

The Atlanta Voice talked with Obioma about balancing history with fiction, the impacts of the Biafra War, and what it means to embrace the past to examine the present and protect the future.  

The Atlanta Voice: If someone asked you to write a book on how your love of writing began, how would that book start?

Chigozie Obioma: “I grew up in the 90s in Akure, Nigeria, in the west of Nigeria. I wanted to be a footballer — soccer. I would play soccer in the swampy areas, even though our kind of neighborhood was somewhat middle-class. I was always taking ill, and I would end up in hospitals with typhoid, malaria, and sometimes injuries. So it was during this season that I began to encounter stories. I would go on what Nigerians call admission, and my parents would tell me stories, and that just opened up my mind to a sort of imaginative landscape within. After two spells at the hospital, I just realized that I didn’t want to play football anymore. All I wanted to do was read. That was how my life changed.”

AV: And now you’ve written your third book, “The Road to the Country.” It’s set against the backdrop of the Biafra War. What was your motivation behind writing a story set against the backdrop of the Nigerian Civil War?

CO: “So I’ve always known that I would write this novel. The question was, when and in what form. In the past, I dabbled with various forms. There’s a poem actually published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, which is one of the big literary magazines for writers. The war has also made cameo appearances in my first and second novels. But the genesis, if I were to trace it, would be an encounter I had in ’93. I grew up in the West, but I’m Igbo, so I’m from the Southeast of Nigeria. I’d never been to the East until 1993, when Nigeria descended into chaos, a sort of constitutional crisis in the aftermath of the annulment of the 1993 election, which was won by somebody from the West, Moshood Abiola.

“Nigeria was volatile. The war had just ended in 1970, so it was still very fresh. Whenever the country shook up, everybody would run back to the east. We drove all night. The following morning, we woke up and I noticed something was quite different with the community people who were coming to welcome us. Many of them had deformities. There was a man with no limbs in a wheelchair. Another person had one hand. There was a woman — I’ll never forget — she had a fraction of her face eaten up by some weird thing. I was a very curious and precocious kid, and I just asked my mom, ‘Well, why are these people like this?’ And the answer she gave me is the type of answer that sears itself in your consciousness for life. She just said to me, ‘It was the war.’ 

“I just became devoured by curiosity. What is this war that this woman would not say anything about, but has left his landmark everywhere on the bodies of these people? There was no year that I wasn’t reading something about Biafra. I just really wanted to know what it was all about. By 2015, when I was finishing my first novel, I was already thinking very strongly about Biafra, about this novel, but then I didn’t write it because it’s not an easy book to write.”

AV: Definitely. That’s something you don’t just write in a year or two. You have to sit with it, because there’s so much history there. 

What is the key to weaving realism and truth with myth when you’re basing a fictional story on real-life events?

CO: “This was my first attempt at historical fiction, but I’ve always been fascinated by the mystical. In fact, I would not call it a fascination. I will call it more like a worldview. I think it comes from my background. My mom grew up in the village, and her dad was a priest of Odinani, the Igbo religion. So for the longest time, they didn’t convert. She was one of the few people who had very strong knowledge about how people lived in pre-colonial times. There was a flow that was not hindered by the switch into Western-infused modernism. Her language was very ethnographic; she would say stuff that often would make one pause. For instance, all those times when I would take ill, my mom would say with serious determination, ‘Well, Chigozie, it’s just because your chi (a personal guardian spirit) is a weak one. Why can he not protect you?’ 

“It shaped my worldview that the things that we do are informed by the things we cannot see.”

AV: In your books, there’s usually an element of mysticism. In “Road to the Country,” we have Igbala the seer, the stars, and his vision of Kunle. How has incorporating that element helped you enhance the narratives you hope to convey?

CO: “My second novel, ‘An Orchestra of Minorities,’ is narrated by a chi. At the time when I was writing that book, I didn’t even know what was possible. Everybody told me it could not be done, because it’s a deeply cosmological novel. But I was just certain that I was going to find a way to put down something to blend the mystical worldview into the present in such a way that anybody who reads the book would see and understand that worldview in display. 

“And for this novel, the mystical goes further. I wanted a structure that could serve as somewhat of a warning. The war happened from 1967 to 1970. That is historical reality. But in the novel, the entire story is set in an eight-hour encounter in a trance received by a seer who is in 1947. In 1947, Nigeria is not even an independent country; the British flag was everywhere. However, at the end of the novel, the seer has just seen what happens 20 years from then. But then he walks into the street, and things are the same. Nigeria is not even formed yet. So, the whole vision becomes almost like a warning. That structure allows me to do a lot of things, such as save time, for instance, as a facility of fictional narrative. In this novel, the present is the future, and the past is the present. So, it also allows me to walk with time in various, interesting ways.”

AV: Readers are following the main character, Kunle, who is learning about the horrors of the war, kind of the same time as we are. You describe the landscape of the war through tragic scenes witnessed by Kunle when he is forced to join and fight in the Biafran army. In an essay titled “In Danger of Researching a War Story,” you write about your dangerous encounter researching the novel. What was the research process like for painting the picture of this war? 

CO: “It was not that easy to research because our people are very funny. It’s not part of our sociological belief to talk about things that are bad. Americans rehash any sort of bad things; they embrace it. So, I have to fish it out of them by force. That oral interview was very difficult. 

“A good friend of mine lives in New York, and her dad loves my work. He has read all my novels to date. We’re talking on the phone, and she tells him that I’m writing a book about Biafra, and the man becomes interested. So, he takes the phone and starts talking with me. A couple of minutes into the thing, I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. How do you know all this information?’ He’s arguing with me, who has read everything, gone into the archives of the Red Cross, and all of that. And this man is telling me, ‘No, that battle happened at this hour,’ and this and that. So I’m like, ‘Sir, please tell me: how do you know these things?’ And he was like, he fought as a 19-year-old. His daughter was so shocked. She had no idea. There was no mention at all of it. 

“I read everything that has been written about Biafra, so I believe, in some ways, without meaning to, I’ve become a sort of historian and authority on Biafra. And the small stories that I was able to get were really very informative.”

AV: “One of the many aspects that I loved about this book and your other books is the blend of Igbo and Yoruba culture, pidgin, and proverbs.  The inclusion of things like historical figures and fixtures of the Biafran nation, such as its pledge and anthem, was a learning experience for me. Do you carry the knowledge that your stories are like a learning experience for many people?

CO: “It’s not always the intention, but sometimes, when I’m writing them, I become aware that they might be. I had to write these books to, in some ways, to educate people to understand these are not just mythological beliefs. They actually informed how people live.”

AV:  I feel as if this is an appropriate time for this conversation, because Nigerian Independence Day was on Oct. 1, but the Biafra War started seven years after independence. The war had these lasting social, political, and health impacts. Do you feel that there’s a lack of historical awareness or that more historical awareness is needed about the Biafran war, especially among people in the diaspora?

CO: “Yes, it has to be, for various reasons. No. 1: It is history. It is how the country was formed, how the identity of the people was formed. Everything that you do, and especially with cosmic events like wars, they shape generations to come. Even if you live here and you’ve never set foot in Nigeria, the Biafran war is affecting you now. The second reason is that when a war starts, it never ends. The battles can stop. The war continues. It is a permanent thing. 

“That’s why I wrote this book in this form. This was not how I wanted to write this book. I wanted to write a different book, but what I noticed was, over time, reading almost everything that has been written about the war, I found that the overwhelming majority of books are non-fiction. When it comes to fiction, there’s a problem. What you find is mostly wartime fiction where the battles are in the background or even non-existent. We just hear of them,  but it concerns itself with the lives of civilians. 

“So I’m like, you know what? I have to do this, because nobody has done it. The battles are true. They are what actually happened. What I have just done is take the selected battles and intensify them in detail, so that the reader can experience and know what it feels like for a 19-year-old who is about to go into the University of Nigeria just before the war breaks out. And now he’s fighting in a ragtag army with 70 men and women as his company, with only 40 rifles. I think it’s something that we need to know.”

AV: There’s a line at the end of the book that kind of summarizes those sentiments that reads, “Biafra lives in all of us. It will never die.” 

The novel isn’t just about war. It’s a battle between love and guilt and then finding your place in a world that’s dealing with turmoil, which I feel like we can all relate to. What do you hope people take away from this book as they turn the last page?

CO: “My hope is that it will challenge them. It will inform them, as we said before, but also it will make them think about the volatility of almost everything, of relationships writ large, not just at the interpersonal level, but in a societal level. You know what happened in Biafra? What caused the war was not something that happened overnight. It had been brewing for a long time in subterranean ways, but people just didn’t pay attention to it. 

“So my suggestion will be that people be careful, especially in society. Even in America today, we can extrapolate and look at the extreme polarization that you have here. Where is that going? But also, it’s a novel. It’s a work of fiction. So my desire in essence is to have the reader experience the characters, to understand what can make a man who is an isolated, removed, detached, and shy law student become selfless, battle hardened by the end of the novel? Well, it’s a lot of things. It is fighting for survival, falling in love with a woman, and having a child, and having a desire to reconstruct a life that has been broken, which, I think, is a universal ideal.”

 AV: That universal ideal has led to “The Road to the Country” being shortlisted for the Nigerian Prize for Literature. What does that mean to you?

CO: “A lot. I started writing just hoping that somebody would read my work, and at the time, it was mostly my sister who paid attention. Now I have to say that there are a lot of people who read my work, so I am beyond grateful, but most of that attention has been in Western countries, Asia — all around the world. But in Nigeria, part of it is also the economic conditions. So, to be recognized at home for this prize is a very big deal for me. I’m very honored. People will say, ‘Well, he’s been nominated for the Booker Prize’ and all of that, but this one is special.”

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