Frances Ogamba is a 2022 CLA fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has won the 2022 Diana Woods Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2020 Kalahari Short Story Competition and the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She is a finalist for the 2023 Locus Awards, the 2019 Writivism Short Story Prize and the 2019 Brittle Paper Awards for short fiction. Her work appears in Ambit, Ninth Letter, Chestnut Review, CRAFT, New Orleans Review, Lunch Ticket, Vestal Review, The Dark Magazine, Horror Library, Uncharted, Frivolous Comma, Jalada Africa, in The Best of World SF and elsewhere. She is a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and her stories have been recommended on must-read lists by Tor Magazine. She is an alumna of the Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop taught by Chimamanda Adichie.
IE: Hello Frances, I know how difficult these things can be, so I’m super thankful that you chose to have this interview with us.
First of all, from your interview with Nation Africa – Kenya, you said, you would love to think of yourself as a Writer first and that the tag, “African Writer” is an alienation. But for this interview, I hope you don’t mind me interchanging between calling you an “African Writer” and a “Writer.”
There is always a disparity in the belief of who we are first. “Are we writers 1st or are we Africans 1st?” is a question some of us have not been able to answer. I believe that this also applies to voices of African Literature. What would you say constitutes the idea that a writer is an Old Testament or New Testament writer? Which of them are you?
FO: Hello, I Echo. I am responding to you from a small town in Anambra, Nigeria, where a bird’s endless squeaking dissects the night. I must thank you for the work you do for African Literature. Regarding my erstwhile comment on the tag, ‘African Writer”, I was speaking from the angle of alienation which our literature suffers in global readership. An ‘African Writer’ is often considered a writer who writes solely for African readers. Some Nigerian writers in MFA programs have been asked what audience they write for, especially when the students in their cohort do not understand the cultural climate of a Nigerian story. This question is rarely addressed to their American counterparts. It was to this fact that I spoke about, the fact that foreign readers often decide not to understand the stories we tell, even if we understand theirs; the fact that many foreign readers, Americans, for example, stick mostly to reading their literature. In this regard, ‘African Writer’ might not mean a writer from the African continent, but a writer who writes only for Africans. I love being addressed as an African Writer, a Nigerian Writer, Igbo Writer. I only wince at a possible isolating undertone when a non-African says it.
Coming to your question about Old and New Testament writers, the labels are very new to me. And I also disagree with them, not because they allude to the Bible, but for what they might mean for African writing. In the Christian context, the New Testament is sometimes considered superior to the Old Testament. Africans have not yet told their stories enough and cannot afford to debase any of their generations of writers. Furthermore, many factors cause the writing voices of a generation to be pooled into some kind of similitude. The advent of the internet and social media will affect writing language as much as they affect day-to-day ‘speeching’. Writers borrow from one another. So, writers working from the same era might have similar voices. My craft is born from the conflation of everything I have ever read and loved or read and disliked. Am I African when I write? Perhaps. Or not. My stories speak more to life than they do to identity. I am often in the skin of my character, wherever they choose to pit their origin.
IE: I believe I understand the need to not have your work isolated based on where you come from. Even as a half-Nigerian living in Ghana, I understand this need to fight against alienation.
“Africans have not yet told their stories enough and cannot afford to debase any of their generations of writers,” feels like a sermon that needs to be preached lately. Because as you said, the New Testament is sometimes considered superior to the Old Testament.
However, would you say that applies to African Literature too? That African Literature can no longer be defined by works of the past but that contemporary African writers are the future.
FO: Well, I will speak only on Literature. I do not think that anything needs to be discarded for another to stand. The present would not be here if the past didn’t fill up time first. Also, I do not see the need for drawing such strict markers and making distinctions and comparisons between what is regarded as old and new in Literature. Every work is informed by its own time. Every work enriches our archives and offers a window into a lived time. Some of these pioneer writers made writing possible for the younger generation of writers. Their books nudged the stories padlocked inside us free. No work done is more or less important than the other. An aphorism says, “The most important time is now.” When ‘now’ becomes the past, are we going to discard it simply because it has aged? What happens to its much-touted importance? I guess my point is that African literature is defined by all the work its writers have done.
IE: You speak with a good sense of certainty and the need for oneness I appreciate.
Your Nonfiction, The Valley Of Memories shortlisted for the 2019 Kofi Addo Prize explores one of the core parts of African Culture, the belief in Ancestral Reincarnation. As you said earlier on pioneer writers setting the platform for younger generation writers, Do you believe that if The Valley of Memories was told in your native language, it would’ve had as much reach as it did? To what extent do you think African Literature can get to if we wrote predominantly in our native language?
FO: Your allusion to the Bible earlier reminds me of a Biblical event: the Tower of Babel. How all the workers on the Tower lost understanding because, on every mason’s lip, a different language sprouted. I wonder how many of our stories we will be able to read if we all write in our languages. Imagine that kind of confusion brewed in that tower. (Haha) Unless we adopt one African Language as the language of writing, we’d have a tower-of-babel situation and there would be limitations to readership. We’d have to rely heavily on translation and might encounter problems of fidelity where the source text loses some of its shiny attributes in the target text. I guess what would happen if I wrote a story in Igbo is that only Igbo readers would read the work in its truest version. Sometimes I imagine a world where our stories are read in our many languages. But when I think of English and its wide reach across the world, I think of extinguished lives and stolen lands. I think languages and belief systems were exterminated just for this single language to take root in nearly every region. I do not want my language to bear such stains.
IE: It always feels like being stuck in an in-between place when I think of writing predominantly in say pidgin language or Akan. Ironically, to explain this, I would have to use Substance, Shadow & Spirit by Tao Yuanning translated (ha!) by Arthur Waley: “I would gladly wander in Paradise, But it is far away and there is no road.”
In your interview with Africa in Dialogue, you said something that stuck with me, “God exists in all religious factions, both old and new.” Do you think this also applies to African Literature? Despite the variations that may be in the storytelling and themes of Old and New Testament generations, African Literature exists in all of them.
FO: I love the idea of wishing for Paradise even though there’s no immediate access. Apart from the problems of translation, a story translated from the Akan language, for example, would read as close as possible to the narrative style of African storytellers. There is a wittiness to words that Africans possess. It feels like they are retorting. There is such a wealth of irony in our languages that warms a reader’s heart when they encounter it in stories. Our oral storytelling tradition also influences how we write. In Nigeria, we love to hear ‘gist’. “There’s gist o.” “Give me the gist, abeg.” It all points to our identity as storytellers and great listeners. You will find this in many good African stories, that detail, that ‘gist’.
About your question, African Literature is the oral and written works by Africans in both African and European languages. I think that the identity of the writer matters when bracketing who an African writer is. If a writer from Africa (who also identifies as African) tells a story, then this story contributes to the Bank of African Literature.
IE: Ocean Vuong said in an interview with The Guardian that he believes that there is a common anxiety for writers to establish a style, which also adds to a sort of limit for each writer. Do you think there is a limit that has been placed on African Creatives about the style/theme of African Literature? To what extent has this limit affected you as a Writer?
FO: A writer once told me that I write in a certain way and that he can tell my voice even without seeing my byline. He didn’t mean this as a terrible thing, but at the same time, he wanted me to invent a new narrative style or voice for every story. I have also met writers who aimed to establish a unique voice for their writing. I do not think that style is conscious. It is as natural as the black mole on your nose. It is as innate as your voice. A writer may work on imbuing their work with more humour and detail and emotion, but the style is bare like exposed skin. Altering it might result in a falsetto, and a reader can tell when the light in a narration has begun to flicker, and when a voice’s sure pitch has started to dwindle. In my writing, I simply strive to tell every story in the best way that I can. My goal is to capture a character’s lived experience in the best possible way. I believe that there are stories only I can tell. No other writer but I know of the light brown patch of sand on the dirt road running by my ancestral home. Or the scutch grass dividing this path like a natural median. If I can successfully bring these spots to a reader’s notice, if I can make a reader feel things they’d never seen, my work is complete.
IE: I just took some notes on how to be my best possible self when writing from your goal to writing. Thank you.
With respect to community in the African Literary scene, writers like Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, etc. speak of how the bonds they formed with each other helped better their craft. I believe it is safe for us to call these writers Old Testament writers. Do you think with the New Testament African Writers, there is a kindness or sense of community between ourselves? Do you have a community that strives for the growth of each other or is that sense of oneness lost in New Testament African artists?
FO: Writing is such a lonely path that it is nearly impossible to walk alone. From the inception of the work to its completion, a writer needs people. Most writers thrive in communities, and by communities, I mean small friendships. We had fewer black writers in the world during the era of Soyinka and Achebe than we have now. It is easier to make friends with almost everyone in the same profession if the numbers are fewer. In recent years, journals like Isele, Lolwe and Brittle Paper publish new names almost every quarter. Our storytellers are growing in number, and so I do not expect that same kind of camaraderie you’d find in a smaller number. Now, writers simply knot their small friendships and cheerleaders and grow together.
IE: As a champion of small friendships and cheerleaders, I agree.
One thing that bothers me lately as a writer in this era is, the “Is like syndrome.” Which says, “If you want to get published, write like successful poets. If you want to be an artist, find your voice. Work that is like something else is easier to publish. Work that challenges will always have a tough road.”
Do you think this is true? Or would you say that the African Literature of generations passed was affected by this? Have you found yourself in a position where you had to lose yourself as a Writer to be “successful?”
FO: I think certain things I said earlier might have spoken to this question in part. It depends on what anyone understands by ‘write like.’ Good writing triggers something in the mind of a creative person. This ‘trigger,’ like the spark born from striking a matchstick, is what we are mostly looking for. Something to point you to the story you need to tell. But I would not consciously copy a style that’s false to me merely because I am eager to get published. I’d prefer to tell a story that I need to tell than be burdened by the question of its marketability. Every story has its audience and will find it. If I borrow another’s voice to tell my story, what becomes of my own voice? Why did I bother trudging along this path?
IE: “I would not consciously copy a style that’s false to me merely because I am eager to get published,” leads me smoothly to my next question.
Writers like Chinua Achebe, Ama Aitoo Addo and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and etc. did not need to leave the comforts of their homes to foreign lands in order to make a name or a life for themselves. However in their time, they formed the face for African Literature. Lately, we have seen a high rise of migration (which some call “brain drain”) of African Artists to Europe or America. Do you think there is now a shift to the sense that, New Testament African Writers cannot have a good enough reach or cannot make it, if we lived or created from Africa? What effect do you think this migration can have for African Literature?
FO: Publishing in Africa has always been coloured by its history of being constrained by economic policies, foreign books being predominant in circulation within African societies, disregard for African languages, low funding, or the absence of it from African governments. It has also mostly gleamed with foreign presence. Heinemann’s African Writers Series, Longman and Oxford University Press are good examples. The ‘scramble’ for Africa’s untapped literary scene led to many of our pioneers becoming published with European publishers. This is why the writers you mentioned lived mostly in their home countries, but their voices were amplified through foreign publishing. It seemed that only in recent years did Africans begin to create their platforms to tell their own stories.
I must add that the reason there seems to be this rush for ‘making it’ with foreign publishers and securing their generous book advances is that the publishing scene in Africa lacks adequate funding. Government policies are often harsh on book markets. There is limited funding for the arts, and worse, for writing. Many foreign publishers do not understand the stories we tell. As a result, they choose a few writers, and this further narrows the already strait gap between the rest of the hopefuls. However, a writer can create from anywhere. Many factors influence the decision to migrate. There are no fully funded Creative Writing programs in African universities. Some countries, like Nigeria, still struggle with electricity cuts. How many writers can afford the new cost of unsubsidized fuel for their generators? How many writers own generators? I also do not believe that migration automatically means success in writing. The difficult work of writing must be done regardless of an author’s location. What we must do is find a way to steer African governments and other institutions towards generously investing in publishing and public libraries and writing programs. Then, we wouldn’t bother about the effects of migration on writing. We’d have a vibrant publishing scene that would offer every African writer a seat at its table.
IE: In recent times as you mentioned, we have African Publishers publishing African Writers weekly/monthly. I’m sure every African Writer is grateful to those who sacrifice daily to get these Publishing houses running. Concerning steering African governments towards investing in the Creative Industry, I look forward to the day.
To close our session, As a New (or Old) Testament Writer, what advice would you give to the next generation of African Writers?
FO: All you (a writer) need to do is show up to work as much as you can. The rest is beyond our control.
IE: Thanks again for your time, Frances. It was a pleasure!