EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH ABUBAKAR IBRAHIM, NLNG WINNER

FOR OUR ESSAYISTS
Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, winner 2016, NLNG Prize for Literature:I have set the bar high For Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, it is a season of alluring feathers as one more feather was recently added to his cap. Just last week, he won the prestigious NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature with his debut novel, Season of Crimson Blossoms, making him 100,000 dollars richer. Ibrahim, who also edits the Arts pages of Daily Trust newspaper, Abuja, had his first collection of short stories, Whispering Trees, longlisted for the inaugural Etisalat Prize for Literature in 2014 with the title story shortlisted for the Caine Prize same year. He has also won the BBC African Performance Prize and the ANA Plateau/Amatu Braide Prize for Prose. A fellow of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Civitella Ranieri, Ibrahim spoke to HENRY AKUBUIRO on his journey from a young boy learning the ropes in Jos to his emergence as the 2016 NLNG laureate. How was it like growing up? I think ours was one of the last generations to grow up outdoors, not entirely enslaved by television in gated houses. We grew up playing in the sands, on the streets, and some of us learnt to swim in the river. I never managed to accomplish that feat, because mum caught me out once and forbade me to ever go to the river. I was a good boy so I obeyed. We played football barefooted and scoured the hills trying to hunt down birds with catapults; I was never good at that bit, anyway, and this business of killing animals for the fun of it never fascinated me. Growing up in Jos then was fun. It was peaceful then. We lived in a community were you had Muslims and Christians living harmoniously. We participated in each other’s feasts, fought with maize stalks and dust bombs and played together as children. Now things are different. The communities are now segregated into Muslim and Christian areas as a result of the violence that had happened. So, for me, it was particularly painful not to recognise the city in which I had my first and most important memories. But all over the world, things are different. Children are too protected. From the age of two, we throw them in schools. They are driven to school and back and, then, we lock them indoors to watch cartoons or give them phones or iPads to play with. They grow up in the living room. They will probably never know what it was like to play in the rain. Children are being robbed of their childhood. The times have changed. At what point did you take to creative writing? What was the motivation? From about when I was 13. But, before then, I had been drawing comics and telling stories with pictures. Of course, what I wrote at 13 was juvenilia and, because I hardly threw away any scrap of paper, I had a stack of these writings done in exercise books or pieces of papers which I used to save in a metal box, the type people used to take to boarding schools back in the days. But, during one of the riots in Jos, the house was burnt down, and everything I had written from the beginning of my life up to that point was lost in the fire. But, by the time I was 13, I knew my obsession with writing was a seriously disturbing thing. By the time I turned 18, I was certain I wanted to do it all my life. And that resolve has always been reinforced by the joy of putting words on paper and how these words impact on the people who read them. Your first offering was a collection of short stories, The Whispering Trees.  What determines when you write shorter narratives and when you go for an extended prose narrative? What determines the length of a story is the story itself. Some ideas come to you and you know that this story doesn’t have the capacity for expansion; it just wants to be a short story so I write it as a short story. A novel is a completely different beast entirely. It takes stamina, both on the part of the story and the writer, to write it and bringing it to term. I have always wanted to write a novel, right from the beginning, so all the short stories I was writing were not intended to go into a collection. They just happened. They were motivated by different reasons; they were written for different reasons. I remember there was one that was essentially a dream I had, and I woke up and wrote it, I made a few tweaks but it was essentially the dream I had. There are others I wrote because I had to write something for the reading group I used to belong to back in Jos. Yet others were inspirations I had, from sheer imagination. These were the stories that eventually went into The Whispering Trees. What triggered the curiosity to explore the widow story in the award-winning novel, Season of Crimson Blossoms? What triggered this curiosity was the persistent vision I had of Hassan Reza jumping over this poor widow’s fence in an attempt to rob her. I was curious about what would happen if the two, living in the same community but from very different social classes and generations, met. So, when the character of Binta Zubairu returned home, I was curious to see how, not only that encounter but their relationship would play out. Eventually, the story evolved and became an exploration of cultural, social and political idiosyncrasies that shape our society. Of course, the common narrative has been that of older men dating younger women, and when it is the reverse and you have sugar mummies, it is often purely for sexual gratification. So I wondered what if the roles are reversed, if an older woman was in a relationship with a younger man, not just for sexual gratification but for something far more trenchant and emotional, how would the society react to it. I was also really curious about how we are one of the most religious societies in the world and at the same time one of the most sinful and how a person like Reza could be categorically bad but there is some good in him and how a character like Binta could be categorically good but there is some bad in her. What was going on in your mind on the eve of the NLNG award announcement? I don’t know. I guess I just wanted it to be over and done with. I had tried not to engage with the prize and the possibilities of winning or not. But the closer the date came the more difficult it was to not think about it, because everyone else wanted to talk about it the moment they see you. The money was mouth-watering, I have to admit, and even people who didn’t give a damn about literature were talking about the prize and the money. It was hard to get away from it. How do you intend to spend the prize money? There are decisions that have to be made, and I will sit down with my family and decide what best to do. I think the wise thing to do will be to invest it. But we will see what happens when the money eventually comes. Do you feel more burden as a writer now that you have won this coveted literature prize? I have always refused to be burdened by others, as much as I can, because I prefer to carry the burden I choose to carry. The burden I have always felt is the one I have placed on myself: that of constantly improving my craft. I am pretty hard on myself when it comes to looking at my own work and critiquing it, and am hardly ever satisfied with what I have written. So, no; I don’t necessarily feel any additional pressure other than the one I have already placed on myself, and I think it is a lot of pressure already. I have set the bar quite high for myself, and I am always striving to push it further. What’s your writing regimen like, considering that you also function as a journalist? I envy writers who have a regimen for writing because I can’t. I am a non-conformist and have refused to enslave myself to any regimen or ritual. I write when the muse visits and as long as she endures with me. But because I work, I mostly write at nights and over the weekends. Fortunately, because I am not particular about when and where I write, it is easy to start writing when I am inspired and happen to have the time to. Are there some challenges Nigerian writers writing in Nigeria face more than those abroad? Writers everywhere have challenges. The fact is that it is hard for writers, not only in Nigeria, but all over the world to live completely off their writing. Not many writers are able to pull this off even in advanced countries. So even writers in the diaspora have to take up teaching appointments or work elsewhere, except if they’ve managed to write a bestseller and are always being invited to speaking engagements where they are paid appearance fees or if they have their books adapted into a blockbuster movie. This is yet to happen in Nigeria. Filmmakers and writers have been going on two completely different trajectories, but we are hoping that, with the quality of literature being produced in the country and the quality of films being produced in what has been called “the new Nollywood”, I don’t think it is too long before we see a major adaptation of a Nigerian novel. I have spoken with many writers in many countries and, for some, it is as difficult to make a living on full time writing as it is here in Nigeria, except for a lucky few. Where the difference is lies is in the fact that it is far more conducive to be a writer elsewhere than here because there are residency opportunities for writers there. We have only a handful of residencies here; we have only a handful of decent literary prizes, and we have no university offering creative writing as a substantive course. To top this, we have a shortage of publishing houses. Three or four traditional publishing houses to service a population of 170 million is almost suicidal. Apart from problems of distributions that they have to deal with because the structure is not there, these publishing houses have to scour the field looking for very good editors for the titles they have decided to publish and, when they can’t find them, they have to look for them abroad. Now that the exchange rate is the way it is, I can’t imagine many publishers being able to afford the services of these quality editors. Invariably, this affects the quality of the books that will be produced. It is hard to be a writer anywhere in the world; it is harder being a writer in Nigeria.  
SOURCE: THE SUN