What gave him away were his shorts. I chuckled to myself, this man has become an oyinbo man. It was a high-taste, luxury hotel in Lagos, and Nigeria’s top novelist and two-time finalist of the prestigious Man Booker Prize, Chigozie Obioma, and I, had lunch, just in time to board his flight back to his base in the United States, where he writes and teaches.
“I prefer the writing part,” he confesses as he sips a glass of juice to ride his rice and dodo to his bowel. We tried in less than two hours to solve the problems of the world and our dear country, and he had a lot to say. He had been in the country for about two weeks and had visited his family in Benue State. He complained about the state of poverty, and how everyone thought he had brought a haul of dollars. He hoped that Tinubu’s palliatives would come quickly. I added that he should be wary of those asking for money. While some of them were genuine, some would invent troubles for his money. He knew that. But we both agreed even that was a picture of the desperation in the land. He had praises for the expressway from Makurdi through Nasarawa State to Abuja. “I never saw a bump on that road,” he confessed. He was referring to the Keffi-Akwanga-Lafia to Makurdi road. It was Fashola’s doing, one of Buhari’s understated legacies.
But he has a lot going on in his life. He was getting ready for a high-octane, Distinguished writer-in-residence programme at the “junior Ivy-league” Wesleyan University at Connecticut. The well-paid affair – I won’t disclose the amount – will take a full year and will give him time to write and teach elite literature about inventing. One of the works will be Italo Calvino’s The Hidden Cities. Meanwhile, he is also heading to Norway in September as one of seven “top living southern Saharan writers” at what is deemed the biggest library in the world, The Bergen Public Library or Bergen Offentlidge Bibliotek. They want to showcase such writers as Nadifa Mohammed, Tsisi Dangaremba, himself and Chimamanda Adichie, when she is not accompanying Obi to the court. He has also pioneered a writers retreat at a resort in Greece for promising talent on the continent. Four Nigerians, two fiction writers and two poets, are fellows.
The author of the Fisherman and the Orchestra of the Minorities was glad to announce that his third work, The Road to the Country, will be out next year. It is about the Nigerian civil war and intersects myth with realism to unveil the pathos and tragedy of war. With Kunle as its protagonist, the novel is described as “formally daring, acutely observed and vivid in its depiction of one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies.”
The well-known Economist magazine has asked him to write an essay for its “By Invitation” column. It will feature soon. Just before we rose, he said he had two things to say. One, the church has eaten the moral and spiritual fabric of the people. He was complaining as a Christian himself. He said, “Salvation is gift,” and lamented that pastors have weaponized fear turned it into a transaction. Two, the youth had now become servile to the cell phone, and it has stopped them from private rumination. “When I was speaking with my dad, he was pestered with calls, so we couldn’t have a smooth dialogue,” he observed. That, however, did not stop us from excavating our cell phones to take a picture to document a happy hour.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with the Nation Newspaper.
