"DON'T PRESSURISE CREATIVE WRITERS" - Bolaji

(Above photos) Bolaji on vacations during the festive season

2012 has dawned and African literature will continue to be healthy in the New Year. During the festive season, well known writer Omoseye Bolaji was interviewed for a Cameroonian magazine by Theophile Ebounge. Excerpts here...

EBOUNGE: You have done very well in the genre of fiction. Yet many people say they do not like fiction much, that it’s much contrived, even absurd. Will you accept that a lot of absurd incidents crop up in fiction?

BOLAJI: Of course, yes. We confront a lot of absurdity in real life too; that’s why we have trenchant expressions like “stranger than fiction”. Incidentally, for those who worship “classical” literature, we might as well remember that a lot of such writing might come across as absurd too. Take early great works by Richardson for example – Pamela, Clarissa...so many strange goings-on. Or the world famous Gulliver’s Travels – nothing can be more absurd! Little people (Lilliputians), people so tall that tall men like me appear like dwarves, horses stated to be refined and supercilious...or consider Oscar Wilde’s classic on Dorian Gray. The weird Faustian “mirror stuff”, a man refusing to age, attacking the mirror ultimately and coming to a grotesque end. Surely all this can be dubbed absurd if one is inclined to be negative. My own opinion is that people who say these things (attacking fiction) are aware of their own limitations; that they just can’t read; and are looking for excuses!

EBOUNGE: I’m impressed that you refer to some classical works. I thought I read elsewhere that you are not really into classical literature...some critics say you don’t like the classics.

BOLAJI: Let’s get this clear –critics are not infallible, they make a lot of mistakes, they spout a lot of nonsense! But on the whole, they are very important even if it is because many of them stoke controversy, thereby drawing attention to certain works. I have nothing against the classics. There are so many of them; but I read quite a number of them when I was young and had the time and complementary concentration. You might remember that some of these critics have also pointed out many allusions to classical literature in my books, over the years. As a writer, I respect the classics...Flaubert – Madam Bovary: Hemingway –Nobel award winner with his sparse journalistic style. Virginia Woolf. Thomas Hardy. Conrad. George Orwell. TS Eliot. DH Lawrence. Charles Dickens. Samuel Becket(author of Waiting for Godot)The Bronte sisters. Of course Shakespeare. It’s just that as an African writer it disgusts me that many Eurocentric writers hardly know about our own writers who have produced classics; like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi, Ben Okri, Ayi Kwei Armah, Yvonne Vera, Dangarembga, Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Camara Laye etc.

EBOUNGE: Many critics say your career as a writer of fiction is over!

BOLAJI: Critics again! They are not deities. People must go out and read the large corpus of works already published and not be hankering for new works. I respect the critics who at least read one’s books, not the “clowns” who read the blurb of a book, or one or two half-baked reviews, and claim to know it all. Critics say I produced no fiction in 2011, yet across the world, my 2011 book, Miscellaneous Writings is largely categorised as “short stories”! This should tell you something. (Pause) Pa Achebe waited for over 20 years after writing A man of the People, before he published his next novel, Anthills of the Savannah. It was almost the same scenario for Ngugi whose Wizard of the Crow came out almost 20 years after his last novel. I published Ask Tebogo (novel) in 2004 and it was only four years later that I could publish another work of fiction, Tebogo and the Haka. It does not mean I am “finished”. Writers should not be put under pressure, ideally. But if I’m “finished”, then I am finished! Anyway, I can tell you that Mbali Publications will be bringing out a book of fiction of mine in early 2012. So are you happy?
(laughter)