When Aaori Obaigbo published his first novel, The Wretched Billioniare, in 2016, many thought he was a late bloomer. Actually, the novel had been in the works for over a decade and he had made the ANA Poetry Prize shortlist as a poet in 1992 alongside Professor Niyi Osundare. Obaigbo, a journalist and photographer, isn’t resting on his oars. He has just published a new novel, The Virgin Widow, a work that limns the Benin past and present, which developed from Chimamanda’s Creative Writing Workshop. He spoke to HENRY AKUBUIRO in Lagos on his literary predilection.
Let’s trip memory lane to your writing career, how did the journey begin?
Storytelling has always been part of my life. My mother used to tell me stories always. This new book, The Virgin Widow, is essentially materials from stories told by my mum. Sometimes she would tell me to tell her stories, and I would tell her I had none. She would then ask me to tell her the story she told me the other day. And you know how children tell stories —things will surely change in the stories. So my stories would always end differently from hers. That’s where basically I started from. When I entered secondary school in 1976, that’s when I started writing stories. I had a classmate, Emmanuel Uso, a.k.a. Baddest Dynamite. He was always asking me for new stories, which made me always write a new story. He was my first audience.
Then when I wrote an essay for one of my teachers, Mrs Eluem, she told me I had to specialise in narrative and descriptive essays. From that point, any exam you gave me, if there were a descriptive and narrative essay, I would excel. But the person who gave me the first public space was Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi at The Guardian. He published me as Poet of the Week, featuring some of my poems. It was in the 1980s. After seeing myself in print, I now began to see the possibility that I could write, so I pursued it, and I was shortlisted for ANA Poetry Prize, which was won by Niyi Osundare. Though I didn’t win, I was excited, for I was only an undergraduate who lost out to a professor. Femi Fatoba was also on that list. These were my heroes. I was also shortlisted when I did a radio play, Reincarnation, for the BBC.
Then I got married early and started having children. I was also trying to get my work, The Bite of the Rainbow, (which was to become The Wretched Billionaire) published with Longman. But Longman, via the assessment of Professor Theo Vincent, said I should make some changes, and these changes had to do with some homosexual scenes I saw at Uniben. I wasn’t impressed with making those changes, so I just faced my journalism and added photography to it so that I could pay my bills. So, between journalism and photography, my writing career died.
So how did the manuscript metamorphose?
Rewriting is actually the real writing, because, when you write, you begin to see gaps; and when you write again, you see other gaps — grammatical, structural, coherence, etcetera. A lot of things have changed. In The Bite of the Rainbows, what happened to Ibadan was the same thing that happened to Ibadan in The Wretched Billionaire, but the character of Dialo wasn’t fully developed in that version. He was almost like a ghost. Kraft Books and people like Maxim Uzoatu also gave useful advice. But the first writing training I got was from Chimamanda Adichie.
The writing workshop sponsored by Fidelity Bank?
No, the one sponsored by Nigerian Brewery. It was my daughter who told me to send in an entry. I was already an old man, so I wasn’t too keen, but my second daughter, Morountodun, accused me of evading it, because I was afraid of losing (laughs). So she challenged me to enter. We decided to enter together. I wrote a script pretending to be a child, and it Chimamda Adichie’s attention, because, during the workshop, she was asking Eghosa Imaduen, “how did he get in?” Imaseun said he thought I was a young person (laughs). My classmates started calling me grandpa when they saw white hairs on my head after a few days at the workshop. I enjoyed their company. Their criticisms were well taken.
Tell us about The Virgin Widow…
The Wretched Billionaire was first published in 2016 and had a reprint two years later by Oremi, which was vigorously marketed. I credit this book partly to my son and Chimamanda’s workshop. I started writing it during the workshop, but, before the workshop, my son, Rainbow, challenged me to write the kind of story I said my mum used to tell me.
I wrote a 5000-word short story in the full tradition of my mother’s narrative style. I read excerpts of that in my class during the Farafina Workshop, and I observed the criticisms. But she did say that the Benin space was a rich cultural background that hadn’t been explored at all in fiction, and we needed to hear the narratives. That’s what I intended to meet by writing this book not in the historical way she wanted but mixing realism with folklorism. I try to marry history and myth in this story. But you can see the Benin story is the core of this.
The hero of this story, Aziza, is a figure taken from my hometown in Sabongida Ora, Edo State. One of my great grandfathers, Ochei, was said to have been taken away by the whirlwind, and, when he came back, he returned with a shrine and riches. He became a juju man.
In this novel, I try to make Aziza come alive the way I was told about him when I was a kid. I also try to look beyind the simple narrative of the British conquest in Benin and artifacts being taken away. People’s lives were disrupted. That incident was a racial trauma. A people that had existed as one entity for hundreds of years, suddenly, all that they had believed were crushed by foreigners. Benin had never been defeated before that. So you can imagine the trauma and the humiliation of having their Oba being sent away. I tracked that narrative, chronicling what happened to ordinary people, those at the warfront and their wives. You know how the traumatised tell their stories to their children. The narrative starts from the past and ends in the present.
You regard yourself as a storyteller…
Yes, long before I could write, I was already telling stories. Even when I am writing, I am listening to a voice narrating. I think sometimes that’s obvious in my script, especially when I read out to the public. Sometimes I sit back and say this story is written to be verbalised or written for sober reflection. It’s like somebody is talking to you. That’s the impact of learning a story from an old woman who had no television to entertain his son.
How relevant is a work like The Virgin Widow to the present, especially considering you are taking a backward glance at history?
I see it more of a forward glance. I have looked at the pains of the past, alright, but I have been able, through this, to signpost the future. Even in the story, I started medias res —from the modern time, with Nosa who’s an editor, who has a mysterious experience, and, in the course of finding out, he discovered how Aziza was. It’s more about the present than the past. When you look at history, it’s a very bitter place, full of annoying, depressing scenarios. You will hear how your mother is taken away as slave, how your mother was raped, and how your sister was abducted. So how do we move from truama to spiritual rebirth? That’s what I am more concerned with than the truama? Truama will come and go, but what’s the way forward?
What keeps you going?
I have no choice when it comes to writing. I am not even thinking about money. I must write to preserve those fragments of my imagination that are anxious to be written. Even if I don’t get published, I will write. The first person to sponsor my book was Oyi Alegbe. My generation of writers is a stopgap between the Soyinka and the Osundares. We gained a lot from the Soyinkas and Achebes. If our kids don’t hear from us, there will be a gap, and we need to fill that gap. The way my children tell their stories, for instance, it makes it difficult to tell the difference between theirs and that of a European child, because their generation has been influenced by television and internet. But the African writes in a peculiar way. For instance, our language is highly metaphoric, and it’s not deliberate sounding poetic when we reflect that in our writings.