Eze Chidubem Iweka III of Obosi, is a celebrated novelist, playwright and poet. In between shepherding the Obosi Kingdom, Anambra State, he has managed to keep writing. At the moment, nine universities are studying his books, including The Ancient Curse and So Bright a Darkness. The author, who is currently working on three books, spoke to Henry AKUBUIRO recently in his palace. Eze Iweka recalled with deep emotion how he was mocked as a ‘nigger’ by white boys in California, during his first visit to America, and how that affected him psychologically, leading to an ongoing book project.
There have been renewed calls for the revival of Igbo language to prevent it from dying. Children born outside Igbo land, especialy, barely communicate in fluent Igbo. As a custodian of tradition, how can this be achieved?
It’s a matter of creating awareness. Incidentally, this morning, someone sent me a video of my speech during the Made-in-Anambra Poetry Concert that took place in December, 2021, where I performed three of my poems. On that occasion, I seized the opportunity to ask our people not to allow Igbo language to die. In my house, for instance, my children speak Igbo. My last born, who is 13 years old, speaks Igbo fluently. One is 12, and also speaks fluent Igbo. They even use inu (proverbs) now; they understand it. On that day of the made-in-Anambra Poetry Concert, I narrated to the audience how a girl whom I knew was Igbo was serving my friend and I in a big hotel during a meeting here in Igboland. We spoke to her in Igbo and she would respond in English. Eventually, I asked her why she was responding in English, and she proudly said she didn’t know how to speak “that thing” very well. She called Igbo language “that thing!”
I also told the audience the story of a girl whom I trained (from primary school to the university), an orphan; in fact, she got married from my house, and my house is an Igbo speaking house —I don’t give my children English names; my kids bear only Igbo names. My own English names, which my parents gave me, I threw it away over 40 years ago, not because I hate English but because I had to identify with mine. When I went to visit this niece of mine, I noticed her children barely spoke a word of Igbo. When I confronted her, she said, “Daddy, vernacular is not spoken in my house,” and I said, “Shame on you; I didn’t raise you that way. With people like you, Igbo language is going to die as the experts had predicted.”
Now, we have to create awareness to let young people know that Igbo language is our language and identity, and, as soon as we lose it, as has been predicted 50 years from now, then we have lost our essence as a people; we have lost our soul; because that language is all that we have. The Europeans came during the colonial times and took everything from us. They took us into slavery; they took our names, identities and culture, and scattered us completely. Now, the little bits and pieces that’s left for us to pick up, if we don’t do them, and start identifying ourselves as Igbo people the way the Yoruba are doing, then we will be lost. We have become caricatured, rubber stamps of the West.
What’s new? You haven’t published a new work since August Inmates.
I have been working on three books at a time. I get tired and full of it at the same time, and I go to another one. I don’t lose track, because the genres are different. I am working on a book of horrors. It’s a number of short stories I have been developing over the years. Now, I am linking them as a single story, because they have the same theme and mood. I have been also working on my anthology of poetry, which is already with the publisher, and will be out any moment from now. Then the one I have been working on in the past seven years is African history. It’s entitled Oakland, Many Miles Away. It emanated from my racist experience in America. It was my second, but very remarkable racist experience, which came on my third day in America. While I was strolling, some boys in a pickup van stopped by and were smiling at me. I smiled back. I was new to America, and I thought I was about to make new friends. The next thing I heard was “nigger” from one of them, and another said, “Oakland is many miles away from here.” They laughed and zoomed off, and their laughter echoed in my ears.
When I got to the house of Andrew Uzoigwe, whom I was going to visit, I told him what happened, and he said, “Welcome to America”. I then asked him where Oakland was located, and he said it was a 30-minute drive away, where a lot of black people lived. He said those boys who mocked me were telling me I was in the wrong neighborhood (dominated by whites).
So this book I am writing is called Oakland, Many Miles Away in response to that. It’s not fiction. It is black history. It’s African history. From that day, I started asking questions, because I remember when I was at the International School, Ibadan, in 1971, at the end of the Civil War, there were about 26 flags of different nations flying. When I left there, there were about 26 nationals —Americans, Germans, Australians, and so on. It was there I got my first racist experience before I travelled to America. An American boy, Mark Rockman, called one Tunde “nigger”. I didn’t know what nigger meant then. Tunde got angry and wanted to fight him, but we broke up the fight. Later on, I realised it was a derogatory word used by whites for black people. I didn’t take it seriously until I got to New York, California, where they told me, “Nigger, Oakland is many miles away,” and that really affected me pschycologically. It made me know I was in a hostile territory and that my black skin wasn’t needed in that area.
That was when I started asking questions, “Where did it all start? How did we get there? Why did we deserve this oppression by white people? How did we end up being at the bottom rung of humanity? How did we become so despised by everybody? How did we end up being the ones taken to be inferior to everybody, including the Indians and the Arabs, who think they are better than us? How did it all start?
I started to research, which made me find out the very rich heritage of the black people of Africa. I discovered the Moors, blacks from North Africa, who ruled Europe for 700 hundred years. I discovered the pyramids and the rich cultures of the Kemets, the Egyptians, whom historians claim to be whites, but they were black people. That is why, when you look at those big statues from Egypt, their noses have been removed, because their noses make people know they were black people; the artists who made those statues made them in their own image.
I also discovered that Africans sailed to the Americas before Christopher Columbus, because, if you go into the caves of Wyoming and other places, you would see their writings and drawings. They were not made by American Indians. I discovered so many things that made me proud of being a blackman.
How soon are we expecting this fascinating book?
I have been collecting materials and writing it for seven years. I have also been taking care of the affairs of the Obosi Kingdom. I write only in my spare time at night when others are sleeping. In that spare time, I also work on my other books I told you about earlier —a collection of poems and Kindred Beyond, which is a horror novel.
You are also versed in movie production, directing and music. One would expect you to turn your works of fiction into movies, what’s the impediment?
There is a friend of mine who got a company in England to make a movie of my novel, The Ancient Curse, which readers often say read like a movie. But somehow it fizzled out. My other book, So Bright a Darkness, attracted another movie interest, but it’s yet to actualise. My drama, August Inmates, which was nominated for the Nigeria Prize for Literature, is the one I want to produce myself, hopefully this year.
What keeps you going as a writer?
It’s the passion. There are many stories within. New stories crop up. There are some old stories, some that people told me about, some from my imagination, and some real life stories. Those are stories screaming to be told, but the process of transforming them from the pen to the paper is a slow process, and there is time constraint, too. That keeps me going. I don’t care whether the books make money or not, because I believe I have stories to tell. I am very much encouraged that The Ancient Curse won the ANA/Cain Saro Wiwa Prize for Prose, but it wasn’t given to me, because it was discovered on the award night that it had exceeded the recommended year of publication. So my prize was jointly awarded to the two runners-up. Today, many colleagues of mine still think I am an award winning writer (laughs). August Inmates, as you already know, was long-listed for the Nigeria Prize for Literature. That’s a booster. That keeps me energised.
Also, my novels are used in nine universities for Literature classes. That’s an achievement and a booster for me. I hope that, one day, one of my novels will hit Hollywood and Nollywood or both.