In the first part of this interview, Akin Adesokan, author of South Side fielded questions about the intentional internationality of the novel; the ‘scent’ of postcolonial studies in the subjects explored in the book; the ways in which the novelist uses the rootlessness of the protagonist, Abel Dankor, to make statements about Africa’s place in the world and the stubborn question of the size of readership for intellectual novels.
In the second part of the interview, I draw on several excerpts to highlight the novelist’s use of geography, travelogue and culinary choices to illuminate Abel Dankor’s world and I ask for explanation of the process:
TOYIN AKINOSHO: The critic Stephen Kenechi, reviewing South Side in The Cable online newspaper, asked you to explain how deliberately you crafted the character named Jilo in the novel, to challenge simplified notions of “superstitious beliefs” versus “western modernity” in Africa. When I read that part of Kenechi’s review, I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me to ask you about the importance of the Jilo story in the book. I recall that you “included” episodes of this integration of traditional spiritualism with modern medical practice, in Roots in the Sky, your first novel. Is it right to read stories like Jilo’s and of that character in Roots as part of the overall theme of your work; that the African’s re-discovery of self is a continuing work in progress?
AKIN ADESOKAN: I have an abiding interest in the validity, the rationality if you will, of so-called African beliefs, whether superstitious or commonsensical. On an elementary level, there must be a reason people do things in a certain way, and that possibility ought to be taken into account always when one responds to those things. As you may recall this was also the theme of Tunde Kelani’s first “English-language” film, Thunderbolt: Magun (2001). In coming up with Jilo’s character, I partially draw on some of the ideas that the late parasitologist, Sanya Ọnabamiro, puts forward in his little book from 1949, titled Why Our Children Die. You know, he was the man who discovered new species of guinea worm and had them named after himself and his hometown, Agọ Iwoye. But he wrote this astonishing book about infant mortality in West Africa, and drew on the phenomenon of abiku, to make a case for a rational, medically sound attention to the phenomenon. He focused on things like prenatal care, the importance of vitamins in nutrition for pregnant women, and those sorts of basic medical care we now take for granted. He was himself presumed to be an abiku by his parents, who lost so many children before him. Jilo’s story comes partly from that. I found out from a friend who’s from Sierra Leone that that’s the name given to female children believed to be abikus in his part of that country. I imagine someone who’d have come through such an ordeal in the family, but will now dedicate much of her professional life to combating what seems to her like a backward practice or belief. And it makes sense to have that person be female, and closer to the protagonist. She’s also opinionated in a good way, independent-minded but respectful of others’ opinions, as you will notice from the way she handles Abel. I have known women like that, and it’s pleasing to see readers take note of her unique personality.
“African American life—Black life in the diaspora in general—fascinates me a great deal, it’s part of my own life in a way, and I’m going to be engaging with that in my writings in any way I can”
Another detail I might add to my long-standing interest in the tango between those so-called beliefs and modern medicine is that when I was very young, late primary school to early high school, my father used to entertain a Beninese savant, Baba Bọlaji, who knew a great deal about medicinal plants. That man from Cotonou spoke Fon, French and Yoruba, but he didn’t know how to write. So he and my father would sit down and he would dictate some herbal formulas which I would write for my father’s needs. He would hold back a few things, of course. His standard phrase was “Ó tún gba ká mọ̀ọ́ṣe.” (“You must know how to mix them”), a phrase you will find in Roots in the Sky. So, after a few days, my father would call him back, buy him gin or give him some cash, and the remaining ingredients would be added! It was actually more dramatic than that, now that I think about it, but there was nothing irrational in it. He had his formula, all the technical know-how, and how to make people value his knowledge. These days, I trawl the internet for online antiquarian bookstores to buy books about West African plants, and I recognize some of the names he used to dictate. And around the same time, over the radio, genres of Yoruba verbal arts–ọfọ̀, ògèdè, àwúre—were regularly used to advertise modern medicines, a sort of rhetorical evacuation of those powerful verbs when you reflect on it.
In the Farafina short story which eventually developed into the novel, South Side, the protagonist’s first name is Atom, and he is a married man, an author living in Malabo. Why exactly, is your fascination with these marginal African cities as the choice place for settling down?
Here’s a line:
“He was in Lilongwe at the time, preparing to join the rest of the family (my mother and two sisters) in St. Louis, so he promised to stop over at the house in the town where the priest sponsoring me had put me and a few young seminarians up for the holidays”.
I am irrevocably committed to the idea that any place, any patch of earth on the African continent, is the natural home of any Black person, and should be for any person of any color as well, as long as that’s the person’s desire. It’s an idealistic thing I have long nurtured, and although I have not travelled much within the continent, I have also never had visa problems any time I wish to go someplace. The earth is all peoples, as a line in a Ṣoyinka poem has it. Partly out of this idealism, I intend South Side as a fully African novel, one that treats a given African country or city as naturally habitable and welcoming to anybody. Of course, there’s an undercurrent of a critique of Abel’s homelessness in that, but I also don’t warm up to the idea that stories should be set only where we come from. That’s like saying we should remain permanently in our national lanes, and I don’t agree with that. As you must have noticed, Nigeria is treated vestigially in the novel. That’s intentional. Imagine what it would mean for literature in general, not just African literature, if our writings were to project companionship for places we’ve never been but others have. Several years back, when I was shopping my stories with agents in New York, one agent did show some interest because she saw references to Lusaka, where she had relatives. That’s how the politics of recognition works.
And it brings me to how you lay out the social environment of the places where your protagonist lives. I am interested in your focus on geography, food culture, history and travelogue in this book. You chose to aerate the narrative with the outdoors. Why is Geography is so important to you? Someone once asked E L Doctorow, the novelist of New York, how much research he conducted for his work and he said, that his research came down to just opening the window and seeing all of New York from his apartment. I know there are authors who claim that they just want to “stick to the facts”. I know of a Northern Nigerian writer who published a novel whose plot was meant to be entirely located in the North, but I struggled to get a sense of the North from the work. I have been disappointed by work of some supposedly well established South African writers who refrain from giving a sense of the lay of the land.
I have three excerpts out of a multitude. Let’s start with the place of birth of the main character
Number 1-Page 97
I was born on a rainy afternoon, inside a ship trawling the
international waters several leagues northwest of the Gulf of Aden.
My father had taken his heavily-pregnant wife to the harbor early
that Wednesday morning, after hearing of planned attacks on the
Bantu community in Mogadishu, and had purchased a passage
at an exorbitant price. Then he returned to the house of a friend
who owed him a lot of money and had promised to pay up the
same day.
……………………………………………………
After several hours, now out of harm’s way, the ship’s captain
received reports from the lower cabins that a woman was in labor.
That was my mother, and the labor was on my behalf, on a ship
practically adrift on high seas, child of native strangers in flight
from a home that was not a home, native of that most fluid of
borders, the proverbial international waters. We arrived in Italy as
refugees, guests of the Caritas, where we lodged for a month until
my father finally joined us.
Number 2, Page 50, 1955
My school was located along Conakry Road, several miles
from the center of the city….
I took the hourly ferry to Queen’s Quay.
From here, Atlantic Palisades, one of the city’s main
streets, went half a mile up to the Granville Sharp Roundabout
which looked like a gigantic roulette board at night from on
high, and from where five roads forked off, one leading east to
Grand Market, in the general direction of which lay the seedy
and crowded quarters of Lower Lugere, one heading off to the
northeastern Government reservations, another, the continuation
of the Palisades north, to the main city and further to the so-called
“Interiors.” Southwestern Road veered back to the Quay…
Number 3 Page 76, 1958
This may be hard to understand but it was while studying in
England that I felt relatively at home, for the first time in my
teenage years. At the time, I put it down to the character of
Birmingham—the city where the Cadburys had taken steps to
improve the lives of the workers and how that came across in
the attitude of sections of the populace toward the non-English,
particularly students from West Africa and south Asia. Only came
across; the reality was a much muddled one, took a while to make
sense, and I would come to know what it was because I was to live
in the city for the next eight years.
I think having a sense of direction—knowing where you are and where you’re going and how to get there—is an underrated talent. It also brings freedom in a particular way. On a personal level, given that Abel is a guest at most places, it helps to ground him if he knows where he is, and how he will get to where wants to go. I’m a habitual walker and try to know as much as possible about where I live or work, just by walking. The stories in South Side are set in places that don’t exist or that I have never been, so I have to make things up, create spaces as if they are real, in order to give the reader some sense of direction in getting along with a story in which several other things are going on. I find that I relate better to a story when the writer provides something like a map, even if it’s speculative, especially if mobility is a major part of that story. Some things I don’t make up but transfer to a new setting. For example, Lower Lugere and Upper Lugere were well-known neighborhoods in Jimeta-Yola, when I did my national service there, and I went often to Lower Lugere, just to see….
But as in other things, there are vital issues of my personal conviction. The African American historian Chancellor Williams speculates in his famous book, The Destruction of Black Civilization, that African history might have turned out differently, positively that is, had our forebears been well-attuned to geography, mindful of where they were in relation to the rest of the world, and had launched out for the coasts. Instead of constantly withdrawing to the hinterlands each time the external aggressors pressed in. Williams has his data, and it’s probably the case that familiarity with ports and coasts was a good thing at a time when international travel and trade happened mostly on the seas. But my interest in the outdoors also comes from the awareness that being in public is a common feature of many African cultures. Hailing people in the street, calling out their aliases as you walk into their house. That’s owambẹ, it comes from oriki, and it happens a lot in Lagos, in Ibadan, and it was striking for me to observe a similar thing with friends in Johannesburg.
Now Let us go to Food. I have some excerpts too. And I have the same question, why
do you like to give your readers a close up of the menu in the many dinners that you populate the novel with?
Abel likes food! You remember how irate he gets when he’s hungry. And he likes to cook, so that’s a way of showing his preferences. At some point, a routine check-up shows that he has allergies toward some foods, and he must watch what he eats. The detailed attention to what’s in the meals comes partly from that because for those with serious allergies, avoiding an item is the fine line between life and death. Besides, until relatively recently, readers didn’t get a sense of pleasurable living from much of our literary fiction. Fictions from the Indian subcontinent used to be belittled for putting food in the groove, for the sake of exoticism, according to the critics. But I think that was unfair. Food is one of the most important means of creating and sustaining friendships, building communities. Some societies hold that it’s hard to betray someone with whom you’ve broken bread. I’m not quite sure about that, but I do know that food makes room for intimacy, it makes people feel vulnerable. In a good way, I think. If you carefully watch someone while they’re eating, depending on the setting, you may notice that they’re at ease, or care-free. My favorite author with this aspect of writing is Sarah Ladipo Manyika, who goes the extra distance of giving us characters who are cooks.
And while we are on his issue, it does seem that the Euro-American menu gets preferential treatment over African menu. Granted, Abel spent more time in Europe and America than in Africa, but in the long spells of time that he spends in Mande, we don’t get to see the assembly of ingredients of an African meal the way we see it in his time in the West.
Yes, that’s true. The difference between his time in Europe and in Mande is that he’s literally at home in the latter setting, and the specificities of what’s in the meals are taken for granted. He mentions cooking for his girlfriend, with the understanding that this is routine. But the cooking is interrupted and we later learn that they have dinner with his friend, who just arrives from the US. But you’re right; he doesn’t do as much with his meals in Mande.
Lunch in Mande, Nematown Page 62-circa 1958
Cucumber soup enlivened with periwinkles for appetizer; fried kenkey; boiled cassava and freshwater catfish in cashew nut sauce; mango sorbet, honeyed milk-curds, and ginger-tea for dessert. And port, of course. To my father, a lunch or dinner that did not include port as dessert was not complete. “Port as essential postprandial,” he would croon, “port the prime export of Porto, Portugal!” The little tumbler dangled from his forefinger, his face lively with the excitement of finding an outlet for his sybaritic yearnings.
This in Italy, Page 107, Circa 1961
The feelings I associate with breakfast and summer, yes, late breakfast in summer, even after I have had to accept the reality of what my blood can and cannot tolerate. French toast, scrambled eggs, English muffins, sausages, home-made yogurt, fruit salads, coffee, honey, and grape juice lay spread out on the broad table,
This in Denmark, Page 285, set in the mid-1970s
I sensed that it was an active, much-patronized place. I ordered a meal which intrigued me by its sheer unseemliness in this environment: steamed tilapia with okra, sliced potatoes, carrots, peppers and spinach.
This is in Denmark, Page 296 set in the mid-1970s
I prepared it for a rotisserie, spiced with oregano, minced ginger, onion, peppercorn and garlic. There were baked potatoes for those who could not do without sizable carbs, but I invested more in the salad, of baby lettuce, radicchio and spinach, skipping the feta cheese for fresh apricots, and cranberry-flavored almond oil
South Side is some sort of a travel story: It comes across as both a Travelogue and a tour guide:
Page 206, Dateline Nematown 1965
During the Christmas holidays when the airy, breezy aura of
the harmattan season made traveling easy, I would drive for
days with Jilo along the coast, as far east as Calabar, in Nigeria, going
inland in a few places. We might spend a night or two in Lagos,
Accra, or Kumasi. But Winneba in Ghana was our preferred stop.
The Osagyefo was kicked out of power in the interval between
visits, but we still had a few friends at the institute, interesting
people from the West Indies and Central Europe who had seen
the world and had read just about everything.
I reconnected with my old teacher Etheridge, and no surprises, good old Billy Rand
put in an appearance to tape interviews for a film he was making
about the slave forts. The weeks between the end of November
and the twenty-fourth of December were my favorite time of
the year. The lodging was cheap, food was plentiful, and there
were lots of things to see and talk about. I wrote at night, and
after breakfast and a short nap, we sailed south of the still river Nsuber, buying freshwater fish to grill for early dinner
Page 123..Italy 1960
Lovere was a small town, located in the cavernous base of Val
Cavallina, and at that time of the year, most of the tourists that
came stayed around Lake Iseo. To reach the venue near the park
overlooking the lake, we needed to pass through the city center, a considerable walk from the house. Thus, Flavia and I stood out in
our citified demeanor, although by personal disposition we were
not looking at things the way tourists did. Not long after we left
the neighborhood, a noise greeted us, leading me to suspect that
the circus was close by.
……………………………………………………………………
We were close to a corner where our path led into an alley.
Flavia whispered something, and I leaned closer to hear. Sweat
beaded on my forehead; the shivering had been momentary.
The brood of kids gathering at our heels had been temporarily
beaten back by the equally menacing voice of a man standing on a
balcony close by, calling the children by name. As Flavia lurched
sideways to turn into the alley, a little girl clasping at her mother’s
hand cried:
“Mamma, mamma, c’è l’uomo nero! L’uomo nero!!”
The mother pulled the child aside, and stared fearfully, not at me, who trained a peripheral gaze at her, but at Flavia. The alley was
narrow but cluttered with little kiosks and storefronts, and busy
with human traffic
Can we explore this tendency in the novel?
You see, South Side is a novel about mobility, about trying to lock down a home, a place to belong to. This is luxury for our protagonist, and it’s a family ordeal for generations. I think it sounds right that we are made to see places as he’s on the move. These new places are also discoveries for him, and because he’s a writer, he’s self-conscious about imparting those discoveries, turning them into fruits of his laborious travels, so to speak. It’s also how a novel about worldliness ought to come across. It was much later, as I came in better contact with people from Latin America, that I began to appreciate the frequent references to Colombia cities in Gabriel García Márquez’s work. Assimilating that kind of information will, over time, add to your own awareness about the plenitude of life, about geographic diversity, and how travel expands your outlook. Remember, also, that all of this is happening relatively early in his life, and he’s showing his sense of wonder, basically, about these attractions. Call it bragging, except that Abel is not too vain in that regard. He pointedly declines invitations, and when he does accept, he has a way of taking off on his own. He’s not a typical, jaded tourist.
Precocious character:At age 18 or 19, Dankor was thinking like this:
“My life, I was beginning to discover, would be made out of books, not the kind he wrote, long poems about his people who had lived in the same place for centuries, resisting, accommodating, or overcoming invasions, but stories of people and things in motion, bodies and organisms which had nowhere to go but could not afford, would not be allowed, to stay put”
What would you say to people who say that this character is too made up; that he can only be a fictional character; that he is implausible, especially for the period in which the novel is set?
Naturally some readers aren’t going to be convinced by everything in the novel, and that’s ok. But again, I think that such disbelief is a result of people having imbibed too many of the values and prejudices of realism, and realist fiction in particular. One thing to keep in mind is that everything in the novel is about Abel writing about his life, in an episodic manner. In such a novel, reconstruction is a valid narrative device. He’s not writing about the present in the passage you just quoted, but recalling his past, and making deductions, avoiding embellishments. Some things you intuited while young become manifestly clear as you think back on them. It’s just like the story of my father’s friend from Cotonou. I deliberately opt out of the style in which the protagonist would say something like, “Looking back…” or “With the benefit of time…” and so on. Such a rhetorical choice would be out of tune with the kind of book he’s writing for the commission.
But let me add another dimension, about two people who fascinated me a lot around the time I made the transition from being a student to being an independent person, earning a living. One was a guy who was on national service with us in Yola. This guy was so smooth, so worldly, and extremely versatile in so many ways, and I was in awe. His name was Shabaan. Fine guy, always nicely turned out, though not daintily. He would wear denims, but use a scarf, carrying some ladies in “drop” cars when we would be trekking or waiting for bikes. I wondered about him a lot and I tried to get close to him. I found out that he had connections with Tanzania! How did a Tanzanian get to go on NYSC?! The other person was a guy called Ọla Sheyin, who wrote a sports column for The Guardian when I started working there in the early 1990s. He was not on the staff, only a freelance. He would bring a story to Mitchell Obi or Joe Okujeni, the sports editors, hang around a bit, and then he was off. Maybe he’d stay to eat a burger or something, reading Paris Match, but he was on his own. He was a freelance, but I remember he had a car. I didn’t get close to him but I liked the way he carried himself. It was the kind of worldliness displayed by these two people that I strive to convey in Abel. In other words, I regarded them from a distance, but then try to create a character who now explores himself, intimating us with what was external to someone like me who was curious about Shabaan and Ọla Sheyin. It’s not a matter of age because his peripatetic life already makes him into someone always looking for an opportunity, hustling for a decent chance to get ahead because you never know when the tides will turn.
In stringing together the conversations that Abel finds himself a part of and the places he goes to, do you get the sense of consciously setting up a large, biennale sized exhibition? I have found myself placing the images I form in my head from the novel with one of Okwui Enwezor ‘s earliest exhibitions: “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994” at Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2001) Can one can read this novel as a textual presentation of such an exhibition….
To be honest, the kind of exhibit you mentioned about Okwui Enwezor didn’t occur to me when I was thinking about Abel’s place in the world. Of course, one could say that his itineraries prepared the way for the boldness, the confidence one saw in Okwui’s work and writing. I attended the US opening of The Short Century at the PS Studio in New York in 2002, and it was exciting to see those incredible images mounted on the walls. Hundreds of people were there—Yinka Shọnibarẹ, Coco Fusco, Martha Golden, Salah Hassan, Ery Kamara, Georges Adeagbo, Manthia Diawara—and many others I didn’t know at the time. Okwui was clear from the get-go: he wanted to take on the world, not for it to make room for him, but for him to turn it something to which everyone belongs, equally. If Abel’s itineraries and reflections about Black life in the 1960s/1970s, about a Black person’s movements in the world at the time, is reminiscent of the later shows, I think those travels provided him with fewer opportunities, compared to what Okwui and Olu Oguibe were able to do. Which makes perfect sense: that generation of rootless Black intellectuals of which Abel is an example prepared the grounds for the kind of experiment that Okwui and his collaborators put up. And you can be sure that some are coming behind who’ll do even bigger things, provided they learn to read the minutes of the previous meeting.
Let’s discuss Abel as a Ladies’ man. Why is that so important to making the story effective?
From the point of view of reading, those romantic episodes serve a purpose similar to the ones about food—to make the experience of reading pleasurable, considering that there are not too many dramas or opportunities for suspense. But much deeper is the need for Abel to know himself better. I liked the observation in Kayọde Ogunbunmi’s review of the novel that Abel is battling with his demons during that affair with Flavia. A dangerous affair, I must say. But he gets out of it and they remain friends…
The affair with Jeanne comes from a different angle, to introduce readers through Abel’s experience to some issues about controversial personalities in the early years of African political independence, and the role that sexuality plays in them. These are more global issues, and the affair isn’t as deep the one with Flavia. Someone who read the manuscript for me wondered whether the way she jilts him is providence’s revenge for the casual way he leaves Flavia. I don’t know, but I know that the affair can’t have lasted because I envision Abel back in Mande and, clearly, Jeanne isn’t going there with him. The seriality of his affairs can also be due to his habits as a writer—he’s too self-absorbed about writing to stay put for long. Recently I read an interview with the late Spanish writer, Javier Márias (I’m fond of his work), and was very pleased to discover that his love life was very similar to Abel’s.
Flavia, in Milan, circa 1961….Page 103
Flavia was seven years older than me, and was already married, to a man twenty years older. Until that time, all I had on the opposite sex I took from Fatema, Sir Koroma’s daughter, besides fleeting high-school escapades with the circle around choosy Nafissa. Now, with Flavia, all distinctions—age, wealth, religion, culture, race, whatever—collapsed. Her family had lived in Milan for over four hundred years, had been Catholics for much longer, she knew a good deal of what was important about her culture until then, had traveled on all continents, and in spite of her best efforts at modesty, had money written all over her. One thing we seemed to have in common, though: an ingrained habit of stepping across the dividing line…
And now about the Politics of governance in Africa. We know things are happening: First there was Roberts’ death and then Sir Koroma’s death…but in Mande, there doesn’t seem to be the sort of upheaval that we had in many parts of Africa in the period covered by the novel. It’s some kind of work which hints of horror but saves the audience from having to engage with it. Is that a good reading?
Yes, I think that novels about political violence are overdone, and there’s no deep experiential reason, for me, to continue to project gratuitous violence. There’s a good deal of foreshadowing going on in the novel. I’m more interested in keeping in step with Abel, so I accept what he accords priority as more valid than what is a collective experience which, as we know, is replicated in many places in a sort of overlap. And when you come to think of it, in several of the instances when he’s had to move, it’s because of one political disturbance or another. I remember you pointing out that there was much needless violence after reading an excerpt from a work-in-progress, and coming after the experience of Roots in the Sky. It might be that I’m keeping these things in mind in a subliminal way as I move ahead, but I didn’t give much thought to that while doing South Side.
“My interest in the outdoors also comes from the awareness that being in public is a common feature of many African cultures. Hailing people in the street, calling out their aliases as you walk into their house. That’s owambẹ, it comes from oriki, and it happens a lot in Lagos, in Ibadan, and it was striking for me to observe a similar thing with friends in Johannesburg”
What should we make of a character like Cory Warrant?
I hit upon Cory Warrant as a character after watching the former governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, during a TV show. It was the summer before Barack Obama won the presidency of the US. I was struck by how effortlessly cultivated Mr. Patrick sounded, and I thought, Well, I’d like to have someone like that in my novel. As you know, Abel doesn’t warm up to him at first. But the experience of the break-up with Jeanne makes him vulnerable, because he feels belittled and is upset to have someone question his Africanness. As luck would have it, he and Cory meet again, and that’s what leads to his returning to Mande. From there, a serious and consequential friendship begins, and it’s Abel’s inability to truly trust anyone who’s into politics that tends to get in the way of that friendship. Toward the end of the novel, Corry becomes an ambassador, and Abel thinks of that as a good reason to be on his guard. He’s also a figure of Black respectability, an idea that would horrify Abel, but for the fact that he’s mindful of the difficulties Black people go through in the US. I think that a symbolic moment in their friendship is when Cory shows him around the old grounds of Tenth Street School and explains the term known as the Talented Tenth in Black culture. I should also make clear that African American life—Black life in the diaspora in general—fascinates me a great deal, it’s part of my own life in a way, and I’m going to be engaging with that in my writings in any way I can.
Originally published by: Bookartville
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