ANAELE IHUOMA: KUNTA KINTE MADE ME CRY
Anaele Ihuoma has worked as a
journalist, banker and teacher. He is the author of the novel, Imminent
River; the short story collection, The Sea Route to Senorita’s
Heart; the poetry volumes, Tongues of Triumphs, Song
of the Threshing Floor and Song of the Swallow; the play, One
Day with the Hounds. among other works. He holds an MA in Literature
from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. HENRY AKUBUIRO chatted with him
recently in Port Harcourt on his writings.
YOU RELEASED THREE WORKS RECENTLY, A
NOVEL, IMMINENT RIVER; A COLLECTION OF STORIES, THE SEA ROUTE TO SEÑORITA’S
HEART, AND A PLAY, ONE DAY
WITH THE HOUNDS. HOW LONG DID IT TAKE YOU TO WRITE
AND PUBLISH THESE BOOKS?
Although they rolled out of the
press within six months of each another, they were written over a period
spanning thirty years. The play, One Day with the Hounds, which was my
first work of any genre, was written in the 1980s but forgotten. The Sea
Route to Señorita’s Heart is a selection from my short story pool, written
over a period of more than five years, and was published in 2019. The first
word in Imminent River was written in April 2006, in Uyo. I can vividly
remember that. The novel went through several rewrites. It’s now that I can
better appreciate the saying that good writing is actually rewriting! Published
in 2018 by Narrative Landscape Press, copies were only received in 2019 after
an excruciatingly long wait at the Lagos port.
ONE OF YOUR WORKS MAKING WAVES RIGHT
NOW IS IMMINENT RIVERS. TO WHAT EXTENT WERE YOU INFLUENCED BY ALEX HALEY AND
THE TRAJECTORY OF KUNTA KINTE IN WRITING THE NOVEL?
Alex Haley’s Roots brought tears to
my eyes after I read it in the University library back at Ife in the1980s. I
wouldn’t say it was the Aristotelian tears of catharsis; it was a sort of
revenge-seeking tears, revenge for the physical, emotional and psychological
pains inflicted on the Kunta Kinte family by slavery –pain you felt vicariously
if you were a young, impressionable student and a Black person anywhere in the
world, for Kinte was a kind of Blackman’s Everyman, an archetype. Yes, that
experience will stay with me for life. However, at that time, it was a
one-track emotional response, a we-and-them stalemate. But, as I matured, I
began to see things, including Slavery itself, from a wider socio-historical
prism. If we demand reparation from the West for Slavery, it is not out of
place to also seek reparation from the Arabs, and from fellow black Africans,
all those who were complicit in the ruinous enterprise and who profited
directly or indirectly from it.
Yes, you could say that a sort of
gene was mentally carried over from Haley’s Roots, but not in the sense in
which, for instance, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart writes back to Joyce Cary’s
Mister Johnson and Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And it was an
afterthought, really, because Haley was nowhere in my mind’s horizon when
Imminent River was being conceived. But the moment my subconscious released
what it harboured as the writing progressed, there came the need, also, to
revisit Haley’s setting. Being an overtly historical novel, a work of
monumental and trans-generational relevance, whatever Roots posits, directly or
by association, invariably carries much weight. Thus, the portrayal of
life in Juffure, which was the life in a particular community in the Gambia,
could be extrapolated by the unwary, African or non-African, to mean the life
in pre-colonial Africa.
What I have done in Imminent River,
in this respect, is proffer another, not necessarily, a counter-cultural
setting to Roots. You would notice, of course, that the trajectory
is inverted: from an African-American coming down to Africa in search of
his ‘roots’, to the African going up to America to look for his ‘shoots’ or
‘leaves’. While this is the mainstay of the narrative arc of Roots, it
is only subtly hinted at in Imminent River, like a teaser pulling the reader
along, until the very last pages. The multiple conflicts, ultimately connected
with the search for the longevity formula, have enough nous to propel the story
along. And Haley did not have the luxury of adding love stories, the one
between Ezemba and Agbonma, for instance. His was strictly historical. Perhaps
the very imperative of his quest did not allow for such luxury.
THE PLOT OF THE STORY BEGINS IN THE
19TH CENTURY, AND IT IS FASCINATING HOW YOU RECREATED THE ANCIENT SETTING, WITH
THE MATRIARCH DAA-MBIIWAY PULLING THE STRINGS. WHAT WENT INTO THE RESEARCH OF
THIS FICTION?
A lot. Don’t forget the story is
based on a real, flesh-and-blood person, my maternal aunt by the name of Mbiwe;
so we all called her Da-Mbiwe (pronounced Daa-mbiiway). To give life to the
dream, I had to scour libraries and cyberspace and relevant histories,
interviewing and observing certain elderly persons. As I began writing, it was
as if she was there in the room with me, even while the bulk of the work was
being done at Ebedi Writers Residency in Iseyin, Oyo State. That was sheer good
fortune. At some point, I disappeared and the story started writing itself.
Certain things happened that I still do not understand to this day. As a ruddy
young man emerged from the strange river, I was trying to give him a name when
he quickly introduced himself as “David the son of Jesse, the healer from the
Healing Home.” My hairs stood on edge. When, back in the early chapters,
I needed to give a name to Daa-Mbiiway’s assistant, the name Jesse had simply
dropped from the sky. And now this! I see divine orchestration in all these,
for at the time of Jesse’s creation the David episode was not even in the
picture.
JUST WHEN I THOUGHT DAA-MBIIWAY WAS
GOING TO METAMORPHOSE AND PLAY A BIGGER ROLE IN THE PLOT, SHE DISAPPEARS. WHAT
INFORMS HER CAMEO APPEARANCE?
It is also perhaps informed by the
logic of the plot; and also the suspense factor; the reader wants to know what
has become of her, or what she is up to. I would think the immediate aftermath
of her capture by the men in the caravan, that is, the slave raiders, was
rather blurred so that the reader can begin to imagine various scenarios and to
begin to speculate as to what could happen next, who has the longevity formula
and what this person or persons could be up to. Now that is the
narratological side. But, frankly, Daa-Mbiiway’s disappearance and
disappearance is the story! A storyteller does not have to explain the whys and
wherefores of certain twists in the tale outside of the story itself. That is
the province of critics and reviewers. Everything has its nature; this is the
nature of Imminent River, just like the warm and cold waters of Ikogosi; it’s
the nature and, therefore, the main attraction of this particular spring,
THE SEARCH FOR THE LONGEVITY FORMULA
IS AT THE HEART OF THIS NARRATIVE, WHICH CREATED RIFTS FROM GENERATION TO
GENERATION. IN A WAY, IT REMINDS ONE OF THE BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE, THE BLACK
PANTHER, AND THE DISCOVERY OF SPECIAL NATURAL RESOURCE IN THE FICTIONAL AFRICAN
NATION OF WAKANDA, WHICH HOLDS THE KEY TO FUTURE OF AFRICA AND THE WORLD. HOW
CLOSE TO REALITY IS THE LONGEVITY FORMULA?
Wow! I’d rather look at it in its
simplest term – this is, or has to do with, the story of an ageless woman with
a formula that prolongs life, whose ancient healing home recorded no deaths! As
the story unfolds, we don’t know the specific active ingredients or their
combination. Perhaps Jesse or his wife, Edidion, might know since he talks
about ‘pharmaceutics’, but he is murdered and Edidion lost, to the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Cell biologists and eugenicists who study
human longevity and improvement of the species often talk about phenols and
polyphenols obtained from plants and reputed to prolong the life of the
cell, which is the unit of a living matter in an organism. In the hands of such
people the story might have assumed an entirely different dimension. Why do
Chinese and Japanese, people whose lifestyle is associated with certain
plant-derived foods and drugs, live longer, for instance? Here, though, we are
dealing with fiction. However, you may consider the fact of the existence of
these longevity phenols with interesting anti-oxidant properties to be a link
between the story and reality.
If you want to draw parallels with
Black Panther in the sense you are suggesting, you could then connect the fact
that the search for the longevity formula led to the discovery of manganese and
other minerals used in the steel making. This, ultimately, leads to the
emergence of E and J conglomerate, Ezemba’s cashcow as he strives for economic
supremacy with Chief Ojionu. But they are two different stories.
THE MYSTERY SURROUNDING THE INSIBIDI
CODE ALSO PLAYS OUT IN IMMANENT RIVER. HOW DID THIS SECRECY HELP THE
IGBO NATION OR OTHERWISE?
No idea. I think the notion of
secrecy in relation to Nsibidi is more in the realm of conspiracy theory. It
fits neatly into a cultural narrative that sees pre-European African societies
as mutually antagonistic rather than cooperative. However, given the fact that
Nsibidi was essentially a writing system still in gestation –it is also
answered to other descriptions – a ‘secret’ context was not inconceivable.
Different age grades or perhaps masquerades, artist guides or trade groups or,
as used in Imminent River, griots, could have found it useful and
expedient as a communication tool in furthering their group interest. Such
things could be done, have, indeed, been done, with other languages with diverse
alphabet systems. That does not turn such languages into ‘secret’ languages. It
was simply an evolving writing system. Did Nsibidi ‘secrecy’, granted, help the
Igbo? Depends. But mind you, although it is generally associated with the Igbo,
it was said to have also been practised by the Efik and Ibibio, Anang and other
neighbouring communities around Calabar and beyond. Every language is a
cultural asset not just to the ‘owners’ but also to the users. In that sense it
must have been beneficial. But I am not sure it was in the sense in which use
of codes played a major role among French and British intelligence elements in
the Napoleonic wars, or critically, the allied forces and the Nazis in the
Second World War. But let’s not forget; this is fiction or perhaps an elevated
version of what my children would call ‘story book’.
I AM INTRIGUED BY YOUR SUPERB
HANDLING OF THE STORY OF THE ARO CONFEDERACY AND ITS MIGHT WHEN PITTED AGAINST
THE WHITE SUPREMACIST. IS THERE ANY STATEMENT YOU ARE YOU MAKING WITH THIS
HISTORICAL CONTEXT?
Thanks for the compliment. As
a story writer, my brief, and the debt I owe my reader, is to write good
stories, not to make what you call ‘statements’ which in this context might
mean political or military statements. However a work of art cannot exist in
vacuo; it emerges from the interaction of writer and society. I leave it to the
reader and the reviewer to elicit statements, if any, from the work, otherwise,
I would be an essayist or a commentator. However, let it be said that it is
incumbent on the committed writer to write such a compelling story as to draw a
captive readership, and at the same time make the reader to easily make the
connection between the work and the imperative of social action, as is often
the case with a writer like Bertolt Brecht. Your question is also an
interesting one, given the elision of history from the school curriculum. As
nature abhors a vacuum, it wouldn’t surprise me if vocations such as
journalism, literature, film and related practices take up the space created by
the deliberate abandonment of history. From history ,we learn of forces such as
the Aro Confederacy which perhaps wielded such anti-imperialist power in the
hinterland of what is now southern Nigeria, as the forces of Jaja of Opobo and
Nanna of Itsekri did on the waterfronts, to checkmate British mercantile forces
as they bid to dominate the lucrative commerce which paved the way for
imperialist expansionism in the region.
In the Epilogue entitled “Ajaelu
Tastes the Hiatus Music”, the setting levitates to Abeokuta in 1934, when Wole
Soyinka was born, and there are echoes of African-American models as the
curtain draws abroad. What informs this strand in the narrative?
It is a very critical strand in the
narrative. As many have observed, the story of Imminent River draws as much
from the fictional impulse as from the historical. This is a pan-West African
story with characters stretching from Nigeria – or what became Nigeria – to the
Gold Coast. It is in the epilogue that the story is finally resolved –
the Da Vinci Code-like puzzle, the face behind the mask of Ajaelu, etc.
and of course the events of July 13, 1934 both in New York and Isara, Abeokuta,
etc, were all real. One who reads in-between the lines will then unravel the
custodian of the longevity formula! Why did I do it? Not sure I have an answer
beyond the fact that it syncs with the story. I also perhaps
wanted to open up the genre space, rather than show servile fidelity to the
supposed content, format or style book of a particular genre.
WHEN DO YOU CONSIDER A SUBJECT
APT FOR A SHORT STORY EXPLORATION?
Any. The acclaimed masters, their
cohorts and pretenders – Edgar Alan Poe, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg,
Luigi Pirandello, Dambudzo Marechera, Maxim Gorky, Binyavanga Wainaina,
etcetera –all explored diverse themes: mystery, love (or its denial), the
psyche, hunger, madness, marriage, poverty, religion, sexual orientation, war,
peace, etcetera. People of different political and ideological bent:
freethinkers and anarchists and demagogues and socialists and religious
zealots, and right wingers have all written and are still writing. Who can stop
a man or woman with battery in his laptop? Nothing but failure of craft! Or
perhaps those done in by the subtle diktat of prize administrators, who might
want to literally effectuate the dictum the the one paying the piper dictating
the tune.
WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE ONE
DAY WITH THE HOUNDS?
The society. Nigeria is a story
waiting to be written. One Day with the Hounds was actually written in the
1980’s just after my NYSC. Originally titled A Day in the Life of a Trapped
Nation, it was presumed lost until Emeka Egwuda who had published my three
poetry works needed a play and so put much pressure on me. By the time I fished
out the manual typewriter-created manuscript, it was dog-eared and roach-eaten
at several points. But it still contained the critical mass to yield what we
now have.
As can be guessed from the
storyline, One Day with the Hounds was inspired by incessant incursions into
the Nigerian political space by the military; but it has been a lose-lose
situation for the proverbial Nigerian man on the street who has to hail every
change of government, only to see them turn his dreams and expectations into
nightmares. But rather than lamentation, the dark comedy the play inheres is to
enable us laugh and live, to fight another day.
