"I write out of a sense of curiosity." An Interview with Namwali Serpell.

Namwali Serpell's creative work plays fast and loose with genre, making her popular with readers piqued by the unexpected. SSDA teamster, Efemia Chela got a sneak peek of the Zambian writer's newest short story, "Company" and chats to her about its exciting premise, Afrofuturism at large as well as her highly anticipated debut novel.

Perhaps what I enjoy the most about your writing is the inherent element of surprise in your work. I listen to this strange podcast called Welcome To Nightvale and the host has a mantra - "Past performance is not a predictor of future results." This statement applies to your writing in some ways; readers can never anticipate what you’ll write next. We’ve had a bank statement, Facebook posts and your latest story uses Samuel Beckett’s play, “Company” as a point of departure.

Could you speak to your peripatetic (I suppose one could call it) approach to subject, character and form in your storytelling?

NAMWALI: I write out of a sense of curiosity. The idea of having the same voice--these days, people call it a “brand”--bores me immensely. I also believe that constraint is the mother of originality, so the delight I take in writing often comes from figuring out which form resonates with the experiences that intrigue me at any one time. These are often quite distinct.

Being a Zambian writer, when you look at Zambian literature does it influence your writing at all? Do you think there are any gems, overlooked novels or stories that people should read?

NAMWALI: The Zambianness of my writing comes more from a sensibility I derive from hearing stories from friends and relatives than from our print literary tradition, which as you know, is not very extensive. My father’s colleague collected and translated a big volume of Zambian folk tales about Kalulu that we used to read when I was a kid--we called it the Omnibus. I loved them! But your own writing is some of the best Zambian fiction out there--so I’ll recommend Efemia Chela’s “Lusaka Punk” to those looking for places to start.

Ha ha. You're too kind!

“Company” is an incredible sci-fi story - ripe with bizarre sensory images, ominous apocalyptic grandeur and clever social commentary on race. It features in McSweeney’s most recent quarterly. Though I don’t want to give too much away, the story is about a woman, Lila and the unnamed narrator on a space and time-travelling quest for a valuable natural commodity. On what should be a routine stop in a village to harvest some, things go badly awry.

How did the idea for story evolve and finally come to life?

NAMWALI: I had a dream about a bubble floating over the ground with little legs sticking out from the bottom--it was a portable invisibility room of sorts. It became a time travel machine in the story, and the rest sort of grew out of that. I have long been obsessed with the opening line to Samuel Beckett’s "Company": “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.” I had included the sentence in an early draft of the story to describe the beginning of the protagonist’s training.

After I had a complete draft, McSweeney’s reached out to me to solicit a story for their “Cover Stories” issue, asking that I cover a classic story, the way you might cover a song--I was given complete freedom as to how. Since I’d already included one Beckett line in my story, I decided to go back and reread "Company", and I discovered many other lines that resonated with the Afrofuturist story I’d already written. So I incorporated them into my prose--the story is now about 40% Beckett’s original lines. It was a wonderful way to be in conversation with his work. I think of it as a Janelle Monaé cover of a Philip Glass song.

Your writing often addresses technology, an uneasiness that characterises modern living and it unlocks wholly imaginative futures. As a theme in your work why do think you peer into the future so often?

NAMWALI: “Peer” is the right word. I am a big fan of sci-fi that reaches slightly forward from the crest of the present--the “near future.” The show Black Mirror, for instance, appeals to me because of its plausibility and its satirical edge. I was greatly pleased to discover, for example, that one element of a sex robot I invented for a Tin House story in 2012 had been patented by the time I gave a reading from the story in 2013. An audience member at another reading I gave pointed out that, despite the insistent variety, my stories all concern mediation--the things between us, through which we talk, love, hate, hurt, and so on. Sometimes they are texts, sometimes they are technology, sometimes they are other people.

I’ve often thought that Afrofuturism, retrofuturism and SFF have such great appeal in Africa because living with the disappointment, the discontents of the postcolony, it is a way for us to begin again. To relive and reimagine both the past and the future as a creative continuum. This genre is something you both lecture on and write about in fiction. What are your thoughts on Afrofuturism?

NAMWALI: Well, they’ve only had such great appeal in Africa lately, as Nnedi Okorafor points out here. And in the founding document of Afrofuturism, Mark Dery’s 1992 essay, “Black to the Future,” he coins the term in the midst of bemoaning the relative dearth of Afrofuturist texts: “Why do so few African-Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other – the stranger in a strange land – would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists?” That historical absence is telling--how can you imagine a future when your present remains so steeped in material lack and violent negation?--but it also inspires the Afrofuturist writers who are scribbling away now. My aim as a black sci-fi writer is not only to help fill that void, but also to riff on the void, to think about the annihilation of black bodies and black culture as a ground zero from which we might build a new politics or even a utopia, which etymologically means "no" + "place".

You’ve written a lot of short stories but just finished the manuscript for your first novel. Did this change in form, require a changing of gears or was the segue into a novel quite natural for you?

NAMWALI: Well, some of my short stories are just chapters of a future novel! But, yes, now that I have moved into the process of editing the entire manuscript, I am thinking more about larger scale questions: How and when do characters return to influence the plot? What are the thematic threads stringing this mess together? Where do I cut off a chapter to keep the momentum going rather than aiming--as one might in a short story--for a sense of closure?

Are you allowed to tell us a little a bit more about your forthcoming book, The Old Drift?

NAMWALI: Yes! This will be my debut novel and it should be coming out in 2018. It spans more than a century and multiple genres, including the Gothic and sci-fi. It tells the story of three multicultural Zambian families over three generations, spiraling down to a love triangle and a political movement. I use the saga of these families to pose some rather grandiose questions: How do you live a life or forge a politics that can skirt the dual pitfalls of fixity (authoritarianism) and freedom (neoliberalism)? And what happens if you treat error not as something to avoid but as the very basis for human creativity and community?

Being an African writer is unique kind of burden. Thinkpieces on us, what we should write, how we should conduct ourselves, where we should live, even, abound. Often where one’s home country doesn’t have a particularly strong literary community, any pre-eminent author that arises is pressured to grow it. Or write for their nation, whatever that means. These discussions often come down to at their heart, the role of the writer.

Do you have any opinions on the role of the writer?

NAMWALI: The role of the writer is to write. I do like to say that The Old Drift is the Great Zambian Novel you didn’t know you were waiting for, but my tongue is firmly in cheek. I am more interested in trying to capture the quiddity of a place and its cultures than in propaganda, pronouncements, or pulpits. I’m too "movious", as we say in Zambia, to be patriotic.

On Namwali’s Bedside Table

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s brilliant novel Kintu, which has just been reissued in the U.S., and which I’m rereading for a conversation I’ll be having with her in Brooklyn next month; Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue; and I’m privileged to have an advance copy of Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom.

"Company" by Namwali Serpell can be read in Issue 49 of McSweeney's which is out now.

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at UC, Berkeley. Her story “The Sack” won the 2015 Caine Prize for African writing. It first appeared in the Africa39 anthology, a 2014 Hay festival project to identify the best African writers under 40. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2011. Her first published story, “Muzungu,” was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2009, and shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize. Her first novel, The Old Drift, will be published by Penguin Random House in 2018. She tweets occasionally @snamwali.

Interview by Efemia Chela a.k.a. @efemiachela 

"...that is what we turn to literature for, a kind of recognition, a consolation." An Interview with Fiona Melrose.

Fiona Melrose’s exquisite debut novel, Midwinter is a touching meditation on growing up and mourning. It's been a resounding success, receiving a nomination for this year's Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Karina M. Szczurek interviewed her about the meaning of home for her as well as the emotion that went into writing Midwinter.

KARINA: You are South African but you lived abroad for several years. What led you away from South Africa and what led you back? Where is home?

FIONA: I have lived in the UK for much of my adult life though have wandered back to Johannesburg at intervals. I do seem to have a very low threshold for boredom and every few years I seem to pack up and move or do something different with my life. My initial reason for leaving was the feeling that Johannesburg and in particular the white monoculture in which I had grown up was, in the end, likely to suffocate me. It had, and still does have, very conservative views about women, their roles, the parameters of their lives, and can err on the side of anti-intellectualism, a sort of closed system. So, I left out of curiosity and a desire for more, more of everything, more of life. So, perhaps I am not curious at all but rather, greedy.

Home is everywhere and nowhere. I am frequently asked whether I feel I am South African or English. I find this a nostalgic notion, and a conservative one too – that we are wedded to nationhood. It is a very masculine ideal, it implies insecurity, this asserting one’s nationality as an absolute, being one thing which automatically means that one cannot be another. We only need to cast an eye to the UK and the US this past year to recognise this. I prefer to exert my citizenship through a more fluid, more relational identity.

I have people across the world that I love so dearly. I think my home is in those relationships and the experiences attached to them as well as the influences, cultural and otherwise that each has had over me. I have never lived in Italy for example and do not speak the language and yet, at each visit, I feel an intense metaphysical comfort and primal recognition

KARINA: Midwinter is your debut novel. Please share the story of its journey towards publication.

FIONA: Midwinter grew out of my experience of living on farm in Suffolk in the UK. I had never lived in the countryside before and the experience was extremely exacting and confronting. I studied an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and this book was initially a short story. Over a year I set about turning it into a novel, working at night and over weekends.

Both my agent and publisher are based in the UK. I met my agent, Jo Unwin, through Twitter initially and then a freelance editor who had taken an interest in my work recommended my work to her. (I think that is how it went). Jo was the only agent I submitted to and she signed me immediately so I didn’t suffer the humiliations of endless rejections and years of torment which one hears so much about. I am always grateful to her for that. She has a phenomenal record and works very hard for her clients and, importantly to me, is just a thoroughly decent person.

My book found a very happy home with Corsair, a literary fiction imprint at Little, Brown UK. My editor there is Sarah Castleton. Jo I think realised that we are both a bit odd and she is right. It is a match made in heaven. Sarah is a hugely sensitive reader, intuitive yet thorough and is not afraid to put her energy (and, in the end, money) behind a quieter book – which Midwinter is. Having her support my career, has given me huge confidence and I trust her entirely with my work.

KARINA: Midwinter is set in Zambia and England. Colonialism and its horrifying consequences touch your characters' lives in the most intimate way. The novel touches on other seminal issues in current world politics, like Britain's involvement in the war in Iraq, but your handling of them is very subtle. How crucial is it for you as a writer to address these topics? Do you feel that being an African writer makes a difference in your approach?

FIONA: I am by nature political. I mistrust people who grew up in South Africa or any country with a complicated history, and yet have made no effort to engage with the issues of the past and the present – that is an easy cop out when such a heavy price was paid. That is not to say I don’t get it wrong and am forced to re-interrogate my thoughts and rethink my position, change my mind, but I do think an active engagement with ideas is something that is essential to who I am. I studied an MA in Political Thought at Wits – it very much shaped me into the person I am today.

Hearing you call me an African writer is still something I am coming to terms with and I am ambivalent about adopting the moniker. I feel in a way that it is a title I would need to earn to some degree and would be hugely humbled by. I certainly don't assume it.

I do think that being an outsider makes a huge difference – it is the gaze that all writers should adopt. And in both South Africa and the UK, I am by virtue of my fluid nationality, and meandering travels, always the outsider.

KARINA: You write very convincingly from the perspective of two men – a father and a son – struggling to come to terms with a great loss in their lives. How did you find their voices? 

FIONA: The father, Landyn Midwinter, came to me clear as a bell. A sentence dropped into my head and I knew the voice not to be my own, not my internal voice, nor my public voice. And I knew it was an older man who lived on a farm. So, I followed that voice. He was so immediate to me it was as if he was sitting at my elbow reciting the story and all I had to do was write it down. Vale was more slippery. As a character he has a natural reticence and I felt that trying to hear him too, so, I had to work a little harder at him, wait a little longer and sit a little quieter to hear him properly.

I find voice is less about finding and creating in an active manner and more about waiting and listening.

The fact that I am a woman writing in men’s voices was neither here nor there though it is mentioned with relative frequency. The issues my characters deal with: grief, love, anger – these are all universals and come without gender assignment. The ways they are expressed and the prisms through which they are magnified will have been constructed along gendered lines but, under it all, we all bleed the same way.

KARINA: Grief – in its many manifestations – is central to your narrative. It is something that most of your readers will be familiar with in some form. How challenging did you find writing about it?  

FIONA: As an experience, not pleasant. I didn’t find it any more difficult to access or express than other aspects in the novel but the experience of getting it on the page was very uncomfortable. Writing can be a fairly miserable business.

There were chapters which I dreaded returning to, knowing that it would require dredging a fairly deep well and one chapter in particular I left in sketch form right until the end. Even once it was written it needed another excavation to get it right and really get the scalpel into the meat.

Even during editing and now, on occasion, re-reading, there are sections that I cannot read without being somewhat overcome. I hope it is not simply an indulgence, but rather, something truthful that readers will respond to.

The same is true of my second book. There are a few sections which seem to penetrate further than others and even reading them casually results in fresh tears. But, in the end, that is what we turn to literature for, a kind of recognition, a consolation.

Fiona Melrose was born in Johannesburg but has spent the majority of her adult life in the UK, first in London and then in East Anglia. She moved to Suffolk to concentrate on her writing and it is there that Midwinter was conceived. Previously Fiona has worked in academia, NGOs, in public affairs and as an emerging markets analyst. She continues to keep a foot in both continents and is currently spending the majority of her time back in South Africa where she is completing her second novel.

#WriteTips: The Filmmaker and The Memoirist

With the theme for the 2017 Short Story Day Africa Prize announced, we thought it would be a perfect time to share with you, some of the latest #WriteTips we've gathered. These two writers come from different literary backgrounds but all their tips really get to the heart of writing your perfect piece - whatever it may be.

Umar Turaki

1.  A story is a living thing. There is a way it desires to be. Listen closely and it will tell you. The art of hearing what a story wants to be could be called instinct.
2. Do you remember the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy is faced with a great chasm and the only way to cross it is to step out in faith into thin air? That’s writing. Sometimes you don’t need all the answers. Most times, it’s enough to grope your way through the dark until you reach your destination.
3. Second-guess everything you put down. And never stop. It keeps you grounded and alert.

Susan Newham-Blake

1. I find the only way I can keep on writing is if I remind myself I’m simply telling a story. I focus on getting it down on paper. You can always go back and create the perfect sentence, bring in elements to help with characterisation. So I try not to worry about perfection until after the story is down.

2. Don’t write for anybody or anyone but yourself. Write to get your unique story down on paper, not because you want to get published, be famous, impress your friends. In other words, do it for yourself and no one else and this might alleviate some of the self doubt.

3. If you want to be a better writer, you need to put in the hours. Don’t think about writing the perfect novel or short story. Think of every word you put down on paper as practice. I often think of Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of putting in the 10 000 hours. You need to write for 10 000 hours before you’re going to write that masterpiece!

"Words move more deliberately than visual images." An Interview with Yemisi Aribisala.

Lauren Smith interviewed our #WriterWednesday, outspoken essayist and food writer Yemisi Aribisala. They delved into what really makes an essay sing, pleasing the palate and Yemisi's new deliciously-written book Longthroat Memoirs: Soup, Sex and Nigerian Tastebuds.

What, for you, is the key to good food writing or to writing essays?

YEMISI: Investing one’s own disadvantage in words: Opening an artery onto the page, that kind of thing, apart from a love for the theme being written on.

There is a biblical king who sees that the battle he is fighting is about to be lost. He takes his oldest son, who is to succeed him, and offers him as a burnt offering on the walls of the city. The battle turns immediately in his favour. The words used are, ‘A great wrath was unleashed against the other side.’ This passive construction is surely referring to something other than the force used by the people fighting the battle. There are some levels of enchantment, some sacrifices that get a primal response – what happens when a child who is not yours, who you don’t know, falls down in the park and your heart breaks and you jump to your feet? It isn’t your business but you are part of something transcendent, and the child might as well be yours. There are many things that happen in the human being that bypass the brain.

I think that some essayists write what is in their heads and they write it for the intellectual prestige of putting down the words. Then they go on to expect the reader to care deeply and the reader doesn’t. If one wants to be a good essayist, one needs to connect and do it at the level of the gut, infiltrate the blood–brain barrier and lose prestige or the footing of pride. Or shall I say, you have to give something of value away to gain the investment of the reader’s time and attention. The subject matter has to mean something more than the mundane to the writer, and the exposé has to ultimately be on vulnerability. I don’t even have to say that the writer has got to write with integrity.

When talking about food and the sensuality of food, you would naturally discuss taste, smell, colour, presentation, etc. However, you also talk about the pleasure of saying words like ‘akara’ or ‘ila cocao’ and how you teared up at the words ‘soft custard of slowly scrambled eggs’. Does sound and language play an important role in the way you experience and enjoy food?

YEMISI: I have a theory about a woman’s chief erogenous zone. I think we can map it somewhere in the brain. I’m speaking from experience. My brain responds to spoken words with their impregnations of nuance and layers, much more so than the urgency of visual presentations. Words move more deliberately than visual images. I can isolate them and really think about them. I can stop them and start them again from retentive memory. The imagery that heard-words craft is more indelible. They are scattershot, full of possibilities, as opposed to the incarceration of visuals.

It probably works differently for other people. I find television, with its combination of sound and fast images, distracting and disquieting; a precursor to pounding headaches. I can’t turn around and watch at the same time. Audiobooks are soothing and freeing, and my ears and brain work better when my legs are in motion. The men that I have fallen passionately for were able to wield words. Spoken words. They were able to convey great passion in speaking, and I mean sincere feeling, not bullshit or charm.

Sound and language have everything to do with how I experience everything. Strangers are more powerfully observed in their words than in their appearance. I can hear all the layers when I can only see what they want me to see. With my back turned, I can sense a lie being spoken. Even feeling in languages that I don’t know makes a strong impression on me. Words applied to food and describing food – of course something explosive happens.

‘My imagination is always ahead of real life’, you’ve said, and Longthroat Memoirs has many examples of the ways in which your personality and proclivities seem to clash with things like meticulous measurements or the stodge of tradition. How have Nigerian readers responded to your radical creativity with local cuisine?

YEMISI: I don’t think that it is radical at all. The corollary is that many people are applying creativity to the preparation of their food every day. They probably don’t feel a need to talk about it, or write about it. I’ve said before that we don’t have a Nigerian culture of cooking and monologuing. It is coming along now with social media and Nigerian food celebrities. Readers of Longthroat Memoirs understand that I am not a methodical cook so there is a lot of forgiveness as regards to my recipes. Some pointed out mistakes as well. I think in the end readers are more comfortable with my imperfections than with a not very convincing expertise on Nigerian food.

You certainly never seem to shy away from topics or ideas that seem geared to unsettle readers. Longthroat delves into the eating of dog, ram penis, and animals on the verge of extinction. You’ve declared, in ‘Sister Outsider’, that you’re not a feminist and never will be, because it portrays itself as a kind of thuggish demand for conformity. You’ve argued that sexual repression is as legitimate as freedom. All your writing is full of strong opinions, brazen descriptions and merciless anecdotes. Where do you get this incredible energy from? Is it what inspires you to write?

YEMISI: I come from a society where the default is conformity. I don’t know how to conform and I find myself putting question marks against everything. If I cannot write ‘Sister Outsider’ in the way that I have written it as a feminist, then isn’t it, in the end, a disservice to my journey and my person to be one?

‘Sister Outsider’ opens with the line, "I have never had intrinsic fuckability." I find that your self-deprecation is so bold it comes across as strength and confidence. You often embrace the negation of what is popular and comfortable. Have you found this a useful way of thinking and writing about personal or contentious topics?

YEMISI: Not so much ‘useful’ as ‘unavoidable’. I am attempting to be true to myself. To be as truthful about myself as I can be without being self-indulgent or acquiring a taste for self-exposure. That taste going by Facebook entries is unquenchable. There is a need to speak on something and I don’t agree with the status quo. The self-deprecation probably comes from not fitting in no matter how hard I try.

‘Sister Outsider’ was written with painful awareness of not being the ideal Nigerian woman. Someone I once worked for asked me "Do you think you’ll ever be able to get it?!" He was talking about some technical task that he had spent a long time showing me how to do. I did get it … eventually, but the words remind me of my failure at getting the finer points of being Nigerian and woman and beautiful and accepted. I have sisters who managed this without even trying. What better way to spend one’s time in the country of fringe dwellers than capitalising on one’s failures? Why wallow in failure? If you can’t beat them, or join them, then you write about them. Yes, it does end up as a kind of power and advantageous positioning in standing out from the crowd because most people don’t want fringe-dweller strength. They want the comfort of close circles and cliques and sisterhoods and other such embraces that require allegiance. The allegiance must be paid for, but if you are an outsider you have nothing to lose, no currency that is accepted. You are cold already and rejection is familiar. It is what it is.

In your essay ‘Giving It All Away in English’, you describe English in the Nigerian context as "an antibiotic, sterile, necessary, but aloof. It is not the blood flowing through our veins. It does not fire up like language on the lips of those pouting neurotic nymphets in French films with English subtitles. It will never make Fidel Castro’s fists pump up and down, or rouse revolutions."

How do you feel, then, writing in this ‘tree-of-good-and-evil’ language that was enforced through colonial rule?

YEMISI: I feel grateful for the power to connect not only with Nigerians but many parts of the world without having to arduously and ineffectively translate what I have in my head. I feel grateful for the education that provided this ability and opportunity. My sympathies and empathy are with the people who find it difficult to adequately translate their thoughts into English or another language even in a basic capacity. There is nothing any of us can do about the fact that the world is shrinking so we need to learn how to speak more languages, not fewer. I feel sympathy for those who must use English or attempt to do so every day in order to connect with other people in institutions, to get money out of the bank, to navigate their way to their flights, to earn a grain of respect in a restaurant. In Nigeria, we have given ourselves no other option than the institutional use of the English language. We haven’t, in addition, provided the necessity and the resources of mastering the use of multiple languages. And that opportunity is so pertinent.

Then we have descended one step down the rung of decency by discriminating against those who don’t speak it well or who speak it with a Nigerian accent. We also elevate those who speak with an American accent no matter how idiotic they sound in their adoption of nasal manipulations and pretentiousness. It is painful to watch a grown man who had an inconsistent education in English, who is, by the way, beautifully articulate in expressions in an indigenous Nigerian language, who is a good human being, who is vocationally successful, smart and competent, being prematurely judged and disdained because he has made one or two grammatical mistakes.

‘Giving It All Away in English’ was one of the first articles that I wrote for Farafina Magazine because I had very strong feelings about the failure of our educational system in taking up the opportunity of multilingualism and instead infusing the learning and use of English language ‘in Nigeria’ with discrimination and class pretentiousness and condescension.

On the other hand, ‘Giving It All Away in English’ also praises the idiosyncrasies of Nigerian ways of speaking English. In what ways do you consider your own writing to be particularly Nigerian?

YEMISI: Thematically, they are Nigerian. I am writing all the time on being Nigerian and living in Nigeria but I have been accused of being stylistically un-Nigerian. My direct address of taboo objects, subjects and descriptions of people are supposedly un-Nigerian.

You and your son have a list of food intolerances so long that you can’t eat out and you descended into the depths of ‘Satan Street’ to find an organic local pot that wouldn’t release chemicals into your food. However, food intolerances are often scorned as mere fussiness or silly dietary fads. Does this attitude create much of a problem for you as a food writer? Or has it inspired you to cook because you can’t rely on others to cook for you?

YEMISI: The important thing is what works in reality. I think we can establish that the human body rarely responds to one-size-fits-all interventions in curing disease or even in maintaining health and balance. Popular impressions and conclusions about food are only really good for creating a market to sell a product to as many people as possible. The gut is such a private jurisdiction that an attitude or a proposal made regarding eating in real life never really translates successfully to the dietary habits of a wide surface area of humanity, in the very same way that impressions on taste do not either.

I see the scorn of dietary proposals as a backlash to the application of one conclusion on food to large tracts of people under the heading of ‘Good For You’. Both standpoints of general moral proposals and general rejections are cynical in their application. When you start to hear how wonderful coconut oil is for everything, question it and apply wisdom to its wholesale adoption for yourself. Also, when you start to hear how coconut oil is saturated fat and will kill you with heart disease, question it and do your research. A lot of the information on food out there is sponsored by markets and supported by trends, in the same way that the words written on the back of food packaging is more concerned about your buying the product than your health status. The lesson in it all is to have your own mind and listen to your own body and do your own research. Something else that marketing food has successfully disconnected from eating is the fact that we are meant to be providing resources for our bodies to function optimally and heal. Eating food should be pleasurable but we have to be pleasured and sustained too.

My own reactions to information on food differ depending on what I have found out in putting the food in my own mouth. Or based on how those who I cook for respond to the food prepared. For example, to start, in order to heal damage to our guts from wherever the damage emanated, we had to declare a no-gluten diet. To aid healing, we had to include many fermented foods and drinks and probiotics and to ingest as few additives to food as possible. After a few years, a little gluten was digestible but the additives are still a problem. Many of them are not food. They are metals or chemicals or colourings or wood shavings, or unidentifiable concoctions put in the food to extend the life or enhance the appearance of the food.

So now you understand from the ramble that the gluten in small quantities is no longer the problem but the things being commercially added to food. How anyone can argue with this premise, not only because it is personal and we as a family are not advocating it for everyone in our catchment area … and more importantly because we have tested it and found that it works for us. Paramountly, in the discussion there are pointers to items that are not in fact food … how anyone can argue with this is beyond understanding.

If a child breaks out in a rash every time he is given a biscuit, how can we conclude that not giving him the biscuit is a silly dietary fad? I think the other person can say for themselves, I can eat every kind of biscuit that I meet. Or, Eating biscuits doesn’t cause a reaction in my own body, but when the Epi-pen is being inserted into the thigh of someone choking on a peanut in the airplane seat next to me, the rational thing to do isn’t to conclude that the person gasping for air as his trachea is closing up is being fussy. What is obviously happening is that the person is fighting for her life.

Therefore, attitude hardly counts at all when we are attempting to determine what foods nourish the body. A lot of intolerances and allergies as they concern individual bodies are life and death issues and toxicology issues. Many of these issues fall outside the domain and patience of the orthodox practice of medicine. The institutionalised curing of disease is mostly a one-size-fits-all method that attempts to apply general medicine to individual bodies. ‘Generally’, this works, but when we have the many ‘one-offs’ of painkillers killing people and not pain because there is an allergic reaction to the content of the medicine, then functional medicine becomes a necessity. There is nothing smart about scoffing at that. I cannot have a problem with bringing awareness to these kinds of facts as a food writer; rather, it is my role to highlight the crucial attention to individuality in the decisions concerning our food. It is important not to just take anyone’s word over the evidence of ones’ own experience.

You’re currently based in Cape Town. How has living here – and in SA in general – added to your thoughts and experiences of food, feminism or language?

YEMISI: We’ve been predictable and made fast friends with the Nigerian woman in Lwandle who sells yams and okro and ugwu and banga in a huge tin, and palm oil in recycled water bottles. The tripe isn’t fantastic but it’ll do. It couldn’t have happened any other way. The fruits and vegetables in the Western Cape are beyond gorgeous. Organic is even better. I have never found such delicious broccoli anywhere. Nor have I, with such confidence, eaten red sweet potatoes with their skin on. It was the Western Cape that gave me the secrets of making my own coffee from scratch. I love Real Food Co., the organic grocers on Fagan Street, a short drive from us. I’ve developed all kinds of unaffordable addictions to stuffed olives made in small batches, R40 bottles of Kombucha, artisan chocolate and the most amazing dried figs. Oh, South African lamb! Just perfect! I will gladly eat spoons of local honey for dessert. That craving for honey has only developed here in the Western Cape.

Like in rural parts of Nigeria, there is a residual pride in producing food slowly, with concentration and integrity, and the best part of being here has been discovering people who just want to do that and will do everything they can to keep the quality of their food a priority. There are many wonderful alternative cures I have discovered related to food. For example, if you are suffering from hayfever, eat the honey from the area where your symptoms are most dramatic, or just from where you live, and you will be cured.  

The interesting thing about feminism and my experience in the Western Cape is that the Afrikaner women seem to be in charge. They are beautiful, big-boned, with hair to die for. The men are quite shabby and subdued next to them and do as they are told. It makes me wonder if it makes feminism ever so slightly insignificant. Well, at least in the Afrikaner community. I understand I might be reading the dynamics all wrong but it is a very enjoyable misunderstanding if it is so.

Yemisi Aribisala is a writer and a lover of good food. She has written about Nigerian cuisine for over seven years for 234Next, Chimurenga Chronic and on her blog. Her essays on food are a lens through which the complex entity of Nigeria is observed. Yemisi has written essays on various topics including feminism, Nigerian Christianity and identity.

Interview by Lauren Smith a.k.a. @Violin_InA_Void

'This year I want to take steps towards a feature film...'. Part 2, An Interview with Umar Turaki.

The joy of running a blind read competition like we do at the Short Story Day Africa Prize is the mystery. We come to the story first and learn about other interesting facets of the writer's life only at the end. Umar Turaki is also an accomplished film maker and here he elaborates on the interplay between his visual pieces and his writing as well as his influences and plans for the future.

 

Migrations is available now in all good bookstores in South Africa. They will be happy to order it for you if they don't have it on the shelves. It is also currently available as an eBook. It will be published in the US and UK in September. 

Right. We need to talk about your love of filmmaking. Apart from a multitude of short films, in 2013 you gave us Tolerance – the story of a young newlywed couple who slowly begin to peel each other’s layers away – finding out for the first time who they’ve really married, and last year you delivered Salt, which screened at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, the Zanzibar International Film Festival, the Durban International Film Festival and the African International Film Festival. Tell us about these short films.

UMAR: These short films have been largely exercises in honing my skill as a cinematic storyteller. With Tolerance, I wanted to work in a way I hadn’t before, which was to write a script that was specially tailored for two actors I had in mind, to workshop the script with them and allow that process to flow back into the script itself. I wanted to aim for a naturalism I was seeing in some of Scorsese’s work, and PTA’s work (ed. - P. T. Anderson), and even Fellini.

I also worked with natural light throughout and operated the camera personally. So I really exerted myself creatively on so many levels, and it was ultimately a rewarding experience. I embraced the technical limitations and even allowed them to become a part of the aesthetic. That window’s blown out? Well, too bad. The wall’s too bare? Well, sorry, but forget about it, focus on the story and the performances. I was putting those two things front and centre and saying to hell with everything else.

With Salt, which looks at the night of the Ebola salt baths in Nigeria, I wanted better production values, so we got lights and paid more attention to production design and just tried to use better equipment all around. But Salt was also a kind of sudden, urgent undertaking in the sense that I was responding to a current issue at the time and wanted to capture and preserve that moment in our history as distilled through my own personal experience, not to mention trying to exorcise my own demons. If the Ebola crisis hadn’t touched Nigeria in the way it did, I would have made a different film, something other than Salt. Both films share the virtue of having all the action unfold in one location, and it was a creative challenge I set myself, as well as a practical decision to make it easier to shoot.

I read somewhere that you missed all the film festival screenings of Salt and the plane to LA for the Pan African Film Festival. What happened there, and how did you handle the disappointment?

UMAR: Up until the Ake Festival in 2016, where Salt screened, I couldn’t attend any of the festival screenings in any of the different countries, chiefly for financial reasons, but my producer and I did try to make it to LA. She got denied a visa for reasons best known to the US embassy while there was an error with my visa appointment application document that wasn’t pointed out to me by the embassy until the morning of my interview, by which time I literally had less than 72 hours to get my visa and get on the plane. I had reached the door, ready for my appointment, and they told me I needed to reschedule because of said error, and the next available date was about a week away. I tried requesting an expedited appointed and was denied. Thank God the ticket hadn’t yet been bought.

In your own opinion, has your film-making career or your writing career been more fulfilling, or promising, and why do you think that is? What would you like to focus on more in the future?

UMAR: I think I’ve probably expended more energy in getting my film-making career off the ground, and that has taken its toll on things, one of them being that my writing aspirations have had to take a backseat. Beyond that it’s hard to say. If I were to think of specific moments of deep fulfillment as far as my work goes, it’s mostly related to my film work, and that’s probably because I’ve been doing it for longer and more intensely and against so many odds. As crazy as it sounds, I would like to keep both going concurrently. This year I want to take steps towards a feature film, while also continuing to work on my book and other stories. However, writing has always been what got me started on this path and it’s not inconceivable that a time may come when I “retire” from writing and directing films to focus on just writing books. But that’s still a long way off.

Tell us a little bit more about your current or upcoming film projects and what inspired them.

UMAR: I just completed a pilot episode for a limited series titled Deviant. I’m currently using that as a proof of concept to raise funding to shoot the remaining five episodes. Deviant is about a teenage orphan who’s also good at stealing things and she is approached by a mysterious stranger who promises her information about her real parents if she will carry out some tasks for him. I wanted to tell a compelling story that was episodic and had elements of suspense and mystery.

I’d also like to start putting groundwork in place for my first feature film, a drama that’s based on my short Tolerance. It’ll have portions that feature exquisite handmade animation, and maybe 2D elements. It feels weird talking about it, but I definitely want to do it.

You’ve mentioned that Paul Thomas Anderson is a great inspiration to you, particularly his film Magnolia. I love that guy. One quote and one quote alone springs to mind when I think of Magnolia… and I really, really wish it wouldn’t, haha. Tom Cruise, playing a self-help guru, stands up on stage at a sex seminar and recites his mantra:

“Respect the cock, and tame the cunt.”

Damn that Paul Thomas Anderson for getting away with shit like that. Genius. I forget my question now. Oh! Quick, off the top of your head, give us your favourite quote from a PTA film.

UMAR: Yes, PTA. He got away with a lot in that film, and that’s part of the wonder of it. That’s a tough question, but I’ll go with Punch Drunk Love when Adam Sandler says, “I’ve got a love in my life that makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.” That’s such a great line.

My last question isn’t a question at all. We here at SSDA want you to adapt "Naming" into a short film, and we all want to star in it. I’ll be the rooster, I really don’t care. Congratulations once again, Umar, strike while the iron is hot and keep churning out the genius.

UMAR: Ha ha, that would be something. Thanks a lot.

Make sure not to miss the first part of Umar's interview which can be read here. 

Umar Turaki is a writer and filmmaker living in Jos, Nigeria. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as AFREADA, Short Sharp Shots, and Ake Review. Umar can also be found on his blog and on twitter, @nenrota. 

Interview by Jason Mykl Snyman