'Her fingers felt numb, as though she was grasping clouds.' An Interview With #WriterPrompt Winner Maïmouna Jallow.

Dreams

Bootsie stroked Rahma’s hair. The long black strands were scattered across her lap. Her fingers felt numb, as though she was grasping clouds. She was terrified of checking whether Rahma was still breathing. Her daughter’s small head felt like it was getting heavier and heavier every minute, and she had not stirred in hours.

Bootise had lost track of the days. She no longer knew how long they had been floating in the middle of the ocean. The scorching days had melded into freezing nights. The screams had turned into hums and now all human sounds had stopped completely.

She’d given up on looking into the horizon. Seeing land felt as elusive as the dream they’d once all had at the beginning of the war. That Bashar al-Assad would step down. Now, as she stroked Rahma’s hair, all she dreamed of was filling her lungs with Hamza’s powdery smell, wishing she could have bottled it for the journey. She dreamed of walking through the cool alleyways of the Citadel, brushing her hands against the coarse rose brick walls, collecting its dust for safekeeping. She dreamed of winged ships that would carry her people to the moon so that they would not die at sea.

And then, she did not dream again.

#WriterPrompt is a flash fiction event run on our Facebook page. We spoke to #WriterPrompt 8 winner, Maïmouna Jallow. She turned out to be one of our more experienced workshoppers with a background in media and the performance art arena.

 

Thank you for taking part in #WriterPrompt. You have quite the CV – radio producer for the BBC World Service, managed Regional Communications for Medécins Sans Frontières (MSF) and currently working as a freelance writer for publications like The Africa Report. How have your life experiences fed into your writing?
 

MAÏMOUNA: I have had the privilege of living in many places. I call it a privilege now, but there was a time when I yearned to just have one home. I grew up in Togo to Spanish and Gambian parents, studied and worked in the UK and then lived in various African countries. I think that travelling and being outside your comfort zone forces you to actually look at the world around you over and over again with ‘new’ eyes. It also gives you the opportunity to see yourself as ‘other’ and interrogate what belonging and identifying really means. Many of my favourite writers are African, perhaps because I recognise my world in their work, but I also love South American literature for example, because I can recognise my emotions in the human relationships they depict. So I think a nomadic lifestyle is great fodder for writing.

 

You said: “Words Matter! They help shape our world – how we conceive it and understand it.” You have spoken on this subject at a variety of literary festivals. Please tell our readers a bit more.

MAÏMOUNA: Words matter because they can literally shape the world around us. Just look at how the relentless racist vitriol published day after day in some of the British press around the Brexit issue has resulted in an increase in violent attacks on minorities there. That is how powerful words are. If they are used for good, stories give people a chance to travel worlds, to encounter different cultures, to access new ideas without having to bounce around the world as I’ve done. Equally important, especially for kids, is to see themselves reflected in stories, which is why I’m so excited about the amount of great writing coming out of Africa at the moment, although more is needed, particularly for teens.

On a personal level, nearly two years ago, I gave up my day job as a journalist and later as a media manager, to embark on a journey to explore traditional East African storytelling. This has taken me down many alleyways, and I have gone from wanting to collect folktales to trying to re-imagine them for contemporary audiences because I realised how important it is for the stories of our past to still resonate with youngsters of today.

I’ve also ended up performing the stories, which is not something I ever imagined I would do. I am petrified of public speaking, I never did drama at school, and yet when I got on stage for the first time and became ‘the character’, it was exhilarating. And then, to see non-book lovers queuing up to buy the books after the performance just because it had been presented to them through storytelling, an art form that is part of our DNA, felt like two magical worlds meshing into something new.

 

Lastly, what current writing projects are keeping you busy?

MAÏMOUNA: I am currently working on a collection of stories about contemporary Africa sheroes. We often speak about our great African heroes, like Kwame Nkrumah or Patrice Lumumba and then lament that we have no heroes today. But that is not true. We just don’t know about them, or perhaps we have a narrow view of what we consider to be an achievement or who we consider to be special. So yes, I do believe that it is important to celebrate the brave men and women who fought against slavery and colonialism. But what about the Kenyan runners who get gold medals at every marathon? Or the women journalists imprisoned by African regimes for their work? Who are they? What is their story? What can we learn from their journeys? I’m trying to explore this more in my writing.

 

Maïmouna Jallow is a storyteller, writer, and journalist who uses poetry, prose and radio to explore questions around modernity & identity and all that exists in the cracks between. She is passionate about preserving traditional oral storytelling and has performed at various festivals, including The Storymoja Festival, The Hargeisa International Book Fair and Somali Heritage Week.

She recently directed a ‘contemporary storytelling performance’ called "And Then She Said", a re-adaptation of five novels by African women authors. Her fiction and poetry has been published in the Fifth Draft and Fresh Paint anthologies.

 

Participate in #WriterPrompt by following Short Story Day Africa on Facebook. 

Interview by Tiah Beautement a.k.a. @ms_tiahmarie

 

 

'Place tangled with spiderweb threads of pains and agonies.' An Interview with #WriterPrompt Ezeuchu Jovita Amaka

Negroes

We have been betrayed.
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Thousands of us.
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Hearts have been bruised and spirit crushed. We are lost in a place we are not sure is home. Place tangled with spiderweb threads of pains and agonies.

They ventured on our land and ridiculed our language and skin.
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We tried to evade but they got hold of us and compelled us back in chains. When we plead and shout they tame it as an urge to satisfy their needs. We experience a dreadful suffering we saw was our doomed future, as our hands were tied in willow twigs. Assimilate they would say, become whiter and forget your language. But never did we listen to them. We fought to stay alive; so as to tell you, who sold us into this place of servitude, how strong you made us.
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Did you know?
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Some died from dehydration,
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while some from starvation.
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Why the comfort now?
Never tell us light at the end of the tunnel for it looked dark even when it seemed near.

You aped in this colourism, by toning your body to lighter skin.
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Each nightfall saw us on a rusty ground narrating tales of home. Tales of seas and birds, which we thought maybe we could, fly like this eagle that hovered into the humid sky, but we can’t. So patiently, we wait for the day we could thrust the forces that held our feathers from flapping at its speed.

#WriterPrompt is a flash fiction event run on our Facebook page. Writers post stories, then workshop the stories with other participants and members of the SSDA team. We spoke to #WriterPrompt 7 winner, Ezeuchu Jovita Amaka.

Tell us a bit about your writing and what brought you to #WriterPrompt?

EZEUCHU: I started writing in July last year. I would say my writing instinct and passion started during my NYSC* year. Probably, because the serene atmosphere provided an avenue for that.

I write flash fiction and lately I have been into short stories as well.

What brought me to #WriterPrompt is the chance to ignite my creative imagination. To understand WHY I penned down this story and not the other one. Because with the provided photo a slew of ideas would roll in my mind, waiting to be crafted into a story.

And also, I have understood that in #WriterPrompt the more you practice, the better you'll get.

 

If you could have dinner with three authors, who would you pick?

EZEUCHU: Cat Hellisen, I simply love her craft in Serein.


What are you currently reading?   

EZEUCHU: Likely To Die by Linda Fairstein.

 

Ezeuchu Jovita Amaka is a graduate of Mass Communications from Anambra State University. She is an aspiring writer.

 

*Editor’s note: National Youth Service Corps

 

Participate in #WriterPrompt by following Short Story Day Africa on Facebook. 

Interview by Tiah Beautement a.k.a @ms_tiahmarie

 

An interview with Nikhil Singh Part 2. On dreams on inspiration.

So about the dreams -

 

I've been writing for some time now, and originally wanted to refine a method of dream recapitulation - more for exploration of dreams - this somehow evolved into narrative.

I sometimes have dreams that take the form of incredibly long movies or fictive narratives and wanted to be able to capture that - so with Taty, I originally had this dream when I was a teenager of a road I had seen somewhere in Umhlanga area. The road was very evocative and haunting and looked like something from King Kong with all its foliage and dinosaur vibes etc. I was amazed by it, but somehow couldn't situate where it was, because the impression I got of it was removed from my memory of when I actually went down it - I must have traversed it when I was very young or something anyway...I was about maybe 15 when I dreamed of a friend I had, who was actually called Taty - though she was acting as a character in a film in my dream, so although I retained the name to create a link to the past, though the character has no actual basis on her, but in a Burroughs-like way, required the link with her 'acting' as the character in my dream to maintain the dream feeling- anyway - the crux of the dream was that she was hitching on this road and then a car picked her up, driven by this gothic woman.

The dream became very long and labyrinthine, but seemed to describe this world of necropoli and ruined cities (a very post-apocalyptic feeling that I have always associated with Durban and the fact that I used to party there in my teenage goth days).  Anyway when I woke up the dream retained a very haunting quality. A few days later I was asked to do a drama project (this was like Standard 9) and had the idea to find this road and film the opening of this movie - I was filming a lot of stuff in high school - music videos and a documentary on splashy fen and little movies etc, so it made complete sense. I asked Taty if she would play this girl playing this girl who was her in a dream playing someone else (lol) and was trying to think of a name for her character, but couldn't think of one because I was still very amped about getting a scene penned so I just called it Taty went...and I was deliberating which way the road went and was reading Burroughs at the time - The Western Lands, where he talks a lot about the Land of the Dead - which I liked - so as a working title only, I named it Taty Went West. Anyway - I never ended up filming this scene, but some years later adapted this opening scene to a comic. I forgot about the whole thing for many years, actually worked onnumber of books, novellas and short stories along the way (Taty is my first published book, but by no means the first novel I have worked on). After decades, I was going to return to umhlanga after some time in London and was touched by a nostalgia for the mangrove and beaches and wanted to work on something that captured that essence and decided to resuscitate this work from my teenage years. Though after so much time I had refined my dream-capture prose technique and was able to 'excavate' the dream in its entirety - and by that I mean I captured the 'atmosphere of the dream narrative' as it occurred in the dream. So I fleshed out the screenplay in London before I came but set to work on the prose version in Umhlanga. I was working in a disused family holiday house near the beach which no-one was using at the time and weirdly when I was finished - literally the day I completed the first draft, I took a long walk past the lagoon and realised that the holiday flat complex's back was against the highway, which ran along the lagoon toward Tongaat - it was, without my knowing it - the mysterious road that inspired the actual story in the dream! So I had made this massive roundabout trip and the actual landscape had brought me back, so that I could write the story on the very road that it came from.

And to perhaps shed more light on the gender thing for you - when I was a teenager, I resembled a girl quite closely and went out partying mostly AS a girl - all my friends were girls, no one really knew the difference when I was out etc. The result is that a lot of my memories of teenage-hood are literally those of a teenage girl in a teenage girl's world. I had no plans to 'be a girl' or anything - it just sort of naturally happened that way, fun dress-ups whatnot and I slotted into that role and when I was bored slotted elsewhere - I play/have played many roles. So in actual fact it’s far more true to my memory of teenage youth and the narrative itself to have had a teenage female protagonist, because essentially it’s closer to who I was then than anything society would decide I SHOULD HAVE identified with. These were my experiences and this was my creative choice based on said experiences.

 

Nikhil is originally from Venus but moved to Earth’s greener pastures after centuries of trying to inhabit a human host. Their drawing career began with chiseling hieroglyphs into the walls of pyramids and although their current artistic endeavours are secret it is unlikely that they are very different. Nikhil, a committed vegan, believes in fairies and has an electric blue glitter spacesuit and knows how to use it. They are the co-creator of the critically acclaimed Salem Brownstone - All Along the Watchtowers and engage in alternative filmmaking and music projects, like Hi Spider.

 

 

Interview by Tiah Beautement a.k.a @ms_tiahmarie