What would you consider the strongest obstacle against your efforts to get your message across? Being a female writer in a supposed male dominated and controlled literary world, being an African writer in a global literary world in which Africans still have to justify their craft, or unhelpful, non-proactive publishing houses.

The greatest obstacle would have to be the fact that there is no yardstick for measuring social relevance. What you consider socially relevant, an editor or agent may consider useless. 
However, sometimes, social relevance is not enough. Writings coming from certain parts of the world are pigeonholed and if you do not fall into the expected criteria, your work is considered unmarketable.

In other words, the arch enemies are preconception and commercialism. It does not matter that you are a woman or an African, but that you are the kind of African woman writing about subjects deemed popular at a point in time. I wonder, is that not a kind of stimulus to dare to be different? To start an era, even if it is not commercially viable?

Would it not be nice if none of us bows to the gods of commercialism? Unfortunately, it is not as easy as that. Writers are at the mercy of publishers, and that is the truth of the matter.

Like many other poets, you also write fiction and lifestyle articles for newspapers. Do you sometimes feel you should concentrate on one? If you were made to choose a medium, which form do you think would best afford you the channel to get your messages across and why?

I go through phases. There was a time when I wrote poetry (almost exclusively). Then, in my third year or so at college, I got a holiday job writing articles for a family friend's newspaper. By the end of the holidays, they decided to keep me on as a contributor and gave me my first ever column. I did that a few years and had tremendous fun. Now, I write mainly short fiction. Which of these three have I found the most effective to pass on whatever messages I may have? I think fiction, for the mere reason that fiction gives you the freedom to write about real people and give their experiences the kind of conclusion you consider ideal. People are less willing to confront themselves in lifestyle articles and poetry is not very popular, is it?

Poetry is not very popular, is it? Chika, what are you trying to do, interview me? Actually, seriously, I addressed that popular poetry question in 2002 via a short piece "Popular Poetry In Our Time" on the Poettext.com website. Well then, if the responsibility is given to you today to make poetry more popular, especially to growing populations of the world, what would you do and how would you go about it?

I tend to write mundane poems: easy language, no obscurity (less intellectual?), clear images. I write poems that people do not need to sift through the language to decipher the meaning. It is off putting for many people I know (and for me too) when poetry is written in some sort of exclusive code. Perhaps, we are not intellectual enough! Seriously though, some poems I read, I feel like the poet has made a conscious effort to couch it in garbled intelligent-sounding language. For poetry to be popular, poets should be willing to write in concise language. There is beauty in simplicity.