| I know the pains some Africans abroad go through to get that Edi ka Ikong soup. The conditions of rootlesness can be ruthless on you.
Again read Caryl Phillips on the matter. And there is this collection of essays, ironically titled “The pleasures of Exile” by George Lamming. So for a writer to say he is not in exile is for him to hope fervently that he is not in exile. I asked Ben Okri at a Frankfurt Book Fair reading in 1996 about home and if he was in exile. Ogaga was in the same audience. Okri, after mentioning that if he goes on about this he was going to be ‘sad’, added that home is always in your head, you carry Africa with you everywhere you go…he also meant, of course, in the stories you tell, and your way of seeing the world. But I suspect that the problem will be that home becomes hazier, seen through the fog of a Selvon-like London. So I take Ogaga to mean he has not left home long enough to feel exiled. The most terrible kind of exile will be the exile of the spirits like the one V.S Naipaul has. That’s why a fellow Caribbean, Derek Walcott, parodied ‘Naipul’ as ‘Nightfall’. So I guess Ogaga is saying, as Ben Okri also suggested in Frankfurt, that he is not in a spiritual but a physical exile. He knows his roots, although his physical location wins him a place on the PEN Members in Exile Committee.
NA: Your poems are presented to make a visual impact, which suggests you intend them mainly for the printed page. What is the coordinative relationship between the visual and sonic elements of your poems?
AE: The visual impact was not intentional. As the literary craft progresses I got increasingly irritated by what G.H. Vallins describes as 'punctuational rashes'. I hate the full stop or comma in poetry or the so-called caesura. So I had to devise a means to mark the tonal stops without having to use the marks themselves. I use gaps, and breaks, and stanzas of three lines, un-rhyming. I find the conscious rhyme pedantic. The music in poetry should be internally generated not hinged upon artificial appendages like the formal rhyme scheme. That was one of the products of literary modernism as opposed to romanticism. I must say, though, that my aesthetic decisions are not influenced by theories of writing. So the result of this kind of formalism is the graphological arrangement you see in my poetry. Its aim is to aid the reading voice, while dispensing with punctuation. Further, it is supposed to highlight the ‘sonic’ elements, by concentrating the voice’s rising and falling at precise points; The page is to be mentally divided into two by the reader such that the further to the left hand margin a word or line extends the higher the reading tone. Conversely the closer to the right hand margin a word or line occurs the lower the reading voice. So what you get is some kind of undulating sonic arrangement as dictated by the visual arrangement of lines. The break between words suggests longer or shorter pauses depending on how large such gaps are. It is modulated speech and rhythmic. Think of it as sheet music.
NA: Now, just a quick brush on Hitler’s Children. How will this your forthcoming collection differ from A Writer’s Pains and Caribbean Blues? Are there thematic or stylistic grounds you plan to break that the committed Ede enthusiast must look forward to?
AE: Usually I let a work write itself. I would like to be surprised myself. Each new work is a learning process. I have no planned experiments. The one thing about this collection is that its thematic thrust is xenophobia and racism, and, well these corollaries of both conditions – alienation and exile, root and rootlesness. I think David Dabydeen, the Guyanese poet, has done something similar in a very powerful language. See his “Turner: New and Selected Poems” by Dangaroo Press. But he goes back in time to look at the experience of the slave. It is very vibrant and muscular poetry.
NA Who are the contemporary writers you admire and why?
AE: If you say contemporary, then I have to mention Wole Soyinka first – for the breath of his vision and his incomparable style, dubbed obscurantist by Chinweizu et al. I think we simply have to grow up to his level at some point in time. Ben Okri, even though I dislike his politics. The famished road celebrates the African way of seeing the world. In an interview, I am not sure if he (Ben Okri) said the only thing he regrets is that he was taken from Britain (where he was born) back to Nigeria by Nigerian parents. If he did not experience Nigeria at some point, he would never have written the famished Road in its grand surrealistic style. Even reading "Stars of the New Curfew" is a joy and a foreshadower of the excellence of "The Famished Road". You needed to have been an African to see in that way. There are some Latin American writers too like Garcia Marquez. Continue>>
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