| Nnorom Azuonye: My E-conversation with Emman Usman Shehu
(continued from previous page)
EUS: If you are true to your calling as a writer, it is difficult to rein in the passion that inspires your writing. At the time I made that statement, I was a bit frustrated with several things including the worsening condition of the country, the failure of the publisher and ANA to properly make QFBB and the other Update books widely available.
Indeed, part of the significance of those Update books was the fact that two Northern writers were represented, and that would have provided a good marketing strategy in the North and in the rest of the country, given the paucity of writing from that part of the country. But the perennial internal politics of ANA made it very difficult for the project to be properly packaged and marketed.
I was also not too comfortable with being stuck in what looked like a protest groove, and I used to jokingly tell Idzzia, even revolutionaries make love apart from fighting the revolution. I am able to express myself fairly well in the different genres, and I felt limited by writing poetry that was predictable. Again maybe unconsciously I was looking at John Donne being able to have more than one aspect to his poetry. But with experience I have come to realise that the problem is not the passion that inspires the writing, but the strategies that the writer is able to deploy to tell his story. As you have rightly noted, that passion is the soul of poetry, and I would not hesitate to add fiction, drama and the movie – I hesitated on that last one and pondered whether to use film but realised that movie is more appropriate because video has become a formidable alternative to celluloid. The video technology has changed even the way directors work on location, using video monitors to decide on the spot which shot is acceptable, something that never happened in the past because the film stock had to be processed at least within 24 hours before the director could preview and decide on which take to accept or even re-shoot the scene entirely.
NA: From Questions For Big Brother, through Train of Tyranny to Open Sesame, a poetic expedition spanning nearly 20 years, how would you best qualify your thematic, structural and attitudinal shifts over the years, and what might we expect for the future from you?
EUS: Dynamism is essential to creative writing, and I have watched with keen interest the changes that have been taken place in my writing. Initially I started out just wanting to write and the Youth Service year provided a good opportunity to do that for within that period I wrote a collection of poems, two plays and a couple of short stories. Then the challenge was just to convince myself that I could do it. African University Press got interested in one of the plays and took the script but nothing has come out of it. Unfortunately I was so naïve at that time that I gave them the only script I had on me then.
That eventually shifted to a situation of deciding to be relevant my artistic abilities. And as I became more sophisticated in reading the situation in my country and the rest of the world, that began to be reflected in my writings. I have come to have a universalist attitude – cant find a better expression – because, for instance, injustice is injustice wherever it exists. The exploitation of the Habe people in what is today Northern Nigeria, is the same exploitation of the oil producing areas, or the exploitation that took place during European colonialism of the African continent, or the ongoing exploitation of the Nigerian nation by the privileged few, or the exploitation of the underdeveloped South by the rest of the developed world.
The oppression of indigenous Christians in Upper Northern Nigeria, is as cruel as the racism that existed and still exists in various parts of the Western world. It is even more dangerous than the tribalism that dictates our perception in the country. These are basic realities that I personally cannot ignore. The challenge for me as a writer is to find the appropriate form of telling whatever story I have to tell. And there are so many stories to tell and this involves finding the appropriate theme and the most relevant structure. I see whatever form I use as only a means of telling a story that I am passionate about.
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