Nigeria’s New Writers Take Different Path

If you’re a writer from a developing country, say Nigeria, and you came of age in the 1950s and ’60s, chances are a major theme of your fiction, essays, and poems is politics, colonialism, independence.

Think Wole Soyinka or Chinua Achebe.

But the younger generation of writers from Nigeria have veered away from politics, and the feeling that they have to somehow represent or fight for their country.

Sefi Atta is a good example. She’s a rising star among Nigerian writers.

Her two novels and book of short stories have won critical acclaim and awards, including The Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, named after the continent’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.

Sefi Atta is from a generation of Nigerian writers who have no memory of the heady days of Nigerian independence from Britain in 1960, and the great hopes that Nigeria would take its place as a thriving new democracy in Africa.

“I always say to people that every generation gets the writers they deserve,” Atta said. “The previous generation had writers like Soyinka, Achebe; they had come of age at a time when there was a nationalist struggle, and then we got our independence. And for a short while, Nigeria belonged to them. And shortly afterward it was taken away from them by the military.”

Atta says that generation of Nigerian writers got involved in the newly independent Nigeria, took bold political stands, and suffered for it.

Wole Soyinka was imprisoned in 1967 during Nigeria’s civil war for trying to broker peace.

Chinua Achebe supported the secessionist region of Biafra during the civil war, and since the early 1970s has lived mostly in exile in the United States. Sefi Atta says her generation has a different relationship with Nigeria.

“I came of age at a time that there was military rule, so I never had that sense that Nigeria was a country I could fight for,” Atta said. “It never belonged to me. And so a lot of my writings expression that frustration that you feel detached from the politics of Nigeria and you’re not quite sure why.”

In the 1980s, Nigeria was 20 or so years into its independence. Already it had a civil war and a few military coups.

So Atta just went about living her life. She trained and worked as an accountant. By 1994, she was living in New Jersey with her Nigerian husband, a doctor.

One day while working as a certified public accountant in Manhattan she saw an ad for a writing course at New York University. She enrolled thinking it might be a nice diversion. And she got hooked.

Several novels, short story collections, and prizes later, she’s given up accounting altogether and even handed over annual tax return duties to her husband.

Like Sefi Atta, Tolu Ogunlesi, started out in a much more practical line of work: he was a pharmacist in Lagos. Ogunlesi came of age in the 1990s, during the dark days of dictatorship under Sani Abacha.

“We were born into disillusionment. We were born into a Nigeria that had fallen apart,” Ogunlesi said. “And in a sense, what we are seeing is sort of attempting to come together.”

Ogunlesi is now a poet and a journalist. He’s the arts and culture reporter for the Next Newspapers in Lagos.

Ogunlesi, too, is more concerned in his writing with the personal and emotional rather than politics. His fiction and poetry are concerned with small moments and feelings, like what he loves about the chaotic city of Lagos, or meeting someone for the first time.

Ogunlesi is 28, so by definition he’s a wired guy. He’s on Facebook, Twitter, has a website. He said the Web has had a huge impact on his writing, and on how he thinks of himself.

Ogunlesi recalled something an overseas publisher said to him in an email.

“She asked me, ‘by the way, where exactly are you based?’ That, I think, just says it all about the world in which we live,” Ogunlesi mused. “You can no longer identify people by postage stamps, for example, you know. The New Yorker joke where a dog sitting behind the computer says ‘on the Internet know one knows you’re a dog.’ So on the internet, nobody knows that you’re 3rd world, you know developing world. It’s worked a lot in my favor.”

Ogunlesi’s poetry and fiction is published in Australia, India, the UK, all over. He feels he’s part of a much larger world.

Sefi Atta is more reluctant. She kind of likes the relative anonymity of her current home, Meridian Mississippi.

“My neighbors … no one knows what I do,” Atta said. “And when they do they’re not impressed. They think I’m rich like John Grisham, which makes me laugh,” Atta said.

They don’t know, for instance, that she’s won the Wole Soyinka Prize one of the most prestigious honors in Africa.