Abstract
The Nigerian writer Elnathan John (born 1982) has become a preeminent commentator on the complex human drama at the core of the experience of the Boko Haram insurgency in northern Nigeria. John is renowned for the caustic humour characteristic of his satirical treatment of virtually every facet of Nigerian life, as his Be(com)ing Nigerian: A Guide (2019) magnificently illustrates. In the corpus of his fictional accounts of Boko Haram insurgency (as epitomized in his debut novel Born on a Tuesday [2015]) he has been preoccupied with the necessity for a nuanced understanding of the Boko Haram phenomenon and underscoring a usually neglected or at least deemphasized human dimension at the heart of that experience. In this interview, John complicates a simplistic account of ostensible doctrinal violence by painting a telling backdrop of a dysfunctional postcolonial Nigerian state that blights the wellspring of responsible creative social life, and more crucially impoverishes and exploits religion and politics, ideally meant to foster communal rather than egotistical aspirations, by advancing other interpretations of these social constructs that gratify human greed and the will to power.
Introduction
Elnathan John was born in Kaduna in northern Nigeria in 1982, graduated from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria with a degree in Law in 2007, and until his recent migration to Germany lived in Nigeria’s capital city Abuja. Adept both in the traditional and new media, John has published in Per Contra, ZAM Magazine, Hazlitt, Evergreen Review, The Economist, The Guardian, and the Chimurenga Chronic. Twice shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing (in 2013 for the short story “Bayan Layi” and in 2015 for another story entitled “Flying”), John was runner-up for the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2016 for his first novel, Born on a Tuesday, and winner of a Betty Trask Award for the same novel in 2017.
In a previous interview, John observes that the story of Nigeria is inextricable from the story of religion. He recognizes this routine conflation of the secular and the sacred as a boon to the artist: to the satirist a virtually inexhaustible source of humour, and to the dramatist an ample theatrical arena peopled by a pool of dramatis personae torn apart by their dual propulsions towards antithetical roles. John notes that the powerful in Nigeria play “twin roles as both political and moral authorities”, and often support their political roles by dramatizing their “connections to faith and public acts of worship” (2017: 93). He discerns how such a situation “provides insight into motives and posturing among a population whose only solace, in a terribly mismanaged country, is often faith and the support systems provided by organized religion” (93). The social injustices prevalent in the system of the failed state and the abject poverty bred by a virtually institutionalized corruption and mismanagement aggravate the political situation further by producing aggrieved young people susceptible to extreme religious ideologies especially when these purportedly promise otherworldly salvation. This is the complex context in which John firmly locates the germs that breed militant groups like Boko Haram: “The mix of a radical religious ideology, local economic and social injustices, an unhealthy fusion of religion and politics, and a ready supply of foot soldiers due to poverty and deprivation exist and have existed for a while in many parts of northern Nigeria” (2017: 90). Mike Smith similarly traces Boko Haram to Nigeria’s complex history, its deeply entrenched corruption that has frustrated its potentials to greatness and creating instead agonizing poverty for a majority of its citizenry, and its poorly educated and unemployed youths (2015: 5).
This accounts for John’s emphasis in this interview as well as in his writing on the ominous deterioration of Qur’anic education, presented as metonymic of the general collapse of the system of education in Nigeria. He highlights the danger to the state when the youths of a country are left in the hands of questionable characters who, incapable of teaching them humane values, instead indoctrinate them into dubious ideologies, secular or religious. There used to be a revered system in which knowledgeable masters in the Qur’an and related fields groomed young disciples — almajirai — who in turn became masters themselves, duly perpetuating the Islamic scholarly tradition. The counterfeit of this system, contemporary Qur’anic education, John argues, is fertile soil for radical religious ideologies like Boko Haram. The distance between the scholar–pilgrim and the terrorist marks the distance between the absolute and its counterfeit modern incarnation. At a doctrinal level, John equally paints a sordid portrait of the conversion of the almajirai into street beggars by their unscrupulous teachers in the present day. Given that in the scheme of Muslim mysticism, the almajirai’s emblematic begging is meant to illuminate spiritual mendicancy, the exploitation of a symbolic gesture as a means of self-gratification in a state of economic meltdown is an aspect of the typical Nigerian ingenuity which John euphemistically refers to in this interview as “self-help”.
John’s initial choice of the short story genre as his preferred artistic medium of expression invariably soon led him to deep reflections on positionality, modes of representations, and the very potentialities of his chosen artistic forms, the short story and the novel. The 2015 short story “In a Time of Boko Haram” lays bare some of the challenges. John is preoccupied in the story with the general state of paranoia in which the characterization of Boko Haram members is invariably imprecise and riven with mortal consequences. In the first section, Mansir’s crossdressing (which in Islamic exorcism is perceived as spirit possession) in the wake of a terrorist attack turns him into a Boko Haram bomber in disguise, with dire results for him. That Boko Haram fighters routinely disguise themselves in the uniform of the forces apparently makes the mistaken identity plausible. The second section highlights the pressures on the State President arising from the insurgency and how this imperceptibly impacts on statecraft and national politics; and the third section shows how the obsession with and habituation to violent reprisals against a violent group is itself fraught with danger. In this story, Mohammed, one of the only several men who survive a Boko Haram attack aimed at the complete extermination of his entire community, ironically loses his life to members of an anti-Boko Haram corps that mistake him for a Boko Haram fighter. Yusuf, another survivor of the exterminating Boko Haram attack, joins the anti-Boko Haram forces but at the cost of his humanity: Yesterday, when we caught a boy who was peeping and making phone calls, it was Yusuf who just walked over to where we had tied him down to question him, stuck a knife in his throat and walked away. Yusuf’s face then was as it is now: blank, with neither smile nor frown, his eyes staring but not looking.
John’s contention is that those who are primed to snuff out life at the flimsiest excuse cannot themselves embody life. Yusuf degenerates into an unfeeling monster. Paradoxically, the anti-terrorist begins to replicate the mirror image of the terrorist because he or she imperceptibly endorses the values and strategies of the former. In a time of Boko Haram, the values of human civilization are characteristically suspended as the laws of the jungle are reinstated in the name of self-preservation. But despite the thematic unity of the three sections of the story, they are at best structurally loose and require greater scope for fullness of exploration and firmer structural integration. In this interview, John notes how the short story “Bayan Layi” led him to that realization and thus to the genre of the novel with its greater scope and greater challenges.
Yet John’s deepest challenges were perhaps ethical rather than aesthetic. Though he grew up in communities in northern Nigeria where the Muslim presence was dominant and so constituted a part of the indelible sights and sounds of his childhood, John, himself a Christian, saw writing about Boko Haram as an opportunity to put himself to school in order to learn about the Muslim faith and its extensive traditions. This is expressed in his sensitivity to the nuances of concepts and of naming as myth-making, especially in a country like Nigeria where the relationship between Christianity and Islam is at best tense. John acknowledges the necessity of constant intracultural and/or intercultural translation in Nigeria’s multilingual and cultural space to render comprehensible words and human actions and reactions. But he cautions: “Some concepts and words, however, remain impervious to translation and must retain their true form if they are going to retain their meaning. ‘Allah’ is one such word. To replace ‘Allah’ with ‘God’ would be to strip it of the sound, context, and history that give it its meaning and texture” (2017: 93). Such sensitivity is a defining attribute of John’s writing in Born on a Tuesday and motivated his reading of sections of the novel even before its publication to Muslim audiences in order to appraise their responses. The concept John evokes in this interview to describe the proclivity to understand the other beyond trending oversimplifications and ideologically-induced stereotypes is “empathy”. It is virtual self-renunciation in the contemplation of the mystery of the other.
The technical correlative of John’s concept of “empathy” in the craft of Born on a Tuesday is the use of a young protagonist and narrator Dantala whose strategic naivety aims to eschew presumptuousness in the novelist’s representations of Islam. The use of first-person narrative foregrounds this strategy and imbues the protagonist’s faltering groping towards truth with humour. Moreover, by typically placing Dantala’s potentially heretical speculations on the incompleteness of the Qur’an as a guide for human actions, as well as its vulnerability to varying subjective interpretations as a cause of the emergence of rival Muslim sects, in italics and in Dantala’s stumbling English, John marks it off as separate from the narrative consciousness of the novel. The evolution of the sugarcane-loving lad, for whom sugarcane is reminiscent of the goodness of Allah and who can conceive of aljana only by conceiving of the sweetness of sugarcane, as a religious thinker, simultaneously broaching potentially blasphemous subjects and at the same time praying for divine forgiveness for his daring reflections, is one of the major delights of the narrative techniques. His faltering awareness of the articles of his faith, as well as their implications, accentuates an enquiring attitude appropriate for a moral pilgrim. This growing awareness moreover underlines the appropriateness of the Bildungsroman form for the subject of the narrative.
John nonetheless never sought to write a reductively Boko Haram book nor even an exclusively Muslim novel. Dantala’s furtive awakening to sexuality and to love, his incomprehension of the basic facts of life, and his endless striving to comprehend the will of God are typically human. In this interview, John refers specifically to how, in his conception of the torture episode at the end of the novel, he self-consciously aimed at a mode of representation which multiple religions and cultures can relate to, that is, beyond even his dramatization of the obvious Christian and Muslim presence in that pit of hell. His emphasis is on the virtually infinite resilience of the human mind which his protagonist embodies. Dantala grows from the fear of death, through the horror of torture to the discovery of the modesty of the created condition. In the Research in African Literatures interview, John had affirmed his deference for aesthetic craft but noted: “The craft, important as it is, is a means to an end in [Born on a Tuesday]. The end is an understanding of my characters and their world” (2017: 92). In this interview, he underscores his striving to locate his characters’ experience and their world at the core of the human lot.
Elnathan John, it is such a delight to meet you in Berlin. But it seems to me that the Western metropolis has increasingly become home for most talented African writers. How would you account for this and do you think it is a crucial factor in their writing?
This is a very true observation — but true only to a certain extent. I would say that a lot of people who do not have the opportunity to have this kind of global stage are doing very important work in all our capitals and that unfortunately when a writer is not in one of these Western capitals, such a writer does not get the visibility that he or she deserves. So, while it is true that a lot of people in the public eye are in the West, I would say that in fact most of the people doing crucial literature are on the ground in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. They probably are without the kind of publicity that some of us have. That is primarily because global publishing capitals in English are in London, New York, and many other Western capitals. To answer the question of what this means: I would say that for many of us who leave, we are aware of the difficulties on the ground with regard to how freely we are able to express ourselves but also that of the day-to-day realities that make it either sometimes difficult or impossible to focus on one’s work. And so when people no longer have to think of those basic things like electricity or security or healthcare, they free up a lot of time. It helps if I do not bother myself thinking of where I am going to get water early in the morning. I remember one house in Gariki in Abuja just a few years ago, where every week, at least twice, I would have to wake up in the morning and go to look for someone who peddles water, a mai ruwa, to be able to buy water in yellow jerry cans. If I woke up too late, I missed the guy who was going from house to house selling water. If I do not have to think of that gunshot I heard at night, whether it was at my neighbour’s or across the street; If I do not have to worry that if I tweet something my governor is going to come after me; if I do not have to worry that if I fall ill, I will have a problem just taking myself to the hospital, it frees up quite a lot of time. People take for granted just how important political and economic stability is to the functioning of the intellectual space for universities, writers, or artists, and so on.
Is it your experience also that the West has particular expectations of African writing?
I will say that if it was ever the case then African writers themselves are setting the tune and are setting the agenda increasingly now. This is especially because every African writer worth her salt or his salt that I know of is aware of the global politics that affects our work and the way we write, and is thus pushing back these narratives. Whether it is explaining ourselves to the West as some people want, whether it is deferring to Western editors when it comes to images that might be good for the Western audience, African writers are pushing back. So it is like Achebe saying let no one be fooled that we are writing in English for we intend to do unheard of things with it. I would extend that to writing and say: let no one be fooled that we are writing in the West, for we intend to wriggle our way out of these spaces and boxes.
Is it your thinking, then, that one must not necessarily be resident in Africa in order to make contributions to cultural development?
I would rather that we were all on the continent, if I have to be honest. But be that as it may, we are able to write and do our work in different places in the world. You do not always need to be present; there are some types of writing that you do not really need to be on the ground for. My most recent manuscript, for example, is a text set between 1847 and 1886 in northeastern Nigeria. I had my materials all ready, historical and otherwise, some of which I got outside Nigeria in fact. So I do not need to be on the ground to study the 1850 Ningi Rebellion against the Sokoto Caliphate; this event already happened. I rely on the historians who have done the work, and many of them did their groundwork in places like Ningi and Bauchi and its environs. I was in touch with some of those people who did the work. One of them was Dr Adell Patton, a historian of that region and probably one of the most prolific scholars when it comes to the history of Ningi between 1800 and 1900. Sometimes you need to distance yourself from the space to be able to reflect and write. This is why even as authors sometimes we go for writing residencies so that we can pull ourselves away from the daily hustle and bustle to be able to reflect outside the immediate pressures, whether these are cultural, logistical, or much else.
That has its value, but of course when one is writing about immediate cultural realities, it might help to be on the ground. So, for example, I am not going to write about a cultural phenomenon that is happening now in Abuja from Berlin. I will not do that. If I want to do that I will go back to Abuja. So being away also affects the kind of work that you can do. I will not advise anybody to do some kind of contemporary cultural work when one is not on the ground; otherwise, you will be doing the same thing that we accuse white journalists of doing when they fly into the country for two days and do a big story about how they understand Nigeria.
How did you first develop an interest in writing? What are your basic motivations and how did you arrive at the themes and subjects that have become recurring in your work?
I first became interested in literature through poetry, and that happened in secondary school. We were then in JSS 3 when our English teacher left abruptly. The teacher that taught the senior classes was asked to fill in until we got a new English teacher. But she was very upset about this because she saw it as some kind of demotion. She walked into the class and just wrote on the board POETRY, underlined it, and then wrote underneath: “Write a poem of 14 lines” full stop! She wanted it submitted the next day and walked out of the class. That was the entire period. So everybody panicked because we had never done poetry before and wondered what we were going to do. However, in a secondhand bookshop in Kaduna, I saw a book entitled Poems from East Africa, edited by David Rubadiri and David Cook (1996). I bought the book and read it from cover to cover that day. I was intrigued to see what poetry was all about. That was my first contact with poetry, and I decided to rewrite, using a different subject, one of those poems, and then submitted it to the teacher. But thereafter, I started wondering how I could stop reproducing already-published poems and start writing my own original poems. That was how I started consuming literature profusely, reading beyond what my English classes required. But for a long time, my only interest was in reading and writing poetry. That was until I ran into a guy who hosted a radio programme on Monday Morning Talk Show at Radio Kaduna who asked me if I could write some prose for his show. I told him I could write only poetry. But he was certain that if I could write poetry then I could also write prose. So I decided to write him a story which he read out on the programme. However, many people called the station to complain that the story was sad and made them cry! As I started writing, it became very obvious to me that I had to deepen my knowledge, first, about literature, but also about the world itself that was the source for the ideas that we find in literature: the history, the philosophy, the psychology, and even the science. I knew that I was hopelessly deficient in this regard and so I made it a point to start reading for writing, because I was catching up with everyone else. I was a science student; I was not in the arts. I did not do literature in school. I didn’t do history; I didn’t do government. I did physics, chemistry, biology. So I had to catch up. I had started asking: Who are the people writing now? Who are those who have written in the past ten years? What were their sources? It took me a long time; and then I started asking myself: How do I think of the world around me? What am I interested in? And that’s how, for example, I came to be interested in culture commentary as in my first novel Born on a Tuesday. Maybe I can eventually take on the particular phenomenon that manifests itself in electoral violence. What does it really mean? And how can true literature create several levels of nuance in a conversation that has been bedevilled with over-simplification?
I wonder which particular writers helped you a little at that stage of your apprenticeship. What particular writers did you really enjoy reading and find instructive at that stage?
The first novel I ever read was Peter Abraham’s Mine Boy (1946). I found it so captivating and it transported me to a time in South Africa that I really had not been reading much about. Maybe we all heard about Nelson Mandela. But before that time the men in the mines, those mine boys, those drinking palours, the women who ran those drinking palours, the strengths of those women who had to take care of people when the men were gone to the mines, when they were away facing violence from the white men that ran those mines. Their strengths in keeping the community together even as they were also visited with violence both from their own men and from the white racist establishment — for me, it was just so fascinating. That fact had drawn me to reading more about South African apartheid literature and I was so consumed by that. Of course, given my initial interest in poetry, I started reading J. P. Clark and Wole Soyinka. I went back to Soyinka and started reading his plays, Trial of Brother Jero (1963), for example. I got stuck with The Interpreters (Soyinka, 1965), which was the next novel I tried to read. Imagine moving from Mine Boy to The Interpreters! I found it completely impenetrable. I could not read, could not understand it. For some reasons that put me off Soyinka for a while. I loved his plays, and his poetry, but I just could not read that novel; it was just unreadable. But I kept trying, kept going back to read The Interpreters. But, of course, eventually I started reading works from outside Nigeria and then I went outside Africa. At a time, I started reading all of the books that were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And when the Caine Prize came in 2000, I also started consuming every single thing that was shortlisted for the prize. So I would say those early writers Peter Abraham, Soyinka, J. P. Clark: these were the very early sort of influences.
Your name “John” suggests a Christian background. Are there no risks involved in a non-Muslim critically examining a Muslim sect that advocates violence as in your novel Born on a Tuesday?
I would say that with every phenomenon, idea, and cultural space one seeks to discuss or expatiate upon, there are risks that one runs. I always like to say that for every space that one writes about, even if one writes about one’s own life, it is outside of oneself. Because, for example, if you suffered a bereavement in your family, which is personal to you. Say, for instance, your mother died, you could write about the experience of losing your mother in such a personal way but without realizing the fact that your brother may share a completely different experience of that same bereavement. So even for an experience as personal as that, you can run the risk of misrepresenting certain things to which you were privy, to which you were a participant in fact. If at a burial ceremony, you carry the corpse in your own hands, your brother can tell you in fact that what you claim was not what happened. Like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, “We remember differently” (2012: n.p.); we recall differently. Memory itself is a tricky thing. So if you even think of things as personal as writing about bereavement in one’s own family, it lies outside of oneself because one has to rely on one’s memory. When it comes to things like one being a non-Muslim and writing about Muslim space, what the writer has to do is to employ as much empathy as is required to situate himself or herself in the character, but first acknowledge that he or she is writing about something outside of himself or herself. And I think it was also Chimamanda Adichie who said, “People often say: Write about what you know” but she says, “Write about what you want to know”. And that is what moves you to start from a point of complete ignorance. She says something like, “Tell yourself: I am ignorant about this matter, I know nothing about it but I want to know as much as I can”, and so it forces you to do all of the work required. So, yes, there was that fear in the beginning. In fact, when I first read the book to a select audience before it was published — because I did a sampling among certain groups of people — I read from an advance copy. They all expressed this fear, wondering if I was not afraid. But my first and, I could say, most devoted audience was the Muslims that I first read to in Abuja when the novel first came out. They were the first who said, “Oh, my goodness it is a long time since we saw complete in one text all of these things put together the way you have in this work”. And from almost all of the Muslims I met in Nigeria, there was complete appreciation for the work. I would say that it was as a result of me not taking anything for granted; not taking for granted that I was born in Muslim space even though my family was not Muslim. The sounds of my childhood were only in part sounds of churches — were indeed primarily sounds of the mosque. That was what I woke up to in the morning when people were saying Allahu Akbar to wake you up for prayers; Hi Allah Salam, wake up, go pray. These were the sounds of my childhood. I could take it for granted and say I know it all and completely mess it up. But I started from my point of ignorance; I said to myself that while that was the sound of my childhood, I knew nothing about it because I did not practise this religion. Even for one who practises the religion, one must be aware of one’s biases. So the work of a writer is really manifold in the sense that one has to go into spaces that most people will not normally go to. That is what shows on the page as empathy, that is what shows on the page as research, that is what shows on the page as a nuanced understanding of the phenomenon one has chosen to write about.
In your depiction of the Mujahideen sect, you underscore its adherents’ opposition to Western education and their burning of books. Is Boko Haram perhaps the model?
It was a composite model. I would say that I made concerted efforts not to mention Boko Haram because of the dangers of it becoming a Boko Haram book; moreover, what I was trying to talk about was much wider than Boko Haram. I was in many ways trying to say that the factors that you see that create Boko Haram existed in many other places. They did not come about by chance, nor is it like a freak accident, nor are these guys just crazy. In fact, the ingredients for this level of violence and this level of opposition to the Nigerian state had existed long before Boko Haram, exist even with Boko Haram, and if care is not taken will exist afterwards too. And so, of course, the book burning; it was reflected in Boko Haram but also reflected in other places. If you remember, there was a former Minister, Shekarau, who was a governor of Kano State who burnt books. He burnt books and CDs in public in Kano because he said those books were immoral. A lot of those books he burnt were books written by Muslim northern Nigerian women who were writing what people call Kano Market literature: romance writing. He added CDs which he thought were immoral and burnt these things in a huge bonfire. It is such an irony that that same man who burnt books later became Minister of Education in Nigeria. So, it is all of these gestures which signal a broken state that allow for people to appeal to young men and sometimes women who are disillusioned by the dysfunctional state, and so they can sell to them whatever kind of ideas that they have. The basis is the dysfunctional state; then, of course, the existence of certain interpretations of religion once the ground is fertile. Then there is the breakdown of the family where people are no longer able to take care of their children and therefore send them off to these schools. This in itself signals a breakdown of the Islamic school model which used to be a venerated system where great scholars from far and wide would take on students and teach them over a long period of time until they themselves became scholars. But it eventually became a place where poor people could dump their children. Like I said, it was a composite thing that sought to analyse all of the factors that allow for the breeding of belief systems that can preach to people that education is wrong, and they will buy it.
What are your thoughts on the upbringing and roles of the almajiri in Islam?
As you know, almajiri itself means disciple and the system was originally designed to produce scholars of Islam and of the related fields around Islam. So, for example, there were scholars who were not just scholars of Islam only because the Islamic learning system is a very wide system that consists of things like the Tarikh, astrology, languages, Arabic language, for example, the history of Islam and the history of the world, philosophy, and the science of the oneness of Allah. It was a very detailed system, so that if you see people who went to these Qur’anic schools 60, 70 years ago, they came out as actual, proper scholars, people who could debate; people who could use logical reasoning to defend their beliefs and their thoughts; and you occasionally had debates between scholars. You had exegeses being compared. So it could be established why someone was Shia and another Sunni; and why this type of Sunni believed in one thing and another in a different thing. People would spar and they would write treatises based on their beliefs. However, like I said the breakdown of the country itself allowed for religion to become a self-sustaining system that was not answerable to government or to the authorities. It started breeding all of these half-baked scholars in the same way schools started mushrooming in Nigeria all over the place after the complete breakdown of the economy in the 1980s. What happened was that everywhere things were going bad. The education system was broken. People started leaving Nigeria to go to school abroad. Then we started having these mushroom schools to fill in for the model schools that could not cater to all the growing population who were desirous of education. People started bribing their way into the Federal Government Colleges. The Federal Government Colleges were not growing so people sent their kids somewhere else. In like manner, the Islamias for the training of almajirai deteriorated. Half-baked scholars just sprang up everywhere and were using or housing these almajirai to make money instead of teaching them. For example, they sent the kids out to beg and it was not supposed to be like that. They were supposed to feed those children and take care of them. Instead, they were sent out to beg, and guess what, those children fed those Mallams, rather than the other way round. They went out, they begged, then they came back and gave the man whatever they returned with. More recently we have seen the massive abuse in that system. In fact, just recently we saw one or two schools where people chained up the boys. This kind of thing was happening in a place where the government evaded its responsibility. There is no regulation. Any school can just pop up anywhere. A guy is housing 200 young boys and the government has no system to regulate a person who has 200 boys of school-going age under his roof. Nobody goes to check on their health. Is this place overcrowded? Is there a fire hazard here? Nothing! You can basically house 200 boys in your home in Nigeria. The government is primarily to blame, but of course, you know when the government breaks down everybody starts self-help. The almajiri system as far as I am concerned is dead. It is utterly, utterly dead — unless the government can think up a way of merging secular education with some kind of Qur’anic education and make sure they weed out all these half-baked Mallams who are just using these children to make money. Without that, I think that as it is now it is a hazard for the children; and it is a way for people to abdicate their responsibility and send their children off in the name of Qur’anic education. It used to be a great system. Sadly, the breakdown of the government means the breakdown of other institutions.
Is the purgation of the protagonist Dantala at the close of the novel a peculiarly Islamic experience?
I will say it is peculiarly human and that was what I sought to do: to sort of move it away from being firmly domiciled in Islam to it being domiciled in humanity in general. To show that the human will is resilient; that in spite of all the things that he experienced, he is able to grope towards some meaning: his reflections and the things that he saw having crucial human meaning. Of course, I sought to have people interpret it in different ways, which was why I left a few things open-ended. You are open to your own interpretation: especially when he saw things on the wall and those writings, what do they mean? I might have my personal interpretation but I am very happy for people to interpret them as they want. I remember one of the editors recommending greater precision. But I thought I needed to keep it open this way so that it can apply across cultures and religions and for it to be a peculiarly human experience.
But the recurring song “Thank You Jesus” at the end of the novel creates the impression of a conflict between Christianity and Islam. Was this really intended?
There is sadly a conflict between the adherents of these religions. Every religion has its beliefs but that was some kind of statement on how religion is invariably implicated in violence. It was not just Islam nor was it just Christianity because the soldiers are from different religions. One of the soldiers is a Muslim, the one who tries to get him to recant at the beginning. The one singing “Thank You Jesus” is a Christian. He is meant to signify how religion is ever present in the theatres of violence. I sought to bring this in especially as violence is used as a tool of the state rather than separately in a purely secular manner. It is used in the presence of these religious signifiers. That somebody can be singing “Thank You Jesus” and still be involved in torture; that somebody can say: I am a Muslim like you, and still be involved in torture; that in fact all of us are generally complicit whether it is in the marriage of state and religion, of institutions like the army and religion, of violence and religion; and no particular religion is exempt from it. Of course, the army is in name a secular institution and when the army acts as a unit, it inflicts violence. Whether they are singing “Thank You Jesus” or they are praying to Allah, they illustrate that merger, that very complicated space of multiple religions, all working for the same violent end. For the adherents of these religions, then, it does not really matter the profession of thanks to what is supposed to be a benevolent God or prophet. That in fact for many people this has no effect on our day-to-day activity; that we can say “Thank You Jesus” and still can pull one’s fingers from their hands.
Born on a Tuesday is an extension of a short story you wrote earlier on. What do you consider to be the delights and the limitations of each of these forms, the short story and the novel?
The short story is a delightful form and you can do myriad things with it and it allows you to zoom in on the crucial things while not being weighed down with massive reels of information and ideas. And so what the short story allowed me to do in the beginning was to zero in on one phenomenon, which is the identity of the players in this theatre of violence, the post-electoral violence. But for many people, it did not come out clearly. I would say that probably I did not do the work well enough; or that I expected too much from the reader to say this is what they should know, what exactly I meant to say: that the short story was particularly about the identity of the players. About the 2011 post-electoral violence, you often heard people say, “Ah, it is those almajirai boys, they are the ones killing people. It is those almajirai, they are the ones killing people”. You heard this often and people started using almajiri as a shorthand for street boys, the boys who were paid by politicians to kill people. And so I decided to zero in on the identity of the people involved in the violence. Who are they, in actual fact? Is every street boy who picks up a knife an almajiri? Who really is an almajiri? So I set the foundation for that story, to have a character that would be sort of mobile between these two groups, moving from almajiri to a street boy, to show that there is a real connection between these groups, while the two groups remain separate. And so you can find out, for example, sometimes these almajirai would finish school and not have anywhere to go. They end up on the streets, becoming street boys, but that is not the only part that they take. That is why I used this character to show in that short story that in fact there are times when all of them — Banda, Gobedanisa, Acishuru, and the rest — are virtually indistinguishable. But these others never went to primary school and could not read the Qur’an. You can see that slight moral superiority that Dantala the protagonist has in the beginning when he tells them, “You do not know anything”. And this was the complexity I wished to underscore. For me it was necessary to add a level of nuance to a very prevailing oversimplification of who the actors were. But it raised so many other issues and that was my fault, of course. It raised so many other issues that crowded out what I was trying to say. What does this violence mean? What is the background of this violence? What is the background of the religion that leads to this violence, that is, where is this violence situated? What are the different groups that exist and how do they relate with one another? What is the difference between the sects? Who are they? And all of these questions started popping up and I realized that I was the one who created this monster, and that a short story could not resolve the matter. A short story could not answer all of those questions. And so, at that time it became clear to me that I had more work to do. That was how I moved from that short story to writing a novel. I like the two forms; and one does not necessarily lead to the other. So, a short story is not a short form of a novel. It is a separate form in its own right and can stand by itself, and there are many short stories that are as nuanced as many novels. I still have a soft spot for the short story because of its potentialities. But the novel requires long, long dedication. It is like a long marriage. You have to stay there even when it is not good. I think these two forms have different uses. I use them differently in my work.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the Alexander Humboldt Foundation for providing the opportunity for this interview by granting me a six-month fellowship at Humboldt University, Berlin, where this interview was conducted on 16 December 2019. I am also grateful to Professor Susanne Gehrmann for suggesting the interview, and to Margarita Mestsch, Obala Musumba, and John Egole for sundry assistance.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
