“erring on the end of overflowing beauty”: A Discussion with Chigozie Obioma, Author of The Road to the Country

Chigozie Obioma, our 2024 Fiction Contest judge, is interviewed by Chinaecherem Obor, our 2024 Fiction Editor. 

CHINAECHEREM OBOR: In your first two novels, The Fishermen (2015) and Orchestra of Minorities (2019), there is an unquestionable emphasis on having African ontological belief systems at the foundation of the worlds of these stories. Your latest novel The Road to the Country (2024) opens with a scene where through the Yoruba Ifa divination, a seer visualizes events that would be key plot points in the story. Do you think these mystical elements, grounded as they are in African belief systems, help your novels challenge traditional Western notions of the novel structure and plot delivery?

CHIGOZIE OBIOMA: Thank you again for the interview. Indeed, I often think of the novel form as the most adaptable of all art forms and therefore to my mind, the greatest of all (of course, I’m biased in this!). But every time I engage the novel, I often think that I should find ways to make it novel—that is, to do something new or fresh, and hopefully original with it. It is, I think, that I try to push myself in this direction. And I think, with The Fishermen, I found a way to do that: this thing I call “mystical realism” in which the plains of the metaphysical and the physical are blended so that there is almost no degree of separation between them. It conforms to the Igbo and Yoruba ontological belief systems as you say. So, although it is an unconscious result of my drive towards innovative structures, it is true that I may be seeking to challenge the Western notions of structure and plot delivery.

If you think about it, the novel is a Western construct. Storytelling is of course not—that is ancient and realized in every culture through time. But the traditional arc of the novel writ large in the common structures of character agency, motivation, conflict, and denouement, etc., is of a Judeo-Christian orientation. Narrating a story in which the past is the future, and the present is the past challenges that foundational anchor point of the novel. This is one of the reasons I have chosen to engage the form of the novel these three times.

CHINAECHEREM: Critics have compared your first two novels to Greek tragedies. As someone who has read a lot of Greek tragedies but is also familiar with the traditional mythologies of many Nigerian ethnicities, I recognize in your novels more of the latter than the former. But also, especially in The Road to the Country, I see the making of a modern myth. Do you think the work of mythmaking is something in stasis, the sole preserve of the ancient storytellers from which we can only achieve retellings? Or do you see yourself as part of this work of establishing the myths by which we make certain sense of the present world?

CHIGOZIE: This is a fantastic question. I think that I am doing both. I think the landscape of any writer’s imagination is often shaped very early on. I think there is a groundwork that is laid down in what you expose yourself to and come to believe in as a person. It is like the texture of one’s skin and the formation of their personality. I was lucky enough to have been exposed to both traditions: the anthropological knowledge from my mother and the early teledramas in the Yoruba culture (of films like Ti Oluwa Ni’ile by Tunde Kelani) and the ones gotten from extended reading of fiction and plays like classic Greek dramas, Shakespeare, etc. I think my aesthetics is shaped by a braiding of the two.

But yes, I see embedded in that task of innovation the task of myth-making. Is it possible for a story that is historical event like the Biafra War of Independence to be framed completely in the future as though it has not yet happened—something that can be prevented? This is what I have done here. And in past books, I have found myself creating what is often described as “Igbo proverbs,” but which in fact, as mythopoetic creations like one of the epigraphs of The Road to the Country: “The story of a war can only be fully and truly told by both the living and the dead.”

CHINAECHEREM: Your latest novel, The Road to the Country, while mystical, is set in a real period of extreme political turmoil, the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-1970. Nigeria’s formal narrativization of this conflict is cosmetic at best, with little done in the time since then to properly acknowledge its horrors and make reparations. Where do you think the story of Kunle, a Yoruba boy from Western Nigeria serving in the secessionist Biafran army, fits into this narrative gap at the heart of this piece of Nigerian history? Do you find the story in some sort of conversation with attempts by some other writers to fill this gap?

CHIGOZIE: You are right in your framing and note that there has been little done about the war and the relative lack of national reckoning around what was one of the most tragic conflicts of the twentieth century. In Nigeria, we are especially prone to what the leader of the Biafran Republic, Odumegwu Ojukwu has referred to as “selective amnesia”: a tendency to consciously forget a part of our history that we consider troubling or difficult. The American writer, Jim Harrison who wrote Legends of the Fall, once said that every nation has two histories: one history that it freely teaches and a soul history that it does not want to think about. For the US, its soul history is the unjust treatment of Americans of African descent and Native Americans. I think that the Biafran War of Independence is Nigeria’s soul history, yet, even today there are hardly any monuments. It is not commemorated.

Also, in terms of its memorialization in Literature, it would surprise you to find that there are many books written about the war. Most of them are memoirs, biographies, history books, dissertations, papers, journalistic accounts—simply, a trove of non-fiction. Then, there are some fiction, but they are primarily what I now call “War-time fiction.” This is fiction in which the war is in the background, rather than frontal. It is concerned mostly about civilians living through the war. It rarely depicts the fighting. There are very few war novels—that is, fiction in which the war is central, and follows the men and women fighting into the trenches. Most of the ones that were written are long out of print and never really had a wide audience. The only exception I can think, to a large extent, is Sozaboy by Ken Saro-wiwa. I wanted to fill that gap as I think there is a need for a work of fiction that depicts the realities of the war in an unflinching gaze so that those of our generation who did not experience it can try to make sense of it and understand the true gravity of the war.

Lastly, I wanted Kunle to be able to experience the war from both sides, so that he is technically both a Nigerian and a Biafran (from his mother’s side). Because his allegiances are divided, his motivations become simply human rather than ideological or political. He wants simply to atone for something he believes he did wrong, and to survive the war he is unwillingly roped into. In that case, Kunle overrides every pigeonhole we can possibly put him in.

CHINAECHEREM: I am curious about the research that went into the writing of this story. I can almost imagine you sourcing for old Nigerian newspapers and painstakingly scouring through them. All the archival materials you must have read, the people you talked to. For how long have you been putting together this body of work? Most fictional books I’ve read about the Nigerian Civil War have their scope on one or the other side of the conflict. Yours reflects both. What were some of the challenges you encountered trying to access information and perspectives on both sides of the conflict? Can you tell us about some of the logistical constraints?

CHIGOZIE: I have always known that I would write about this war from a long time ago, perhaps from when I was only a boy. It just really was this event that was seared into my consciousness mostly by an encounter in 1993. I was only six years old when Nigeria erupted that year due to the annulment of the presidential elections won by chief MKO Abiola. The immediate result was a riot and a group of people trying to protest the action by the Nigerian junta. My family, as most Igbo families, felt safer in the East so we set out for the East. Once we got to the village, my first time there, I was faced with the sad specter of many people with physical deformities—a man without limbs who was on a wheelchair; another woman with just one arm; and a young woman with half her face eaten up what I would later discover was cancrum oris, a rare disease spurred by the war. Naturally, I became deeply curious about the war and began reading whatever I could find about it, and knew over the years that I wanted to write a novel about it at some point.

So, over the years, I read so much and heard so much from people who had experienced the war in one form or the other. Of course, there have been documentaries, memoirs, historical accounts etc. I also read books about other wars to get a sense of what it meant to be a frontline soldier in a war. I even ventured to ask an active Nigerian soldier fighting the Boko Haram insurgents in the north of Nigeria what it felt like for which I was in danger—in this piece I wrote for the Financial Times.

CHINAECHEREM: The language of The Road to the Country is lush and evocative, captures so well the distinctive patterns of Nigerian speak, and communicates scenes and atmospheres to the reader so closely to the point of tactility. I find this style stimulating in the way being physically a part of some ritual performance might feel. Is this something you look out for in a story? How do you think the language of a story can embody the spirit and atmosphere of its world in a way that does not become an overkill?

CHIGOZIE: I think that language and its power to shape perspective and to carry forth my vision for a story is one of the things I work on so very closely. I think of language as really the only canvas I have as an author, whereas a filmmaker can have in their employ various tools that can augment the artistic and cosmetic aspect of the story (given that fiction is a work of art). So, in lieu of sound, cinematography, actors, I rely on two things: poetic charge and detail. These help me to give the reader an experience they are not used to in their every day, which for me, is really the central aim for writing. Doing this would include realizing everything on the page in ways that I feel my reader is either not used to (which is, I think, the grand utility of poetic or figurative language), or capturing a detail that will make them experience what you are trying to make them see. Of course, one has to be as measured as possible, but I also believe, as I argue here, that one can take the liberty to flow as much as possible as erring on the end of overflowing beauty isn’t a bad thing. I’d rather do that than the opposite: plain-clothed fiction devoid of aesthetic beauty.

CHINAECHEREM: Your two earlier novels have both been finalists for the Booker Prize. Congratulations! I can already see the prize-winning potential of The Road to the Country. So you must know one or two things about writing a story that resonates. But what are some of your thoughts on the fictional short form? How can a story reverberate without the aid of the added pages that a novel offers?

CHIGOZIE: Haha, you essentially asking me how to write a strong short story. I think you use the same tools as the novel, with slight modifications for length. The Fishermen, for instance, was first published as a short story, though conceived as a novel. By cutting the story down to its basics, I was able to capture the essence of it while also carrying through the narrative power of the story through poignant language. I think the difference between the two forms is that while the novel can allow for the development of character over time through detail, actions and inactions, dialogue, etc, the short story allows its character to be revealed mostly through gestures (physical and verbal). JD Salinger does this so very well.

CHINAECHEREM: You teach creative writing at the University of Georgia. What is that single piece of writing advice you find yourself repeating to every new set of students?

CHIGOZIE: Haha, the University of Georgia will not allow me to share them here. But my advice is simple: write what is true to you; what you truly believe in. I think that the death of art is tribalism. Everyone’s mind is unique and rich, and that unique perspective is what will make your fiction distinct and appealing to readers. Don’t fall for the temptation to copy others or write what is in fad. What will best inform your art is who you are when no one is looking. That is what you must write about.

CHINAECHEREM: Congratulations on the publication of your third novel, The Road to the Country.

CHIGOZIE: Thank you so much! These are some of the most well-thought-out questions I have ever received! I hope everyone reads this book.

The Road to the Country, a novel by Chigozie Obioma, came out on June 4, 2024, and is available from Penguin Random House. To learn more about Chigozie Obioma & his work, you can find his website here. If you’d like to learn more about BWR’s 2024 contest, you can read the guidelines on our Submittable page, or flip through our most recent contest issue, 50.2, by snagging yourself a copy from our online store.