E. C Osondu is a Nigerian novelist and an associate professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where he was a Syracuse University Fellow. His short story, “Waiting,” which won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2009, was included in his first collection, Voice of America, published in 2010. He is also the author of This House is Not for Sale. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, n+1, Guernica, AGNI, and many other magazines. He shares his opinions on literature and his writings with The Muse.
The Muse: Your story “Waiting,” published in 2008, won the 10th Caine Prize for African Writing in 2009. It is probably the most read story on the collection, _Voice of America_. What inspired the short story? What do you consider most captivating about the story that has enabled it garner such recognition so far?
E.C. Osondu: First off, thank you for your patience over the interview process. I know there was quite a bit of back and forth. The story was inspired by my interaction with refugee kids in Upstate New York most of whom had spent their lives in a refugee camp in Kenya-Kakuma Refugee Camp-to be precise. Over one summer while volunteering, I interacted with the young men and women and towards the end of that summer the inspiration struck to put their harrowing narrative down on paper.
The Muse: Back in 2006, your story “A Letter from Home” was judged one of the Top Ten Stories on the internet. You were also a finalist for the 2007 Caine Prize with your story “Jimmy Carter’s Eyes,” and have won the Allen and Nivelle Galso Prize for Fiction. Is there a way in which the prize drive inspires you to keep writing?
E.C. Osondu: As I have had reason to say jokingly to another interviewer-Prizes are important, but the writing is importanter, if I am permitted to use that very Nigerian coinage. How many prizes did Shakespeare win or Kafka for that matter. Jean Paul Satre rejected the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some past winners of the Nobel Prize are barely read these days if they are remembered at all. The writing matters more, but prizes are like a wind to your sails, urging one to keep going.
The Muse: As a homegrown writer, what were some of the challenges you faced in the formative years of your career?
E.C. Osondu: There was no internet in my formative years so you had to submit work by snail-mail. There were not as many venues to publish as there is nowadays. Regardless, writers no matter what time they live in must perpetually deal with the three sisters known as Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
The Muse: In most of your works, we see the presentation of such tragic matters as poverty, squalor, struggle, disease, migration, yearn for civilization, strife, helplessness, and death. However, this is counterbalanced with an underpinning humor that seems to act as succour for the pain in the stories. How are you able to achieve this?
E.C. Osondu: A life of relentless horror is another definition of hell. Humor is the elixir for survival. To quote a poet –the world is too much with us, but as Samuel Beckett reminds us, we must go on.
The Muse: The exiled and dispossessed characters in “Waiting” have to say Tsofo, and by that act decide their fate. Is this a reference to the biblical matter of saying “Shibboleth,” which was the password used by the Gileadites to distinguish their own men from fleeing Ephraimites, because Ephraimites could not pronounce the -sh- sound?
E.C. Osondu: We live in a world where people are discriminated against based on their skin color, the way they speak or dress or walk etc. This aspect of the story is highlighting that and showing how arbitrary these things could be. Sometimes people are discriminated against based on the length or shortness of their nose- so ridiculous.
The Muse: Chinua Achebe once said that his stories come to him complete. Do your stories come that way? Are there times when you have to find stories from your environment, experiences and the people around you than let them come to you?
E.C. Osondu: Every story is unique. Every story determines how it should be told. Some come like the rain and is poured out in one fell swoop, some come in drips and some come squeaking like an ungreased piece of metal.
The Muse: There are critics who think that literature should be distinct from society. What is your opinion on the matter of so-called “socially committed art?” Do you think literature is useful?
E.C. Osondu: The eternal purpose of art has not changed-it is simply- to instruct and entertain.
The Muse: Do you consider it important to incorporate African aesthetics, Nigerian belief systems, cultural values and ideologies in your writing?
E.C. Osondu: Of course, these form the spring well of my stories.
The Muse: The stories in _Voice of America_ have a universal appeal. They are universal stories about suffering. There are critics, who, however, feel that because these stories are about Africa, they represent the culture of underwriting Africa. Do you sometimes feel guilty for writing Africa in that squalid light?
E.C. Osondu: I’ll feel guilty if I didn’t portray Africa in totality in my work. Africa is joy but Africa is also a squandering of riches and a whole lot of missed opportunities.
The Muse: There is a sense in which the titular “Waiting”, of your award winning short story, echoes the tradition of tragedy with the particular implication of the account in _Waiting for Godot_ which resolves in perpetuity. Do you find that Beckett’s play influenced your story, especially as your story also seems to resolve in perpetuity and makes a direct allusion to it?
E.C. Osondu: As you would have noticed, I quoted Beckett earlier. He was one of the finest. Many think he was a nihilist and stuff like that but he had a bone-dry sense of humor. To wait is to believe, to stop waiting is to give in to despair.
The Muse: What do you think about the fast fading reading culture in Nigeria; does it bother you as a writer that most of your countrymen do not get to read what you write?
E.C. Osondu: This is a canard. Nigerians read-now, what they read is a different matter, entirely. There are so many young writers in Nigeria these days that if you threw the metaphorical pebble it would hit a writer, for sure.
The Muse: Migration is a prominent issue in your works. Does the fact of your movement to America, and the experiences that followed, have a definitive role in this?
E.C. Osondu: Absolutely. We write our lives, for the most part, and to a lesser degree, the lives of others.
The Muse: One of your reviewers writes thus:
“Many of Osondu’s stories are resonant of _The Thing around Your Neck_ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s story collection. Adichie’s quietly determined Nigerian women juggle anxieties, aspirations and a stoical yearning for personal independence. Osondu plumbs similar ethnic and ethical conflicts, but his genial prose has a comparatively muted emotional palette, rarely generating a depth of conviction, anguish or delight.” Do you think this is so; do you find any such semblance between you and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie?
E.C. Osondu: Western critics will always compare one African writer to another. That is the real burden around the neck of the African writer.
The Muse: You are a member of Writivism’s Board of Trustees, with fellow writers Zukiswa Wanner, Chika Unigwe, Noviolet Bulawayo, Nii Parkes and Lizzy Attree. What can you say about creative writing in Africa from this vantage point?
E.C. Osondu: We are living in a boom-time for African writing. Like I said in a speech in Kampala few years back, we have many problems in Africa, but story-telling and writing is not one of them.
The Muse: In your career as a writer has there been a time you felt it was not your right to capture a situation you were not directly affected by, like it wasn’t your story to tell?
E.C. Osondu: In my experience, it has often been more about second-guessing myself and asking-is this worthy of Literature? Does my experience qualify as Literature with upper-case L?
The Muse: Thank you so much for granting us this interview.
E.C. Osondu: My pleasure. The Muse must not die. Keep the fire burning! Ji si ike.