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There has to be a conscious and deliberate government subsidy of the Arts generally. But it will take another century to get there perhaps, or a miracle. Private individuals have to set up foundations as it is done in the west. All we do with our money is to flaunt it and marry more wives.
So for a phenomenon like Nollywood to flourish we might need outside help, solicited and unsolicited. Our literature has almost completely gone into exile as it is. May it not perish there! And at home those who are writing are increasingly disillusioned. But I suppose art survives life, even though it only imitates it. So it will all be well.
NA: Let's go back to your writing. What was the trigger that started you off as a writer? Are you now pleased or a bit annoyed with that trigger for placing the burden on you?
AE: Well, the trigger was suffering, as it was for Hemingway, who once said all you needed to be a writer was a bad childhood. I was a sensitive child, a curious child and a fool with a book in the hand. So I was more serious minded than my siblings. There had to be an outlet for such strong emotions as burdened me. Wordsworth described poetry as the 'spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions. That spontaneous flow suffused me in class 4 of the secondary school and I wrote my first juvenilia. I remember some of those poems...but I do not have them. I think Radio OYO in Ibadan must still have them in her archives. I used to read on a program called "Youth Rendezvous". I am happy for that trigger that places a moral burden on you and makes you a writer. It allows one to analyse existence to record human activity as it unfolds. But then it places a moral burden on you. You cannot be a Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet, who turned coat and became a slave-trader. Of course he dried up. He did not write poetry anymore.
NA: Have there been times you wanted to pack it all in? In such times where from, do you draw the inspiration to go on?
AE: I have never really thought of 'packing it in'. The nearest I got to that is being frustrated because you do not get enough publishing outlets...Poetry is not a form popular with publishers. But I guess every writer the world over goes through that. As Prof. Soyinka told me as an 18 year-old in 1982, 'the road is narrow and those who are called are few'. You have to watch out for the psychological moments where you have a break through. Sometimes Prizes help - even though I do not think all who are worthy do get prizes. It is only perseverance that can bring any kind of big break. It is a labour of love as I said before.
NA: As an African writer writing for a target global readership, when you tackle Africa-specific themes, do you attempt to explain the African philosophy and culture, interpret Africa towards a universal kaleidoscope, or reclaim African sensibilities destroyed or damaged by the gang-rape of Africa by past and present western political, cultural and religious invasions?
AE: I think it would be patronising and didactic to try and explain all the motifs in a work. The reader has some knowledge of the world or should discover through individual effort. It is part of his reading process. I do not interpret Africa either. I show respect for my reader's intelligence and spirit of adventure and let him or her discover. How do you reclaim African sensibilities destroyed by history? If you mean using traditional forms, I would say no. My style is hybrid, post-traditional using elements of the modern and the traditional. I learnt a lot from the medieval English poet John Dryden. He thought me brevity. I learned from Tchikaya U'Tamsi, the Congolese poet. He taught me some esotericism. I learnt a lot from Soyinka. He taught me what all the other writers had and more.
NA: Well, taking into account the fact that Africans are becoming culturally and politically hermaphrodite, when I talk about reclaiming African sensibilities, I talk about reclaiming everything that is lost, dead or dying, such as the gods that lost out to invading gods - like Soyinka reclaimed Ogun, like you have reclaimed Esu. Like Chimalum Nwankwo reclaimed the Igbo poetic vernacular in The Womb in the Heart. Is it your view by the way that a traditional African form has to be cross-pollinated with extra-African forms for it to become modern?
AE: I do not believe that traditional African forms necessarily need a 'cross-pollination' with the 'extra-African' forms; I am saying that such cross-pollination is the very spirit of an African Modernism or post-traditionalism, if you like. I spoke before about hybridity. I do not know how rivers started specifically but there is a point in the history of waters where you find one ocean flowing into the other and influencing its currents to a large or smaller degree. The same with cultures. Colonialism brought changes with it which cannot be ignored.
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