Nazareth

"The first thing that struck me about Ekwensi was his stature. Physically: he was tall, slim, and had a forceful and direct voice. He was someone who knew exactly what he was doing. But what was this figure from the past doing now in the IWP?" Peter Nazareth first met Nigerian writer Cyprian Ekwensi in the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (IWP) in the fall of 1974. Nazareth, now the IWP's Adviser to Foreign Writers and a UI professor, relates the story of their time together at the IWP and describes the scope of Ekwensi's influence on him in the following memoir:

I took my final exams in English Honours at Makerere University College early in 1962, while Uganda was in its last year as a British Protectorate. In those days, a good degree was considered to be an Upper Second. But nobody from the first two years—I was in the third batch of English Honours students—achieved that kind of degree. Even the most brilliant of them, the one we all looked up to, Jonathan Kariara, received a Lower Second. I decided to test myself by sitting in the library and doing old exams. Walking out of the library, I bumped into Murray Carlin, one of my favorite professors, and I asked him if he would mark those exams I had done. On the basis of his marking and his comments (I received Cs), I thought that these exams required not book learning but strategy. I planned on answering one question brilliantly, one well, and one not quite complete and giving the impression of being hurried for lack of time—so my true worth would be judged by the best. After taking the exams, I decided to pass on my strategy to the most brilliant of them all, two years behind me, James Ngugi (as he then was). We met outside the canteen, which was halfway between our two halls of residence. I told him how to pass exams well (!) and he reciprocated by introducing me to the African writers he had read on his own.

While waiting for my results and teaching at St. Mary’s College, Kisubi, I read all the African writers Ngugi had recommended. Among them was Cyprian Ekwensi's Jagua Nana. It was a striking novel whose protagonist became part of my memory even though I did not re-read the novel for several years.

I also read the few critics of African literature there were at the time, and as the years went by other critics, who joined these few in finding fault with Ekwensi, comparing him unfavorably to Achebe, implying or stating that his novels were pedestrian and not well structured. So I thought of him as a kind of John the Baptist to Achebe’s Jesus: that he prepared the way for a superior writer whose work was much better written and structured.

Imagine my surprise when I met Cyprian Ekwensi in the International Writing Program in Iowa City in the fall of 1974. I had been in the IWP in 1973-74 (the program was seven months at that time) and now was working as a Research Associate for a project of Hualing Nieh Engle, Associate Director of the IWP, translating the Literature of the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957-58 (I worked with John Hsu, who translated from Chinese, and I polished the translation). The first thing that struck me about Ekwensi was his stature. Physically: he was tall, slim, and had a forceful and direct voice. He was someone who knew exactly what he was doing. But what was this figure from the past doing now in the IWP? Read More...

Read an excerpt from Ekwensi's Jagua Nana here: Chapter One

WHAT CYPRIAN EKWENSI DID FOR ME continued...

I did not wonder for long. I found out he planned on writing a novel about the Nigerian civil war (aka the Nigeria/Biafra war) and just needed the time and space to do it. And I discovered he was a practical man as a writer. He obtained permission to attend classes on fiction in the Writers’ Workshop (which is a different program from the IWP) and to discuss drafts of the chapters of his novel as he wrote them. I read a draft and went to the class to discuss it. I found him very receptive to good criticism—that is, to practical suggestions that could help him make his writing better. I remember pointing out to him on the pages he had distributed before the class began what I did not like about one paragraph—he needed to add more details—and what I did like. In what I did like, he said, “That’s my title!” He took the phrase “Survive the Peace” and made it the title of the novel. He was to tell me when we met again some years later that he should have given me credit for the title, but of course novelists cannot give credit to everyone who has had some influence on their writing or it would get in the way of the writing itself.

I was talking to Ekwensi one day about Idi Amin and what was happening in Uganda. He said, “My God! You have the novel in your head! Write it!” “That’s funny!’ I said. “That’s exactly what Jose Antonio Bravo, the novelist from Peru in my session of the IWP, said to me the night before he left Iowa! And he wrote in a strange way. He planned his novels like an architect, with large sheets of paper on which he drew categories of major characters, minor characters, theme, story, chronology, etc., and when it was ready, he wrote.” “Good,” said Ekwensi. “Let me show you how I do it.” He took me to his room—and there was a large sheet of paper on the desk on which he had drawn categories of major characters, minor characters, chronology, etc. This was too much, I said to myself.

So I went to Iowa Book and Supply, bought large sheets of art paper, began drawing categories of major characters, minor characters, etc.—and then it took off. I began typing and typing, taping sheets to the wall in front of me. It was like a dam had burst, swallowing up (to mix metaphors) everything, including three fragments I had written, one in Uganda before leaving to accept the Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale granted for my first novel (In a Brown Mantle), the second after I got to Yale, and the third at Iowa City, fragments I thought were unrelated. I vaguely recalled receiving a phone call from Ekwensi and relying that I was writing my novel and his saying, “All right” and ringing off. I phoned Ekwensi some days later and said, “It is done!” “Good!” he said. “How long did it take you?” Nine days!” I said, amazed, because it seemed like years and years. “You see?” he said. “When I say I wrote Jagua Nana in nine days, people think I am not a serious writer!”

“However, I have one big problem,” I said to Ekwensi. “In real life, when Amin announced the Expulsion of Asians and gave them a deadline of three months, the time seemed so short it made everybody and everything frantic. But in the novel, three months is such a long time that it does not persuade the reader that there is any reason for the people to get frantic.” “Why don’t you change the Expulsion deadline from ‘three months’ to ‘the next moon?’” he suggested. “Amin is a Muslim so reference to the moon is not illogical. And while people are rushing around to find out what ‘by the next moon’ means, that will explain why everything gets frantic.” So I did make the change. In my novel The General is Up, the Expulsion deadline announced by the General is the next moon. It worked.

There were other practical suggestions Ekwensi gave me. He read my manuscript carefully and typed a report on it. He also wrote me a report in which he said how he could not put down the manuscript until he had finished reading it. As I said earlier, Ekwensi himself was completely open to suggestions for improving his writing, and he was equally willing to give other writers practical suggestions when it was still possible to improve the work. But he told me to now put aside the manuscript and not read it again for several days. It was later I came to realize that doing so meant drawing on the power of the subconscious when one got back to re-reading and revising the work. I incorporated many of his suggestions in the final version.

I wonder how much there is in common between our novels since I wrote mine while he was writing his. One similarity I am aware of is that in both Survive the Peace and The General is Up, the violence, which is horrible, is almost always described indirectly. This has the effect of not turning the reader off for direct violence is hard for the reader to take and s/he may block out the novel and instead appealing to the reader’s imagination.

There, of course, are differences between our novels. I have taught both in my classes on African Literature, and I have taught Ekwensi’s novel in my Guided Correspondence Course, Literatures of the African Peoples. My novel is much more of a Trickster novel (see my In the Trickster Tradition: The Novels of Andrew Salkey, Francis Ebejer and Ishmael Reed, London: Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1994)—and yet, and yet, as I show in my essay in Georg Gugelberger’s Marxism and African Literature, the juxtapositions of what just seem to be factual descriptions in Ekwensi’s novel contain within them moral judgements that the reader must make, such as for example concluding that the protagonist James Odugo is not just a poor innocent victim but also a self-centered and sexist man who contributes to the agonies of that terrible war and who grows to moral awareness just before he dies. There was another connection between our novels, although inadvertent: my title is taken from a poem by Christopher Okigbo, who died during the Nigerian Civil War.

I spent a lot of time with Ekwensi in those days. We went to some conferences together. I read a lot of his work. Sometimes I felt that he had under-written some parts and I told him so. He was always open to criticism that was specific that could help him improve his work. What he did not care for was criticism that came after the work was done and out. He once angrily said about a famous scholar who had written on him, “He has built two careers on me—the first attacking my work and the second praising my work!” He was not envious of the success of other writers. When I asked him who his favorite writers were, the first he named was Chinua Achebe.

Always practical. I asked him how come a pharmacist became a writer. He said he wanted to be a writer but knew at the time that he would not be able to sustain himself with his writing so he decided to study something from which he could make money which would finance his writing. I understand from Abioseh Porter (the editor of the 'Journal of the African Literature Association') that as he prepared to meet his ancestors, he collected all his work together. I expect Nigerian scholars will pay attention.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. When I told Ekwensi that I had completed the novel, he asked me how I felt. “Like I have recovered from a long illness,” I replied. Cyprian Ekwensi was not surprised. It made sense that he was a pharmacist and a writer for he knew the healing power of fiction.

Read an excerpt from Jagua Nana here: Chapter One