Sefi Atta is the author of many books, most notably Everything Good Will Come (2005) and winner of the 2006 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa and other notable prizes. She has also written a couple of stage plays, like
After so many books, why the need to write for children, especially when you don’t have a young child?
It isn’t necessary to have young children to write children’s books. I imagine that most authors of children’s books write just for themselves, and it helps that they’ve been young before. That’s how it was for me. To prepare, I remembered what it was like to be a twelve-year-old, and once I found the voice of my narrator, Timi, I was able to write. The process was hard, though, because I had to stay in her world and see life from her perspective. Now that the book is published, I’m a little nervous about how children will respond to it because they can be impatient if you don’t grab and hold their attention, and they’ll let you know. One of my first readers told me point-blank that his mother made him read the book, but after his initial reluctance, he enjoyed it. He was twelve, mind you, and this book is for nine to eleven-year-olds.
In your latest novel, The Bead Collector, you set the story around the February 13, 1976 coup. Same for Drama Queen. What is the significance of February 1976 and why are two books set in that time?
It’s not unusual for me to do this. I explore stories in different ways and forms until I’m satisfied – by which I mean I no longer have a desire to recreate them. The coup of 1976 was my political awakening. It was the first bloody coup I was aware of. The previous one happened in 1966, when I was two years old. I remember the coup of 1976 as a tragic play, perhaps because I studied Macbeth a year later. I found it dramatic in many ways: the fact that it occurred in a leap year; the fact that it happened on Friday the 13th. Even the coup plotters had theatrical names: Iliya Bisalla and Buka Suka Dimka.
Drama Queen is a book forged clearly in the forge of nostalgia. Have you been back to Queen’s College recently and is there regret at what it has become?
I haven’t been there recently, but I’ve been back since I started writing. I was surprised at how small the school grounds were, and also by how much the geography of the school had changed. For instance, our beloved assembly hall, where we performed plays, is now used for some other purpose and there is a much bigger hall elsewhere. In those days, we would have to cross a public road to get to our new block of classrooms; now, they’re within the school grounds and the main gates are further out. The dorms depressed me, I have to say. They were so run-down I pitied the students who had to sleep in them. Meanwhile, the students I met were lively, intelligent and confident. The truth is that Queen’s College never had the best facilities, but we just managed. What mattered more were the friendships we formed, the lessons we learned about life, and the education we got. Under the guidance of our principal, Mrs. Coker, we believed there were no limits to what we could achieve if we worked hard enough.
You are not very funny in real life but your writing is always sprinkled with
Misery, maybe. I just have a very Nigerian sense of humour. Watch a middle-aged woman who walks with a wobble and tell me she doesn’t move from side to side in that way – temerity, alacrity, temerity, alacrity. What could be more Nigerian than chanting, “17, 18, 19, bobo,” to a woman’s strut as we used to when we were young?
I’m glad you’ve brought up humour because it reminds me of a related matter I’d like to talk about. One of the dilemmas I had with this novel was deciding whether to use QC slang or not. To me, our slang was funny, but I wasn’t sure children today would appreciate it. I decided to use it in the end because it was true to life and showed how inventive we were with language. I expect some of my readers will be used to stories set in the US and UK and more accustomed to reading American and English slang and colloquialisms. Consequently, they may be resistant to my use of QC slang, but that won’t stop me from trying to win them over. Even a children’s book involves political decisions. One of the ways my generation decolonised itself was by playing with the English language. If a teacher taught us the correct pronunciation of a word, we would learn it, but you could be sure that after school we would find a way to make it sound Nigerian. I don’t think that children these days feel the need to counteract globalisation. They seem to absorb any culture they encounter, while they’re reading, watching cable television or surfing the Internet. I’m all for raising cosmopolitan kids. I was raised that way and have raised my daughter that way too. What I don’t want is for Nigerian kids to grow up valuing other cultures over ours. Drama Queen encourages children to take pride in our cultures without being prejudiced against others’, or allowing people from other cultures to patronise them. It introduces a Nigerian heroine to children who are not used to heroes and heroines who look like them. It is not a fantasy story set in a magical, mystical land, either. It is realistic.
Photo by Author
Timi Aziz, your heroine, went to QC like you; she writes plays like you; is slim like you and can blast like you. Are you Timi Aziz and how autobiographical is this book?
I am not Timi, but I used some of my experiences in the book. I was in the drama society. I wrote a story titled “General Bouncing Crusher” to parody a senior prefect. I also staged a coup against class bullies. A senior in my dorm called me Jughead because I was terribly skinny, even though I ate a lot. I never obeyed rules that involved being on time and I would blast any of my peers who blasted me. In short, I was a royal pain, annoying to some and likeable to others. So is Timi. She always speaks her mind, regardless of the consequences. I was that girl until I was forced to be more diplomatic, but through characters like her, I still get to say whatever I want.
Timi Aziz likes being in the boarding house but she also knows you need to be tough to survive it. How was your own experience and would you recommend it to children in today’s Nigeria?
As happens in the book, we often had no electricity and sometimes had water shortages, but I never felt sorry for myself. A few seniors took advantage of the hierarchical system and some of my peers were bullies, but I dealt with conflicts immediately and got over them fast. I felt privileged to be a student at QC and enjoyed being in an environment with girls from different backgrounds. While I was in school, I was usually around girls who were not family friends. In fact, I hardly talked to my family friends until I went home on holiday. QC is government-owned, though, and these days anyone who can afford to would rather send their children to private schools because government schools are so badly neglected. I’ve heard troubling stories about the conduct and attitudes of spoilt private-school kids, but I doubt they’re the norm. I’ve had the opportunity to meet students from a variety of schools in Lagos and it was one of my most memorable events. They were charming and smart. I also recently met students from Vivian Fowler Memorial College at my book launch, and they were brilliant and fun to be around. I would only recommend that parents try to raise their children with the values we upheld at QC.
There is a very poignant scene in the book where Timi Aziz helps the blind girl get water then ends up being passed over. Water, it seems, has always been an issue at QC and it led to tragedy recently. Does it bother you that forty years later not much has improved?
You know, while I was revising the novel, I wondered why I’d written about water so much. It may have been an issue when I was at QC, but no student ever died from contaminated water. The loss of Praise Ṣódiípọ̀, Bithia Itulua and Vivian Osuinyi was awful. Their deaths could and should have been avoided. I can’t even imagine what they and their families went through. Of course it bothers me that not much has changed and my references to water probably reflect that. One good thing to come out of the tragedy is that the Old Girls Association is actively involved in improving living conditions for students. In 2015, my classmates, the class of ’79, founded Rebecca’s Room, a resource centre for visually impaired students, and recently they launched Adopt-a-Girl, an initiative to fund school fees for students in need.
You always manage to insert history into your books. Is this always intentional or is this a case of the story writing itself?
It’s never intentional in the sense of including history for history’s sake. It’s just part of my writing process. I trick myself into believing my characters are real people who existed at a given time. So in writing about them, I recreate the time period. I’m glad I do this because, as you know, they stopped teaching history in Nigerian schools for years. I read that they’ve started again, which is great, if it is true. I’m also glad I revisited the coup of 1976 in the book because my readers were born in the new millennium and all they’ve ever known is the dysfunctional democratic system we have now. They might be interested in finding out what it was like to live in a military regime. The story shows them that politics is personal. Children who live in unstable parts of the country and students who attend run-down schools already know this. However, election season has begun and politicians have the stage. For all the farcical moments, there is the potential for violence, and even sheltered children will have to cope with anxiety. Timi recovers from her disquiet after the coup and, hopefully, so will they.
Religion rears its head in Drama Queen. How much of a problem do you think religion poses in this country?
Religious intolerance, extremism
And finally the obligatory question: will there be Drama Queen II?
No. I’ve explored the story to my satisfaction.
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