Ahmed Maiwada is an Abuja-based legal practitioner, poet and a novelist. For having tried his hands in poetry, fiction and drama, which is currently in his offing, Maiwada is regarded as one of the leading figures in the contemporary Nigerian literature. In this interview with IBRAHIM RAMALAN and AWAAL GATA, Maiwada discusses his recently published poetry collection called ‘We Are Fish’, a fresh offering that explored a new dimension of concrete poetry in which he advances a thesis that man is akin to a fish, and sundry issues.
You recently released another book of poetry. This year, many poets are releasing their poetry collections, probably because there is NLNG poetry price to be won; are you in that bandwagon?
I am not aware that many poets have released their poetry books this year, and am not in a bandwagon with anybody; what I can say here is that possibly, some people are in the same bandwagon with me, because yes, I consider myself in a competition with others.
I can recall that some people at one time were calling for the scrapping of the NLNG prize. Their argument was why should only one personwin the prize. I said, look to me it is not about winning the prize, it is about the competition. For example, in the Olympic games, they would tell you to come and participate, for in participation you would bring out the best in yourself. So it is an atmosphere I cherish and, believe you me, it is possible that even though I may still be publishing, but by the time I do so without any competition in mind, the quality of what I would produce may not really be as good as what am bringing out. So I am a competitor and I compete, I lose and everytime I keep telling myself look, you are not good enough; go and do more. By the time I sit down and look at what I have done before, I would say, ‘do you mean that I actually wrote this, even though it never got mentioned anywhere?’ I always get amazed at what I have done.
So for me, it is very much welcomed. I try to time myself and program my writing schedules in accordance with this competition so that at any given time I would be like, I have a burden to produce so and so book for so and so competition. Another thing is, by my nature, if I don’t have something guiding me I will not be able to achieve anything. So if there are others who have released their works because of this year’s NLNG prize, yes I am in that category.
Are you saying that you always have NLNG prize in mind any time you want to release a book?
No! As I said earlier, it is the atmosphere I found myself. The poems in my latest book have been written over the past six years. The way I write, I don’t write many poems and say let me make a collection, No. It may surprise you to know that I have already started working on another collection now. So the way I work is, I keep writing and writing within a subject matter, I won’t write any poem that comes outside the subject matter. I program myself within a collection I am currently working on. I am not a writer that can write several poems or lines left, right and centre. So, to say that I sat down purposefully to say that am writing this collection for NLNG prize may not be 100% right because there are other things I also wrote these things for.
One, I share many of the poems I write on Facebook and other social media platforms, because I know I have a following, especially those that are learning the rope of the art. That alone is a mentoring format. I do not work in isolation because I carry people along. Secondly, there are other competitions apart from the NLNG and it is possible that I can compete.
However, I don’t normally enter competitions. Even the ANA prizes I think I only entered once. That even, I didn’t enter it by myself, my publisher did so. NLNG was there but I never attempted it until when I gave my opinion on‘Yellow Yellow’ which I said was not a good book and should not have won the NLNG competition.
I remember when we went to Zamfara, I was in the panel that interviewed the book’s author, KaineAgary and people said my comment was too harsh. Some people also said I was only jealous that was why I gave those comments. I then said, I can equally win this competition, there is nothing so big a deal about it. That was why I sent ‘Fossils’. I didn’t write ‘Fossils’ purposefully for it.Therefore, after observing that this competition has come to stay, I have insisted that unless the work is excellent, I will not publish it. If you look at the quality of my latest collection: ‘We Are Fish’, I think it is only ‘Fossils’ that comes close to it. So, I have personally improved and am happy about it.
At the moment, you are critiqued as one of the best contemporary poets in the country ; Don’t you think it is high time you go international ?
Well, I actually don’t have that opinion about myself. If you say so, that is your opinion. I have a very ambivalent opinion about my works. That is why I always believe that there is always a room for improvement. So if you come to tell me ‘oh! You are a master or whatever’, that is your opinion because I won’t believe it. I keep improving and any day I stop improving you would never see any collection even if NLNG is going to be say $1m, I won’t produce. Let me tell this: you can never ever see me reproduce something I did in the past. So, back to the issue of internationalizing my poetry, to me, the reader decides that.
My poetry has been published online. However, I am not the type that believes in contributing my poetry to anthologies or journals, especially if such contributions have to stipulate that you either have to buy copies of what existed to see what they are doing or you have to pay some money before you enter. However, way back in the early 90s, there was an online site, I think it is called poetry.com or something. They accepted my poem for inclusion among poems they were going to cut a venal CD on. That time I was in Lagos and that was the time I was actually sending my works abroad. I was published in one Indian journal and my works are also in other foreign online sites.
But then, those were the days when I was thinking along that line. But my main audiences are Nigerian readers. I believe that once you can satisfy a Nigerian, it is easier for you to satisfy anybody in any other part of the globe. So I consider myself in a marathon race, it is when you get there that you are there. I have never in my life thought that somebody somewherein Africa could read my works. But when Richard Ali was touring East Africa, he took copies of my book along and even read some of my poems there.
It was a success story, according to him. So I don’t want to go out of my way and say ‘look I have to be read in so and so places. I am not in a hurry because I programmed my race and am doing it strategically. Mark you, I know what I have in store, especially the manuscripts upon manuscripts am sitting on. So let me start scratching on the surface and by the time the home notices me, then we could think of launching out.
‘We Are Fish’ seems to be an improved version of you as a poet. How satisfied are you with this level of achievement?
Yeah, at the moment I am satisfied with what I have achieved. But, as I told you earlier, I have already started working on another thing. So far, based on what I have done, I think I have improved upon what I did in the past. But I am somebody who is never satisfied, and I think that is really the reason why I keep writing.
In ‘We are Fish’, the normal Maiwada’s voice is still there, except the architecture of the poems. What informed the decision to explore this aesthetical dimension?
Oh no! Let me tell you my opinion concerning this. The voice in ‘Saint of A Woman’ is ‘Jeremiac’ – complaints all through. I follow the Nigerian trend. Nigerian writers like to complain about the situations of the country, the bad governance and whatever. Even though I used symbols, I actually was full of complaints. Thereafter, in the ‘Fossils’ the voice became sensual – having to do with sensual feeling. As the NLNG judges observed, private feelings, ideas and narratives. Then ‘Eye Rhymes’ goes back to that complaint but not about government and governance – it was about the situation of the book. You can even say it is a response to the NLNG judges. Yes it was a complaint against what concerns writers, the treatment that we often get and the book culture in the country.
I think the treatment we writers got in that 2009, particularly myself, was uncalled for.For example, you cannot say a certain collection of poetry is an example for younger writers to follow, you cannot say it contains fresh metaphors, praise it to high heavens and then come and tell me that it does not meet certain requirements for the prize. And there was no explanation to back up that stance. Also, in the ‘Eye Rhymes’ I tried to explore a refashioned epic poetry – one poem running from beginning to the end.In ‘We Are Fish’, what I tried to do was to do something completely different from everything I have ever done in poetry. The collection is a thesis poetry, which means I have made a proposition which I never did in the other collections. In all my previous works, I have never for once made or presented an argument or said this is the state of this an argued it.
The proposition is that man and fish are the same – even though we are different animals.
Coming to the poetics I used in the collection, I think in my previous collections like the ‘Saint of A Woman’, I wasn’t that experienced to use high-end imageries. I only used metaphors and similes. Then, in ‘Fossil’, I infused a lot of sounds. This was because I had a considerable influence from E.E. Cummings.
The liberty I took in ‘Fossils’ I have not taken it in other collections because I played around words and imageries. In fact, I enjoyed myself in there, I can call anything with any name I wish as long as it sounds well to me. In ‘Eye Rhymes’, I extended the range of my poetics: from similes, metaphors to alliterations, synecdoche and hyperboles. ‘We Are Fish’ is my first environmentally conscious work. I took a lot from Sylvia Earl who happened to be a female marine conservationist. She has so many postulations concerning the relationship between the green earth and the sea – the relationship that if we destroy the sea, we are literally destroying the dry land. So in the book, I used the technique of a narrator, that the fish is the dramatis personae in the collection.
The fish is giving us the story of a journey that the fish has undertaken – from the pond to the river and the lagoons before it eventually gets to the sea. So a journey takes place from the hinterland to sea and the breeze which blew, lured the fish into the sea where the water tastes salty. The breeze further told the fish that in the sea, there is a possibility that they will not remain as a small fish that they could grow into a shark, whale and so on. And the fish obliged.
They travelled in a caravan to the sea. When they got to the sea, they liked the feeling and began to enjoy themselves. Suddenly, the same breeze that lured them into the sea became a storm and began to cause havoc and many fishes were killed.
As for symbolism, apart from the literal meaning that man is a fish, I discover that we are so wicked that we could eat each other – just like the big fishes eat the small ones.Another area I discover that we are fish is, we actually live in houses which is akin to aquariums. Anytime we are needed, death would come and pick us.
I also use an imagery of a school. Man goes to school, and a group of fishes is called‘school’ too. I compare the sea to the dry land.
The deeper you go into the sea the darker it becomes. So the fish in the depth of a sea may likely not encounter what exists on the surface of the sea. Just like when man is told that God exists up there in the sky. No matter how higher and higher you go, you may likely not encounter Him. This is where fake spiritual leadership comes to play, just like the breeze that lured the fishes into the sea and later became a storm to them. I think am using a parallelism technique for the first time. I got this technique from the Coetzee. Another area man is the same with a fish is that we are all swimmers. Man was an egg swimming from the scrotum to the ovum before we later came forth onto the earth. So we share swimming.
The architecture of the book is particularly interesting. So what inspired the architecture sir?
In ‘We Are Fish’ I tried to bring in music into play by infusing Hip-hop into poetry. Likewise in other collections of mine you could either see fiction fused into this or drama fused into that. While in ‘We Are Fish’, I introduced Hip-hop remixing into poetry, because I actually adopted a lot of phrases from previous collections. For instance, you can hear an original song today and tomorrow it is remixed into something different. In essence, I was only trying to say that poetry is music. You cannot isolate music from poetry. You see how the Nobel Prize brought to our attention the fact that you are into music doesn’t necessarily mean you are not into literature.
So you think the Nobel judges did not make any mistake awarding the prize to Bob Dylan?
You see, as far as I am concerned, I don’t think Bob Dylan wrote literature. So if the Nobel Prize is for literature, then I think they are wrong. I expressed my anger at first. But during calm observations, I got to see that there is nothing iron-cast about literature. The argument before was literature was only poetry, fiction and drama. Then people say essays too have to be included and they convincingly argued it out.
After that, some people were now saying that even scriptures are literature because somebody was actually inspired to write them. By this, even a written music can be a literature. More so, if you check out Dylan’s originality and his mastery of creating imagery, you would see sense in their judgment. You know, it is not the volume of literature that matters, but what the reader takes away matters a great deal. The question is: has a writer contributed to cultural parlance?Because that was how the likes of Shakespeare and Milton became influential – they contributed a lot to culture. Now, Bob Dylan has done so too. For your information, so many phrases that are used today actually came from him through his music.
Sir, given what Professor Remi Raji said on the blurb of your book, how were you influenced by George Herbert’s?
I never knew who George Herbert was until when Prof. Remi Raji mentioned him. Actually, there is no influence of Herbert in my work. Unfortunately for me, he happens to be one of the notable English poets. For the blurb, I think this is the point why, when you are considering literary judges, you have to look forpeople who are seasoned in the field – you don’t leave literature judgment to pedestrians. Unfortunately in Nigeria, it has happened and it is still happening.
Worse of all, they have gone to the point of saying that people can vote to determine a good poet. How? What do they know about what people have done in the past?
Coming back to your question, what I have here is concrete poetry, but my own style of it. It is actually something new that I have never seen before. And how I came about it is because, you know I have been a fine artists, I can draw pictures. I have decided I have stopped drawing pictures because I could draw bigger, faster using words. Then, after learning the ropes of poetry, I began to ponder on how fine art could be merged with this newly found talent (poetry) to paint pictures with words. That is how this book came about.
Many Nigerian poets favour abstract metaphors but you seem to go for concrete. Why did you decide to go different?
It may interest you to know that I was a member of ‘Crazitivity’ back then before I was voted out under some circumstances. While I was there, there was one moderator who observed that my imageries were not concrete. I shared my elder brother’s poetry and he also condemned it, even though some people praised it. He condemned the imagery in it. He said: ‘how can you say ‘thigh of the shy’’?Now, he was limiting imagery because imagery is not just about metaphor and whatever. It is also about sound: there is a sound in the ‘thigh of the sky’, and it is as concrete as it can be.Also, there was a time UnomaAzuah and Kamar Hamza observed that I was using obscure imageries.
In fact I had a very stormy argument with Kamar concerning that andI took it up, because one thing about me is that I believe am still learning. When I reflected on my work over time, I discovered that they actually made some points. From my own experience, if you want to relate your readers’ experiences. For instance, when you write about salt, you can only appeal to a reader that has ever tasted salt. You may not be able to cut the throat of a reader that has never tasted salt. So, as much as the obscurity is part and parcel of the sublime, sometimes it is good to try and use concrete images that relates to the experiences of a reader. That was the reason why I decided to write this. I feel I have done something different, then it is left for the reader to decide what appeals to him or not.
As a critic now, what would be your opinion about this work? I mean the impact you want the book to make in the contemporary Nigerian society.
Possibly, I expect this book to contribute to culture. For example, if tomorrow I hear people talking about fish in the public parlance, it catches on and becomes part of the culture, I will be glad. But most importantly, I would like this book to be widely read. So that people would be able to form opinion about their existence like: are we being destroyed or are we destroying others? If we are, the please let’s take a reverse. The second arm of it is that lets us accord every life that exist the respect that it deserves. If we are not nurturing the fishes and birds, someday they would seize to exist. Please let’s look at ourselves and our environment.
Let’s talk about your book, Musdoki. Few years ago, daggers were drawn at you that you distorted history. What have you to say about this and before you wrote the book, did you have Adechie’s book, ‘Half Of A Yellow Su’, in mind?
I can’t remember when Adechie’s book was published but I think Musdoki was published before hers. And by the time I wrote Musdoki there was never ‘Half Of A Yellow Sun’. Even if it existed, which am sure it didn’t, I never had it in mind while writing the book. Judgment of literature has to be left to the initiates. If you leave it to ordinary people, you would be amazed at what they would do.Let me first of all make this clear: Musdoki is not a history. Look, the greatest sin that any reviewer could commit against a book of fiction is for him to brand it as a reality. I never set out to record a history.
I only gave it a little bit of me, which is normal in literature. So anybody that reads Musdoki and calls it a distortion of history, is not worthy to talk about any book of fiction, he is totally incapable. The points such reviewer made against the book are utterly jejune. I mean, why would a writer be blamed for the mistakes or inabilities of his characters? To me, when a character is bleached out of proportion, he or she often loses touch with reality.
That aside sir, you keep churning out poetry collections. When are we seeing other genres?
I have started writing a drama. I want to break a tradition of writing within an existing tradition. I always like to bring out something different and new. My ambition is to see how I can move literature forward through inventions. I am currently working on a drama which has little or no stage direction. It is the dialog that will tell you the situations on ground.
Is it performable on stage?
Actually yes! Shakespeare did it. To me, the best drama you would see has the least stage direction, because it is from the dialogue the drama supposed to emerge. People don’t know that the laziest drama one would read is the one with plenty stage directions. It inadvertently means that there is no drama in the dialogue. So, I have about four or five volumes of fiction that am working on – a collection of short stories and novels.I am also writing a sequel to Musdoki and it is called ‘Box of Rags’. You may call that autobiographical of me, if you like. I am trying to bring out something that some people may not have known before.I chronicle the stories of my life, my birthplace – Zaria and the religious crisis and tolerance in the midst of our divergent views about life and what have you. I believe that will be my next book to be published possibly by next year.
Finally sir, how do you juggle between writing and your legal practice, especially given the fact that each of them requires time and voracious reading?
Well, I believe I started very early as a writer. I remember even while in the classroom taking lectures for our LLB certificates, but I would be busy drawing or writing. They told me that that was unholy marriage; I should get rid of it. But it may interest you to know that I never reseat for any course all through my stay in the University. Do you know how I did it? I trusted the capacity of my brain and I allowed it to run wide. And once you trust it, it never fails.I am a very good listener, if I listen I hardly forget. Now, I have developed that working relationship betweenwriting and legal practice overtime so much so that they have become my first and second skills.
