Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo was in-house when Abuja Writers’ Forum (AWF) marked its third year anniversary in June. The award-winning author was the Guest Writer that time, and she led a group of other attendees who cut the anniversary cake on exactly the same weekend that the first edition of the Guest Writer Session took place in 2008.
And that on top of a literary evening that was both eventful and memorable. Participants said so. The Guest Writer herself did not hide her feelings when she expressed delight at been on ground to interact with audience at the Pen and Pages Bookstore venue of the monthly programme that has proved the most consistent in the country.
The event provided an opportunity for many to meet for the first time the author whose work they had read over the years and it was memorable because it was unusual in form and content on this occasion when Adimora-Ezeigbo came calling.
In her introductory remarks, she took her audience on a literary trip the way only a teacher could. Everyone had listened as she spoke as though in a classroom, breaking issues into chewable pieces, sharing experiences that were not only informative but encouraging to writers and would-be writers. Her listeners proved to be good students, good listeners, that time. It seemed everyone waited to be taught and by it gain insight into the art of the trade from the award-winning author.
In any case, she has always had a way with the younger generation, which made up a larger part of the attendees. In her word, “I relate well more with younger people. And I really enjoy being with people who are younger than me, which I think is a reason I have had a good time at the University of Lagos all these years.”
Adimora-Ezeigbo spoke about her experiences in writing, especially of manuscripts completed and never published, manuscripts that did not catch the interest of a publisher but caught that of another – both at home and abroad, a thing her listeners found fascinating. One of her earliest manuscripts remains unpublished till date, this author of thirty four books had told an audience that must have been stunned by that revelation. The manuscript gathered dust, turned brown on the shelf, but she would not bring it out over the years, “because I always want to move on, work on new things.”
Recently, someone took the abandoned manuscript to Europe after some four decades of lying around, and it has begun to generate interests among publishers. “Don’t throw away anything you ever write,” she counselled her enchanted audience. But she was also quick to observe the task, the demands and the means a writer needs in order to produce good manuscripts. She noted how it is important to have a stable job because there is no money in writing in this environment yet. “You can’t start out writing with your mind on making money.” And for anyone serious enough about writing, “when next you have a relation who asks what you want him or her to do for you, ask to be accommodated in a room in some quiet place for a couple of weeks where you can do some writing.” And she would go on to state to many who may have been searching for issues to write about that the nation has so much materials for fiction which have not been fully explored. Such are the Niger Delta issue, the Boko Haram, the military years, and the civil war, the last of which she wrote about in the Roses and Bullets.
In her words, her book; Roses and Bullets “is basically about two important characters, a young man and a young woman in a period of war. The war affected their love; it actually destroyed it. It is about their lives and their families. The girl is the most important character. The story widens to bring in the war experience and other characters who are affected by it. Roses and Bullets is a love story set before and after the war. I have read everything on the Nigerian civil war. Apart from witnessing it, I have been able to transmute ideas and facts into fiction.”
One of the things that stood out in what Adimora-Ezeigbo shared with writers at her reading is that there is no magic to writing. Know what it is that you want, and be determined to work at it, she had said, recalling names of writers, especially women, whose husband burnt their earliest manuscripts but who refused to give up and have become household names as authors. By the time she closed her introductory remarks and announced that she wanted to read from Roses and Bullets, her listeners were snapped out of a moment in which they were fed with words that filled more than food, word that were excerpts from a lifetime; and they had clapped in appreciation, too. Adimora-Ezeigbo read excerpts from this latest book of over five hundred pages, and which she had researched over the years, begun in 2003, finished in 2007, but had published in 2011. What she started in her introductory remarks she continued with when it was time for her audience to ask her questions.
The Guest Writer would note that her book, Roses and Bullets, is a product of many years of research. The thesis for her doctorate degree was on the Nigerian civil war, and her research made her to read about other civil wars around the world including the American civil war, any war at all, and this made it easy for her when she began to write Roses and Bullets.
She had also experienced the war first hand. She was a volunteer on the Biafran side in the course of the 1967-1970 war. “There was so much enthusiasm for the war, so everyone just volunteered.” She held a rank in her group of volunteers and they were given military training. She knew close-up what war meant, the deprivation, the agony, and the losses. Her relatives died; people she had seen in flesh and blood. They went to war one day. They didn’t return the day after. There was this look in Adimora-Ezeigbo’s face when she said all of that. It was the look of a woman who had seen many things, and her voice was soft as she said all of it, as she recounted bits and pieces of what she experienced.
First hand experiences of harsh realities of life such as wars have various effects on people. With a tone to her voice that resonated in the emotional issue that she described, Adimora-Ezeigbo gave the impression of one who was touched, though her will remains intact. She came across as a woman who, because of all that had passed around her, has a more sober view of life; she didn’t appear to be one who takes life so seriously, nor take herself so seriously, though she takes the things she does seriously. Her simplicity endeared her to many, really. And there was no trace of bitterness in her voice. She had these gestures that seemed to say, ‘what has happened has happened.’ And it was a moving that she went through much, but has emerged from it to become a repository of knowledge on the Nigerian civil war years, and now she has a book that tells what she witnessed, read in the work of the generals that fought, heard from her father, from her husband and some of his friends who had all fought in the war.
The federal government was instrumental to the course her life had taken, she admitted. That was because she and her sister secured a federal government scholarship in 1970-71 to study in the University. In an atmosphere where whatever her father had in Biafran currency became ordinary papers, that timely aid from the federal government is something she remains grateful for. “We were selected on merit, and for two girls from the same family to be selected was a great thing,” she pointed out.
And she got married while she was an undergraduate. “My parents felt I was too young, but I was convinced I had met the man I would want to live with.” They are married with three children today. “I always asked him: is there anything you miss, anything you need that I have failed to provide?” Adimora-Ezeigbo said when a question came about what the effects of her devotion to writing might have been on her husband and her children. “You can see that now I am in Abuja, and I am away from him,” she added, a way of pointing out the fact that there is always a price to pay for everything, but that she has an understanding husband, one who has encouraged her to do what she likes to do. But she discussed it with him when she wanted to take on the name Adimora-Ezeigbo. At the University of Lagos, she is known simply as Akachi Ezeigbo. She bears Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo because “my father encouraged me to write earlier on. He is dead, and because I want to immortalize his name, I discussed with my husband that I wanted my father’s name ‘Adimora’ to be part of my name as a writer.”
Adimora-Ezeigbo pointed out that writing fiction about the civil war has been on her mind since the war ended. Her fascination with the war had made her do a doctorate thesis titled, “Facts and Fictions of the Nigerian Civil War.” But she never really had time to work on her fictional version until she took time off, spent time away at a Fellowship programme, and that was when she was able to complete the book, Roses and Bullets. “With this, I think I can now safely lay the war issue to rest,” she said.
Courtesy: Tunji Ajibade
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