Why I Wrote ‘Burma Boy’ —Bandele

A: Basically, what happened was that before I was 10, probably when I was about six or seven years old, my dad took me to the local library in Kafanchan, where I was born. And I fell in love with books. I started reading books. Shortly after that, I started writing stories, but imitated the writers that I liked. And I decided very irrationally that I was going to be a writer. And by the time I was 15 I had my first short story published. I mean, I was pragmatic, very realistic. I knew that I might not be able to make it as a writer, so I had contingency plans. I was going to be a journalist. And I did practise that briefly when I went to the United Kingdom later.

But essentially, I decided at a young age that I wanted to be a writer and things fell into place. And I have been writing professionally for over 20 years, which is really weird.

Q: When you were at Ife you won an international playwriting competition with The Rain. What impact did that have on your writing career?

A: It was a U.K-based competition. The results were announced on the BBC World Service. But actually, winning that competition had a big effect on my career. It was called The International Students Plays Competition.

As a result of winning that competition I was invited to the UK and when I left the country to go to the UK I had the manuscript of the first novel which I had written. And people like Kole Omotoso, who was one of my lecturers, would attest to that. Virtually on my first day at Ife I walked up to him and I gave him a copy of the manuscript. As a result of which he became a mentor. I used to go to his house at the staff quarters. His late wife Aunty Margaret was like a mother to me and to quite a few other people who were mentored by Kole Omotoso. His children, who were very tiny kids at the time, were like brothers and sisters to me. They’re all grown up now and I actually attended the wedding of Akin, the oldest of them. He got married in London.

I went to the UK with the manuscript of my first novel and in less than a month of arriving there I had a publisher for it in the UK, in Germany, in Italy and in France.

And I also got a job with a weekly newspaper called Home News. And they made me Arts Editor, though I had very little experience. But I learnt very quickly on the job. And I worked there for about a year and left. I decided to just pursue my career as a writer. It wasn’t easy but I stuck to it. That’s what I do for a living. I write or I direct. But, you know, everything I do is connected to creative writing.

Q: Your novels teem with protagonists who are dysfunctional. For instance Maude in The Man Who Came From the Back of Beyond, Rayo in the Sympathetic Undertakers and Ali Banana in your latest novel, Burma Boy. Why make use of dysfuctionality as a motif?

A: Again, it’s not something that was conscious. I have been trying to understand that myself because, for instance, I don’t have a history of insanity, I haven’t been hospitalised. But there are two things. I was born during the civil war. And when I was growing up in Kafanchan it was very common to see mad men, some of whom had been combatants in the Biafra War. You’d see them completely naked, their hair completely matted, just walking around. And there were amputees, there were women who had lost their husbands during the war; who were now working as prostitutes. And these were women that were all over the place.

I stayed with my grandmother very briefly in the very early 70’s and one of the houses that she owned was rented by this guy who ran it as a brothel. And my grandmother was in her 90s but still very active. But I would kind of leave home and go play with the children of these prostitutes. And there was a lot of weird energy in retrospect, a lot of things which now would seem abnormal were probably normal, like, you know, the mad men would sometimes seem to have moments of complete lucidity. But there were people who I don’t think were mad so much as people suffering from post-traumatic stress.

I also happen to be the son of a man who was a soldier who fought in Burma in 1994, came back to Nigeria in a straitjacket in 1945 and was dysfunctional. He wasn’t mad but he was like pretty sane, but you know, quite dysfunctional. Maybe that is why that kind of dysfunctionality has featured in my books.

Q: As a Nigerian writer living it the UK, what are the challenges you face?

A: The first one is the weather, which is not meant for human beings. And the second and the toughest is if you are not careful you end up continually, time and again, having to explain your humanity. You are not quite often assessed or judged by a jury of your peers, you are not judged by people who believe purely instinctively in a shared humanity with you. You have to always go through a test, you know. Is this person with us or against us? And it is very subtle. And if you internalise it, it could be debilitating. It could affect you in a number of ways. And one thing I try very much is I take it as a given that I am as human as the next person and I don’t need to explain my humanity to people again and again. I wrote a novel called The Street in which I didn’t describe characters as black or white. I just assumed that any intelligent person reading it would be able to tell the difference because there are kinds of codes that we always share. And I was told years after it was published by a white friend of mine that some people have been baffled because I didn’t describe the characters as black or white. Of course, you know, when you read novels by white writers, quite often the only time race is mentioned is if the character is black. When the character is white they don’t mention the race. It is actually a deep entrenched form of racism. So the whiteness becomes the standard by which everything else is judged, by which perfection is judged. And I subscribe to humanism. I don’t actually believe in deracination, the idea of people being undifferentiated. I believe that of course we are all different and unique and we all bring different stories to the mix. But I believe that it is possible sometimes to actually find what we have in common. It is possible to actually accentuate that over what divides us, what makes us different from each other. So in the UK there are the saints. On the other hand it is also a very secular culture and I like that. It drives me crazy in Nigeria where you go everywhere and there are churches and mosques, not even any of our traditional religions. If you talk about our traditional religions, people look at you as being crazy, which is quite interesting. There was that survey that was done a few years back which placed Nigeria at the very top of the very religious countries in the world. Which is quite a paradox because I assume that people who are religious are by definition righteous, trustworthy people, which we are. But we also live in a country that is rife with corruption. How do you work out that? I think, you know, the thing with religious societies is that people treat God with a lot of respect and each other with absolute none. And I think God is a great being but the world would be a better place if we actually give some of the respect we give to God to each other. God would really be happy with us, I think.

Q: What is the relationship between you and Professor Kole Omotoso?

A: He was a teacher, he was a Professor in drama. He actually didn’t directly teach me formally at Ife. But he was a professor in the department. He is more of a mentor who quite a few of us would go to his house on campus and his wife was like a mother to us. And every week he would give me two novels and say you must read this. And I would read then, we would discuss the books. Week after, I would get hold of another two books. And he was wonderful that way.

Q: When your first novel, The Man Who Came From the Back of Beyond came out, I remember Kole Omotoso saying it is a marvelous realist novel. And till date many critics believe that it is marvelous realism. But now critics are already saying Burma Boy is a surrealist novel. Where does marvelous or magical realism stop in your novels and surrealism begin?

A: I don’t know. I did electives in literature when I was at Ife and I got a few definitions of what magical realism was. I don’t actually consider myself to be a magical realist writer. Magical realism for me is what you get in Amos Tutuola, in Fagunwa, in Ben Okri, in Marquez and in Rushdie. I don’t do that. For me, what I occasionally do in my work is a kind of heightening of reality. You collapse reality. It’s like a state of mind.

Q: Then can we say it is surrealism?

A: What you get in my work which sometimes people mistake for magical realism is an attempt to capture the state of mind of a character. For instance, a character is having a fever. I have had malaria. And when you have malaria you are in and out of yourself all the time. You might be aware for five seconds and your body is in so much pain it feels like five days. You might shut your eyes and open them five days later and it seems that you only shut them for one second. And that is the reality that you are in at that moment. Or you might be inebriated, you might just be drunk and while you are drunk you decide you are floating from Ikoyi to Ikeja. People do that. So I don’t do magical realism. I try to get under the skin of my characters. And in getting under the skin I try to get to their minds. And strange things sometimes happen in people’s minds. There is a scene in Burma Boy where the protagonist, Ali Banana, as a 14-year-old kid, witnesses the death of two of his friends and they are engaged with the enemies, the Japanese, and these two kids, who are a bit older than him, just died. He’s never in his entire life witnessed a death before. And it’s completely surreal. And I have been there. The first time I saw someone die it was completely bizarre.

Ali Banana looks at them and he starts having this conversation with them in his head. He refuses to believe that they are dead. So he’s kind of talking to them, you know. It’s like a few seconds. He once talked to them physically and he continues the conversation. And in the novel the reader is told, shown this guy is dying and in the next passage, shown these two dead guys having a very normal conversation with Ali Banana. And the chapter ends there. Now someone will call that magical realism. To me it is not. It is just me the writer getting into the mind of his character.

Q: When you set out to be a writer what did you really want to achieve? Was it fame or to be a catalyst for change in society?

A: I think, you will find out that most artistes, most writers, go into the arts to become writers or musicians or painters actually because of a desire for both, whether or not that desire is conscious. When I was seven or eight I decided I wanted to write. And when I probably started writing I think it was a desire for fame. But in a very specific sense I think I just wanted admiration from my dad, my brothers and my friends. And I got it, and later at school I was a kid who wrote stories and sometimes was made to read the stories before the class. And then sometimes you wanted to change, not change the world so much as bringing a new take on things. So Burma Boy was a book that I wrote because I knew that at least 120,000 West Africans, most of them Nigerians, fought in Burma. And not a single work of creative fictional narration about them. And it is just pretty weird because Burma and the Second World War have been the most documented, the most written about of wars in history. But there wasn’t a single book about these West Africans. In that sense I wanted to change that perception. And I am glad to say that after many years I put into publishing this kind of book, that I have achieved it. The book is being published in about 12 languages right now all over the world. And everywhere I went in Nigeria, I actually met with very warm reception from people who had read the book. That’s great, you know. That’s fantastic.

Q: At the end of the The Man who Came in from the Back of Beyond, Lakemfa kind of turned a new leaf. Are you in a way trying to say that the writer has a self-appointed task to reform society?

A: I wrote that book when I was 17. I think that is one function of a Soyinka kind of writer. Chinua Achebe, for instance, has described himself in an interview as a didactic writer. He says I am a teacher. And he has had the most successful career of any African novelist. There are other writers who see themselves as entertainers. I see myself as a witness, not a teacher, not necessarily an entertainer. Although I like to entertain as well.

Q: What you are saying now has something to do with the reader response theory which says that any work or art is open to the reader’s interpretation ….

A: Well, that is true. That is what always happens. The reader will see a reflection of themselves in whatever he or she is reading or seeing. There is a story about an actor who went on an audition for a very small part in a play by Chekhov. I have forgotten what character. But it is like the character who was on a stage for about 10 seconds without even having a single line. And this character is a doctor. He got the part and, shortly afterwards, he ran into a friend on the street. And the friend asked, so what you are doing right now? He said oh! I am appearing in this play by Chekhov. And the person said, and so what is the play about. He said it is about a doctor. But it is completely legitimate. That is his own reality. And we do that. All human beings do that.

Q: Your plays have been staged in the Royal Court Theatre. For a Nigerian writer in the UK that is no mean feat. How did you break through to the Royal Court Theatre?

A: Again in retrospect, having lived in the UK as long as I have, I realised actually that it is very difficult to break through to those places. But when I went there I didn’t know that. I just felt that everything was possible. It was really a state of mind. I never take no for an answer. I just pick up a phone, call a few places. I got into Royal Court by sending a copy of The Man Who Came In From The Back Of Beyond to the artistic director, which is a pretty weird and illogical thing to do. If you are trying to get a job in the theatre you send a novel. But it didn’t occur to me at the time. I did and he read it and he liked it. I went in for a meeting and he said, we love for you to write a play. That is how it happened.

Q: What are your influences in your writing?

A: That is a question I find really hard to answer because there are thousands of them, from very obvious ones when I was growing up, you know. There are the Soyinkas, the Achebes, the Okigbos, the Clarks. Ayi Kwei Armah was what I really liked, Faulkner, some Hemingway. Hemingway I actually really liked. But I am not into his kind of macho: bull fighting. I like those books but not the personalities he created. I think Death In the Afternoon, which is about bull fighting, is one of his masterpieces. People like James Baldwin. I am not a big fan of his novels at all, but I think his essays are amazing. Dickens, Shakespeare, a hell of a lot of writers. Every time I get asked that question, I give at least two names and then after the interview, I remember 30 other names.

But I got to a point in my career where my influences were literally not the novels I read. What tends to influence me more tends to be something that I see on public transport, someone saying something, something happening. That has a lot more.