Emmanuel Iduma
In Conversation
This week we spoke to Emmanuel Iduma about his new book, his experimental approach to nonfiction, and the importance of finding form.
Interviewed by Nancy Adimora.
NA: I’m really interested in writer origin stories, but as a loyal subscriber to your newsletter, I know you also have a keen interest in photography. So to broaden the question slightly, could you tell us where your love for storytelling came from?
EI: That's an interesting question, because when I think back now, I realise that my experience was never connected to one form of storytelling. I grew up as the son of a clergyman, which meant that in my formative years, the stories of the Bible was certainly part of how I thought of my place in the world. When I was about six, the first thing I remember writing was a retelling of the story of Philip the Evangelist who was away carried by the Spirit in the Book of Acts. I vividly remember sitting down on the floor and trying to retell the story from memory. There might have been earlier attempts to write stories, but that’s the one that comes to mind as the most important attempt for me, because it was my first real imaginative endeavor and I wasn’t just copying out the text from the Bible. That’s the earliest thing I remember writing, but because my father also wrote books, I would watch him write too. I would watch him go into the church hall, where we're living at a time, and just stack books on this large table. He would sit down and research and write whatever he was working on at the time. This image of watching my father write throughout my adolescence and into my adulthood made me attuned to the possibility of producing literature.
I ended up going to law school in Nigeria, but before I was clear about what I wanted to do in terms of practicing law, I was clear that I would keep writing. When I eventually had to decide whether to practice law or find a way to make a writing life possible, I answered in favour of the latter because I felt that the practice of law would not give me room to be the kind of writer I wanted to be. I wanted to be a full-time writer, even though I didn't understand what that would mean financially.
Right after law school, I got involved with a group of photographers through an organisation called Invisible Borders. They were travelling by road from one part of the African continent to the other, and this is where my two worlds began to converge - the world of visual arts, and the world of literature. I had already become interested in photography, and when I was in my final year in university, I would go around with a camera I’d borrowed and just take snapshots of the school. Travelling with Invisible Borders was an education in seeing. When I now think about the work that I’m doing in trying to tell these kinds of stories, I'm no longer seeing the distinctions between the two forms, I'm really just thinking about overlaps and convergences.
NA: Overlaps and convergences, I love that. I think many people would probably associate your work with what we understand as travel writing. Have you always been drawn to this kind of nonfiction, or would you say it also came as a result of your experience with Invisible Borders?
EI: That's a very good question because it's important to clarify that in university, when Ayọ̀bámi and I met, all I was writing at that point was fiction. It was purely short stories and poetry. In 2012, I actually published a novel in Nigeria. It's a book called Farad, and it was my first publishing experience. So my initial ambition when I committed to being a writer was actually to write novels and poetry. That sort of changed when I had the experience of travelling across the continent, and I realised that there was an opportunity to tell these stories of being on the road.
Over the years I’ve avoided creating hierarchies between fiction and nonfiction. The work of writing I Am Still with You, for instance, is just as important as writing a novel, and I think most of my nonfiction work has certainly come out of the ambition to write fiction.
NA: That makes perfect sense. As a reader, my first love was fiction, but the older I get, the more I appreciate nonfiction. I particularly love memoir and personal essays because I think it's important for more of us to start seeing our lives as stories. I wish there was more experimental nonfiction from the continent, but I’m wondering whether you were drawn to this specific genre and style because you were inspired by others, or whether it was in response to feeling like there was a void that needed to be filled?
EI: I have to be a little careful in answering this question, but I think I’ll start by saying that I resist the notion that one comes out of nowhere. I’m the product of a lineage of thinking and writing from Nigerian and African literature. The only thing that might be different is my way of telling. As I said, the overlaps between fiction and nonfiction are becoming increasingly blurred for me, and this is something that I've thought about more recently because my trajectory is a bit unusual. When I was going to study for an MFA, I didn't go to study creative writing, I went to do an MFA in the New York School of Visual Arts, in what was then called Art Criticism. It was very specifically eclectic, in the kinds of things that we were doing. Essentially, the program was an attempt to think through the history of the image, which includes all forms of visual arts, but it also required us to reflect on what it means to be a critic in the world, or to be a writer who is writing criticism. So that education is what led me to write A Stranger’s Pose. It’s a book that interweaves text and photographs and some poetry, and it was pushing the boundaries of what travel writing could be.
But there’s also a host of writers on the African continent who have done some important work in nonfiction. I always talk about how important the work of Teju Cole is to me, in the ways in which he has engaged in photography and the ways he writes about life and cities and the human experience. It’s very trained and acutely attentive. I also think of Aminatta Forna’s memoir. There's a huge tradition of nonfiction writing on the African continent, and I am speaking specifically of nonfiction writing that goes beyond a collection of essays. I'm thinking about writers who paid attention to the form of the book that they were going to write, and were careful to raise the stakes in their imaginings of what those books could be.
NA: And now moving specifically to I Am Still with You, to put it simply, it’s a story about your journey to uncovering the mystery of your uncle who disappeared during the Biafran war. Like many Nigerians born after a certain time, my first real introduction to the war was through Half of a Yellow Sun. It’s crazy to think that fiction was my entry point into this part of our history but like many readers, I remember being haunted by the disappearance of Kainene. I couldn’t stop thinking about her and I wondered whether a similar feeling was what led you to delve into your uncle’s story?
EI: I did actually think about Kainene while I was writing this book. In Igbo, Kainene essentially means ‘let’s keep looking’ so this sense of loss is in-built into her name and I speak about this in the book. In my estimation, perhaps a third of Igbo families can speak of someone who didn’t return. And I really don’t think that's an exaggeration. I don't have hard data to prove it, but I think that for many people, the war not only resulted in loss in terms of deaths, but in terms of a certain kind of existentialism. There was this sense that they were not only losing lives, but also ways of being, and ways of being together. This was obviously compounded by the loss of people who simply disappeared.
When I look back at it, ‘haunting’ probably isn’t the word, but the absence of my uncle was sort of woven into my family's life, because they had experienced one tragedy after the other. By the time I was born, only one of my father's brothers was still alive. So by the time I started writing this book, I was dealing with this loss or this absence from an indirect perspective. And that became what was important to me, figuring out how to process a loss that I’d experienced secondhand.
Those who lived through the war have the experience, but it's the generation who was born after that can actually speak about it. The trauma is too heavy for those who experienced it.
NA: It's really interesting that you mention this because one of the first sentences I highlighted was the line where you said, “we are a generation that has to lift itself from the hushes and gaps of the history of the war.” — I felt that sentence in my spirit, but in order for you to tell these stories, there has to be a conversation between two generations. You have to start by asking questions. Hard questions. So how did you start the conversation, and what was your approach to breaking this tradition of silence?
EI: Initially, it almost felt impossible because right around the time that I had decided to write this book, my father became ill and passed on. He would have been the easiest person to speak to because he had always been interested in responding to questions about the past. Even if it were difficult for him, he would have agreed to speak about the war to help with my research. I now had to go around the absence of my father, and the way that I managed to do it was to write about his life instead. So what happens when my father’s life becomes some kind of placeholder for what I could have obtained from him – that was the question I asked myself. I then went on to think that, in grieving my father, I might understand how my father grieved his brother. So that was my approach on the one hand.
On the other hand, my approach was to actually visit the places where the war had been fought. By going to those places I felt that I was confronting, or outpacing, the distance that existed between myself and these landscapes and these histories. That’s obviously a more subliminal or psycho-geographical approach. I also wanted to be as direct as possible so I spoke to my relatives who were old enough to remember what happened during the war. That strategy worked. Even if they didn't necessarily have all the details about my uncle, they were at least open to listening to my questions.
NA: I love that, and it kind of brings me on to the next question, which is more about your decision to write the book in the way you did. You oscillate between your personal story and certain historical facts that you might expect to read in a textbook. Why did you choose to merge these two approaches in this way?
EI: I think the historical is invariably personal.
NA: Hmmm.
EI: So the epigraph of the book was very important for me, it says “the past does not change, nor our need for it. What must change is the way of telling” and so I had to figure out my way of telling and the strategy in which I could enter into this history. The history of the war always seemed very impersonal and opaque to me until I remember that my uncle didn’t return, and he was the person I was named after. I’m also interested in the fact that many people in my generation do not know the facts of the war, so I couldn't shake the need to reproduce some of the facts that are agreed upon. But the question then becomes, how do I reflect or even inflect on those facts? And that's where the personal story comes in. The way I see it, we are all stories, as you said earlier, our lives are stories. They are stories within stories within stories within more stories. And I began to imagine my life and my family's story as a tributary that flows into a sea of stories.
I don’t think that I would write the story of my family if I couldn’t reckon with something broader, both historically and politically. For me, this book was a way to propose that when we're thinking about our individual stories, we can't think in pockets of events, we have to figure out a way to broaden the scope of our thinking about our lives, in order for the lives of others to enter ours.
NA: That’s a beautiful answer. I’m also interested to know how you decide what to work. So, with this book, how much of it was purely a reflection of your interests, and to what extent did it feel like sense of duty?
EI: That's a great question because I'm asking myself the same thing. When a book is released into the world and people start reading it, that’s when writers have to figure out what’s next and start working on the next thing. So this is exactly the question I’m asking myself now, what's the right balance of duty? Or I’d amend that slightly to, what's the right balance of the sense of emergency that one feels? This book was a story that I feel like I had been in some way thinking through for at least five years before I started writing or even knew what form the story would take. So my initial attempt was to write fiction about a person who was trying to find where his father was buried. But when I was thinking about it, I realised that I was thinking about my uncle and I was trying to look for my uncle through this fictional character I was creating. And so that's the moment where I felt like it couldn’t be fiction, and needed to be nonfiction.
NA: Just to double down on that question, how do you know when an idea is worth pursuing? Do you feel a sort of spiritual pull towards certain stories? And at what point do you commit to focusing on telling that particular story?
EI: For me, the pull towards this story was definitely my father's death; it was the sense that I had to recover something of his life. Once he passed on, I realised that there was so much I didn't know about my family, but in writing this book, I realised that it wasn’t necessary to know everything. I mean, how much can we really know about the past? How far back can you go to know about your family? And so the question was then to see what could be made of that which I did know.
To answer your question more directly, and to use that word I used earlier, there is suddenly a feeling of emergency that compels one to know what work needs to be done. Especially once you've worked on a few books, the question is not simply about how difficult the writing will be, that's a given. At this point, you’re asking yourself how your story adds to literature. Also, in my case, I often think about what am I doing in my work that enriches traditions of Nigerian literature, or African literature. And so when I begin to think about those things, in all the multifaceted ways, I begin to get a clearer sense of direction.
NA: And to move to a more technical question. What does your writing process look like?
EI: In most cases there is a distinction between writing fiction and nonfiction, in that you can sell nonfiction to a publisher without completing the book.
NA: The joys of nonfiction!
EI: That's definitely one of the joys of it, but it also comes with its own challenge because I'm a writer who is committed to traditions of literary fiction, poetry, and storytelling that doesn't necessarily fit into the neat categories of the memoir or the travelogue. I'm also working within criticism, so I had a lot to juggle. And so the first thing that I did was to actually have an experience. And I think that's important to restate. I went on a journey and spent about a month of traveling within the southeastern part of Nigeria, talking to people, visiting monuments, and approaching it like a travel writer. In those days of traveling, every night or the following morning, I would keep a log of every single thing that happened. I would write everything I could remember and from these notes, came the first draft. The first draft was designed as a travelogue in that I essentially structured it around all the places that I travelled to. It was one chapter per place, and this didn't work for obvious reasons because this wasn’t a linear story, and we don’t get to the point where I discover where my uncle died. Not to spoil it for you, but there was no way I could have known that in retrospect. I started this book thinking I could find out what happened to my uncle, but how do you do that when there are little to no records of all the soldiers who fought in Biafra, especially because Biafra lost the war. These were things that I discovered in the process of traveling and researching, so part of the narrative of the book had to be shaped from these gaps and retellings of history.
Of course, I then had to incorporate historical research, so the writing process felt like weaving. Draft after draft, and with the help of my editors, I had to get to the place where things were woven a little bit more intricately.
NA: Can you tell us the significance of the title? There doesn’t have to be a big story behind it, but something tells me that there might be?
EI: There's no big story - in fact, the title came before the book. I had the title since around 2015. It’s a verse from Psalm 139, when I awake, I am still with you, and I kept thinking that I needed to find a story that worked with this title. I can say that the significance, and why it's perfect for the book, is the preposition of ‘with’. So what does it mean to be with? What does it mean to remain alongside the dead and the unborn? Someone, I think it was John Berger, said “the living, the dead, and the unborn stand shoulder to shoulder.” And so being ‘with’ is the key notion that made me feel like this was the title for this book. And of course, what I'm trying to propose is the simultaneous way in which the past and the present are combined, in that we are always in conversation with those who have gone ahead.
NA: Wow, I’m going to have to go away and think about that one. But before I do, could you leave us with one piece of advice to aspiring authors?
EI: I would say that they should find form. That sounds very brief, but I think that’s it. The story of my writing has been a story about finding form; it’s been about the attempt to keep looking for the form that makes the story possible.
Born in Nigeria in 1989, Emmanuel Iduma studied law at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and received his MFA in art criticism and writing from the School of Visual Arts, New York, USA. He is the author of the travelogue A Stranger’s Pose (2018), which was longlisted for the 2019 Ondaatje Prize. His nonfiction and criticism have appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Granta, n+1, the New York Review of Books, the Yale Review, and other publications. In 2022, Iduma was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction. He is married to the writer Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀.
You can read an exclusive excerpt of I Am Still with You here, and you can subscribe to his newsletter here.
