Coordinator of the Fidelity Bank International Writing Workshop, Helon Habila, introduces a new anthology of stories from the programme, ‘Dreams at Dawn’:
I remember, many years back, when I must have still been at university, or had just graduated, a friend and I decided to go visit the famous literary critic, Professor Ben Obumselu. One of our lecturers was his former student and we must have got his address from the lecturer. We met Obumselu in his office, somewhere in Ikeja, I believe. There he was, alone in that office, a publishing company he had just started; and there we were, two fresh faced and eager students, waiting to be given the key to the kingdom of writing. He was very gracious; he asked us what we were working on. Poetry. We were all poets then. Prose we considered to be too easy, not artistic enough, unless it was Kafka or Henry James. He disagreed.
“Be accessible, be topical, be relevant. Most of the great writers you read today, like Dickens and Shakespeare, wrote about the pressing issues of their day. Some serialised their stories in the newspapers, that’s how topical they were. That way, they were relevant then, and they are relevant now,” he said – or something to that effect. I guess the point he was making is that what makes a work artistic is not its topicality or the lack of it, it is the treatment: language, form, imagery, plot – how they are deployed to appeal to the artistic sensibility of the reader. And if that is so, if an artist is free to choose his subject matter wherever he wants, isn’t it better to choose what is topical, what is immediately recognisable, and then go on to make it art?
He was also trying to tell us that human motivation and action, from where fiction draws its material, are constant. Times may change, but people will still love and cheat and aspire and fight and dissemble and be heroic and be greedy. Therefore, as long as the stories are truly about people and their actions and motivations, and as long as they are artistically told, they will never grow out of fashion. Stories acquire more power, more relevance, the more they move away from gilded places and never-never lands and inhabit the everyday, when they are about the ordinary man and woman, Everyman, in essence about us. For then the story becomes, not just about that particular moment for that particular character, it becomes a story about life itself: Everyman wants to do good, wants to be just, wants to be happy, but the tragedy is that everywhere he turns there is something to thwart that noble impulse. This is especially true in a society like ours, where choices can sometimes be so limited; where those who should be the people’s guardians, the elected officials, the law makers and enforcers, are totally indifferent, or have become the oppressor. We empathise with Everyman, for when he feels he feels deeply, when he hates he hates passionately, when he speaks he speaks in the idiom of the masses, and for the masses. We have come across him in Ben Okri’s Lagos short stories, and in Cyprian Ekwensi’s ‘Jagua Nana’, and in so many other stories by our authors.
What impressed us as editors (Tsitsi Dangarembga, Madeleine Thien and I) is the presence of that “ordinary” sensibility on every page of this collection. The writers have their finger firmly on the pulse of what goes on everyday in this country. They paint a picture of our country as it is lived today, as it can never be captured in history or news reports or government statistics. Or even in the novel – for the beauty of the short story is its ability to capture that fleeting moment, that “slice-of-life” moment, in a way that extended prose fiction can never do. It became our unspoken editorial purpose then to make sure that we preserved that unique voice in these stories; to make our editing as unobtrusive as possible, to retain the streets, the speech patterns, the freshness, and yes, even the naiveté (for naiveté in art is often better than sophistication, which can sometimes turn unconsciously into sophistry) of these stories.
There are stories here about students dying on our university campuses where they have gone in search of a chance for a better life; there are stories about lecturers who sadistically torment their students, threatening them with failing grades just because they can. There are stories about the darker sides of our culture and traditions: a mother-in-law bullying her son’s wife, checking her body as if she were merchandise on a shelf, to see if she is sturdy enough for childbearing. There is a story about hopeful graduates going to the nation’s capital for their share of the proverbial national cake, only to end up prey to corrupt road safety officials. There are stories set in the villages and in the cities of this country. They may not be faultless artistically, but they are heartfelt and sincere. On every page, in every story, one is reminded again and again how beautiful this country is, and how resilient and resourceful its people are.
A theme that recurs in many of the stories, including some that didn’t make the final list, is that of religious violence, in Jos especially. One of the stories in this collection, whose original title was ‘When Dreams Wilt at Dawn’, inspired the title of the overall collection. It is also about the Jos massacres, it is dark, it is sad, but it does end on a happy and hopeful note. Art is about interpretation, about point of view, about the way we see the world and ourselves. It is up to us whether we want to talk about dreams wilting, or dreams dawning.
Most of the writers here are young and previously unpublished, in fact for many of them, it is their first attempt at writing creatively, and it is clear that this will not be their last attempt. Like most Nigerians, they have a lot to say, and they are not afraid to say it – our work as editors was to make sure they said it artistically. My hope is that soon our universities will recognise this need for self-expression in our youth and begin to offer creative writing courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Art is cathartic. We are a nation of story tellers, all we need to do is to learn how to tell it well.
Helon Habila, author of ‘Oil on Water’, facilitated the 2011 Fidelity Bank International Writing Workshop alongside Jamal Mahjoub and Diana Evans.
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