I started writing because I wasn’t eloquent - Zainab Alkali

updated: Tuesday 24-06-2008

Professor AlkaliProfessor (Mrs.) Zainab Alkali, foremost Northern Nigeria female writer and current deputy vice chancellor (Administration), Nasarawa State University, Keffi, is the author of several creative works which include The Stillborn, The Virtuous Woman, Cobweb and Other Stories, The Descendants and The Initiates. Alkali started creative writing in 1980 as an undergraduate student at the Bayero University, Kano (BUK), but it was not with the intention of getting published: “By nature, I was a very quiet person and I had problems with oral communication. Later, I discovered that writing is another formidable way of communicating with people and I employed it as a way of expressing myself since I was not so eloquent when it comes to talking,” the literary Amazon explains. She speaks further about her literary career in this illuminating chat with Akintayo Abodunrin.

How The Stillborn was conceived
IT was by sheer accident that The Stillborn came to light. At BUK, we had this gentleman, Professor Stewart Brown, who was the Head of the Department of English where I was working. He started a journal called Kakaki and was asking for articles and creative writings for the journal. I happened to have written about four chapters of the novel then but I was keeping the papers when it occurred to me that I could show Professor Brown what I had written. However, I had no idea it was going to make any wave because I felt it was just some papers.

He took a look at the four chapters and when he got back to England, he read the four chapters over the weekend on the BBC. I was taken by surprise because people kept on calling me on phone, telling me that did I write a book or something of that nature? I said I remember giving some writings to Kakaki, not knowing that Professor Brown had published the four chapters and was reviewing the stories. Then out of the blues, a freelancer for the Longman Publishing Company came to Maiduguri to ask me to complete the book I had started; that Longman would love to publish it. By the time the freelancer came, I had moved to the University of Maiduguri, which was in 1982. So, I finished the book and handed it over to Longman, UK, who published it. My first book thus came like an accident and I’ve always seen it as the baby that opened the world for me.

What influenced your decision to go into writing?
The Stillborn encouraged me to keep on writing. Perhaps if The Stillborn had not succeeded as a novel, I would have forgotten all about writing because I did not write with the intention of publishing. The success of The Stillborn encouraged me to start writing because immediately after the publication of The Stillborn, I started The Virtuous Woman. As you know, The Stillborn was released in 1984 and it won the ANA Prize. I then immediately started writing The Virtuous Woman which was published by Longman, Nigeria, in 1987.

Women, motherhood and the role of women generally in the society have been the focus of your works. Do you feel marginalised as a female writer? And you also celebrate women in your works...
I do not feel marginalized as a writer. Of course, I should celebrate women. I’m a woman. But that is not to say that my focus is on just women alone. If you have read The Initiates you would have seen that the major characters are men. I do not feel marginalised as a writer. I’ve never felt inferior to men writers. So, it will be wrong for me to say that I feel marginalised because I really don’t. After all, how many of us women write in English? There are quite a lot of women writing in Hausa and I don’t know how they feel among their male colleagues. But those of us writing in English, we are not many and I don’t have the mindset of being a woman when I’m with male writers. I always think of myself as a writer.

In the North, like I said, there are few women writing in English but a lot are writing in Hausa and also, I do not know the challenges women writing in Hausa are facing but I know as a woman writing in English, one of the few; I really don’t feel anything. By marginalisation, if you mean I’m not being celebrated, I’ll tell you that with The Stillborn, I was over celebrated. It reached an extent that some of the critics over here went as far as saying it was because I was almost the only woman writing in the North, that my work did not deserve to be celebrated the way that it was being celebrated; that the celebration was because I was a kind of pioneer writer. Also, I want to add that I really got celebrated way down in the South, especially with my first few books. Now, I’ve written some new books but I’m not seeing the ripples. I don’t know why or what the reason is; maybe the books have not gotten around, I don’t know. But probably I should wait for a year or two and perhaps I’ll have a feedback. The reason why I’m saying this is that with The Stillborn, it was instant, but the subsequent books, people are not really being interested as they were in the first book.

How easy do you find writing?
Writing is my way of relaxing. I’m a very busy person; I started writing when I was raising children. I was a student when I got married so as I was raising children; I was reading for my first degree and I was writing. When I graduated, I took up the Masters’ degree part time. I discovered that the only way I could relax was to write. Whenever I was bogged down by a lot of work, when I wanted to rest, I’ll go and write. That’s the way I get my relaxation, through writing because as a writer I go into a world of my own. I close the door, get pen and paper and I pour myself on paper. I don’t even have a social life; I’m rarely seen at festivals or parties because that’s the only time I have. The time that I probably should have gone to parties, I use to write.

How do you then get inspired to write since you say you are not a social person?
I’ve always said that writing comes to me naturally and we all know as artists… I’m one of those who believe that artists are born. I’m a descendant of artistes. My maternal grandfather and maternal grandmother were both artistes. My grandmother on my mother’s side was a dancer and my grandfather was a dramatist and singer. My grandmother, also, was a singer. I’ve always related how they, I was told, got married at the arena because my grandmother was a singer and dancer, and my grandfather was a dramatist. These things, I believe run in the blood because when you have artistes in the family, you are likely to have... Maybe if I were born a generation or two ago when education was not established in the North, I may have ended up as a story teller. It’s possible because I have nephews that are singer. I see my writing as something that I’ve inherited because ever since I was a kid, I used to listen to my grandmother tell stories. And after she was done with her story telling, she would ask us young ones to retell the stories and I used to excel because I have this knack of adding salt and pepper, that even the rest of the siblings will be accusing me of lying.

I was good at that. And the minute I got to primary and secondary school, whenever we were given compositions, I used to get A. So, when I got to the university, I specialised in Literature. I realised that my strongest point then was literature. I would read James Ngugi or Chinua Achebe and I would tell myself that if I try it, I may be able to write something like this. Well, we can say that is an inspiration. Reading those writers was a way of telling me that if I were really serious, I could sit down and write something like that.

A Nigerian critic has said that most of the women writers started by telling their own stories. Are we to consider The Stillborn a reconstruction of your story?
No. All I can tell you is that the way I see it, in all writing, you can discover a little bit of the author. The Stillborn is not an autobiography. There are some experiences which I may have incorporated into the writing. They could be my own experience or a neighbour’s experience or some other peoples experiences but we always say that whatever a writer writes is grown from experience, part of which could be the writer’s own experiences or that of people that are close to the writer. Of course, some of the physical setting in The Stillborn; if a person coming from my environment should read The Stillborn, that person could recognise that this is a place that is familiar to him. Some members of my family said you wrote this, this sounds like some things I did when we were growing up. So, you see, when you write, you derive from your environment, your experiences and you put them together.

In your Cobweb and other Stories, there is a striking story, "House of Dust", where it was discovered after the man’s death, that he had a dual family; one in the city and another in the village. Is there a story behind that story or is it just fiction and is it predominant in northern Nigeria?
It’s not just a fictional work, it’s happening in fact. And this is happening not just in a certain part of the country, it’s happening all over the country. I listen to women, there are cases like that whereby a man suddenly loses his life, the family is in mourning, another family surfaces. Maybe a woman coming up with some children claiming that the man that died is also her husband. We hear these stories all the time and I thought it is worth putting into writing. It’s very hard to just cook up such a story. Honestly, it is really happening in life because as you know, even though we call our work fiction, fiction is actually a reflection of what is happening in the society and the reason why we bring out such a happenings in the society is to highlight such problem so that the society can learn. These are issues that are not spoken about in public for reasons of family integrity but they can be written about. I don’t sit down and concoct a fiction but I use the happenings in life as a reflection of what is happening in the society. That is not to say that my stories are real incidents but they are stories that happen. When I create a story, I try to mirror the society.

Using museums to bring positive change

By Olamide Balogun

Adetokunbo Kayode, Minister of
Tourism, Culture and National
OrientationThe 18th of May, observed globally as the International Museum Day to celebrate the contributions of museums to the advancement and propagation of universal heritage, was marked with a lecture at the National Museum of Unity, Ibadan. The celebration held at the Aleshinloye premises of the museum which is the largest museum complex in the country with four big exhibition galleries, a research library, storage facilities for artifacts, a craft centre, a museum kitchen and tree bank for planting indigenous extinct trees was tagged “Museum as an agent of social change and development.”

Curator of the museum, Pastor Yemi Opaleye, in his address at the occasion traced the origin of the museum which was established in 1976. He revealed that the idea of building the Museum of Unity was mooted by General Yakubu Gowon (Rtd) who, after the civil war, felt that Nigeria’s artifacts could serve as a unifying factor between the different ethnic groups in the country. The Ibadan Museum, Opaleye added, was a tourist center par excellence. Speaking on the theme of the celebration, Opaleye said it was aimed at enabling the world to view museum as an institution that brings social change to curb social ills and crimes in the society and to empower people in order to bring development.

The curator said museums were well equipped to reconcile people with their roots in order to effect positive social change and development. The museum, he stressed, has thus become an agent of fostering understanding and peaceful co-existence among Nigerians. “This, no doubt, will help to discourage ethnic polarism, suspicion, rivalry and opposition, which have constituted one of the banes of social, economic and political advancement,” Opaleye added. In a lecture delivered at the occasion, Pastor (Mrs.) Ayotunde Oyetunde of Nation’s Light Ministries, highlighted the roles of museums in bringing change and development. She said museums have transformed in developed parts of the world from mere repositories of artifacts to specialized museums. She said it is now possible to get war museum, ecology museum, science museum, maritime museum and even insect museum.

She equally highlighted the benefits of museums to a heterogeneous society like Nigeria. Oyetunde said that apart from allowing people learn from the past, museums also enable people learn tolerance. “When we know more about other people’s lives, habits and ways, we appreciate them and we are able to see that there are so many more things that can unite us than divide us,” Oyetunde said. That’s not all. Oyetunde advised Nigerian museums to strategically position themselves to become agents of change and serve as a center of learning. She equally urged the museum to advertise and promote itself so that the public can use its facilities. Pastor Ayotunde then left the museum’s staff with a challenge: “start the change, start from within”.

In an address at the event, Chief Mabinuori Adegboyega, Aare Latosa of Ibadanland advised youths to stop aping foreign cultures and stop speaking foreign languages to the detriment of indigenous languages. Adegboyega stressed the importance of preserving history and urged Nigerians to emulate corporate organizations that have been doing so through various social initiatives.