Interview with O-Jeremiah Agbaakin: On His Premier Collection No. 18

Image of young Nigerian man in sweater

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin, a Nigerian poet, recently published his poem chapbook The Sign of the Ram in the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Box Set series, Tisa, — an African Poet Fund (APFB) project set up for “poets who have not yet published their first full-length book of poetry.” Agbaakin, alongside ten other poets, features in the 2023 limited-edition box set. You can purchase The Sign of the Ram here.

In early days of writing poetry as a law student at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Agbaakin had not initially considered himself a ‘poet,’ even when he found his works in the pages of blooming literary platforms springing up here and there. Thinking about his journey of what he considers “self-confidence,” he’s thankful to have been nourished by the kind and warm support of friends and family. When he set out with publishing his poems first on social media like every other writer of his time, he had his “impressionable” non-writer friends and family believing he’s “the next Wole Soyinka and that the Nobel prize is finally coming home,” an endeavor that labors under the burden of great expectations.  

When I first stumbled upon his poems published in the “World Rhyme and Rhythm–an  anthology through their Briggite Poirson Poetry in 2016,” I was immediately smitten by his keen eye for detail and profound understanding of theology, human relationships, and behavior, and they weave together with such empathy and insight that make his poems feel destined, imbued with an almost prophetic quality. From “Isaac’s confession,” “Tenebrae,” “A thesis on language,” the speakers in Agbaakin’s poem are often on quests for self-discovery, not through outward ambition but through a deep desire to understand their social standing. They yearn to understand their place in the world, engaging in a constant dialogue with society and its reflections.   

His poems are published in The Tems Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, EPOCH magazine, Guernica, Kenyon Review, POETRY Magazine, Harvard University’s TRANSITION magazine, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, and “places where my favorite poets at the time have been published.” Agbaakin is currently pursuing a PhD in English with Creative Writing concentration at the University of Georgia.  

I recently talked to Agbaakin over the email about his new chapbook, the story behind his poetry, and how he knew writing was the one after a string of trials with his lawyerly dream. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin (Interview Respondent) in front of a blue wall

Photo credit: O-Jeremiah Agbaakin 

This interview was conducted over email by MAR Assistant Editor Aishat Babatunde.   

Interviewer

Congratulations on your first published collection! How do you find the experience? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

Thank you, Aishat. The experience has been cathartic for two reasons. One: it was a kind of release from some anger about a familial crisis which coincided with the period I was becoming more aware of my artistic vision. Two: it was a dream come true. I will focus on the second reason right away. I would say the feeling of both excitement and catharsis is no longer as familiar, like a vivid dream fades away upon full waking. When Siwar Masannat, the managing editor, reached out in January 2022 that Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes had selected the chapbook for publication, I couldn’t believe it. I’ve always wanted to be a part of the African Poetry Book Fund family. I had read many of the chapbooks from the series such as Warsan Shire’s Our Fathers do not belong to us, Gbenga Adesina’s Painter of Water, Ejiofor Ugwu’s The Book of God, Leila Chatti’s Ebb (among others); and even the full-length poetry collections like Clifton Gachagua’s Cartographer of Water. APBF has been and is doing a vital project of publishing, archiving, and promoting contemporary African poetry. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that, right? Thanks to the generosity of previous authors under the series, I was nominated to submit a short manuscript sometime in 2018. I had no quality body of poems I was working on at the time. They rejected the manuscript. I think it was a karma for submitting such a mediocre work that they didn’t nominate me the following year! It was the year I wrote “Good Friday” , the poem which I think is very important (unknown to me at the time) to The Sign of the Ram. I emailed APBF to ask if they had nominated me but their email didn’t reach me (haha) but seriously my submission/contact email address had been deactivated by the University of Ibadan. They said they had not nominated me! The following year, they nominated me. I submitted; they rejected it! They asked me if I was interested in being nominated the following year. I said yes and submitted and they accepted it! I’m saying all these to express my gratitude to Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the trust and support they gave the tiny book. I don’t want to take my blessings for granted.  They helped promote the chapbook boxset extensively with readings at the Africa Center in NYC and a virtual reading with Woodland Pattern book center. It is not often in the literary industry that publishers organize that level of publicity for a chapbook. Today, I don’t feel that way (elation) about the chapbook anymore. I feel like the speaker in The Sign of the Ram is now alien to me. It is a 2018 version of the speaker in my current poems; which means sometimes I am embarrassed by his audacity and vulnerability despite the mask of the persona of Isaac that I used! I am focusing whatever energies on my first full length poetry collection. One wonders what and how a future version of the speaker is going to look at the current speaker in my poems!  

Interviewer

How has your experience in the US influenced your writing, if at all? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin

This is an important question, one that I have mooted a response to so many times informally and formally. It’s also a tricky question because it assumes that the place (one moves to) automatically influences the art that’s produced; and therefore, if a Nigerian writer were to leave and start living outside of the country, their writing ceases to be Nigerian. While these assumptions are valid, it reduces influence to a cannibalistic process where the artist consumes everything in his immediate environment and the environment consumes the artist, spits out the artistic vomit to something alien or at worst, amorphous, all to the chagrin of the fundamentalist bemoaning the loss of an authentic native (substitute for Nigerian/African) writing. There has been much thought-provoking critical writing against the death of Nigerian literature. To their hubris, they believe their jeremiad is original; but its’ not. As long as people will not stop migrating (regardless of the motives), the discourse surrounding the authenticity of native art will not cease. All this to say this didn’t start today. Pius Adesanmi wrote about this issue in 2005, almost the same time the idea/movement of Afropolitanism was taking roots in African literature. It’s a deja vu for those that know history. Interestingly, this is what happens to the creatives who leave home. In a bid to stay ‘original’, the writer turns inward to nostalgia and memory. But that memory is fraught. It is unreliable in its recollection. The place called home doesn’t wait; it changes, such that memory as a literary expression is now foreign to the experience. Anyway, my short answer is that America has influenced my writing in the way that I hope I have described. Yet, it has allowed me to stop taking things for granted. Critics have not examined the problem of books and access to books back at home and how that limits the wide range of influence available to new creatives. Here, it is easier to obtain both historically important works and contemporary African books here than back home. Also, the themes that I didn’t pay attention to in Nigeria are starting to force their way into my creative interests.  

Interviewer:

You have a background in law. When did you realize you fell in love with poetry more? Did your legal background influence your poetry in any way? Are there surprising connections between law and creative writing?  

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

How bold of you to imply that I fell out of love with law! Haha. The last time someone asked me last year–  I think it was Maggie Graber during a poetry reading in Oxford, Mississippi– I told her that I didn’t have an answer for the question and if I found one I would reach out to her. I said that because it was a live interview and I couldn’t think on my feet for an appropriate and honest response. With you, I have an advantage of mulling over the question longer (Gotcha!). But really, this goes back to the previous question on influence. No experience is immaterial to any artist. One of the ways by which I determine the maturity of a poem I am working is by asking myself: has it, i.e. the speaker and the poem undergone an experience (vicariously through me of course) commensurate with the ambition of abstract language? Does it possess any wisdom that one often gains through a process by which the experience is aware of (and even documents) its own prior inexperiece? You need to go through the fire to be able to have a language for some kinds of writings. I am in that stage where the experience of being trained as a lawyer (without one year of Nigerian law school and call-to-bar experience that I am sure you know about!) has yet to present itself as a conscious material in my work, as a project; or even where it may exert some influence, I am unaware of it; which means that it doesn’t matter what I say now. The influence may just be outside the threshold of perception, but it is potentially there or not. I don’t think my writing would have been different if I had studied English or architecture or anatomy! But maybe in the future, I would produce a work that explores that intersection between law and art or raid all the knowledge I have gained from studying law for five years, the way M. NourbeSe Philip, the Canadian writer and poet used her training as a lawyer to write the haunting book, Zong! about the Zong massacre. I knew I always wanted to do creative writing even before I started studying law at the University of Ibadan. If you remember correctly in our last interview with Tell! Magazine I have always inhabited the world of story-creation (and later on, poetry) since I was very young. Do you remember our interview on Tell? And to what degree do you think you have grown as a journalist and brilliant book and culture commentator?   

Interviewer:

Absolutely! It’s fantastic to hear from someone who remembers our chat on Tell. I may not recall the specifics after so many interviews, I do appreciate our interview on Tell! magazine. 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

As for how I’ve grown, well, I think anyone with a curious mind keeps evolving, you know? I think the more I delve into different stories and the more I’m let in on people’s personal experiences,  the richer my understanding of the world has become. Maybe my writing has matured a bit, hopefully in a way that keeps things interesting! 

Interviewer:

Earlier, you argued against the idea that a writer who leaves Nigeria loses the ability to write authentically Nigerian literature. What are your thoughts on the counterargument that perhaps a writer’s physical distance from their home country can lead to a more critical or objective perspective on their society, in a different way that enriches their work? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

I think I started taking my writing more seriously after that interview! It’s like “look I made it” moment for me at the time (haha). Growth is scary. It is unpredictable. You think you know it all now; wait for a couple of years! That is my guiding principle whenever I try to express an opinion on something. But the fear of growth shouldn’t stop one from sharing an opinion or thoughts. It is better that one has the opportunity to be wrong now and grow through it than one to have no opinion at all. This is a good counterargument. My opinion on the idea of alienation of the Nigerian writer both physically and psychologically is that it is inevitable, as inevitable as migration. The writer must do with it whatever they see fit with their condition. One’s work will not automatically enjoy the benefits of distance (such as clarity, foresight, objective perspective, and so on) by that virtue of removing oneself alone. It’s like going to the mountain, doing nothing, and expecting the rewards. The ascent is only an element of the process. You must scream at/on the mountain to test the timbre of your own echo and carve a voice out of it; you must sit and pray before transfiguration can happen. You must be disciplined to not be carried away by the relative ease you have now found and forget the condition of your life, which although is now past and lost (lost because it’s severed from place, time and one’s psyche). You must also climb down from the mountain. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the descent is harder than the ascent. You need patience unless one may be stuck on a plateau to find that the landscape has changed. It reminds me of the speaker in Safia Elhillo’s ”origin story” from her January Children collection whose grandmother upon her physical return to the homeland tells her to “shred dill / by hand she means to teach me patience  she calls it length of mind”. Afterwards the grandfather reminds her ”it is time to come home”. I guess I’m speaking too much in metaphors but that’s the best way I can respond. Staying away from home can create a disconnect between the writer and the temporal realities of home, yet it gives the alienated writer the opportunity to be free from the clock(work) of the society’s psyche. I think  it was Charles Simic that quipped that it is the ambition of lyric poetry to stop time. If that is true, then the alienated poet can hold on longer to that momentary pause.  

 Interviewer:

In your poem “towing // or the book of isaac I” (published in The Temz Review), there are elements that seem both personal and observational. Can you talk about how you navigate the tension between memory and observation in your writing, particularly when it comes to capturing the speaker’s blackness? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

This one is tough because that’s a really old poem (written in 2018 and published 2019 I believe) And your question suggests that I still navigate the tension between memory and observation the way I navigated it “Towing…”. Talking about growth, that will not be the case! At the time that I wrote the poem– and this is true for all the poems I was writing at the time– I wasn’t aware that there’s tension between memory and observation in writing that poem. But the very nature and the relationship between memory and observation is fraught with tension. One deals with sensory data captured instantaneously while the other is a matter of data retrieval and the subsequent iteration and reiteration of data. One lives in the moment, the other lives in the past and desperately wants to live in the moment. But the moment even the present is reproduced in words or strokes of color, it ceases to merely be a matter of observation. Now that I am more grown, I try to play the role of a mediator between the two. I honor memory; I remind the present it, too is a vapor. So there really is no tension. Because the moment will also become a vapor, I must live in it. I must write about my immediate environment . I have written about Oxford, Mississippi. During a hang out with one of my professors, Beth Ann Fenelly and other new students in January 2021, I shared the fact that James Meredith, the first Black student to attend the University of Mississippi, travelled to Nigeria to continue his education in Political Science at our alma mater, University of Ibadan. Seeing the reverse-parallel between us, she challenged me to write about that. I didn’t! (In my defence, she didn’t state in what genre I should write it!) Instead I wrote about the 14-year old black boy, George Stinney jr., the youngest person to be executed by the electric chair in the United States, in my poem, “Devotion” , one of the poems in The Sign of the Ram. What tension can possibly exist in writing a poem like “Towing”? I was not Black at the time in Nigeria the way I would now be considered black in America. The speaker in the poem is Isaac, who is an object of near-sacrifice the way black bodies are in the history of civilization. By using the persona of Isaac, it becomes easy to collapse collective memory of a cult figure in Abrahamic tradition and a racialized body/site of violence with an active observation of an event of being on the road at the time I wrote the poem.    

Agbaakin reads from his newly published chapbook to an audience at the University of Georgia.

Photo caption: Agbaakin reads from his newly published chapbook to an audience at the University of Georgia.

Interviewer:

Do you see a role for African writers in the diaspora to bridge this gap in access to books back home? Perhaps through advocating for increased literary resources or even incorporating those limitations into their work? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

I think it will be unfair to task the nomadists with solving all the problems with our literature. The problem of the dearth of literary resources is on an institutional scale, and requires an institutional solution. I think this is one of the innovations of the African Poetry Book Fund Libraries. Currently, they have libraries in six African countries. That is a huge stride! Despite the pessimism of many critics about the death of Nigerian literature, there has been a renaissance in the system of support. I think Kanyinsola Olorunnisola (whom we both know) wrote about this in his essay, “Our Literature has died again” where he declared himself among other japa writers the nomadist movement. This is a more interesting term than Afropolitanism. Anyway, he lists the plethora of prizes, journals, editorial fellowships, grants, seminars and so on that are actively promoting Nigerian and African literature at large. Like I have mentioned, the government has to involve someone. The scale of the solution must match the scale of the problem. I have chosen to be optimistic. We, writers in the diaspora and at home can be the impulse that sets the wheel in motion. If not us, who will?  

Interviewer:

Given your experience living in liminal spaces, how do you define your relationship to Nigeria? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

It depends on the time of the day, seriously! (Haha). It’s a frustrating relationship, really. I hate that the country has created and sustained the conditions that would make a majority of its youth want to leave in droves every year. Now my generation may want to think that they are in exile, but that is not entirely true. I think it was in Teju Cole’s Open City where Julius in his interaction with Farouq said something along the line that we are not in exile if we can always return. To quote directly, Farouq says: “To be a writer in exile is a great thing. But what is exile now, when everyone goes and comes freely?” If I am in no exile, then what/where am I? The question is important because what I am defines my relationship with my native land. Clearly, I still don’t have the mobility capital of the Afropolitan; which is why I don’t identify as an Afropolitan, to answer your previous question. Yet, I (this is true for many of us) have a unique set of circumstances that is close to being in a state of exile. If I have to travel outside of the United States (to Nigeria of course), I have to renew my expired VISA; to go through the humiliating immigration process again. You are reminded that you’re an ‘alien’ anytime you apply for an opportunity that requires an American residency. I have defined my relationship to Nigeria as that of being a Nigerian. For all the respect that Nigerians command worldwide, the country itself commands none. Therefore, I am proudly Nigerian but feel nothing for the country itself beyond the feeling of frustration. I am not sure if I have experience living in liminal spaces. Some days, you feel fully Nigerian, Your voice comes to you unchanged. Other days, there is a great sense of spatial disorientation that you even feel it physically in your body. I guess it’s the same experience as speaking English. English is our language. Where we are right now (the place, the culture, the history) is a kind of home. If not? Then what is it?  

Interviewer:

What is your writing process like? Do you have a specific routine or preferred environment for writing poems? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

I am a very slow writer. I envy many of my friends who are able to write a poem at a go. I write lines that add up over time and when I have a coherent draft, I take forever to revise it. Writing is like planting for me. My best planting season is sentimentally in April where I have a better structure. I write a poem a day for the whole month, then trash like a half or three quarter of the poems and revise the rest for the rest of the year. Outside of this ritual, I don’t write a routine. I prefer writing while on the bus or while I am walking. In the past, this is what I did during the revision stage: I take the poem on a walk until it’s forced to say something of its own accord, not what I have written into its medium. Now, I walk to get the writing out.    

A copy of The Sign of the Ram, Respondent's poetry collection

Photo Caption: A copy of The Sign of the Ram.

Interviewer:

Can you share a poem from your collection that resonates with you personally, and tell us a bit about its inspiration? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

All the poems in the chapbook resonate with me personally because I poured my heart into them. It is a collection about being vulnerable  and confronting the alienation between a father and a son, told through the lens of the sacrifice of Isaac. The story has been told many times in Christianity and Islam as a testament to the faith(fulness) of Abraham. It is a story of man-divine relationship, while largely devaluing the man-man dimension of the story. Talking of liminal spaces, it is a story of the liminal space of awkward silence between a father and a son on their way back from the foiled sacrifice. If the two patriarchs were to talk as one mortal to another, what would their conversation be about? There is the subject of forgiveness, which inscribes itself as a divine virtue. Another question is that what about the conversation between Isaac and God during the whole episode, without the appositive insertion of Abraham? Was Abraham God in that moment he took full control of his life and the language used to mediate or excuse the exercise of tyrannical power? In what ways do men in patriarchal societies embody the voice of God to abuse their own power and cause violence? I think that is the broader question I was asking in The Sign of the Ram. 

Anyway, if this chapbook had only one poem in it, that poem would be “Good Friday”. I feel that is my most authentic poem ever. I have not been able to reproduce the moves I made into my other poems, especially the compact structure, the wirework of allusion, personal history and communal memory embedded, and so on. It starts with a dialogue with a divine son and a divine father who sucks at snake charming; father as in God. The snake as in the serpent. It takes the risk of being iconoclastic but (let me tell you) it becomes less  irreverent when I tell you that the father is also a physical father and the speaker is a physical son. One day, a spitting cobra (Sebe) entered our living room while my brother and I were watching a movie at midnight. The electricity had been coming in a low current for a few days. One midnight, the bulbs shone brighter (because people were sleeping and not using their home gadgets) so my brother and I decided to watch a movie that we’ve been burning to watch. I think the title is Sekeseke (boundage), Yomi Ogunmola was the main character. You can guess where this anecdote is going: if we weren’t watching the movie that night, there’s no telling what the snake would have done undetected. Anyway, the snake slithered away when it saw that it was exposed. My father said we should leave the snake. That it was not coming back! The other men in the house (it was a family house) insisted that we hunted the snake down. Lo and behold, the snake was slithering back into the house again. I don’t remember much else from that night but my father’s psyche was interesting. If we had listened to him… yet, maybe he could have been too tired after a hard day’s job, or maybe he’s just pro-animal rights (haha). We never had this conversation till date so we are still living in a liminal space about that incident.  

Interviewer:

What are some of your favorite things about being a poet?  What are some of the challenges?  

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

Easy one. I use a mask, to cast the shadow of a truth! The truth is difficult, too bright and stark to look at so sometimes it is better to look at it at an angle (Dickison’s tell the truth slightly?) or wear goggles, or like me, wear a mask! By mask, I mean the persona of other mythological (and often Biblical stories). That is my signature move that finds antecedence in my beloved Peter Weltner, among many other poets. The mask allows me to blend private ethos with a more universal mythos. Which is why I love it when other poets go into their poems with a raw face. How do you do that? I don’t consider myself too interesting to expose myself in my poetry. Yet, there are moments I feel naked when I read my poems and I get it. The feeling comes with a sense of satisfaction that I am the only one privy to a fact in the poem, and that comes with its own catharsis as well. The most important thing is that my language must take control of the poem. This reminds me of what Jessie Nathan said of Richie Hoffman’s: ““All technique, no passion, a critic said” of Canadian pianist Louis Lortie, “but,” writes Richie Hofmann, “that was what I liked.” It’s as if what moves the poet is not the feeling directly, but the way that feeling emanates from the completeness of its subordination to the craft.” At the end of the day, we are not special. At the end of the day, our suffering is not special but it is ours. The greatest pleasure I get as a poet is when a revision goes well. It is when the poem finally speaks! Another favorite thing is when I am able to finally document a childhood experience, a haunting into an artistic language that doesn’t call attention to the experience itself but ruptures the temporal prison where they used to be. It was not that I forgot those things, but that before I knew I was a poet, I didn’t know what to do with them. Thank God I am a poet. The greatest challenge of being a poet is how do you live outside of the impulse to literalize every single experience that’s happening now? How do you live in the moment without trying to make meaning out of it? It is almost like going to a vacation in paradise with a camera. If you don’t capture it, you can’t remember and write it as it was; but if you write it, you are not enjoying the beauty viscerally. It’s hard! But sometimes, I deliberately forget that I am a poet. That helps. 

Interviewer:

Thank you so much for your time. 

Book Review: On Matthew Baker’s The Sentence No. 18

Image of diagrammed sentence

The Sentence by Matthew Baker. Ann Arbor, MI: Dzanc Books, 2023. 140 pages or 1 page, depending on your definition of a page. $31.95. (Accordion edition.)

—. Berlin, GER: Round Not Square, 2023. 1 page. €170. (Scroll edition.)

A sentence diagram. It reads, "The Sentence is a masterful synthesis of form and content."

Matthew Baker’s The Sentence is a gripping graphic novel – if you put the emphasis on graph, as in a sentence diagram … and if your definition of “novel” is based on page rather than word count, because this engrossing work is a single diagrammed 6,732-word sentence. The setup may sound gimmicky, but the “gimmick” and the story itself are completely inseparable, coming together to make a work of art much greater than the sum of its parts (and the diagram form is much easier to read than it appears!)

The narrator, grammar professor Riley, has a fraction of a second to grab one item from their office as they are suddenly rushed into the unknown, away from the new dictatorial government’s unfounded treason charge against them. That one item they instinctively lunge for: a book, “the seminal text in the art of the sentence diagram … (a system for imposing order over chaos, for mapping the rough terrain of the language (the secret trailways that logically linked the words together,) for depicting the hidden architecture of a statement (the structural supports that prevented a collapse in meaning) …” This system serves as an anchor for Riley as they try to adjust to life on an off-grid anarchist compound as a very organized autistic person. Putting the story in diagram form embeds the reader under Riley’s skin by presenting reality in the orderly way they process it. The contrast between Riley and the community they come to care for is a very compelling conflict. Trying to decide between the lawless vision of their friends and the oppressive but lawful government they resist, Riley laments, “I would be forced to choose between friendship and chaos and loneliness and comfort and might die either way …”

Even the book-as-object mimics Riley’s thought process and brings the story to life in your hands. The hardcover, 70-foot-long accordion-folded sheet of paper that accommodates the diagram structure resembles Riley’s brain: neat, focused, and fragile. While toying with the book (naturally I unspooled sections across my apartment floor a few times) it occurred to me that the book is like a single thread that you pull at or comb through as you read, that continuously unravels or untangles Riley’s brain.

I just cannot get over the craft features of this form. It’s surprisingly well-equipped for pacing. As you trace through a long tangential clause, the line on the left-hand side tying it to the relevant upcoming story beat continues steadily downwards, often building suspense and always providing the assurance of order that sets Baker’s narrative apart from other stream-of-consciousness styles. At the end of a long tangent, I would follow the trail back to the point that triggered it, assess the action again in light of the new information, then flip forward once again with the background neatly compartmentalized. This back and forth motion held the story together like a backstitch, securing every lengthy description in place. It reminds me somewhat of the chronological back and forth I enjoy in Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez’s writing, but the motion is spatial rather than temporal.

The Sentence asks us, what happens to an orderly system (of language or law) when it is stretched to contain an entire life? An entire people? Not only that, but the book offers itself as an exhibit of its own study in such a clever way. As a poet and poetry reader (not to mention a book arts geek), the novel struck me as a textbook example of how form and content can work together, and I’ll now be using it in the creative writing class I teach this fall.

Book Review: On Barbara Ridley’s Unswerving No. 17

Yellow book cover with colored circle

Unswerving by Barbara Ridley. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2024. 227 pages. $19.95. Paperback.

Barbara Ridley’s novel Unswerving is a journey through perseverance and the importance of community. Tave, a delightfully judgmental character, is introduced as a bitter young woman who recently broke her neck in a car accident, losing her ability to walk, function in her arms and hands, and, perhaps more importantly, contact with her girlfriend Les, who was also in the crash. Tave begins the novel as a grumpy protagonist struggling to come to terms with her circumstances. As she slowly regains control of her hands and arms, but not her legs, Tave needs to push herself to recover both physically and mentally. Enter Beth, her 30-something year-old primary physical therapist, who serves as a counterpoint to Tave. Having a more optimistic outlook, Beth is the kind of person to enjoy the reward and teamwork of working in rehabilitation. As a fellow lesbian, Beth identifies with Tave’s mental turmoil and isolation and goes beyond the call of duty for her.

From there, Ridley tells a brilliant story of what it means to live with a disability. The novel is open about the hardships being paralyzed can bring, yet never dramatizes what it means to be disabled. Instead, the story crafts a cast of disabled characters who are independent, joyful, and find fulfilling hobbies within the disabled community, such as handcycling. With these side characters who invite Tave, and the readers, into their world, Ridley shows the importance of a dependable community to survive. This community is pivotal to Tave’s mental recovery and well-being, helping her find new sports, having previously been a softball player, and independence. This means day-to-day independence in the form of mobility and independence from her homophobic, extremist-Christian family. By spending time with colorful characters Maddy, who Beth introduced to Tave, and Billie, a former patient in Tave’s unit, Tave is made to question her own preconceived notions about being disabled. As she becomes more comfortable around Maddy and Billie, Tave also becomes more comfortable with herself. 

This storyline is mirrored by the significance of both Tave and Beth being gay. Beth acutely sympathizes with Tave’s lack of support system and refusal to rely on her unaccepting mother. Because of this, Beth feels a greater personal responsibility to helping Tave discover how she would live meaningfully with her paralysis, which leads her to introduce Tave to other people who are disabled, help her go on outings away from the hospital, and help her find more information about Les and the crash. The bond between the two is in part fostered by this sense of queer solidarity. Through this connection and Tave’s slow but welcomed entrance into the disabled community, Ridley underscores the importance of having a community to rely on. To Ridley, independence and community are inseparable, both in queer and disabled communities, despite how a starkly individualist culture would define the terms.

–Haley Souders, Mid-American Review

Interview with Aamer Hussein, On Characterization No. 17

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi. In 1970, at the age of 15, he moved to London to complete his education. He graduated from SOAS with an Honors degree in South Asian Studies. He simultaneously studied European languages. He began to publish short fiction in the 1980s. Mirror to the Sun, his first collection including new stories with others previously published in journals and anthologies, appeared in 1993. This was followed by several other collections including Cactus Town and Insomnia, and two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and The Cloud Messenger (2011). He returned to shorter forms with The Swan’s Wife (2014) and Hermitage (2018). He has since published his first collection in Urdu and a volume of memoirs and autofiction, Restless (2021). His stories have been translated into Italian, French, Arabic, Japanese, and Urdu. Aamer was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004 soon after the publication of Turquoise, his highly acclaimed 3rd collection. He was also a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, The Literary Review and The Independent for many years. He is currently a Senior Editor at Critical Muslim and a regular columnist for the literary pages of Dawn (Karachi). Aamer Hussein’s latest work is a selection of his stories, memoirs, and essays, entitled What is Saved (2023). 

Sheeraz: Many of your characters are seen walking, biking, sitting in a moving train, or planning to go somewhere (e.g., the protagonist of “37 Bridges”). This often corresponds with their mental miles across continents and years. What makes them go places? What makes them develop a sense of belongingness everywhere and nowhere?  

Aamer: Let us go back to beginnings. My mother was born in Indore in what was then called Princely India, but both her parents came from elsewhere. Though she retained many of the ways of Malwa, where she grew up, and was always nostalgic for its green spaces and its monsoon when she moved to Karachi after her marriage, she told me many years later that she always felt she did not belong in Indore. In Karachi, where she had a busy social life and dedicated herself to classical music and to women’s rights, she found the topography alien and spent much of her spare time planting flowers and fruit creating gardens with my little sister and me assisting her. I believe her children inherited her “sense of belongingness to everywhere and nowhere” though to tell the truth I do not think I belong everywhere. I began to feel like a stranger in the city of my birth when I was a child and often longed for rainy Malwa and its cold winters. Not one of us returned to live in Karachi once we left. I spent four formative years between the ages of 11 and 13 shuttling between Karachi, Indore and various Indian cities, until I spent 18 months studying in the Blue Mountains in South India before moving to London at 15. So I experienced a sense of inquietude at a very early age; although I spent many years trying to settle down in London, and didn’t begin to travel abroad till I was 20, I chose to belong nowhere. By chance or unconscious design, many of the friends of my youth were transients, wanderers, and exiles. At 21 I began to travel in Europe; at 26 I visited Bangladesh, where my sister lived, and since then I have frequently travelled back and forth between London and South Asia. Like my parents, who moved back and forth between their homelands all their lives, I put down some tentative roots in Karachi in the second decade of this century to assuage my sense of longing for a permanent home, but continue to move between languages in my writings and contrasting landscapes in my memories and anticipations. I suppose my characters’ constant flights reflect my own adult life and journeys. The title of my antimemoir, Restless, captures my writing self and to some extent my private world too. 

Sheeraz: Critics have read some of your characters as fictionalized real people (e.g., the protagonists of your novel, Another Gulmohar Tree as writer Ghulam Abbas and his Greek-Scottish-Romanian wife, Zainab or poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz and his British wife, Alys). To what extent is this reading correct? How do real people contribute to the development of fictional characters? How do you decide on what to allow of a real character to enter the narrative? How do you keep a fictional character different from the person that inspires it? 

Aamer: Fallacy. Faiz and Alys have nothing at all to do with my story. I did read “The Girl with Golden hair”, a story about a transcultural marriage by Ghulam Abbas, the unsatisfactory conclusion of which provoked me to start AGT as a rejoinder, but it was quite a while later, when I was well into the Karachi section of my story, that I discovered Zainab/Chris Abbas’s charming illustrations in a book of her husband’s poems and tales for children. Since I am not an illustrator, I found them enormously helpful in depicting a British woman’s attempt to give her pictures an unexotic Pakistani flavor. Usman is one of the most difficult characters I’ve ever created, and entirely unlike me; since I have read very little about Ghulam Abbas’s life, any resemblance between him and Usman owes all to happenstance. I later found out that Ghulam Abbas happily lived with two wives – now if I’d been writing about him, where would that have taken my story? In most cases, when a real person enters my story, they appear as themselves; for example, “The Lady of the Lotus” is drawn, with her approval and collaboration, from my mother’s diary. There are exceptions I can think of; my Urdu story “Zohra” (an English translation was included in The Swan’s Wife) was inspired by the tragic death of the very talented Lahore poet Hima Raza, and drew tears from the eyes of her sister when the latter heard it read out in their native Lahore. My friend, the late great Indonesian poet Toeti Heraty, asked to be portrayed in a story, and not only chose the name of her fictional self but loved the story “Insomnia” when she read it. Inspiration, however, usually comes from characteristics writers observe in the many people we meet, and indeed contradictory aspects of ourselves, not from fictionalizing any one person. When I went on to write about real people, I chose the form of the personal essay, a form I approached in my 60s with some trepidation and then increasing confidence: I’ve written about the role the writers Qurratulain Hyder and Han Suyin played in my life, on a note of elegy; and about encounters with Abdullah Hussein, Intizar Hussain, Fahmida Riaz, sadly in the form of obituaries. But my Karachi friends Mehreen, Taha and Shahbano appear as themselves in some pieces, as does my Chennai friend Mukund in “A Convalescence”, which is often read as fiction, but is actually fact, an experimental and time bending memoir; its dreamy quality derives from the large quantities of painkillers I was taking during the eponymous convalescence. There are one or two “lockdown” stories in Restless which trickily navigate the middle ground between genres, because I wanted to fictionalize myself in that time that slipped away from time, rather than follow a diaristic approach or a strict adherence to clock or calendar.   

Sheeraz: Most of your characters live in big cities (e.g., London, Paris, and Karachi) as globalized, educated, middle-class people. They find friends in swans and doves and trees and waters but are often seen struggling with developing human friendships. How do relationships define a character? 

Aamer: I would say that my characters struggle with betrayals and unrequited love, not human friendships. Poet Mimi Khalvati, at the launch of my collection Insomnia, described my abiding concern as friendship and love beyond the narrow confines of the erotic. The title story of that collection, for example, and “The Angelic Disposition”, are both about friendships between men and women that defy sexual desire. And Restless, too, embodies this in its factual or semifictional depictions of my abiding friendships. My characters, at least since my third collection (and to an extent in my novel The Cloud Messenger, in which romantic love becomes friendship), are defined by such relationships, which sometimes as in “Knotted Tongues” only end with the death of one person. The stories in Hermitage, which are fables drawn from my imagination in which characters like the Buddhist monks appeared before me from nowhere, or from traditional sources like the legend of ‘mad’ Qais and Laila, do often deal with love and separation, in an attempt to reach out to the grand Sufi tradition. And yes, as Ali Akbar noticed in his interview with me, my characters do find solace in quiet green places, by rivers and lakes and the sea, among birds and sometimes other creatures: but their walks are often companionable, chatty rambles with friends, not solitary expeditions.    

Sheeraz: Your poetic short short, “Dove,” is a character story. For an expert reader, the phrase, “country’s queen of melancholy verse,” when read along with the cities named, is indexical to poet Ada Jafarey and adds her life history to the meaning of the story. How do you decide what to mention and what to keep out for the reader to fetch from their knowledge, experience, or emotions?  

Aamer: I can’t say much about the story except that it came as a kind of epiphany; and yes, the central image was inspired by a passage in Ada Jafarey’s magnificent autobiographical work, Jo Rahi So Bekhabri Rahi; but I never met or even saw the lady in person, and wanted to present the era in one life, not a biographical essay about the poet. So no, not a character story in my book, though for a reader who knows of the poet situated in history, it may appear to be so, and the reader who doesn’t may not need to know the inspiration behind it, though I mention it in an afterword.  

Sheeraz: I heard you speak in a craft talk about a composite character inspired by multiple people from real life. Would you like to elaborate on the creative process behind writing such a character?  

Aamer: I think you’re talking about Sara in “Zindagi se pehle” (translated as “What is Saved”)? Her cats, and the walk in Regents Park, are inspired by my friend the novelist Mary Flanagan, as is the visit to exhibition in the story: but Mary does not see herself in Sara at all! The life of the painter LM, who never appears but plays a catalytic part, is entirely fictional: I felt her work was inspired by the paintings of Lee Krasner, until my friend Alev Adil, herself a writer and visual artist, reminded me of our visit to an exhibition of the paintings of Etel Adnan, whom I knew, at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park like the exhibition in my story. Memoir forces the mind the observe ‘truth’ in chronology and location; fiction gives me licensee and plays wonderful tricks, as it did in this case, where memory took me to a spot I had forgotten. That is why I wrote the story as fiction and not as an essay or memoir: an unconscious process, as is the creation of character.    

—Muhammad Sheeraz Dasti, Mid-American Review  

Craft Corner: The Art of Diversion in Fiction No. 5

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Life is not a straight line.” This holds true not just for our own experiences, but also for the types of stories and lives of characters we encounter in stories. Yet, in fiction, the temptation often exists to create linear journeys, with heroes marching steadfastly towards their goals. But what about the detours, the unexpected turns, the moments where characters veer off course? These diversions, often dismissed as mere plot twists, can be the very essence of a character’s arc. 

To many writers, diversion is the creation of a surprise in a narrative, and the thrill of that surprise is what keeps the reader involved in the story. The word “diversion” has its first recorded use in England in the early 1600s.  It is believed that the concept of diversion bore some similarities with some elements of writing discussed in the treatise “On the Sublime” by the Greek philosopher, Longinus, but it became popularized by eighteenth-century writers who employed digression as a form of diversion. For Longinus, diversion, as a crucial literary device, suspends the reader’s sense of disbelief. Generally, in literature, it refers to the practice of including stories within the main story. The stories within the story are usually very brief and are often used to expound on a particular element of the main story. As Peter Selgin notes, by its very essence, a story is “an exercise in controlling information.” Writers must skillfully dole out knowledge to create patches of unknowledge – i.e., suspense – and keep the reader interested. Such diversion, in the form of well-timed revelations and withheld information, does not happen solely according to the creative strategy of the individual writer but adheres to a tradition as old as the stories themselves. The main purpose of a diversion is to create a sense of anticipation or to build enough suspense to keep the readers interested in the main story. A writer could also use this technique to provide the reader with some necessary background information that cannot be included in the main story or to help set up a climax. By using the different stories within the main story, the writer has a chance to provide a much wider view of the world. The reader gets various perspectives on different elements of the overall story. This can serve to make even the most fantastical of stories seem more real because it is demonstrated that different characters have different, opposing views and so on. Also, by giving the reader ‘breaks’ in the main plot where they get to read other smaller, self-contained stories, the writing becomes a lot more accessible and targeted to all kinds of readers.  

In simple terms, diversion in fiction, like other forms of display, seeks to do more than to decorate or to entertain the audience. When one witness in a court trial declares that, for example, defendant A did not break into a house, it is so easy for the audience to keep making wild, imaginary scenarios of how the burglary took place. However, the narrative, fabricated in their minds, is abruptly cut when the same witness suggests that in fact, the burglary did not even take place on the previous night as he claims to know, but on the night in question. By offering new, surprising twists to an on-going temporal narrative and deconstructing the audience’s version of the known events, the narrative gets a boost. Through diversion, we see the writer cleverly creating situations in which the reader’s anticipation is crafted to naturally expect a certain chain of events. This then allows the writer to break this chain and surprise the audience.  

It is of course important that writers should discern when to use diversion as a literary device in such that subplots, creation of cliffhangers at the end of chapters, adding in unexpected twists, deceptions, strategic revelation of information, and creating an open ending, all contribute to keeping the reader diverted. The reader feels smart when they catch the hints and forms expectations on how the story will unfold. At the same time, they become curious to find out whether the predictions are accurate as the plot progresses. In turn, by being engaged in the reading, emotions are evoked as the story takes the reader through different methods of diversion, making the reader experience the special and stunningly galvanized into plot and characters. For example, a well-timed twist can suggest hidden correlatives and themes. Or it can inject an unexpected viewpoint that might add a fresh sight or serve to emphasize thematic elements. Well-disciplined use of diversion often profound the reading. Readers may continue to explore to find out what each new turning and twist may uncover and can be delighted by success at prediction or stunned by a wily and subtle deception. This act of provocation is a delight to many readers who find the discovery and unraveling of solutions highly satisfying. In this manner, diversion enables the reader to be active on a metaphysical and emotional level. 

Again, when we think of how diversion can become a shrapnel for crafting the character arc, it becomes clear that characters are not robots programmed towards a predetermined conclusion. They are complex beings shaped by choices, experiences, and the unforeseen twists and turns of life. Through diversions, the writer can add depth, nuance, and a touch of the unpredictable to their journeys.  

Why does there need to be a twist in the plot in every story, you may ask? It is an interesting point to focus on, the real thing is that if one diverts someone’s attention, and then that other person will most probably be focused on other things, instead of finding out the truth. So, the reader will not try to discover the writer’s true opinion or where the story is set if it is made clear. If a writer is telling a story directly, then diversion would be in the form of flashbacks and maybe the introduction of more than one small puzzle, maybe a few more than two! It is remarkably interesting because if you take the definition out onto the internet or open books, you will find that diversion covers many different parts of stories, from characterizations to distinct types of diversion. 

It is important to consider some real-life examples of how diversion works. Fans of this literature will find various examples of distraction at work in short stories across the ages that have been written by a range of authors as well. A great example to start with is “The Purloined Letter,” written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published over 150 years ago. This classic short story is about the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin as he attempts to retrieve an incriminating letter that is being used for blackmail. Throughout the story, there is a sense of deliberate, misleading information that is being given to the reader, which distracts from reality and makes it more difficult to discover the truth. This kind of diversion could further be used to create suspense within the reader as one avenue is explored after the other, each with its own sense of partial logic and progress. Another prominent example of diversion in short stories can be found in the work of Shirley Jackson and her famous short story called “The Lottery.” This tale of a small town that commits human sacrifice as part of the harvest ritual was first published in 1948, with some readers dismissing it as being nothing more than mere sensationalist horror. However, when looking deeply at the themes within the story, it becomes clear that Jackson has intentionally used diversion to guide the reader towards shock and distaste for the characters and society within the story. The use of detail to distract from the grotesque occurrences of the “lottery” and to prepare the reader for something entirely different is a key strategy; the fact that the ending comes as it does shows that diversion has been used effectively in this piece. Through exploring these examples of diversion in short stories, the message of how this works to create interesting and absorbing literature becomes clearer.  

While the town is small and it seems everyone knows each other, the truth is that it is completely isolated. The village serves as a dehumanizing environment that is resulting in a change in society. First, we can observe the irony of the town’s and the lottery’s name, as the lottery is commonly known to be a good thing to win and be a part of, but in this situation, the ‘prize’ is death. The first mention of tradition comes when the boys see each other and make a pile of stones. Soon after, the parents, especially the dad, are with the boys. He’s reminding the boy of how to arrange the stones and Jackson writes, “Bobby Martin has already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones…” (Jackson, 2009). The author wanted to clearly show how even the youngest of the village knew what they were doing, what is the underlying meaning of this ritual, and how to bring the evil of the event to its success. This creates an atmosphere of horror as even the audience becomes aware that a successful prize of winning is death, as they see that everyone, children and adults, had taken part in organizing the lottery and preparing for it for the past few weeks. Finally, when the victims gain a voice after the winner has been selected and is going to die, they use ‘it isn’t fair, it isn’t right.’ It is a reminder that people and society do have the power to change things and that they’re not losing their voice to fear. 

-Aishat Babatunde, Mid-American Review