Writers who have inspired me

To talk about writers who have inspired me I must first talk about story tellers who have inspired me. Like most Africans, my first encounter with fiction was oral, not textual. I grew up in a tenement house with about six other families, and in the nights our mothers would gather all the children, more than a dozen of us, and tell us stories. There were scary stories, sad stories, stories with songs to which we all contributed, and not one of them was boring. I can now see the influence of those stories in my fiction – I like compelling story lines that grip you, like the ancient mariner, and force you to listen.

Then came school and my first encounter, formally, with the English language. I learned to read English at age seven or so, and from then on I never stopped reading. The day I discovered that I could decipher the sounds and meanings of the characters on signboards and shop fronts, I went all over town reading the signs. I was like a blind mind suddenly given sight. Then came the Bible – in Hausa first, then later in English. The Bible seemed to me a continuation of the folktales our mothers told us: the red sea parting in two, Balaam’s donkey speaking to him, spirits inhabiting a herd of swine and driving them crazy, people being raised from the dead; the directness and simplicity of the language – all pure folktale.

Then later, when I had made up my mind to be a writer, at about sixteen or so, I was lucky to come across a tattered copy of E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. This book, more than any other, gave me a practical understanding of how fiction works. After reading it I decided to systematically look for all the books discussed in the lecture: Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, all of Henry James, Tolstoy’s  War and Peace and Anna Karenina, all of Dickens, all of Defoe, and dozens more. I am still tracking them down. Other important influences are Achebe, Soyinka, Tayib Saleh, Stephen Crane, Kafka, J.M. Coetzee. I also read a lot of non-fiction, life writing especially, and poetry.

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