Hello there, it is I, your line editor cum writer extraordinaire, AKA couch potato princess, and today we will be chatting about a teeny mistake I have noticed with black writers who try to write African literature. By African literature, I mean stories about black people (Nigerians, in my case) doing what people do.
Permit me to assume you are like me, and you have read your fair share of stories with protagonists named Brandon and Watson. Maybe, like me, even though you started out with European literature, you have grown to love African literature and have decided to emulate. To write our stories.
You might be brimming with ideas, thinking up characters with names the tongue would have to learn to pronounce, infusing these stories with indigenous terms and struggles peculiar to us alone.
Let us talk about the blunder you might not have noticed in your work—the use of foreign terms in your local stories. I hope local doesn’t raise your hackles. I know we have been made to feel like local is inferior, but I mean local in the very sense of the word.
So, there you are, writing a story set in Adamawa state with its charring sunshine, or in Lagos with its busy traffic, or Porthacourt with its crazy rain. Yet terms like winter, summer and fall manage to slip past words like agbalumo which should be sentinels against them. Yikes! You know we don’t deal with those seasons here.
You know mama Titi who owns a Buka down the dusty street would not be caught dead soliloquising about the ‘imminent hike in petrol price due to the Libyan insurgency’. Oh, she could complain about the cost of petrol and might even have something to say about the Libyan insurgency, but she would never use those exact words.
You and I know this. It is unnatural. Yet they find their way into your story, and you do not notice them until it is too late, and a reader points out these issues. Or, if you are lucky, until you find an editor primed to spot these issues and deal with them.
Either way, it happens, and no one is blaming you for describing the seasons the reader in you knows like the back of their hand. No one is blaming you for the mai shayi who speaks pristine English.
All I am saying is this: When writing about people like you, do not write detached from the story. Write like you are in the story. Let us taste the uziza in your ofe nsala.
See your story like you are writing from within that world and not from a strange place in your head where your relationship with these things is a dichotomy of I am and I write about.
So, please do not write your story like a foreigner. Own it. And if you do not feel strong enough to write about harmattan and the buzzing mosquitoes in rainy season, find you an editor who will guide you. One who would make those terms and situations feel natural to you.
Shameless self-promo here.
Just don’t stop writing your stories. The world needs them. I would love to read them.
