MEET THE AUTHOR : The very surreal Sahara Testaments

What you need to know:

The poetry collection won the Nigeria Prize for 2013.

Actually, in my case it is a pertinent question as I have been known to be extremely assimilative in my praxis, if such a notion has any validity. The separate influences I had imbibed over the course of some thirty years sometimes blend like claret. But sometimes they quarrel like white wine and red. There was a teacher in my elementary school in the village who would recite Kofi Awoonor’s Song of Sorrow to our hearing in class. I was about nine years of age then and those words moved me very strangely indeed. I was made to perform Wole Soyinka’s Abiku as my contribution to my class-graduation party from primary school into secondary school at age ten. After that I read J.P Clark and my father, who taught literature, would make me recite J.P Clark into a recorder. As I grow older, the formalists seem to have me.

A concatenation of events, I think, eventually led me to write the book. Human engagement with the land, our victories and defeats within this conundrum of a continent. The history of Africa, the prehistory of Africa and the human geography of the continent all move me. I remember writing the first four quatrains of the Sahara Testaments in an airplane going from Lagos to Delhi. It was a daytime flight and flying over the Sahara in daytime gives you an idea of just how vast the space we are talking about is. And then to think that this is not just wasteland but a theatre in which significant human history has occurred. Here is where mankind first discovered how to reckon the calendar. Ancient rock art from the Cave. There is a lot to say about the pressures on the planet and the fragile hope we can still entertain and pursue. I felt that the seizing of the days could be done with sobriety as it could be done in a spirit of celebration – of human triumph over materialism and crass planetary exploitation.

I settled for some sort of compromise between the approach that Pablo Neruda took in his Canto General and the approach that Derek Walcott took in Omeros. My subject dictated that. I could go from country to country but the boundaries we have today, it must be recognised, are new and arbitrary boundaries. I could strive after a master-narrative around which sub-narratives weave in and out but the space I had to contend with has polyphonic and equally pertinent narratives – to privilege one above others seemed dishonest. The quatrain comes fairly naturally to me. Each stanza, and we do well to remember that the stanza is really etymologically a room, served as refuge for a thought or two. I set out to build a thousand such rooms for The Sahara Testaments. The biggest aesthetic challenge was to engage reader interest in what is prima facie difficult terrain over which difficult language and subtle thought has to be deployed.