At 35 In the Pen Craft: I like to Write Like Richard Wright
ByAbdulWarees Solanke
I am not a wine connoisseur but one of the greatest aphorisms I appreciate in life is related to liquor usually associated with inebriation, intoxication, even alcoholic addiction, which is haram to me as a Muslim. This aphorism concerns one’s experience and expertise in the writing or Pen Craft which journalism embodies, knowing what it requires to achieve reckoning, mastery or become skillful in a profession that demands rigour, attention to details, endurance and sacrifice to come of age and be celebrated for excellence as in journalism, education is ceaseless while learning is without boundary.
The saying goes thus: Writing, Like Wine, Matures with Age. This was the headline of an interview I was granted by one of the Sun Newspaper finest feature writers, the diminutive Sola Balogun sometimes in 2004. In the course of compiling my works in print for a book project, I had visited the newspaper that I was becoming a household name as a regular opinion contributor. I had, as usual, visited my friends from the Concord years, the most prominent of whom was Femi Adesina, its editor then and my neighbor inside the Concord Press of Nigeria complex when he was the features editor in the powerful paper’s lifetime (our offices Features and Foreign Desk were adjacent– I was then foreign Desk coordinator)
In the Pen Craft, you die when you stop learning. For the writer, it is a veritable suicide to suffer what is called the Writer’s Block, a phenomenon in which your pen dries and your head is bereft of ideas again and you labour to come out with the masterpieces for which you were once celebrated or garlanded. This is because the writer is as good as his last work. Therefore, the worth and wealth of a journalist, a writer, or anyone who is involved in the creative and knowledge enterprise including the academia is in the quality and quantity of his output. And so, especially in the academia, they sing it into the hearing of all, Publish or Perish. Same goes for the Pen craftsmanship.
Between me and the Pen, I don’t know who chose the other as first friend. All I know is that we are companions, as I came to realise that I inherited it from Baami, the unlettered Oke-Foko Painter who has the habit of keeping diaries. From his old notes in his diaries, I found a bit of his journeys in life, all the birthdays of his children, his life crises and challenges. In his diaries, I found that his marriage with Maami was consummated in 1949. I found the date of his relocation to the residence we lived most in Ibadan, the address of which is SW5/128A. This same address is what I used as my contact address even as a university student up till I graduated from the University of Lagos, grilled as a writer having learnt the at the feet of notable communication scholars like Professors Alfred Opubor, Onuara Nwuneli, Andrew Moemeka, Luke Uka Uche, Idowu Sobowale, Ralph Akinfeleye, Delu Ogunade, Olatunji Dare, Olu Fadeyibi and Yomi Daramola. A few are dead, and some still alive, strong, intellectually vibrant and thriving even at 80 plus.
In Life, all my associations and obligations have to do with the Pen, All the appointments, chances, compliments and opportunities I have enjoyed emanated from the Pen. But my adoption of 35 years as my age in the Pen or Writing craft is merely for convenience of my year of graduation from the University of Lagos, 1988. For me, writing is what I grew up with as a child, can I say from the cradle? But I remember as a primary pupil assisting adults to write letters in Yoruba. Men and women in the neighbourhood could call me into the inner recesses of their rooms to dictate their emotions to me to convey in letters to their wives or husbands or children far flung from home.
I was also blessed with some good handwriting. And with this talent of artistic handprint, I assisted indolent senior students to copy notes they missed in class, in the process absorbing knowledge of some subjects beyond my class. In primary school too, I belonged to a select few students who assisted class teachers to fill report cards or sheets. So I was always privy to the performance of my mates.
Often, my answer scripts in Economics and History were singled out and displayed or recommended to others for their flow of thoughts in how I answered examination questions.
Born to write, I pledged to write myself to stupor when on employment by Concord Press of Nigeria in 1990, I was transferred to Yola to replace an elder journalist Jare Ilelaboye who had been angling to be transferred out of the Gongola State capital as the State Correspondent, for which there was no replacement. Yola was and is still a far place in Nigeria. Its climate is harsh, hot and dry and no one in his comfort zone will ever aspire to live in Yola. But this town then notorious for the Maitatsine threats of the 80s I was posted, becoming my own Canaan soon with the calibre of friends I made and the rich contacts and connections I developed which I used positively to enhance my career as a journalist with National Concord
It was in Yola fate, fortune or providence as some would claim brought me in contact with my brother from another mother Mallam Abubakar Bobboyi Jijiwa, who made one of the greatest impacts on my writing path and who I met as the General Manager of Gongola Broadcasting Corporation in 1990. Youthful and under 30 then, he smoothen my path in understanding the dynamics of Gongola Politics and the complexity of the Adamawa society by educating me on the norms and nuances of its politics, culture and tradition so I could write from infomed persepective. Recently I wrote about him and Mr. Tunji Bello as special among my mentors in the mass media.
However, some of my other great mentors are men I never met in life or in flesh. They are writers whose work shaped my writing and style. I know as a young boy, I read a few Mills and Boon series. I also read virtually every Pacesetter series as a teenager. Evbu My Love, Bloodbath at Lobster Close etc. Nobody recommended them for us in our secondary school days. But it was fashionable for young chaps with vast reading appetite to pose with a Pacesetter. It was our pride to be counting titles we had devoured of Pacesetters.
However, as a student of literature throughout my primary and secondary school education including the Advanced Level GCE, I can never forget the authors of all my literature texts. If you read Kola Onadipe’s Sugar Girl or Cyprian Ekwensi’s Eze Goes to School at primary school, you will understand the value of early exposure to good writing. At secondary school Ordinary Level, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was the most popular in the African Writers Series. But Ayi Kweh Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born also made a great impact on Me. As a form four student, I enjoyed Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native but his Mayor of Casterbridge used as A Level prose text remained a special in my collection of books that shaped my writing style. I enjoyed Wole Soyinka’s Trials of Brother Jero as a drama text whereas Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again made a lasting impression on me too. I cannot forget some of the lessons learnt studying Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Reading Geofrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales sharpened my poetic story telling style just as the few of Willian Shakespeare’s library I was exposed to whether or not recommended as texts for our literature in English bore significantly in my writing composition. Julius Ceaser, Macbeth, Othello and Merchant of Venice stood out among them.
One special writer I will however continue to appreciate in my life is Richard Wright for his work, Black Boy. In writing Black Boy, Wright was deliberately graphic. You could feel scenes jumping from the pages as Wright wrote like a maniac, his personal experiences as a child who was rebellious. You could feel his hate against an enslaving religious system. You could experience his pains as a poor transit child he acutely painted of himself in Black Boy. Wrights gripping illustration of struggles of the black to escape the shackles of slavery and poverty in the American society was something else.
Generally, I thank Allah subhaanahu wa taala for taking me through the path of writing such that I consider every writer as a trust bearer for others. Everything a writer writes and every experience a writer illustrates with his words is not new nor is it peculiar. Millions of others are carrying it in their heads, experiencing it, have witnessed it before but they just lack the time, space and peace to convey them.
The Writer is just fortunate and blessed to have clearer head, saner mind and more fertile or vivid imagination to the conjure scenes and scenery that transfigure one either to the past or the future. So, every writer must be grateful for the grace or gift of the Pen. He must be careful not to abuse its privilege.
Unfortunately, the pens of many of us in Nigeria deliberately drip with blood. We paint hopelessness even when progress could be discerned. They are responsible for the perversion of many minds in our society in many instances in what they purvey. Instead of praying for peace of their land with words spawn by their pens, they pollute people’s mind to push down the country into the abyss of destruction. What a painful practice and perfidious preoccupation.
Back to Richard Wright whose style resonated well with me: Some of Wrights works may be controversial as his life; many of Wrights words may be lurid or pungent. But it cannot be denied that Richard Wright was one of the finest Black American Writers. To him I owe a strand of my style that could seem gripping or flow swiftly and silently like the Mississippi in the US or Kisangani in the Congo. Richard Wright was no ordinary writer. He was an artist of the finest creative writing genre. He was a painter whose pen is the Brush with which he paints his feelings, experiences and emotions in words as Baami, the Oke Foko Ibadan Painter who painted houses on the campus of the UI, Nigeria’s premier University as a staff of the institutions Maintenance Department where he worked between 1957 and 1978, retiring to Abeokuta his nativity to continue in the craft that sustained his averaged sized family that had me as his sixth child who inherited his art in a different form, fitting the meaning of my Muslim name, Abdul-warees from Allah’s attribute of Al-Waarith, the Ultimate Inheritor. Alhamdulillah, Robbilaalameen!
Abdul-warees Solanke is the Deputy Director/Head, Strategic Planning &Corporate Development Department, Voice of Nigeria
