Andrew Dixon | Collegian
“The power of hindsight is the most effective tool in the writer’s toolbox,” said internationally acclaimed Nigerian novelist Chigozie Obioma on Tuesday night in Plaster Auditorium.
Obioma came to campus as part of the English department’s Visiting Writers Series, and on Tuesday, gave a lecture titled “Objects in the Mirror are Closer than They Appear: On Perceptions and Conclusions.” On Wednesday he read excerpts from his two bestselling novels, “The Fishermen,” and “Orchestra of Minorities.”
During his Tuesday lecture, Obioma talked about the importance of distancing yourself from your subject as a writer.
“What is readily observed often lends itself to information or narrative,” Obioma said. “But what is observed, then passionately forgotten, is relived and recreated by the mind to become something different than its original form.”
This recreation of the subject by the mind is a rich place, Obioma said.
“The original data, that actual record of events is remoted and reconfigured to suit the writer’s artistic sensibilities, and of course, vision,” he said.
This distance from his central subject is what enabled Obioma to write his debut novel and international bestseller, “The Fishermen,” which follows four brothers in a politically-ravaged Nigeria.
Obioma himself grew up in Nigeria and was one of 12 siblings. In 2007 he moved to Cyprus to attend university. To complete his bachelor’s degree, Obioma wrote “The Fishermen,” and because he was in Cyprus, he could conceptualize his native country in a new light.
“The landscape of Cyprus is a desolate desert and sparse population,” Obioma said. “It was to me so unlike anything in West Africa that it formed such a strong contrast of what my vision of Nigeria was. My vision of Nigeria became sharper. So, being away from Nigeria offered me the ambient space for the story to form.”
“Since hindsight implies a reliance on memory, therefore, writing from that psychological base is more powerful,” Obioma concluded. “Removing oneself far away from the source material of the event, or situation you’re employing in your fiction would also achieve what the great stories and the great books do. They become convex mirrors, that bring us closer to something, an emotional or psychological object that we may have thought was far away from us.”
Associate Professor of English and Director of the Visiting Writers Series Dutton Kearney, who brought Obioma to campus, enjoyed the novelist’s insights.
“So much fiction today is more journalism than fiction,” Kearney said. “Obioma’s technique of distancing reminded me a lot of the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth when he says that poetry is the overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranquility.”
The writer’s need for distance and recollection is what allows for nuance and transcendence, to really engage with an idea or place for a time and not reach a surface level or obvious conclusion, Obioma said in an interview with the Collegian.
This technique fights against the prevailing trend among modern writers, who reject nuanced thinking and language.
“In 2015 I wrote an essay about how the English language has been dumbed down and eviscerated in a way,” Obioma said. “The culture of emojis, social media, and quick texting has made writers in the contemporary Western tradition afraid to write more fully.”
Unexpressive language is the norm among modern writers who write with staccato sentence structures. Obioma attributes this to the quick-paced life that marks the modern world.
“I called for more complex sentence structures,” Obioma said. “Less is not always more, but, in fact, more is more. Some of the works of fiction that have been canonized over time were excessive. And they exalted in their exuberance. I mentioned Milton last night, for instance, but James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ is a work of exuberant writing. There’s no minimalism there.”
This un-nuanced, surface-level writing and thinking is hurting American literary production due to its culture of conformity, Obioma said.
“There’s a movement towards conforming at all levels of the American intellectual and cultural life. It’s just how Americans have developed temperamentally over time. The worst thing that can happen to an American is being ostracized from a select group,” Obioma said. “Writers often try to stick with a particular playbook. So I think that American literature might be in a kind of decline, even though you have very interesting writers who are writing today. But most of the time they sound the same.”
With all his insights into American literary production and the process of writing itself, Obioma shines as a unique voice telling his stories through the lens of Nigerian cosmology. His multiculturalism—he speaks four languages and is of Igo descent—informs his writing in ways a traditional American writer would not have (“it struck me that I had borrowed from the Yoruba worldview in constructing that sentence,” Obioma remarked.)
But while Obioma’s novels are specific to Nigeria, his deep reflections on human behavior have a universality that all readers can recognize.
“The human condition is at the center of everything Obioma writes,” said senior Latin major Jessica Wood. “Although the settings of his novels may be unfamiliar to American readers, the universality of his themes ensures that no emotion or decision feels foreign.”