Beyond the Fields We Know

This is not about Lord Dunsany and the book he created with the title of this blog. This is about a journey, not a destination. My father, a genuine intellectual, taught me the beauty in words and in the ordering of words. It became my first love (forgive me ) but what can best be described as the mundane things of this life took me on a different circuitous path and for a while, my dream slept. But there is something William, Shakespeare that is, said and I will try to paraphrase. There is a flood in the affairs of men when taken at the flood leads on to fame and fortune. I am at such a crossroad in my life. I did not train as a writer, I like to think that just as some were born leaders, kings and princes, I was born a writer but I also realize that it is possible to learn how to be a leader. I am humble enough to admit one can be taught to be a better writer.

Why prose? In a single word, Africa . Depending on where you are or what you are, the name conjures different images. A seemingly riotous, chaotic market with women in impossibly bright floral prints selling mysterious food items and managing to talk all at once? Or bare breasted females balancing earthenware on their way to the river gossiping gaily or the silhouettes of giraffes, their necks undulating gently with the golden brown sunset in the horizon. Yes this is Africa, yet there is an Africa that is missing from contemporary African and world literature. True there are stories about the community, about the collective, about the cock crow at dawn, the music of the mortars before dinner, and about the darkness and our metaphor for hopelessness. But there is another Africa, of a people familiar with foreign currencies, the internet and mobile phones, of people if the need be, more dubious than Sicilians, more pugnacious than Irish men and who gaze at the stars wondering Ïs there anyone out there?. Yet a people noble and strong, and a people of the future who long after technology has failed the West, will be a source of strength for the human spirit. I try to tell these stories, and with a hope, the hope that we will learn and if we learn nothing new to be entertained.

I want to write for an international audience but my experience is limited to the Nigerian experience. They say we write of the things we know and I want to write of more than I know. Speculative fiction needs a voice from Africa . I have read stories of some persons they call new voices in third world speculative fiction and the less I care for it. There has to be something to do with America , you have to do something to prove you are bright. Vandana Singh has a doctorate in physics no less! Amitav Ghosh is a professor of English, I think! For them to hear us they must be convinced we are a lot smarter than their average. Or is it? Clark Ashton Smith, Ursula le Guin and Howard Smith did not have doctorates. Sometimes I wish I have lived in two or three continents so I can distill that experience into how to deal with other people. so this is for people who love Africa and yet are not shy of admitting they read superhero comics or Tolkien's The Children of Hurin. Stand up and be counted!