Art and Literature in Conversation with Irenosen Okojie — Whitechapel Gallery, London

On 10 February 2022, I went to an Art and Literature Conversation held at the Zilkha Auditorium at the Whitechapel Gallery, East London. This was both a discussion to celebrate the latest issue of leading arts and literature magazine The White Review and a conversation between editor Izabella Scott and Irenosen Okojie, author of the award-winning novel Butterfly Fish published in 2015 by Jacaranda Books. 

Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British author whose experimental works create vivid narratives that play with form and language. Her debut novel Butterfly Fish and short story collections Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch have won and been shortlisted for multiple awards. A fellow and Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, Irenosen is the winner of the 2020 AKO Caine Prize for her story, Grace Jones. She was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature in 2021.

What attracted me to this event was the combination of art and literature — both fields of the arts that I am particularly passionate about on many levels. It was fascinating to hear of Irenosen's writing process for Butterfly Fish and how she weaved art and literature within fiction to tell a unique and innovative story. 

Myself and Irenosen Okojie at Whitechapel Gallery

I was keen to ask a question at the end, in fact I was one of the first to ask! My question was related to form, especially because Irenosen uses many different forms in her writing. I asked her how she negotiates those forms; do they conflict with each other? Irenosen responded by saying she brings in art to her writing even if it's a setting, e.g. museums which she often visits; places where inspiration is available even to write poetry. Her favourite art form is film. Conflict is not necessarily a negative and can be a way of balancing the forms.

Novel's Synopsis:

"After the sudden death of her mother, London photographer Joy struggles to pull the threads of her life back together, with the support of her kind but mysterious neighbour, Mrs Harris. Joy's fortune begins to change when she receives an unexpected inheritance from her mother: a huge sum of money, her grandfather's diary and a unique brass warrior's head from the ancient kingdom of Benin.

Joy's search for the origins of the head take us on a journey through time as dark family secrets come to light. Joy unearths the ties between her mother, grandfather, the wife of the king and the brass head's pivotal connection to them all.

A spiritual successor to the tales of Marquez, Butterfly Fish masterfully combines elements of traditional Nigerian story-telling and magical realism in a multigenerational tale of the legacy of inheritance." — Jacaranda Books Art Music Ltd.

Novel's Structure:

There are many aspects to Butterfly Fish that I like — the rhythm, texture, vivid imagery, richness of the writing style, and the beauty of the language: 

"I ran myself a bath longing for the peace the water held out for me. Lying there I watched an insect circle the light bulb on the ceiling and envied its frenetic flight. For years I'd been fed on incongruous things; smudges on windows washed away by rain, static from the TV, white lines just before traffic lights, wilting in shaky, paced train carriages. On the need to hold my loneliness, watch it change shape yet essentially stay the same. I felt woozy, faint. In the tepid water my grip on things slipped. The small, silvery, distressed figures I'd seen earlier in the kitchen offered their limbs to the dropped, bloody razor as the frantic black eyes of the dice spun." 

The short chapters work well too, amounting to a few pages and a few words, yet are packed full with storytelling that pays attention to detail that keeps you in suspense. 'Less is more' means that it is far less about the amount of words and far more about the depth of the novel and its intriguing form, multilayers, and pace of plot. Added to this is the actual physicality of the hardback copy of the book with its stunning front cover design. Presentation is key, especially as the book has a tactile feel about it.

Butterfly Fish is an extraordinary novel with a dual narrative set in contemporary London and eighteenth century Benin in Africa — thereby making use of Irenosen's West African heritage.  Reading this book was strangely satisfying as the writing possesses an elegant prose yet is quite humorous and playful, which keeps you grounded in reality yet you are able to savor the magical elements that do not feel out of place. Past and present are full of mystery and yet they quite skillfully and craftily make sense and work well together.

I was thankfully able to have a brief chat with Irenosen at the end of the event, where I made sure to get her to sign the hardback copy of her book.😊

Comments Welcome!

World Book Day 2022

 

Books by Nicole Moore

Today is World Book Day (WBD) which happens annually on the first Thursday of March. This year marks WBD's 25th anniversary. The theme this year is a message for all children: You are a reader!

Today, I am remembering and celebrating the books that I brought into fruition between 2005 and 2010, which were independently published collections of creative expressions by Black and mixed-race women:

*Brown Eyes, 2005
  Sexual Attraction Revealed, 2008
*Hair Power Skin Revolution, 2010

*Funded by an Arts Council England  Grants for the Arts Award 

These anthologies included poetry and personal essays from a diverse group of Black and mixed-race women — everyday women expressing themselves in their own unique style, without the white gaze. The writers offered empowering and creative ways of understanding and relating to a range of themes including gender, 'race', ethnicity, identity, hair, colorism, culture and heritage, with strong and reflective voices, some unheard; some previously published.

Full details are listed under 'Books' on the right of this blog.

In my childhood days, my reading was somewhat limited to books that I could read in my grandparents house — the Encyclopaedia Britannica a general knowledge book, which I would tackle occasionally; a few editions of my grandmother's Readers' Digest magazines (grown up stories that I would dive in and select something appealing) plus children's' novels that I loaned from my local library, which I really enjoyed visiting on Saturday mornings.  Then there were comics like Bunty a British comic for girls, which consisted of a collection of many small strips, the stories typically being three to five pages long. 

Thankfully, over the last twenty seven years I have widened my reading and with modern technology, I have a vast selection of books on my Kindle. I still have a yearning to  buy 'real' books and have a small collection that are of sentimental value mostly because they have been signed by the authors.

Happy World Book Day!

Comments welcome!

Akala in Conversation at the Southbank Centre

L: Akala; R: Mustafa the Poet / Photo: Abundant Art

On 6 February, hip-hop artist and author Akala appeared at the Southbank Centre to launch the paperback release of The Dark Lady. I had left it too late to actually obtain a ticket for the live event as tickets sold out fast, so the next best thing was to buy a live stream which turned out to be as good, although I would have preferred to be there in person, especially as Akala's entrance caused a riotous and rippling applause from the audience!

Akala was joined in conversation with Canadian poet and singer Mustafa who was such a breath of fresh air to watch. Mustafa's perspective and questions to Akala were so nuanced and thoughtfully prepared on the novel's content about 'race', identity, class and society, that I witnessed an unforgettable dialogue between the two of them. It was like watching a good film; I was hooked from beginning to end!

Akala - Photo: The Times

Akala's debut novel for teens and young adults, The Dark Lady is a magic realism book about a young, Black, orphan boy called Henry, an outsider, a thief, a fifteen-year-old invested with superpowers, living in the streets of Elizabethan London, who is haunted by dreams of the mysterious Dark Lady. Inspired by Shakespeare, the novel refers to Bard's Sonnets and attempts to paint a realistic picture of street life in Renaissance England. 

Akala - Photo: Ents 24

I mostly enjoyed hearing Akala discuss his writing process and how hard he found the task. Although Dark Lady is his debut novel, he had already written Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire, (2018) a Sunday Times Bestseller non-fiction book that I really enjoyed reading and would definitely recommend. 

There's levels to this thing ...

Mustafa: "What were the challenges of moving into fiction and attempting to maybe draw a thread between Natives and your novel. How do you explore without losing the essence or the clarity that you write with in Natives?"

Akala: "As anyone who has ever written a book will know, brother, my whole definition of what I thought was hard work has been altered by these last three years working on these two books, and you're confronted by the fact that you realise you're no way as near as smart or as important as you thought you were when you were twenty-five ... I think about how difficult it was for me to write these two books and then I think about War and Peace, or Toni Morrison, or James Baldwin ... there's levels to this thing ... as a writer you realise just how difficult it is to complete a book that is even readable, forget good. Anyone who completes a book that's readable deserves a medal. 

I read Stephen King's book On Writing and when he was talking about "I'm fifty books in and still when I read my first draft I think which kind of idiot wrote this foolishness?" And I was oh thank God, it's not just me. The first draft I sent to my publisher they could've legitimately slapped me. Part of this was feeling pressured to send in something; it wasn't really a draft, just a few words and there was that one scene that was "sick" and they was like we know you can do it as this scene is "bad". 

And so I think the technical craft of learning to write a novel is like being the director, the actor, the editor, and the scriptwriter all in one. You've got to decide where the camera is positioned, you've got to decide when to cut from scene to scene, you've got to decide what angle the person sees the film from, you've got to inhabit the emotional universe of each of your characters to get the best out of them like a director does, you've also got to act and be the characters ... man, it's hard brother. And you finish it, and it's not even satisfying when you finish! 

Being a musician I spent the whole of last year driving around bumping these mixes and enjoying listening to my music. I don't think I've ever got that level of joy from my own books. You finish writing them and it's like a gaping wound in your soul. You ask yourself what am I going to do with the rest of my life. You feel distraught; there's this weird kind of melancholy. 

The process of research is wonderful, reading books, making notes — wonderful! Then you get down to writing — awful! Unbelievably hard, like training for the Olympics and then you come 75th! So I think authors are a bit pseudo-masochistic. 

Don't get me wrong, I still appreciated both of the processes. There is a very different creative headspace to writing a novel and writing a nonfiction book. I personally feel like I'm naturally better at nonfiction but that may just be because Natives was longer ago and so the distance of it being five years ago in 2017 makes me feel like the process was easier than it was at the time, because at the time I don't think I felt like that, whereas brother, I'll be honest, the novel was hard! 

I'm not going to sit here and pretend to you ... I think I did nine drafts of 80,000 words, that's work ... and I think it's a very good book, I'm very proud of it but it's not Toni Morrison and I'm not going to delude myself and think it is ... maybe one day in twenty more years I might get there. Writing a good novel is a huge achievement but there's levels to this thing."

I totally understand how Akala felt ... when I independently published my first anthology Brown Eyes, it felt as if I had given birth and then put my baby up for adoption! Very similar to the 'gaping wound in your soul'.

Tickets are available for the Akala in conversation livestream to watch online until 6 March - price £8.50. It's a must watch!!