Chigozie obioma biography of michael
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Chigozie Obioma: ‘I Really Do Believe That Fiction Should säga More Than One Thing’
For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. fyra thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today? Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.
In this episode, we talk to Chigozie Obioma, whom the New York Times has called “the heir to Chinua Achebe.” We discuss his childhood in Nigeria, his novels
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Chigozie Obioma: My Influences
My process of composition is a long and sinuous one: first an idea comes to me, usually by serendipity. I can now allow the idea to incubate and grow into a fully formed piece — a novel or a short story. That period of incubation is often long, but when the story spills onto the page I am often satisfied because it has been a long time forming. But in when I completed the novel I had been writing since , I felt that the narrative perspective was not right. It wasn’t a third-person narration; I had already tried that. It wasn’t a simple first-person narration; I had already tried that too. So what then? I left the book in frustration and began writing other things until I flew to Nigeria that summer. It had rained on my way to our house in Makurdi, but on arriving, the sun was shining and it had turned hot. I took a quick shower and lay in my old bed, now occupied by my younger brother Benjamin, who was nine at the time.
Benjamin had been waiting
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Michael Delgado
Speaking about his first novel, The Fishermen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in , Chigozie Obioma said that he was interested in the forces that can destroy a family. Centring on four brothers who fish in a polluted river near their home in Nigeria, the novel tracks the breakdown of their relationship, sparked by a ‘madman’, Abulu, and a murderous prophecy he gives them. While Abulu is the novel’s putative saboteur, Obioma remarked that, crucially, the destruction of this band of brothers ‘is helped from within’. What is it, Obioma asked, ‘that can turn that love to hate’?
This is a question that animates Obioma’s second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities. It tells the story of Chinonso, a modest poultry farmer living in Umuahia, Nigeria, who is driving home one evening when he spots a car parked at the side of a bridge. As he slows to investigate, he sees a woman leaning over the edge, about to jump into the murky waters of the Amatu River. In a de