Yewande Omotoso on writing Bom Boy
Yewande Omotoso sits across from me at Nairobi’s Fairview Hotel with a glass of cold orange juice dripping beside her on the table as she speaks. Her dreadlocks rise and fall with her expressive hands as she sincerely ventures to answer my questions. I am captivated by the depth of her answers and the intricacy of her thought process.
She is the author of Bom Boy which was shortlisted for the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature. As one of the three writers shortlisted for the prize she participated in the Kwani? organised writers tour of Nairobi that took place the last weekend of June.
The book tells the story of Leke, a troubled young man living in the suburbs of Cape Town who through a series of letters written to him by his Nigerian father whom he has never met, learns about a family curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. The well-crafted and complex narrative of Bom Boy captures the intricacy of a solitary and confusing life.
Here are a few questions UP Magazine put to the vivacious writer.
Do you remember where or when the first line of the book was written?
For me the first line is never the first line, the first line is something I do much later when I’m arranging the book. It emerges in the process of writing the text of the book.
Do you remember where you got the idea for the book?
The idea of the book started very different from what it became. I was travelling down a highway and I saw a man harvesting a picture. We in South Africa have traffic camera’s that catch you when you’re speeding and at some point the traffic officer has to harvest the photo and then they send you a letter saying you owe us money with a picture of you in your car. I saw that and it was interesting, it’s not something you often see; you see the camera going off but you don’t see the guy going to collect the evidence. And I just wondered about him a bit and what his life was like.
The point of this is that the idea of something can be quite far removed from what you actually write. I didn’t write a story about a traffic officer collecting fines but the image of that got me thinking along the lines of a person’s life; a particularly solitary and lonely life. So Bomboy is about the solitary life of a young boy called Leke.
What about Leke was inspirational and what about him was thought out if you can remember?
The way you talk about it there, and I suppose for some people it is - this sort of distinct things that are on purpose and things that are just moments whereas I don’t think it’s always that tidy for me, that easy to categorise.
I follow a thread of thought, I interrogate it, I think a lot about it, and I try and immerse myself in this person’s life and ask myself questions. Who is this person? Does he love anybody, does anybody love him? Where is he from? Where was he born? What’s he afraid of? What’s he sad about? That can take months and as you’re asking these questions you’re also writing.
A lot of the writing you’re doing you eventually chuck and some you keep. Amidst all of that some t is stuff that comes to you when you put the pen on the page; some of it is stuff that you think, okay I think he’s this. But I also have to be ready to not have an ego about it, and to allow the story to tell itself at moments. Sometimes I think when the writer is trying to force something you can tell, having the humility to ask what the characters story is, and to keep interrogating it until it feels like it fits is important.
It sounds like writing requires a lot of intuition. Do you find that the more you write the easier it is to know?
It’s intuition the way driving might be intuition. I don’t want to sound like writing is unnecessarily sophisticated. Once you’ve learned to drive, and you’re driving there’s often that sense of how did I get here? Like the car brought me here. Maybe that comes because you’ve been driving for seventeen years, maybe it comes because you’re just good at driving, or you had a good day.
There’s an element of coming to the page, or coming to the story and there are somethings that are kind of practiced about how you do this thing. And then there are things that you can’t explain. That’s how I would describe it.
How did being born in Barbados, brought up in Nigeria, and moving to South Africa influence Bom Boy? I don’t know if you can specify?
You can just assume that it did. Obviously the kind of characters that I write… like Leke ends up being part Nigerian; in the book I’m writing now, one of the characters is from the Caribbean and a part of the story is set in Nigeria.
Which writers do you and did you admire that influence the way you write?
Yoruba girl dancing by Sidney Bedford, I think I read that when I was eleven. In my teens I devoured Toni Morrisson- I read all her books, I wrote papers on her in high school, I admire her immensely. In my early university days I deeply admired Arundhati Roy, particularly because I’m an architect now, studying architecture. I was torn because I wanted to study literature but I love architecture, and she’s amazing because she’s also an architect. For the first time it felt like she was a role model because she studied architecture and then wrote and it meant to me that the two could co-exist. It didn’t feel like I was giving up something if I completed my degree. It didn’t mean that I couldn’t write. I loved her for that, and I really loved God of Small Things.
How does architecture impact your writing if at all?
Someone once said that there’s always a clear structure in my writing. I’ve only written once book so I don’t know how true that could be, but she just knows it’s very structured and she’s not surprised I’m an architect. So in that sense there are many comparisons one can draw, for fun, whether they’re true or not, just to keep the mind busy. There are ways to draw comparisons between writing and designing. On the one hand when you design, you have some kind of concept, you do a lot of tracing. You draw over the concept, each time trying to get the essence out. When I write I draft a lot, using the word draft; first draft.
How have your respective countries received your book?
I don’t think my book is available in Barbados except on Amazon and I have no idea how it’s been received there. In South Africa, okay I suppose. And in Nigeria the same, it’s newly available in Nigeria. I don’t know, I get a lot of mixed responses from people, sometimes they’re nice sometimes they’re not so nice.
Do you always grow from them either way?
Or you ignore them, it’s fine. I’ve had people write to me and say they liked it, and others write and say they can’t read it. It’s a very subjective thing, there are some books that are highly acclaimed that I find awful. All it teaches you is it’s a subjective art, with art we’re in a subjective realm anyway, so it’s okay.
Do you find that you listen to everyone equally or you have some people who you listen to more than others?
I listen to myself because I think I have to be true to myself and what I’m trying to do. Then I listen to people I respect, I respect their writing and their reading. Sometimes when someone says something nice you don’t really know what to take from that except from just being flattered. I don’t know you, I don’t what you read, I don’t know what writers you like. I think you just have to have a very relaxed attitude, remember that you’re on your own mission to tell stories and keep checking with yourself what is true, what you tried to do. Did you fail? Okay, it’s alright. Could you do better? Okay good, do better next time. Keep going.
By Ondi Madete
