When you think of Ghana’s Jeff Atuobi, who answers the pen name “Andrew Aidoo” in his fictional works, you think of a literary talent that is enigmatic and energetic all at once. Our conversation happened via email; myself from Makurdi and Jeff Atuobi in Accra.
Jeff Atuobi is a Ghanaian writer and educator based in Accra, Ghana. He is an alumnus of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing Workshop, Mo Issa Writers Workshops and Ebedi Residency and Fellowship. He is currently a participant in the Goethe-Institut Workshop for Art Writing and Criticism in Lagos and the Co-publishing African Arts Workshop in Yaoundé. He edits for the Journal of Writers Project of Ghana. His short fiction, published under the pseudonym Andrew Aidoo, can be found on Jalada Africa and in the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing anthology A Mind to Silence and Other Stories. He also moderates international conversations on all art forms in Accra and Lagos to initiate and sustain creative collaborations. Professionally, he’s an English Language Instructor and a course developer.
CARL TERVER
When I think about how I met you, it was by seeing your comments under Timi Agboola Israel’s Facebook posts. Your name Jeff Atuobi, especially the last name “Atuobi,” registered for a while. I was curious since I imagined it was Ghanaian. Then one day you made a post about making memes to slight your Nigerian friends on Facebook. So, I’d commented that I wouldn’t see the memes, which led me to send you a friend request, to be a witness to your Schadenfreude. But beyond any interest in memes, I’d clicked that add button for something else. It was your uncanny wit and—I must say, now—what I saw as a distinctive brilliance in your interaction on the blue space, which piqued me. So, when in those early days I made a post requesting short stories I’d feature in that year’s Ten Short Stories for 10 Days of Christmas for Praxis magazine, I knew immediately I hadn’t judged wrong about you because the first story you sent “April Twilights”—which I didn’t accept and will explain now, was because of the density of its prose which I didn’t find suitable for a yuletide read—confirmed I’d met an unusual, eclectic writer hard to find today. A writer who approaches writing as, what Teju Cole said, more than just a settled thing, not taking language as a bore. I imagine you are a student of James Joyce and, once in a while, you write some really good and interesting nonfictional prose, on Facebook, that shows a preference for deliberative and contemplated language. Where were you all this while, absent from the literary scene, and what kept you away when you have so much interest in language?
JEFF ATUOBI
Thank you, Carl. I remember those precious, boyish days. Yes, I am a student of James Joyce and prefer language that contemplates, but also questions and destabilises conventional meanings, a playful usage akin to Thomas Pynchon’s sensibilities. I started literary reading and writing in 2015. From then until 2020, I entertained the fantasy of myself as a hermit waiting to emerge fully-formed into the Ghanaian and global literary scenes, without known history or discoverable pedigree. This adolescent megalomania flourished during the pandemic. It kept me focused on my reading and writing—on “honing my craft,” you know. But one day, Kelechukwu Njoku, a friend, after reading an unpublished short story of mine, sent it to his friend, who loved it and requested to speak to me immediately. Later on, this friend became my friend, and they read other unpublished pieces. They didn’t understand why I hadn’t published them yet. What nonsense! These are mature works, Jeff! They sent me magazines and literary journals and helped me write a bio for Andrew Aidoo, which is how “Baldwin” got published in Jalada Africa that same year.
CARL TERVER
A great short story. I assume it is a bit autobiographical?—correct me if I am wrong. But I like how autobiographical stories open us to things about ourselves we are yet unaware of. For example, your story is about baldness, and its title “Baldwin” is the name of African American writer James Baldwin. The character, becoming bald too early in his youth, deals with the conflict of reconciling his social life of being youthful and bald, which connotes aging; until he finds triumph choosing to go fully bald. I’m thinking of the young James Baldwin who first abandoned his faith (you know, he almost became a preacher); then he also had to deal with the conflict of his place and social standing within the American society as a black writer, and of being gay back then, and so on; and finally had to go away to Paris. What were your thoughts when you used the double entendré “Baldwin” as the title of the story—of young men dealing with the normal conflicts that come at a certain age and time in their lives, which, of course, includes you?
JEFF ATUOBI
Thank you. Baldwin was autobiographical in the sense that it was inspired by my baldness and the fact that people, consequently, called me King Promise. Besides that, the events, plot, and feelings of the character Stanley are entirely fictional. My experience with my baldness was entirely different. I decided to go bald for the same reason I decided to raise an afro or cut a flat top prior to the baldness: the shock value. At the time, I was more concerned with shocking than with looking good. So, the story departs from my experience. Its title is another matter; it is a pun in the story and is innocent of the African American writer James Baldwin. When I discovered James Baldwin after publishing the short story, I wished I had read him earlier. If there are parallels, they are beyond my authorial intention. I was in a space of lyrical jollity drawn from Korede Bello’s Godwin. Interestingly, I started with Godwin as the character’s name, then switched it to Stanley because I did not want the pun to be too on the nose, you know?
CARL TERVER
You mention Korede Bello and his Godwin song and I’m thinking: “Baldwin” was written that far back. Surely when you speak of lyrical jollity, I sense the overplay and acrobatics with words in the story. However, “Red,” your story I eventually selected for the Ten Short Stories for 10 Days of Christmas, has a more grandfather tone; you know, care, and restraint. Did you write “Red” much later or was this a consequence of the theme of “Red”? Also, there is an inclination to humour in your stories—is it something you do intentionally or it stems from your natural self?
JEFF ATUOBI
“Baldwin” was written in 2017, two years after Korede Bello’s Godwin. The song was a staple that was replayed many times on people’s phones and computers in the university hostel. “Red” was written when I was home sometime in 2018. Its initial form took its impetus from Derrida’s reaction to a female cat catching him naked in the bathroom and the ensuing reflections on animality as the opposite of humanity. I left the draft for “Red” for two years and revisited it, cut out the excess and shaped it to what you finally accepted. The tone in “Red” remains ironic, and the jolly wordplays persist in the narrative, character names, and even the references. But it was more poignant than cheerful. That is the difference. There is an inclination to humour in all my stories, published or unpublished, from 2016 to 2021. The drafts written as far back as 2015 are heavyhearted, and cumbrous with sadness and loss. The pre-2016 drafts reflect my default disposition. Later on, after reading Shakespeare, Pynchon, Joyce, Garcia and Musil, I learnt to laugh in the sadness, loss and leadenness. I found, especially in Shakespeare, Joyce and Pynchon than the rest, that I derived a cheap satisfaction in discovering that line of a pun and twisting it into a well-spun yarn. But my literary habits have changed now.
CARL TERVER
Tell us about LOATAD and its activities, and in what ways you think it is shaping the literary landscape in Ghana for writers like you who have come into the fray. Especially, if you can tell us some of your practical involvement with them. I recall a time you were in the company of writers like Molara Wood.
JEFF ATUOBI
The Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD) is a vibrant cultural centre in Accra, housing thousands of books authored by blacks across the globe, and some archival materials. It also holds writing residencies all year long. Sylvia Arthur, the founder of LOATAD, carries an international vision. In this vision, I have come in contact with a wide number of African authors. I take myself as one of those products of LOATAD’s many international and domestic initiatives, because, as you mentioned, I found myself in the company of Molara Wood, and we know how such personal, convivial encounters with established authors irrigate the seedling talents of emerging writers. Finally, LOATAD is a library and so it is accessible, more or less, when there are no residencies in progress. I go there because the team is another family and I help whenever I can.
CARL TERVER
Speaking of residencies, in February and March last year you stayed at Ebedi International Writer’s Residency in Iseyin, Nigeria. Did this residency give you any new thoughts about being a writer? And as you mentioned, how has meeting an established writer like Wood re-directed your career or given you any new thoughts about writing?
JEFF ATUOBI
It was my first time in Nigeria when I stayed at Ebedi. The absence of a cultural shock of the stay had an effect on how I perceived Ghana. Iseyin spreads widely between two mountain ranges. The road within it runs for at least an hour before coming close to its border. Iseyin looks no different from Asiakwa in Ghana, where my nuclear family resides and I visit sometimes, but Iseyin could easily be ten times the size of Asiakwa. And Asiakwa, also, is a town straddled by a pair of mountain ranges. In the residency, I met a Ghanaian ghost-writer and they helped me with professional ghost-writing tips. That definitely added to my attitude as a writer. It was no longer just a compulsion to tell my own stories, but to tell other people’s stories for them. My interaction with Molara Wood opened my eyes to art history. She’s such a versatile writer and her versatility inspired me to try new things. So, I did by venturing into art writing.
CARL TERVER
You have an alter ego personality; you’re Jeff Atuobi and Andrew Aidoo, the latter appearing on your fiction works as an author’s name. What’s the big secret?
JEFF ATUOBI
Yes, Andrew Aidoo appears in my fiction but Andrew Aidoo is not an alter ego. He started out as a character in an inchoate, wayward semi-autobiographical first draft. He was supposed to tell his own story of coming to age as an artist, after James Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, Robert Musil’s Torless, and Goethe’s Werther. But the project grew too long, and other parts of it sprouted. He jumped out as a distinct consciousness, with the capacity to direct his own artistic and intellectual goals. So, the plan is to have Andrew Aidoo write enough fiction, both short and long, so that when he writes his fictional autobiography, he will include references from his published works, blending the line between fiction and nonfiction and producing an exhilarating world of intertextuality. I afford Andrew Aidoo the rebellious autonomy to express himself online and in fiction.
CARL TERVER
That’s very interesting. Were you made a prefect in secondary school?
JEFF ATUOBI
Nope.
CARL TERVER
How were you missed? You kept to yourself, that is, introverted? Were you as cerebral back then as you are today?
JEFF ATUOBI
I was and am not interested in leadership. In school, I was curious about a lot of things other than the curriculum. I spent more time at the library reading encyclopaedia entries than my textbooks and notes. Even if I was nominated, I’d decline it out of the impulse to reject anything that confirmed that I was special, lest I agree.
CARL TERVER
So you’re not a philosopher king? What do you think about Plato’s idea of the philosopher king as the ideal ruler of a state, about how this idea is at odds with what I have observed, as you’ve just confirmed again, that while writers are gifted with what we might consider the requisite skills—in the ability to navigate, tell stories, create the impossible through art; somewhat all indicative of an ability to lead—but yet, often, only assume their work is to witness? Is politics, for you as a writer, something you wouldn’t actively participate in, and why not?
JEFF ATUOBI
When I consider myself a philosopher, I do so in the Socratic sense. I take Zizek’s way of putting it: “A philosopher is a corrupter of the youth.” If I ever consider myself a philosopher, it is at the moment that I am corrupting the youth. A corrupt youth is one that doesn’t follow the established order, like a corrupted file that won’t open or respond to commands. Socrates was a man of irony, which is what I possess—the use of slippery language, of words that slide rather than stand, that leave people uncertain and contradicted rather than affirmed and smug. It is one thing to write; it is another to organise a polity. Writers are not automatically ideal leaders. They are just writers. As regards writing and politics, I defer to Chinua Achebe, who said: “Those who tell you ‘Don’t put too much politics in your art’, are not being honest. […] What they are saying is don’t upset the system.” I will overtly participate in politics as a writer and a civil entity. The reason is simple. I am already cast as a political entity in a political situation, with a political destiny determined by the political system. Whatever I do is already political. It is only authentic to embrace it and subvert it where I must.
CARL TERVER
In my reading recently of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, he writes, and I quote: “Late in his life, Joyce was enormously pained and frustrated by the wrong turn he believed his career had taken after Dubliners and Portrait. The finest short story ever written, he claimed, was Tolstoy’s late, simple little fable, ‘How Much Land Does A Man Need’.” Gardner here was discussing what he terms mannered writing, where an author’s obsession with “style” or foregrounding risks affectation. This last bit aside; now going back to Joyce—I am quite surprised Joyce would say such a thing. As his student, do you know this, and what do you say about it?
JEFF ATUOBI
I find that bit of comment of Joyce interesting. Joyce’s regret is similar to Tolstoy’s own regret about his earlier writing. It is the same regret that I have determined not to feel in my later years. I’m more interested in my growth from the flamboyant to the austere. If I end up with the Achebe-like accomplished intensification by devious simplicity, I’ll take it gladly. If I devolve into the Joycean excess seen in Finnegan’s Wake, I’ll take it. But there’s some consolation in the fact that possessing an urgent message can help perfect one’s style. This is what returned Tolstoy from the titanic epic writer to the provincial fable-teller. I love “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” for this kind of simplicity. But I love War and Peace, and Anna Karenin too. I love both Ulysses and “The Dead.” No regrets.
CARL TERVER
Interesting. I’ve kept a special place in my heart for Alex La Guma’s “A Matter of Taste” as the finest short story ever written—and I don’t think I’d be shaken to dethrone it yet. However, Maupaussant’s “Two Soldiers” is a very memorable short story, too. I think that ability to withhold the punch of a story and deftly introduce it at the end is something of great mastery. I like how you describe Achebe’s style as “accomplished intensification by devious simplicity”—I think he accomplished more of this in his essays. Anyway, you wouldn’t expect me to believe that “How Much Land Does A Man Need?” is the finest short story ever written, would you? Which short stories have you judged to be some of the finest?
JEFF ATUOBI
I have abandoned hierarchies in my preferences. There is no “the finest story” for me. There are only stories. I’m this way because my taste is capricious and my understanding has no use for order. However, there are short stories I always return to for a motley of reasons. These stories include “A Little Cloud,” “A Painful Case” and “The Dead”—all of which can be found in Dubliners. There are more short stories I return to, but these three have dominated my recent rereading.
CARL TERVER
A true Joycean, yea?
JEFF ATUOBI
I just love to see Joyce when the vitality of his style is hemmed, it gives a gravity to the sentences. One feels he is restrained and could have flown with that phrase or that sentence, but he is holding in. That’s what I see in those three stories, especially “The Dead.” I love other short stories by other authors but this has been a Joycean season.
CARL TERVER
“Our Spruced Up Young Man,” which was published in the AKO Caine Prize anthology A Mind to Silence, is aristocratic, the characters, the setting. Since it explores the penumbra between hetero- and homosexuality, is the aristrocaticness of the story a device? I see two scenarios: one, because of his status and background, the main character OJ can’t pursue a homosexual life and settles for good old tradition, marrying his childhood friend as destined; while Kwame, his man lover, becomes more like a cameo in OJ’s life. There’s a lot to see in interpreting the meandering ways the story opens up. For example, the hypocrisy of the aristocracy—I really feel Kwame is the victim here, not OJ, who’s spruced up anyway.
JEFF ATUOBI
The story of the Spruced Up Young Man is intentionally set in the Ghanaian aristocracy. I use the Ghanaian aristocracy here because it is the same class that moves to suppress the protection of the rights of people in the LGBTQ+ community. The heart of the story is in the right place but its execution suffers a bit from size. The story’s aim remains largely unformed. Too much is going on that isn’t explored or allowed to bud into its final form. I will say that OJ’s privilege shields him from hostile confrontations that his sexual activities would have brought upon him if he were ordinary like Kwame. OJ is interestingly free to explore his homosexuality only if he portrays a patriarchal and heteronormative masculinity typical of a Ghanaian politician. Ghanaians’ hypocrisy is that they don’t want to see the truth of one’s sexuality, even if they know it. Kwame’s victimhood is hardly explored in the story, only hinted at through reducing his presence over time into a shadow that passes through OJ’s memory or periphery, bringing tears to OJ’s eyes.
CARL TERVER
You executed that well, because there’s an appearance of OJ’s repressed sexuality, which the reader becomes empathetic about—but it’s just that, an appearance. The story is more about Kwame, who, except from the first 1000 words, fades into the background; and only a very conscious reading forces your readers to ask “why is this so?” before they get the revelation. Have you read Petina Gappah’s “A Short History of Zaka the Zulu”? Your story is quite similar to it, but with a different trajectory. I came across the word “crefiola” in your short story “April Twilights,” repeated very often. But I can’t find its meaning anywhere. What is it?
JEFF ATUOBI
I’m glad you pay attention to Kwame too. A lot of him doesn’t make it to the text. Unfortunately, I haven’t read Petina’s short story. What does it say? “Crefiola” is a made-up word from the stem sound of “trefoil.” It is an imagined epiphyte that engages in pollination in a manner similar to human coitus. It produces an aphrodisiac aroma as a result. I invented it for the fantastical forest in “April Twilights.”
CARL TERVER
I figured so much that it was a sort of neologism fitting perfectly into the aromatic-romantic atmosphere of the story, with its onomatopoeic colouration it lends to the language in the story. I’m thinking of adopting the word to mean whatever I want it to, like Trump’s covfefe, if you have a hint. (Thank you!) Petina Gappah’s story is a beautiful tragedy better experienced; it is an exploration of the homosexuality, too. What is next for you?
JEFF ATUOBI
Going forward, I intend to diversify my writing portfolio and include art writing. I’m currently in two art writing workshops, each sharpening in their own way this new skill set. I intend to write about Ghanaian art with curative attentiveness, bring out the flavourful marrow of our expression, and deepen our appreciation for our local arts made for our enjoyment. I still have fiction in me. I still write short stories and dream of my long-form projects, but art writing has joined the fold now.
CARL TERVER
Besides Molara Wood, whom you said introduced you to art writing, which other writer, what other things or discoveries have influenced this passion?
JEFF ATUOBI
Molara Wood’s versatility as a writer, editor, critic, historian, among others, is what inspired me to diversify my portfolio. However, my introduction to art writing was prior to my meeting her. My mentors in style used to be John Ruskin, Marcel Proust and Walter Pater. All dead white men. Currently, I look to Teju Cole and Emmanuel Iduma for guidance in style in and approach to art writing. In terms of discovery, Black Sherif’s meteoric rise has provided a fertile soil on which to cultivate my skill of writing about the cultural atmosphere of contemporary Ghana.♦
Afapinen 