Muhammad K. Muhammad
20 December 2008
interview
How do you find life as a professional dancer, a teacher, and a writer?All of these things actually give me a lot of fulfilment. Now that I am older, I don't have the kind of energy that I had in times past to be able to dance. But now I do express myself more proficiently in poems. So it gives me a lot of inner fulfilment: all the things that I could have said in dance, the statements that I would have loved to make-because all of the arts are a platform for making statements about what you feel passionately about-I express them more now in choreography and poetry.
Do you also see yourself as a professional writer?
Would I like to say that I am a professional writer? I don't know. But I write-I write poetry, I can't write prose. But I do write poems.
What impact does dancing have on society?
A few days ago, I finished a production that I titled "Morning Yet Again". What I did was to set my poems from the book You Are a Poet into dance and music and perform them. It's a beautiful production; it's one of the greatest productions I have ever done and I feel very fulfilled, because we talk about everything that you'd want to talk about. My poems talk about everything about our way of life, the things everybody wants to be identified with-and people see themselves in that kind of thing and everybody who came to see it felt really rewarded. That's making impact on society.
Your poetry book contains a number of poems written in Pidgin English. What was the purpose of doing so?
Most Africans speak Pidgin English. In fact, most Nigerians speak a lot of Pidgin English. When I wrote my first few poems in Pidgin English, I didn't actually set out [with the intention of doing that], but there are things that you want to say that come easier when you say them in your language. But when you say them in Pidgin English, many people will identify with them. I remember giving [one of the Pidgin poems] to my secretary to type. When she read it, she said 'Madam na wa o!' She had been typing other ones before that were just in English; and she didn't say anything. But when she read this one, she reacted because she could identify with it-she understood it, nobody needed to explain anything to her. And also, even as a writer, you feel like that: you feel you could express yourself more glibly.
Many of the poems in the collection also seem to be speaking about the experiences you had. Are you reminiscing about your youth?
Well, yes. Most writers, I'll tell you, write from their immediate environment. They write about the things that they know. If you don't write from that perspective, you will not communicate. I can't sit here and write about snow in England because I have only visited there, and maybe it was during summer; so wetin concern me with snow? You cannot imagine an American writer writing about harmattan in Kano or in Gusau-it wouldn't make a lot of sense. But when you're writing from your environment, you write from what you feel passionate about, from something that concerns you. And that is what I do.
What are you currently working on?
I have a tentative title for my next collection. I call it Thrills, but it may change. It's a lot more mature than what I wrote previously. Somebody once said that we should think more about things rather than beings. Now I think more about things rather than beings, not about people, but about things, because even these things have voices: they're saying things that people want to say things about; that people should talk about. So it is no longer about my sister, my brother, my daughter, my son or my mother. It is more about how we are in this country. So I'm maturing.
One of the issues raised by female writers at the 27th Annual Convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) was that women writers were not promoted. But you see women writers like Chimamanda Adichie, Kaine Agary, and so on winning awards. Is that not enough promotion?
If you look at how they did it, you would see that it is not from here. In fact most of the people who get these awards, you'd see, are published from abroad. Although we have people who are equally talented if given the same opportunity to be read in our society, we don't have the same opportunity to be publicised so there is no way you'd get those awards. So you see that, actually, we need a platform for exposure.
When you published your book of poetry, how did you market it?
That is one of the problems we have. We have to really peddle it round as if we were selling tomatoes and pepper. [We had to] go begging bookshops, asking them to display it, and for somebody like me who teaches in the university, I was a bit luckier because I could get my students who were interested to read my book. Otherwise, for many other people, there are no avenues at all.
As the chairperson of ANA Plateau, how do you find the leadership of a people who are known to be naturally critical of happenings around them?
Well, if you actually listen to people criticising you, you will not be able to move forward. The thing is to have a focus, to be convinced about what you're doing and to go and do it. Being the chairperson of ANA Jos has actually infringed a lot into my private time. And you also discover that if you have to combine that with going to work, then you have less time for creativity, which is something I don't really enjoy. I don't like administration personally, but because all these people are younger people and they seem to depend on [me], I sacrifice the time and everything to be able to lead them all. So I think because of my age and love for people, I make the sacrifice to see that we are going ahead.
Now, how do you see the future of writing in Nigeria? Do you think that the environment is conducive for writing?
Well, I think the environment is very conducive for writing. What it is not conducive for is marketing, because you have to be the writer, the publisher, the marketer and everything in one person. There should be various people handling those kinds of things and you [as a writer] should be able to concentrate on the fact that you are a writer. I always wish that I was very rich so that I could just write and [have] the other works done by other people and I wouldn't have to worry myself about them.
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