Amatoritsero Ede, an award winning Nigerian writer based in Canada, is famous for his efforts at enhancing the literary development of fellow writers. As the moderator of one of Africa’s largest writers’ listserv, krazitivity, with a membership comprising Nigerian writers living at home and abroad and the editor of Sentinel Poetry (online), his efforts have yielded tremendous results over the years. In this interview with SUMAILA UMAISHA, the holder of combined Honours Masters degree in German Language & Linguistics and Literature in English & Cultural Studies from the University of Hanover in Germany, speaks on literature and the internet and the effects of self-publishing, among other issues.

NNW: Let’s begin with your brief biography.

Pix courtesy: www.nwokolo.com

Amatoritsero Ede: I was born in Sapele, Delta State on March 6th, 1963. I grew up there. My childhood existence was fringed by the ever-glowing haze of gas flares on the horizon above river Ethiope. It was my one fascination to understand in my child’s wild imagination what presence it presaged. I would stand on shot legs spread wide open and bend my head between my knees, the better to gain an understanding of that cosmic phenomenon through the frames of my legs, eye-balling the sky upside down. I never understood it. Only much late in life did I realize what that strange, fiery ball of fire was, and how it has disrupted lives and wasted land. I attended Bishop Johnson Primary school in Sapele and then Eghosa College in Benin City, and finally Adelagun Memrorial Grammar school in Ibadan. Later I worked with Spectrum books as an Editorial Assistant, more an underpaid editor’s position really!; Gbenro Adegbola’s Bookkraft (did I get that right?!). And finally, in 1991, I started studies at University of Ibadan in German Language and Literature in English before leaving for Germany in 1994 for further studies.

At what point did you start your literary career?

I began writing in high school. I was a lonely and dreamy, much misunderstood child, always buried in books. So books, first and then writing was a kind of retreat to an inner world. I actually started writing songs, first captivated by Fela’s horns. My inspiration was of course my first contact with poetry at Adelagun Memrorial. I had an English teacher, Mr. Gbadebo, who seemed to sympathise with whatever it was that troubled the quiet shy boy that I was. I gradually grew more brazen, of course, as the teens years progressed! I buried myself in the the works of pioneer African poets, especially Soyinka’s poetry. Okigbo’s "Before you naked I stand, mother Idoto", seemed to be a form of greeting between some of us boys. I like the thing happening on the page with this magic called poetry. I started trying my hands at poetry. The first time I wrote a poem, I remember, was in class four. As time progressed I collected quite a number of juvenilia and had a small notebook of them, which I seemed to log around. Poetry became a retreat from the harsh world to my overly sensitive self. I was quiet, morose and simply thought in verse. If I had a problem – poetry was the counsellor I went to – I wrote about it. In some way then, at that point, writing was therapeutic. Hemingway insists that all you need to be a writer is a bad childhood. I had my share of a bad childhood, which made me very sensitive, and I worked out personal problems in inflammatory verse. As such poetry saved me from the streets – which is not to say I was not at times rascally as boys can be. But it was a kind of mild, disinterested truancy. As time went on I discovered the Augustans, John Dryden and Alexander Pope. I simply walked into Odusote Bookshops at Oke-Ado, Ibadan one day and bought the collected works of those poets. It was an eye-opener. Dryden had this powerful and precise way with words. I learnt a lot from him. Of course I wrote in imitation of their kind of heroic couplet at that point. I did not try my hands so much at the Alexandrian epigram. As time went on my reading got wider. Hopkins was a delight, Elliot too and so on. That was how it transpired. And then poetry became a progressive obsession, then a passion. As time went on, one realised the other uses, apart from the therapeutic, to which writing can be put, and you were hooked for life!

As an expert in German and English languages, which of the two is richer in literary tradition? And which is more effective in poetic expressions?

There cannot be anything such as richer. The uses you are capable of putting language to depend on where you are coming from and your capacity with each language. As for literary traditions, each is equally rich. In German literature you have great writers like Goethe, Stefan Georg, Holderling, Maria Rilke, Bertolt Brecht and more; in English you have Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Thackeray, Joyce, Elliot, the romantics, the modernists ad infinitum. So it is all relative. So to have to compare the effectiveness of German or English as literary languages is a difficult thing to do. But German has one up on English. It is the language of philosophy. Actually this was one of the reasons that made me want to study German at the outset. I felt that if people like Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, Wallerstein et al wrote complex exegesis in German, then it must be a language of thought. Never mind that some of these philosophers were thorough-going racists in their work – like Hegel, who wrote Africa out of history, consigning it to an empty abyss. As for English, well they have their philosophers too: Hobbes, Hume, Adam Smith and John Locke, etc. Again these philosophers have their biases as far as other races are concerned. But at the point I made my decision, I was not thinking of their politics. I decided I had mastered the English language well enough, I did not need to study it, definitely not in isolation. So I felt that since German seems amenable to abstract thought, I would have an extra tool for thought if I studied German as a major with English as second major. So it began. I have only dropped German after the MA. In my further studies it is English all the way but with an emphasis on African Studies. I used to write poetry in German but I stopped because I felt I was not going to help perpetuate a language, whose people were oppressing foreigners in their country, in my experience. So I have never published any of my German poetry. I also add the caveat, that there are great contemporary German people in Germany, but there is a clique of the political right, which continually embarrass and upstage the whole population with their racist rhetoric and acts of murder.

You are an ex-Hindu Monk. Has this fact any influence on your writings?

At some point it did – when I was in the Hare Krishna monastery in Lagos. But I could not say, like Steve Biko, "I write what I like." I had to write pseudo-religious poetry with Krishna stuck in somewhere there. Like the Jesuit priest, Gerald Manley Hopkins, I could only have written about non-religious themes illicitly, if I wanted to – I never did; which meant it was a dry period for me. It was one of the reasons I left the monastery amongst others, like my dislike for regimented authority. We woke up at the same time (3 a.m.), took our morning baths at the same time, had morning service at the same time (4 a.m. till about 10 a.m.), had breakfast at the same time (10 a.m.) and went about our priestly duties during the day at the same time, to return at the same time for evening service at 7 p.m. And by 9 p.m. we must all fall down and sleep and rise again like automatons and it went on and on. The lasting influence it had is that it freed me completely of any kind of that type of institutional or self censorship. Since I left, "I write what I like"!