A while back, African Writer Magazine published this great Ugochukwu Anadi review of How To Get Rid of Ants, a book of short stories written by Jesutomisin Ipinmoye. Anadi’s intriguing review prompted me to order the book immediately. And then I wanted to read windows, a title the same author published a handful of years before Ants. Next thing I knew, I wanted to meet the consciousness behind all the goodness. Welcome to a world where the supernatural comfortably co-exists with the mundane.
Jesutomisin Ipinmoye operates in the rarefied field of African Speculative Fiction, that vast space inhabited by the few who dare to poke reality in the face, until it bends and swallows its own slippery tail. An engineer by training, a teacher by calling, in the exchange below, Ipinmoye is a writer/emerging literary theorist commanding a prime spot centerstage.
This writer who delightfully fan-freaks on Lesley Nneka Arimah, Akwaeke Emezi, Kurt Vonnegut and Edgar Allan Poe, reportedly writes quickly, typically finishing the first draft of a short story in a sitting; and then tweaking it for as long as it demands to make a shiny new thing. For one who once said “I think people who write novels are special and have a capacity for torture,” Ipinmoye is currently embracing that torture by attempting to write a novel.
If you believe, like Vonnegut, that “What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time,” visit Jesutomisin Ipinmoye’s website to buy the books.
This email conversation with Sola Osofisan (another lover of Poe, Vonnegut, et al,) has been edited and condensed. Dig in.
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SOLA OSOFISAN: While reading How to Get Rid of Ants in a waiting room, someone asked if I had an insect problem at home. It took some explaining, but we laughed over it. Between How to Get Rid of Ants and windows, have you received other curious questions like that about your book titles?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: The original title for HTGROA was coldwater. It came from multiple places: Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, the excerpt of which prefaces the book; a triptych I wrote during the cyclone season in 2019 called coldwater and heartbreak; a fascination I’ve always had with cleansing. I’ve always been a little obsessed with the idea of being drowned. At any rate, conversations with my publisher swayed me towards changing the title to something that would raise questions. I’ve heard a lot of feedback about the title since publication. In general, people seem to believe it sounds a touch prescriptive? It apparently sounds more like instruction and less like fiction. I’ve also gotten self-help allegations. It’s all very hilarious to think about.
windows, on the other hand, raised no questions. It’s cute that my little disavowed experiment lives on!
SOLA OSOFISAN: You grew up in Agbara, on the outskirts of Lagos, Nigeria. A “small, sleepy town” is how you described it. Can you tell me about your upbringing, focusing on the ingredients like home, the people that stood out to you as a kid, what you saw, watched and read, the memorable moments, the places you visited and how it all came together in the cooking pot that is your mind dishing out stories today?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: I cannot say I’ve ever written from a place of inspiration about Agbara, spatially anyway. I would find it mighty difficult to locate a story there and have it resonate. I am simply too many years removed and hold no strong feelings for the place. We lived in a government estate well outside the town’s market centre – a housing project by Gbenga Daniel, I believe. My parents are home bodies and I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up. As a result, I was always in the house. When I turned 10, I got a bicycle and would occasionally ride around the estate. Sleepy is a very accurate adjective in hindsight. Not a lot of things happened there, at least not anything my deeply evangelical parents cared for me to see. As a result, I was always dreaming outwards, escaping home through fiction. Then I actually escaped to Accra for three years and change, and then Abeokuta for another two years or so. Mix in some boarding school, and by the time I left for Mauritius, I had no solid concept of Agbara as a place to write about.
That being said, I have recently found that the atmosphere seeps into my writing. Strange how that works: the place-as-place harkens no feeling, but the place-as-texture does. I suspect this is because I have since lived in a few more places that feel that way. That feeling – dusty emptiness, languid and lazy movement, house-then-field-then-house-then-bush – stays with me.
I think, in addition, I view myself, especially recently, as a sleepy sort of prose stylist. I have grown a fondness for alliteration, assonance, accumulation, and sudden rupture that when successful, feels like a lazy and crawling afternoon that slowly builds heat into a sweltering evening that refuses rest.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Your story, We Don’t Speak of That feels to me like it is written in Yoruba. On page 145, it says; “There are some truths that aren’t worth telling and sometimes the consequence of a lie is a balm when held next to the burns the truth can cause.” I’m sure there’s a ‘neater, fancier’ way to write that, but to effectively express the Yoruba worldview behind the words, for me, it works so well. Take another sample from the title story: “Silence means many things, and this was the kind of silence that settles before despair finds you.” There’s wisdom, harmony, and depth to it such as you would hear from a wizened griot. You identify as a storyteller. What’s it like to be an old soul in a young body? Do you have Yoruba storytelling influences?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: Am I an old soul? I hear this a lot. LMAO. Thank you! I don’t think myself wise though – if I was, I would certainly have a lot more discipline in my life. I think I have just allowed myself the misfortune of many kinds of lives, and as such, can extrapolate the emotional textures.
As most speculative fiction writers in Nigeria would tell you, Amos Tutuola is a major influence in how we think about tearing veils. And there’s also D.O. Fagunwa. However, I do not know that I can honestly name them as early influences. As far as Yoruba influence exists in my work, I owe that to my love of myth and my mother’s love of proverbs. My mother almost always speaks in proverbs and aphorisms. She managed, often, to pull a new one out every time she told any story. It was a delight to untangle these statements and gleam a sort of lexical beauty from this attack on the quotidian: truly, what is “they got angry” in comparison to won tu’tọ́ s’ókè, f’ojú gbàá?
Side note: that’s one of my favourite stories from the collection still. It has a gradual and tangible presence to it, one that manifests over time, boiling over and cooling rather audibly. I’m charmed by it and glad it carries a very traditional feel.
SOLA OSOFISAN: I got to the last page of your story, Solitude! and I said to myself, Ipinmoye has somehow succeeded in making the ground under his protagonist’s feet the villain in this story. And then you ended it by sending your protagonist off to do battle with the earth. How exactly is that not a one-sided battle, since the same earth as already established in the narrative could swallow her up in a wink? How do you do battle with deity? What were you thinking when you wrote that bit? It reads like it was a challenging story to wrap up.
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: I laughed reading this question. I wrote sections of that story after a six to eight month break up. I think I was grappling with the concept of inevitability. I like how you put it: “a one-sided battle”. I am told that my writing can be rather depressive, yet I think myself an optimist. I think when I first wrote it, back in 2022, I was operating from the idea that battle with the inevitable does not mean you cede the fight. If you believe you deserve love, then hell or high water be damned, you ought to fight for your love. But right now, I kind of see how that’s a downer. I suppose the suggestion is that the battle would end in a loss. LMAO. But I guess those are the two sides of the inevitable? I guess that’s why I ended the story there: in refusal of any resolution that settled the question. That sounds fake deep.
I do not remember it being difficult to end which I find remarkable in hindsight. If I was writing it now, it would have been at least three thousand words longer and would have ended wrong. I think I captured the emotion necessary to, to the degree necessary to, landing at the end before the mysteries were dulled.
SOLA OSOFISAN: To flip back briefly to We Don’t Speak of That, on page 147, you write: “There are versions of yourself you can’t be here. Some boxes you can’t open.” I understand you’re fairly well-traveled, not only in the books you have read, but in the places you have walked. Talk about the places you have visited and how your travels and encounters have impacted the “boxes” you dare to open in your mind and stories.
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: I’m weighing how specific I want to be here, for many reasons. Mark Twain called writers to travel. I think this is still the single most important thing a writer can do for their career. If you can afford it, and it is feasible, you should do it. It doesn’t have to be international. It must just be intentional and take you to a new place. Broader exposure to various cultures and ways of thought has a starting effect on the mind: it would take remarkable effort to remain close minded. In that way, there’s so many more places I would go, types of stories I would tell, shapes my work can take, that are possible simply because I have seen more. ‘good sh!t’, for example, is based on a thing that I have been told by numerous Kenyans really does happen in Nairobi.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Perhaps my pet quote of yours is “I’m fascinated by people. I’m fascinated by the things that happen silently, the things that no one else talks about.” That’s the perfect recipe for encountering the wildest ideas. Taboo is about my favorite word in the world. I love dancing close to it in my stories because it makes readers piss their pants. We’re products of a superstitious society. Are there subjects you would not deign to write about? Any taboos?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: You have a penchant for asking me really difficult questions to answer LMAO. I love it. I think the reason why this is difficult to answer is because I have conflicting positions on this. I think it is possible to write about anything if you take enough care (i.e. do your research, ensure you aren’t being gratuitous, are being responsible with portrayal, are not operating with a desire to shock senselessly) and yet at the same time, there are topics I do not have interest in, or simply do not believe I am a good steward of. For example, I do not see myself writing sexual assault. That is simply not a story element that interests me, nor is it one I think I would handle well.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Stephen King says “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” We don’t have to make it up in Africa, right? There’s a lot of craziness happening daily around us in Nigeria that we take as normal, but these are not normal things. We walk past a rotting corpse on the way to work; there’s a naked woman beside the road conversing with the wind; human body parts are sold in “open” marketplaces… And it is per for the course. Many of us are quietly broken, and we don’t even realize it. Why, though, do you keep on tugging at these loose strings at the edges of our reality, when you know we’ll only get rattled and unraveled and run around naked in the marketplace?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: Why wouldn’t you want to look at the thing? Why wouldn’t you want to run mad? To paraphrase Philip K. Dick, it is a perfectly valid response to reality to run insane. I see speculative fiction as a way of restoring your senses. There is what was lost to our dislocation in time: we no longer can identify with who we were before colonialism muddied our minds. Then there is what is lost to constant trauma: we are unfeeling, everything is normal. It is important to run mad; it is important to yaw till breaking to realise that everything is in fact abnormal and we should take it as such.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You seem to be a keen observer of African folklore, myths and urban legends. They seem somehow reborn in your stories, adorned in modern cloaks and twists; magun, crossroads and cross-species marriages, Ifa divination, the granting of wishes, amulets… Your stories bridge the borders of the known and that other place where anything can happen. Stephen King in Danse Macabre calls this kind of writing a delicate dance; It’s a balancing act. Push it too far, or too soon, and you lose the reader and he ceases to “suspend disbelief,” thereby collapsing your construct. How do you sense what buttons to press, what works, and just how far to go in each story?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: Speculative fiction operates first from the premise that life in itself is plenty magical, and our problem is often one of dead senses, as mentioned above. We over-rely on sight, an imported and primarily western and body-obsessed sense Oyeronke (Oyewunmi) diagnoses in The Invention of Women, instead of all our other senses. The failure here is that with western eyes, we can’t see all the lurking spirits: those eyes are unfamiliar. So, we must sense instead. I write fiction towards that objective: I do not invite you to suspend disbelief because there is no place for uncertainty when your skin prickles. A way to do this is (1) to very quickly establish a premise and place it in your hand; or, (2) to make the speculation appear as an ordinary consequence of action. Sometimes, I use both to great effect. The truth is simply that the bizarre splits out of reality when you crack it, and what is conflict if not the crack that whips narrative?
SOLA OSOFISAN: You said in an interview that you sometimes “work backwards” – reverse engineering so to speak – “an experience or behavior that seems completely irrational” to “arrive at that irrationality in a rational manner.” I think that’s one of the most clearheaded and practical approaches to writing crazy shit that I have heard, and I suspect you take that approach because you’re also an engineer. Taking things apart to see how they work comes with the territory. I watched that YouTube clip on repeat for a while. In what other ways do you apply your engineering training to your writing?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: This is a fun thing to think about. The extrapolation here, that my writing process is rather mechanical, had never naturally occurred to me. I like it! I think I have never actually considered that doing all that engineering would have practically tweaked my brain into a base practicality. But I suppose this makes a lot of sense: I spent 5 years mastering the thought process that every problem has a practical and logical solution, no matter how counter-intuitive. That is actually one of the more fun things about an engineering degree, especially if you’re lucky enough to do it more practically. You learn very quickly that a working solution is never pretty but is always creative. Things have qualities but those qualities can be repurposed, items bent into new shapes to fit novel purposes. However, after really sitting with this, I think the biggest effect has just been the shift to my register. I am told, especially recently, that my fiction can occasionally acquire a scientific bend to it. Equations and physics and gravity and grace. All that jazz.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Some of your stories leave the reader hanging, and frustrated, asking “Is it over? Where’s the rest of it?” The title story of Ants for instance. Why do you feel compelled to end some stories like that? What effect do you hope the things left unsaid will have on your reader?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: There’s a quote in a YouTube video essay I really like (shout out CJ the X). It goes something like: “You either end a story where it began or somewhere else.”
Allow me present another idea: Edgar Allan Poe viewed short stories as a vehicle for a singular unified effect. That is, through the use of narrative, we manipulate a single event and use it to explore the depths of humanity.
Across both ideas I’ve just presented, I’ve always viewed the short story as a gambit of premise and outcome. A thing happens and then the story is in what happens after the thing happens. But when we arrive at a resolution of emotion, there is no story there anymore. By resolving how the characters manage the event, we will find ourselves at the beginning or somewhere else. But after that point, within the medium, there is no story.
This is what separates the novel from the short story. A novel is almost a life; there is not just one thing to happen. Instead, the story there becomes how all these various things combine to transmit the information of continued change, growth, and action. So, where a short story prizes singularity, the novel values plurality.
What I’m trying to say, in vague allusion to Weil, is that a short story exists at the exact point at which the maximum amount of energy can be drawn from a premise. Any further, and we will be looking at a life.
TLDR (and this is what I often say off-hand in response to this question): I don’t know what happened after the end either.
In response to the question of desired effect: I think I strive for vertigo, a very brief sensation wherein within yourself you sense a world that was just solid beneath you, now falling away.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Writing literature in Africa has always had a social responsibility burden. It’s how our predecessors had to do it; the Soyinkas, Achebes… What we have are countries-in-progress after all, unlike elsewhere where writers have the liberty to tell stories “just because” – with no compulsion to speak to power. In the title story of Ants, we see how Niran’s destructive power over the ants is tantamount to that of the outside forces over his own existence. He is no more than an insect, tormented even as he himself remains a torment. Talk about how that power-play is on display in a society like ours where power is wielded forcefully to oppress “lesser” mortals. How do you navigate this in your writing? Do you feel any pressure to “s’oro s’oke” (speak up) with your writing?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: There’s a few important axioms to establish before I answer this; (1) All art is political; (2) Artists bear a responsibility to be aware of, critical of, and intentional about, the political effect contained in their work – that is, they must ask the question, does this do what I believe? (3) In awareness of this responsibility, it is important that the work not exist naturally from your beliefs and not to your beliefs, otherwise you risk revealing yourself as a puppeteer.
This being established, there’s the responsibility to say something and then there’s an amorphous pressure, emanating from our global conditions, to say everything. However, this is not necessarily a burden. A consistent political position, especially when well grounded, extends into every topic and you only come to one that is thorough from attention through first principles, Simone Weil style. It’s almost like a lighthouse. Things come into focus and the story radiates outward from there.
This feels like word salad. I hope I have made at least a lick of sense.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You have a gift for creating characters that are easily recognized by your readers. They’re often familiar, everyday people who could be our neighbors. It makes the bizarre in your stories go down well. To borrow Stephen King’s words again, on writing his horror stories, they “often work better when we have a stake in the game.” The stake in this case being our friends and neighbors and even ourselves that you write about. What’s your character creation process? How do you bring your protagonists to life in your stories?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: This is one of those compliments that reinvigorate belief in yourself. Thank you. I say so because I think my skills are weakest at characterisation. I also struggle with creating an immersive sense of place. I think this was easier when I wrote windows because I still visited home more often. It’s an uphill battle now, especially if I am to render any detail without caricature.
This is also compounded by the fact that I write in a manner that’s first excited by incident before character. In the book on craft I am currently reading (The Art of the Short Story by Valerie Shaw), they describe this as a fascination with ‘things’ over ‘people’; ‘head’ over ‘heart’; ‘idea’ over ‘passion’; ‘denouement’ over ‘drama’.
I think my mileage does vary: there’s stories like ‘husband material’ and ‘good sh!t’ and ‘we don’t speak of that’, where the line between the tendencies vanishes and I glimpse a person.
So, I am greatly pleased that the characters in HTGROA are familiar.
SOLA OSOFISAN: At the end of a story in your book, one is often instinctively compelled to take a moment and process what has just happened, before moving on to the next one. That is serious engagement with your readers. Is that intentional, or you merely tell a tale and it’s just a by-product?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: This is something that confuses me, but I am coming to accept that it is a thing of perspective and personality. I am immensely grateful for it, absolutely so. I think it’s a wonderful thing to occupy space – this is a preoccupation of mine – and such, I cherish the idea that I could stick around there with a few words and demand rumination. But I don’t intend it. I’ve always just gotten that response and found it confusing.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You’ve been consistent in interviews about the writers that have influenced you; Akwaeke, Arimah, Serpell, Vonnegut. Can you name five other writers or books you read that shook your world before you encountered those writers? At what age did you read the books/writer?
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: I adore Okwiri Oduor’s Things They Lost. I read it last year, after the longest time owning the book and struggling to get into it. I think it just needed to meet me at a different time. Some books are like that. Okwiri’s pen is divine. She has such an inventive control of language and spirit. She’s also great fun to read.
I’m buoyed by the Japanese, although I wish I could read them more. Currently, the bend my work has taken in the years post HTGROA is perhaps tonally similar to Murakami – minus his emotive qualities I suppose. I’ve paused at least five times since writing that statement to consider its veracity. I suspect I’ve offended someone somewhere. I’m thinking in particular about two or three stories of mine that I wrote in the last year and change, and one’s only just been published.
Anyway, the Japanese. Yes, I read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in 2019, I believe, on recommendation from a good friend of mine. I am quite certain that this was also the year I read Emezi’s Freshwater so it was decidedly the year I realised there was nothing left to explore in realist fiction for me. If Freshwater offered the spiritual, The Vegetarian offered the visceral and upsetting. I reached with both hands.
It’s difficult to write speculative fiction or fantasy as a Nigerian and not venerate Okri’s The Famished Road. I came across it in 2016. As I write this, I’m looking up at the copy I stole from my school library then. I took it to the dorms so I could write and rewrite the opening paragraphs into a notebook, again and again. I was intimately aware that I was reading the sort of words that came charged. I wanted to harness that through my own arms too.
Speaking of high school, I very randomly became obsessed with the idea of Edgar Allan Poe. I say ‘the idea of’ very deliberately, and you’ll understand why soon. At any rate, I came across A Tell-Tale Heart and grew obsessed with the macabre nature of the tale. It is in writing this that I am realising a fault in my earlier conclusion of grasping the visceral from Han Kang. Maybe it just loosened it out of me; forced me out of a more literary mode and into true weirdness. Maybe I’ve always just been a weird fucking kid. Anyhow, I really loved A Tell-Tale Heart at 14. Something about Poe’s unified control of language and mood, immersing us in worsening insanity. Lovely stuff. I was tapped to write a story in 2016 to enter the KPMG Short Story Competition. The schools that wanted to participate had to have their nominees send in short stories. So, I was put in a classroom and asked to draft something. I remembered Poe and plagiarised A Tell-Tale Heart. That got me into the competition, which I eventually won in front of Lola Shoneyin and Toni Kan. Very lovely stuff.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Tell me a little about your interest in filmmaking. You seem to be circling the idea…
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: I am! I picked up an involved interest in film in my first year of university. Something about having all the internet and time in the world, all away from home. What I particularly gravitated to as my interest developed was direction. I enjoyed thinking through stories in terms of movement. In my prose, it can prove to be an unfortunate habit that betrays how I cut my teeth writing. In a screenplay, however, that obsession was useful. I found the exercise of thinking about how actors and camera could dance in tune to the story very enjoyable. However, I have enough practical experience with student films to know that I’m not a director. I’m not cut out for it. My medium remains on the page and that’s already plenty hard to master.
This being said, I try to make it clear that I write screenplays as well. I’ve co-written one once (with the homie Gabrielle Emem Harry), but I don’t think it was ever produced. I also have about three or four pretty ‘meh’ shorts, I wrote but never did anything with – sometimes, it’s just nice to get the pen working.
I am on a campaign where I’m trying to find someone to introduce me to Lesley Nneka Arimah so I can beg her for the opportunity to write the screenplay for ‘Who Will Greet You at Home’. I think it’s ludicrous that we have fresh horror IP (Intellectual Property) THAT good and no one’s bought the rights and produced the thing.
SOLA OSOFISAN: I look forward to reading the works you’re going to write in the near future. Consider me a huge fan.
JESUTOMISIN IPINMOYE: Thank you so much for saying this. I’m still getting used to the idea that there are people that read and think and appreciate what I do. I hope you enjoy the novel (if it ever sees the light of day) and all the subsequent short stories.
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Image via subject, remixed