STEPHEN: The Five Sorrowful Mysteries is a prayer of the rosary my family and I often said while I was growing up. One evening while writing the novel, I suddenly realised that the life of Andy Aziza, the narrator and protagonist of my novel, as well as the trajectory of the story, strongly mirrored this prayer. Thus, I decided to give the novel this title. I think it’s an intriguing, malleable, and multipurpose title with many interpretations. I don’t want to go into possible explanations – I think readers who read the novel will fully grasp it and in fact produce personal, even more powerful interpretations of it. But in terms of representing the narrative, I think the title does so effectively, even though it’s also slightly deceptive, for the novel has been described as ‘tragicomic’. Moreover, I’m hugely invested in ‘intertextuality’, how texts speak to and reference each other. To me, intertextuality engenders the cohesion of literature, to a streamlining of it, so that texts as ‘dissimilar’ as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Things Fall Apart could be seen to collaborate, fuse, proselytise a similar message, bring about a reconceptualization of the world and humanity. Perhaps my interest in intertextuality stems from my background in Catholicism (scripture) and mathematics (which often references and seeks to link disparate branches of its theory). Nevertheless, I hope many readers who read the novel get to realise that it’s sort of a ‘literary prayer’, Andy praying not just for himself, but for his community, country, and continent as well.
I began writing the novel in Nigeria in June 2018. One evening I was sitting in my living room when a voice suddenly came to me. The voice was full of so much urgency, energy, shame, sadness, the desire to confess repressed thoughts. So I picked up my BlackBerry and I began to follow the voice, to give it room to express itself, to try to understand it. After writing about 500 words, I stopped and began to reread all that I had written. I discovered that it was the most truthful and eviscerating piece of writing I had ever composed up till that time. This piece became the opening of the novel.
STEPHEN: Andy is a smart and funny fifteen-year-old boy who is obsessed with blondes, whiteness, sex, who his true father is, life abroad in the West. He’s also preoccupied with pop culture, maths, poetry, Afrofuturism. He is ashamed of his poverty, his uneducated mother, and of course, his desire for white girls. So in the novel, Andy battles with this desire and shame, and this battle is further intensified when his life is suddenly destabilised by communal violence.
I didn’t deliberately choose to tell his story from his perspective – this decision was made unconsciously. His perspective presents the simplest and most engaging way to render the narrative. He is fifteen, living in a place that most readers aren’t familiar with, fighting many psychological and socio-economic battles, and it just felt natural to present the story from his perspective. So that, through his first-person POV, the reader partakes in his journey and fully empathises with him, and his story thus feels more personal, visceral, urgent.
STEPHEN: When I was fifteen like Andy, I found poetry and maths hugely therapeutic. They were my canvases for spray-painting my rioting emotions, angst, hopelessness, daily frustrations, my spaceships for momentary escapes. They were amazing tools for scrutinising and unravelling myself. One of the greatest breakthroughs I had while writing Andy Africa was realising that maths/science, poetry/literature weren’t antithetical at all; that they were in fact pursuing the same thing (‘truth’, comprehension); that they were all parts of me, and they would provide interesting modalities for Andy to vent, to scrutinise and understand himself, his community, and the world.
STEPHEN: This is such a powerful and important question that I’m rendered speechless by its enormity, by the whirlpool of ideas and emotions that want to spurt from me. Almost everything about me has been shaped (at varying degrees) by the West. Almost everything. What I eat, say, or think, where I call home. Even my very name: Stephen Buoro. I’m a raging composite of the West and Africa. This is what I sought to depict in my novel.
I think the following passage from my PhD thesis gives a snapshot of how my life has been shaped by the West:
Growing up in Northern Nigeria in the 2000s, I felt that my identity – as well as those of my peers and siblings – was a bifurcation. We had two selves, African and Western, in constant oscillation and collision with each other. At home with our parents, we were African: we ate Nigerian food, our parents made us speak our Nigerian mother tongues, tried to inculcate in us our culture, the oral histories of our tribes. But when we were alone or with our peers, we were Western – Americans, British, French. We chatted endlessly about American films and comic superheroes, life in London and Paris, the tastes of pizzas and burgers, even though we had never travelled abroad or tried these Western foods. We inundated our speech with Americanisms, put on American or British accents, fantasised about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. At night, we prayed to the Western God in English with our parents; on Sundays we went to church and worshipped the white Jesus on his brown cross. At school, we jeered at mates who mispronounced English or French words; our teachers caned us or meted out on us corporal punishments when we spoke Nigerian languages or Pidgin English. I wanted to depict all this in my novel, their imprints on our psyche, on our perception and conceptualisation of the world.
STEPHEN: Yes, definitely. Partly answered in my response to the previous question.
Just like in many postcolonial societies, religion is a primal, powerful force in Nigeria. It intertwines and preordains almost every other system: socio-economic, political, educational, historical… Writing about Nigeria is writing about religion, for it is a country where almost everyone is religious or conditioned to be religious.
STEPHEN: Yes, in a way, the novel could be described as a narrative about complicated love, about complicated relationships. First between mother and son; second between two young people of different skin colours and classes; third between Africa and the West.
STEPHEN: The Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship has been quite transformative in my development as a writer. Without it, I would’ve been unable to study Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, or to fully pursue my lifelong passion for writing. Just before I received the scholarship, I was a mathematics teacher in Nigeria. Each month I was paid a pittance. To afford to study at UEA, I would’ve had to work for several decades and saved everything I earned. In practical terms, the scholarship paid for my tuition, my flight to the UK, and provided me with a monthly stipend. Without the scholarship, I don’t think I would’ve written my debut novel, or at best, would’ve completed it so quickly. Besides, the scholarship injected in me more belief – in myself, my craft.
STEPHEN: Every book I’ve read has influenced me in some way. Some of the writers who influenced Andy Africa include: J. D. Salinger, Anthony Burgess, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (particularly The Brothers Karamazov), Vladimir Nabokov, Chinua Achebe, and Junot Díaz.
