UWEM AKPAN

“You know, sometimes writing can be like what Joseph Conrad says in Youth: "You fight, work, sweat, almost kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself trying to accomplish something—you can't. Not from any fault of yours." If I failed, I didn't want to be bitter and cranky, you know. I like what the three men thrown into fire by Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel for worshiping the true God say to him: "If our God wants, he will save us from the burning flame. And if he does not, we will still worship him." - Uwem akpan

A book of short stories entitled “Say you’re one of them” written by Nigerian Jesuit priest, Uwem Akpan, was picked by the fairy god mother herself, Oprah Winfrey as her 63rd book selection for her book club on Sept 17, 2009. Oprah’s bookclub is the biggest in the world with almost two million online members and books chosen by Oprah invariably skyrocket to the top of US best seller lists. When Winfrey chose David Wroblewski's "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle," a first novel, the book achieved instantaneous success after the announcement. Ever since Oprah's Book Club kicked off in 1996 with Jacqueline Mitchard's novel "The Deep End of the Ocean," the seal of Oprah-approval has virtually guaranteed overnight renown for authors. It was the first time she had chosen a book of short stories. The collection was published in 2008 and contains short stories each set in a different african country; kenya, Benin, ethiopia, Nigeria and Rwanda and cover issues of child traficking, religious conflict,child prostituition and genocide.

Uwem Akpan, is an Annang man born on the 19th of May, 1971 in Ikot Akpan Eda in southern Nigeria. His parents were teachers and he and his three brothers grew up speaking both English and Annang. He joined the Jesuit order at the age of 19, in 1990 and became a priest on the 19th of July, 2003. Akpan studied philosophy and english at Creighton and Gonzaza universities then studied theology for three years at the Catholic university of Eastern africa. He later received his masters degree in creative writing from the university of Michigan in 2006, two years before his book was published. Since it’s release the book has been ranked with the likes of Chinua Achebe”s “Things fall apart” which celebrated it’s 50th birthday earlier on this year. Akpan won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first book and his collection of stories have raked in several awards and nominations such as:

Winner of the 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
Nominated for the Guardian First Book Award
Nominated for the Caine Prize for African Writing
Nominated for the Story Prize
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, African Region
Nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

His stories have been published in several magazines including the New yorker and he has received raving reviews from every reputable publisher including the Wall street journal, New york times, Sunday times, Washington post and Publishers weekly. He has certainly become a household name and his story telling powers have earned him the reputation of a literary icon whom we hope has come to stay.
In his own words, Uwem Akpan shares a glimpse of his Nigerian roots, does it sound familiar?

“I was born under a palm-wine tree in Ikot Akpan Eda in Ikot Ekpene Diocese in Nigeria. I was inspired to write by the people who sit around my village church to share palm wine after Sunday Mass, by the Bible and by the humor and endurance of the poor. My grandfather was one of those who brought the Catholic Church to our village. I was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003, and I like to celebrate the sacraments for my fellow villagers. Some of them have no problem stopping me in the road and asking for confession!I have very fond memories of my childhood in my village, where everybody knows everybody, and all my paternal uncles still live together in one big compound. When I was growing up, my mother told me folktales and got me and my three brothers to read a lot. I became a fiction writer during my seminary days. I wrote at night, when the community computers were free. Computer viruses ate much of my work. Finally, my friend Wes Harris believed in me enough to get me a laptop. This saved me from the despair of losing my stories and made me begin to see God again in the seminary. The stories on that first laptop are the core of Say You're One of Them”.

His story is the Nigerian dream: to rise out of obscurity or hardship and succeed by tenacity,talent,a little of that Nigerian resilience and plenty of that “Baba God de” spirit!

In an interview with Erin J. Shea posted on www.oprah.com, Uwem admits that the book was a painful book to write and he needed balance to get through with it. In his simple down -to-earth way that characterizes his writing style even in his book, he narrates the contents of prayers he prayed to God while working on ”Say you’re one of them”. He tells it like this;

“i was basically telling God; i will give my right hand to develop this talent you have given me. Whether i succeed or not is your call.”

You can almost feel his passion as he explains the bitter- sweet pangs that accompanied his pregnancy with this book when he says:

” ... my prayers before the Blessed Sacrament were, “ Lord do not allow this mad pain or crazy joy to destroy me”.

He carried this baby to full term after eight years of labour and it’s certainly paid off. With an endorsement from the most influential talkshow host in America, his book is well on it’s way to being a best seller success and has paved a way for African fiction in that part of the world.

If you wondered how he is able to combine the work of a priest and a writer he explains:

“ It took me eight years to write the book; i began when i was preparing for the priesthood and had to pace myself carefully, writing nights, being a seminarian in the day.” He also adds: “It is demanding. As a priest, you can be called upon anytime…and you would have to put writing aside to visit the sick, to console the bereaved, etc. And when I am teaching, it is three things I have to juggle. So far, I have to say, this juggling has not killed me!”

His long journey from there to here does not seem easy as he responds to a question from an Oprah book club member, Antionette;

” It took me eight years, 2000 to 2008, when my book came out. The only thing that came suddenly was the idea of writing about children. The rest came sentence by sentence, picture by picture. I kept rewriting, learning to write and experimenting …it felt like something I had to do. It was like a vocation. I was afraid many times, of not succeeding, of getting the details of another culture and country wrong, of sitting through the painful scenes in the stories many times to get the details right but I know all of these fears pale in comparison with what children who live through war, child trafficking, hunger actually have to face. They're the courageous ones!”

As i read his interviews i get the sense that it’s not about the writer at all but the African continent and the ills that plagues her societies and the plight of the children who face the harsh realities of them. When asked what he hopes readers will understand about the current state of affairs in Africa, he said :

”I hope they are able to see the faces of these poor children. I hope they are able to hear the voices of these children. And, I hope they are able to react. The first line of reaction is to see this as a deeply human book, with human stories and then feel for these characters. Even as spread out as these stories are, I cannot paint the complete picture of Africa. There are many happy children in Africa. It’s not as if every child is facing these particular problems. I don’t want people to think Africa is all about suffering and misery, but at the same time there are real issues there. I also hope people will read these stories and see the influences of the outside world on these situations”

He has certainly earned my interest and respect for his both his person and his cause. He is a model Nigerian. In another interview with Rumpus magazine, he explains his call to priesthood to Grace Tulsan;

”Like you, I was born Catholic and started thinking of the priesthood quite early. Like your family, we had many priests come around our family. I was fascinated by what the priest does. And I started feeling I was called to do this. My high school was a minor seminary, and I attended a lot of ordinations. I picked the Jesuits because of their spirituality, the way I saw them relate with people and missionary spirit. For me, I say the calling became evident over time.”

He also had this to say about how he started writing fiction:

“ Regarding writing, I have always loved stories. There was a lot of storytelling in Ikot Akpan Eda, my village, where I grew up. Yet when I started to write, I wrote poetry and essays. I never knew I could write fiction till a Nigerian newspaper rejected my articles. Seeing that it also published fiction, I tried it and got serialized for many consecutive Saturdays in 2000. I was very excited and wrote lots and tried out so many things.”

His road to success has certainly not been a walk in the park, his first book took him eight years to write, his initial attempts were met with rejection... he certainly has gone through the gauntlet typical of hard earned success and of course, he did say he had to rewrite his stories over and over to make them better and he went to school to hone his skills;

“After ordination to priesthood in 2003, I went to work as a vice principal and English teacher in a high school in Abuja, Nigeria. That was when my superiors finally said I could apply to writing school… I always felt my writing could benefit from the attention of established writers. I knew my work could grow and be better. So I looked up the best programs on the Internet, and Michigan was one of the places that admitted me… I did some ministry, but I didn’t teach during my MFA years. I went to Michigan with two hopes: to develop my writing and to see whether I could get a foot, as they say, in the publishing industry.”

But how did he get noticed? When his first story got published in The New Yorker, other publishers came knocking;

“I had no agent. The New Yorker had rejected “An Ex-Mas Feast” twice before I got to Michigan. So when my teacher, Eileen Pollack, told me to resubmit it after one semester at Michigan, I was reluctant. By this time, though, I’d rewritten it over and over again. She gave me the name of an assistant editor to whom I submitted it. After four months or so, one afternoon, I got a call from Cressida Leyshon, the assistant editor. For a long while I was confused with happiness, because we’d been told in writing school that if they called you it meant you stood a big chance of your work being published. She was very nice on the phone, but then when we came around to the issue of my submission she said they’d cut my work to fourteen pages from twenty-four. I wasn’t amused and started arguing with her, telling her my work had now grown to more than thirty pages in the four intervening months because I’d been rewriting the story. (Each time I learnt something new in the workshop, I would go back and apply this to all my stories.) So I told Cressida that my classmates and teachers liked the latest version of my story and that that was the version I was comfortable publishing. She emailed her critique. At the end she asked me to resubmit the story in a month’s time, taking her suggestions and those of the workshop into consideration. After the phone call, I walked more than a mile to church to thank God. But on getting there, I couldn’t sit or kneel or pray, out of excitement. I ended up hurrying around the outer aisles as if I was doing a fast-motion Stations of the Cross. Then I told God I would talk to Him another time and darted home. I was lucky no car hit me on the road. When I told Eileen later on about the argument with Cressida, she rebuked me. “You don’t argue with The New Yorker!” She explained that I should allow them to publish whatever they wanted and then I could change the story once I got a publisher, which would happen easily only if I got into The New Yorker. I thought I’d lost my golden opportunity, for I didn’t know The New Yorker was that big an entity on the American literary scene. I was mortified…well, within four days, I’d rewritten the story as best as I could. Cressida sent me an email two weeks later, not one month as she had initially said, asking me whether I could send in the story. I did and they accepted thirty or so pages. Four publishers did come forward as soon as “An Ex-Mas Feast” appeared in the fiction edition of 2005. It was just as Eileen had said about The New Yorker! But I refrained from getting contracts because I felt I wasn’t ready yet. I still had one year of writing school to go. I was in dreamland…

He adds;

“ I wanted to work some more on the collection before I committed myself. My classmates had a big party for me. To cut a long story short, my editor at The New Yorker helped me a lot. I had walked into something I knew nothing about. She and Eileen helped me find an agent, who had to contend with twelve publishers the following year when “My Parents’ Bedroom” came out and I was finally ready.

Uwem is my Nigerian Hero right now and there’s no better story to exemplify the potential of the Nigerian borne if we would only harness our skills and be proud of our heritage.