Bura-Bari Nwilo is a postgraduate student of African literature at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, where he also received his undergraduate degree in English Literature. Bura-Bari has been published across print and electronic platforms around the world. His poems and stories have appeared in Cultural Weekly in US, Ake Review, the ANA Review, Guardian Newspaper, 234 Next Newspaper and more.
His book of short stories, The Colour of a Thing Believed—published by Griots Lounge (Nigeria/Canada), won second place at the 2019 ANA Abubakar Gimba Prize for Short stories. His pidgin story, Like Eyes Liquid with Hope, was longlisted for the 2016 Writivism Short Story Price in Kampala Uganda and is published in English and French.
Bura-Bari is an alumnus of the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop and the Wole Soyinka Foundation workshop, respectively. He volunteers with the Port Harcourt Literary Society in Rivers State and he is the Book Reviews Editor at Afreecan Read.
Bura-bari is from Luubaara in Khana Local Government Area of Rivers State but writes from a cosy room frilled with family pictures and flower plants in Nsukka, Nigeria.
Miracle: Welcome to this conversation, Bura! How are you and how is Nsukka this evening?
Bura-Bari: Thank you, Miracle. I’m well and Nsukka is calm. Where I live rarely knows calm but I’m great.
Miracle: From the little you drop on the internet I can tell you are a man who is much involved in his tradition and people. So I wasn’t surprised when I saw the announcement about your book written in your Native tongue, Ogoni. Can you tell us about the people of Ogoni and experiences you had growing up as an Ogoni man?
Bura-Bari: The Ogoni people exist in the south-eastern part of Rivers State, with a population of about 1 million or more. We are farmers and fishermen since we have access to Rivers and seas. I grew up in Port Harcourt and would go home during the holidays, still, I was never really fascinated until I came of age and people would ask me questions about Ogoni, then I became deliberate to learn and read about my people. This stage of my life is about helping to fix things. I dropped Vincent for my middle name, Bura-Bari because I knew I needed to sell that identity too. This project is personal to me, I had to learn how to read and write the language to attempt poetry in it. I’m glad it found shape and I am looking forward to the next phase of it.
Miracle: well, that is encouraging. So is this your first book publication in your native language? If yes, how does it feel to eventually have a book in your own language?
Bura-Bari: yes, this my first project in the Khana language. Ogoni has four local government areas and each of them has variations of the Ogoni language. The term Ogoni is still debatable whether the people would go by it or something else because it is also a corruption of an Ijaw word Igoni which means stranger. A school of thought has it that the Ogoni must have settled in Rivers State before some Ijaws because Ogoni has the juicy land and Ijaws are by the seas. It is only someone who arrived a place late that could have settled by the sea. So the poetry I wrote is in Khana Language which happens to be one of the four languages of the Ogoni people. I feel very fulfilled, this looks like the best thing I have ever done with my life. You know sometimes you finish a project and you are like: okay if I die now I know I have contributed something to the world, that’s how I feel. It’s this important to me because from Port Harcourt to Ogoni is about forty-five minutes yet when people migrate from Ogoni to Port Harcourt, despite the short distance, they lose the language. Again part of the reason for losing the language was because the Ogoni people were seen as backward people. There was a generation that didn’t want to identify with the tribe so a lot of people didn’t bear Ogoni names. They would rather translate their names and all. So part of the job my generation and other generations before mine did was to let the people find confidence in the language, bear the language, carry their identity of the language, own it, and then create with it. My project right now is about creating in the language. It feels really amazing to be part of this project. This is not a perfect work but the idea is to spur creativity in the language.
Miracle: I agree with you. One of the fulfilling events in the life of any artist is to promote their identity to the world, which is what you’ve done with this poetry book. Can you speak about the ideas and experiences that informed the poems and how you decided to involve your native tongue this time around? Also, I noticed foreign alphabets in the Ogoni/Khana language. What are they alphabets called?
Bura-Bari: yes truly, I think an artist who doesn’t do enough for his own language is almost serving the other purpose of just promoting art in a foreign language. For goodness sake that art would just be there and someday he would look back and there would be nothing in his own culture. Creating in our culture does not only preserve the language, but it also invites the world to see how unique our languages can be and how the languages can embody metaphors in our heads. The book has 25 poems. The 25 poems represent 25 years since the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa and its other Ogoni’s who were killed by the federal government of Nigeria on trumped-up charges of being involved in an incident that happened in Ogoni in the mid-1990s where four Ogoni elders were killed. This year makes it 25 years since then. There have been conversations and there are still conversations about November 10 this year. The conversation would be: what has happened, has there been a change in the mindset of the people since then, has there been any kind of improvement in the oil wells that have been shut for 25 years? And consciousness in the sense that, are the people now fully aware of being able to sit at negotiation tables with the federal government about the natural resources of their land? That’s the beginning of the collection, the poems vary from supplications that are to God, friendship and distrust. There are also the mentions of shell Oil Company, and how Ogoni oil has built Abuja and Lagos but still on life support. There’s also the political theme, the love poems, the silly ones; the theme is diverse but within the rims of the Ogoni struggle. If you go through the English translation you could see some of these things. Particularly, there’s a poem about death from an occurance in the 1990s, when the Military raided Ogoni looking for MOSOP members (Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People) and people who pledged allegiance to MOSOSP. There where killings, rapes and all kinds of brutalities. But the blood of these Ogoni people that were killed was not just sinking into the ground for nothing. It was springing up something very important, and what it has sprung up is the courage and the enthusiasm in us, the younger generation. We may not be fighting the kind of fight our elders fought but there is the consciousness. So I guess the blood has gone deep into the ground to blossom consciousness and some level of confidence.
About the alphabets, I had to source the dialectics for it. They are not foreign, they have names and are still available in some other languages like Chinese. I don’t know the individual names of the alphabets but from the materials I studied to write the Ogoni language, they provided all of those representations.
Miracle: I remember when I requested for a copy of your book you told me, I may not enjoy the English version like in the language. I don’t know if that was a deliberate act to dampen my expectations or you saying it as it was for you. Because I relished every single verse in this book. One of my favourite poems in this collection is ‘Ogoni Oil’. As you’ve just said, it takes my mind back to a period when the people of Rivers state (a state where the Ogoni people reside), protested against the shell oil and government violating indigenes of the land. The beginning lines were dark and poignant:
Ogoni oil has a name.
Its name is blood.
The blood is fiercely hot
The blood flows like a river,
The blood of Infants and adult,
Of the rich and poor.
What is it about Ogoni oil that you want the world to know?
Bura-Bari: Thank you very much for the question. Why I told you about you not going to enjoy the English representation of the poem is because, there’s a lot of expectations on English poetry, and one of such expectation is for it not to be simple (laughs). For it to carry on a particular kind of weight, so I felt the English language wasn’t going to carry the kind of weight the Ogoni version carried as I was translating it line by line from the Ogoni language. For example, ‘Ogoni oil’, the oil has brought the tribe to a fall not for a good purpose but for the purpose that they were terribly marginalized and under-developed. And the period they came around to seek better treatment was met with brutal violence and the destruction of their lives and source of living, and of course the killing of their kinsmen. So for this particular poem, I wanted the world to see the actual face of the Ogoni oil. You know the saying that goes: Art gains relevance. Sometimes art gains relevance because of what it has gone through. A piece of art on whose watch somebody was slaughtered or a genocide took place has become more than just a piece of art. It’s now a priced artwork. That is how it is for the Ogoni oil now, because of the blood that has gone into the soil. I want the world to understand that when you buy a barrel of Ogoni oil, you are not just buying an ordinary oil. You’re buying the people’s sweat, the people’s curses, and a lot of things the people have endured. I wanted to also with the poem paint the troubling picture of the state of oil: the oil is blood and the blood is fiercely hot, and the blood flows like a river. It is almost unending, because even as we speak, there are oil companies with the current Rivers state government who are attempting to impinge our land without negotiating with the people. There’ve been times when the government and oil companies put hands together to sponsor violence in the area. To create the unsettling environment and probably look for another reason to come in. People are still dying as a result of communal clashes, cult clashes and some of these cult people are empowered and the death keeps going on and on.
Miracle: I believe poetry is the harmonious flow of emotions. It being either complex or simple shouldn’t be a determinant, so long as the writer can bring out a defined beauty. What do you think?
Bura-Bari: I agree with you totally.
Miracle: Going back to the poetry book, its cadence flows with the beauty of an orchard garden on a sunny day, easy and brilliant. Still on its beauty, let’s talk about ‘the great wind of life’. I remember the feeling overwhelmed when I first read it, that It takes one who is attuned to the rhythms of nature to be happy and free. Can we talk about this poem and the emotions that followed while creating it and after?
Bura-Bari: this ‘great wind of life’ was the first poem I wrote in this collection. It is also the poem that carries the weight of the collection. In the sense that, I was looking for a title and landed on GbƐnƐ Efᴐp Dum, the Great Wind of Life. It was meant to be a love poem then it turned to be a supplication to God; the supplication was for total renewal. At the point I felt I was unclean and not just unclean, I felt that I needed to ask God for so much, which I think I did:
Today, I write your name on the ground
I write your name on the ground too
I call fourth the Great Wind of Life
To fall on me
And show me a path.
It is a call for direction, a rite of passage, like some ritual you should conduct when you are ready for a particular form of transformation. I think this was what I felt at that point because I needed to find my path. And the lines that say: the great wind of life fall me and raise my hand up, is also about my craft and everything that has come to be identified with me. I wanted the great power of providence to lift it, whether it was my love life or not, I wanted it to lift me up. This piece was of my entire essence and willing it to the great creator. It could also be of the tribe and willing its essence to the creator for a total renewal and growth. Imagine when the God factor takes you to the riverside and then scopes water with his mighty hands and washes your face clean. There’ve been times in my life when there’ve been some levels of misfortunes whereby I apply for programs, the same programs people applied and I don’t get accepted. I feel that there’s a rite that is missing whereby God needs to take me to the riverside, not immersion this time around but scoping water and then washing my face clean. Because I also believe with such act from God, I’d be opened to greater goodness that’s out there in the world.
Miracle: Speaking of my favourite poems in your book, let’s talk about ‘there’s no Brother’. The lines that say:
Build your faith strongly
Hold strongly to goodness
For there is no brother anywhere.
What inspired you to write this? And what was the aura of the moment when it was constructed?
Bura-Bari: (laughs). Well, the truth is that there’s no brother anywhere. I have been friends with a lot of good people who I felt they were brothers, and were cool and amazing. Then it felt at some point I wasn’t doing enough, and we just either stopped talking or they left my messages unread. So at that point, I felt there were no brothers anywhere. If the world was a jungle, what would bring you brotherhood or the semblance of brotherhood would be your faith. If you hold on to your faith strongly and hold on to goodness which is a trait that can attract people to you—that’s what would bring you all of these. I have lived a life where I have had people disappoint me. I once had a job and later went back to school to lose the job, then I thought I could work remotely and then take care of myself at school and family too at home as the breadwinner—but it never worked and often I’d have to get lost in my thoughts. Sometimes I’d have to try to get job or ask friends to refer me to available jobs. It was deeply personal experiences from the things that have failed but, I wasn’t losing a faith in the humanity that is the individual. Because it is the individual who emits goodness that would also win other people. The aura was some sort of regret but it wasn’t so much of that. It was also of awareness that if I work on myself some more, I may just attract the right set of people for the moment—because I know at the end of the day they are not going to last. But for the moment that they’d last, they would serve a purpose and I’d serve a purpose in their lives too.
Miracle: It’s been a pleasure having this conversation with you Bura. And to round up, do you have any advice for budding writers on using one’s native tongue language in the craft of poetry? Also, how do interested individuals get a copy of your work?
Bura-Bari: thank you so much Miracle, I’m truly grateful for this. Our language is an important identity we can always hold on to. Exploring and creating in it should be a thing of joy. It may be a bit uneasy because of the distance. Of course speaking the language and creating in it are different things. But the conscious effort to create in the language is like leaving a legacy and giving your own committed contribution to sustaining the language. I think a language that has survived into creativity especially literature is an amazing one. Creating literary pieces in native language is not as easy as creating music in native language. You may not get the support, publishing houses would not take you seriously because they’re looking at the reach and how many people would be interested. For mine I had to source funding from within my circle to do this, it was something within me like a burden and I felt I really needed to make it happen. The book is going to be sold and also introduced to secondary school students— they are the people to take over and create some more. The next phase of this project is to create language clubs in secondary schools in Ogoni. If that is successful I’d go on to create a website called the Ogoni language club where information about the tribe and language can be uploaded for people to visit. The project is in stages and I’m taking it bit by bit. The proceeds from the book sale would be used to fund the website. It’s really crazy, to be truthful my people barely buy books, I can tell you that from my heart. But the idea was to print it cheaply and sell it for low as 500 Naira or 1000 Naira ($1.31 or $2.61). For now, anyone who wants to get the book can get it through me. However, in a couple of weeks I’d put limited copies in bookshops in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. I also have plans of making donations to the Department of Linguistics and Nigerian languages here in the University of Nigeria Nsukka and the University of Port Harcourt. We also looking forward to having copies on Amazon for easy access. There’s so much ongoing and it’s a one man’s project, so you can see how it could be draining but in all, I’m glad I’m on it.
Miracle Afigbo is a writer who lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria. She is an alumnus of the 2019 Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing; a Workshop held annually by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She is the Deputy assistant Prose Editor at Afreecan Read. Her works have appeared/forthcoming in My Tutor Africa, Africa Writer, Afreecan Read.
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