By Mcphilips Nwachukwu

Ekanpou Enewaridideke, president, Ijaw People Congress is a writer and an activist. Educated at Delta State University, Abraka, where he obtained a degree in English, the Ijaw born writer- activist has written across literary genres and won important literary prizes.

His works are steeped in the geography of the Delta region and address with admirable penchant issues that bother on  social injustice as well as political, cultural and economic marginalities. In this interview, he shares his views about how the structure of national imbalance  fuels  his  precarious journey into the dual engagement of writing and activism.

You have written quite profusely in recent time. Where do you drive your energy from ?
My writing revolves around my people – their deprivations, strivings, longings, culture, occupations, idiosyncrasies, philosophy, convictions, creeds, preoccupations, joys and sorrows  – the whole gamut of their experiences. My people are located in a territory where they are daily exploited, devastated and degraded by their supposed protective forces of nurture. Thrown upon this territory through an inexorable force of authority, I drive my creative energy from the locality, the territory, the terrain and the environment of my people  which  I endeavor to take on for creative analysis of their daily experiences and sufferings.

Many readers would think that your literary interventions appear too factual and may find it difficult to draw a line between fact and fiction in your work. How do you respond to this claim?

Any literary journey or voyage moves from fiction to fact or reality. Creative dissolution of fiction produces fact or reality. This dissolution process bears resemblance to spiritual alchemy in mysticism because of some form of transmutation occurs. A creative process devoid of transmutation — probably from base elements to gold – is laughable and directionless. Fictionalisation is a creative realignment, distortion of reality towards the production of another reality or fact that readers can easily relate to happenings in their environment.

Fictionalisation is a process through which the reality avidly sought by the artist is attained. We need fiction to produce reality or fact. Fiction does not produce fiction just as fact does not produce fact. It is only fiction which produces reality or fact. And it is the product of fiction clearly distilled as fact or reality we need to regenerate mankind. I am sure this alchemical-like creative dissolution of fiction into fact can be located in my works with ease. To me any creative work is incomplete without this metamorphosis between fiction and fact. It is the evolution of the fictional piece into reality or fact that plagues, suffocates and destabilises  corrupt authorities.

Your works appear interlaced with the geography of your environment and most of the time, the politics of marginality. What statements are you trying to make ?

I have long made my statements. My people in the Niger Delta are developmentally backward despite  abundant crude  deposit in the region that produces the wealth of the nation. The Ijaws and many other nationalities in the Niger Delta region are perpetually exploited by the government at different levels and the exploring and  prospecting oil companies. Even some of my own people occasionally found in relevant positions are active part of this convoluted corporate marginalisation dance.

My people therefore need orientation that will lead to the interment of the virus of individual moral and official decay – in fact, a total value re-orientation. I am critical of the insensitivity of both the unpatriotic attitude of some of my people in positions of authority and the Nigerian Federal Government. And where the Nigerian Government cannot develop my people in the Niger Delta in proportion to the revenue from the area, my people should be allowed to codify their own ethos, values and creeds of independent existence without any recourse to war.

Mr Ekanpou

Let the independence of my people wear the colour of willing co-operative divorce between tired couple in  Nigeria –  each limited to his or her own resources derivable from toiling – without macabre dance of annexation, expansionism and irredentism.

Take for instance,   one of your recent offerings: The Wanted Man in Camp Four. It smells heavily of recent activities of the Niger Delta militants. How do you expect readers to qualify such a factual account as a literary dramatic recreation ?

My recent play, The Wanted Man In Camp Four exhumes and throws back at you recognisable reverberating echoes of the struggle of freedom fighters, sometimes, whimsically demonised with criminal intent as militants in murderous official quarters. Then, my dramatic recreation is a huge success bearing in mind the responsibilities of a writer to his own society of sojourn.

Characteristically, a writer should be ready to lead his own people to the Promised land; he or she should be the voice, vision, direction, hope, liberator, historian, motivator, teacher  and of course, light of his own community. In times of adversity, the writer should claim the responsibility of saving his people from perceived agents of pulverization by  pointing the way forward. This  is what I have succeeded in doing in my play.

My position here is  to  re-echo  Prof. Wole Soyinka who says that: ‘When the writer in his own society can no longer function as conscience… The artist has always functioned in African society as the record of the mores and experiences of his society and as the voice of vision in his own time. It is for him to respond to the essence of himself’.

For the foreign reader, the play will make a marvellous reading. But  how do you expect the Nigerian reader, who is part of this disturbing  history to respond to it ?

I feel honoured, justified by your thesis that The Wanted man in Camp Four will claim marvelous readership in the hands of foreigners. You seem to posit that Nigerian readers may not enjoy my play because they are familiar with the materials deployed. I dare puncture this claim. Is Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart not about the experiences of the Igbos in the colonial days? Does familiarity with the materials of Things fall Apart hamper enjoyment of the book?

The qualities that make a literary work enjoyable and unputdownable are universal. As long as there is an amazing skillfulness in the handling of the plot, language, theme and the total design of the play, it is bound to be enjoyed by the readers across the divide.  If my own play The Wanted Man in Camp Four is likely to move the foreign readers, it will also snake its way through the minds of the Nigerian readers because the standards for assessment of literary works are universal. Writers always, characteristically throw back at you familiar materials but creatively refined to teach lessons.

You are also an activist. Do you see the platform of writing as an extension of your activism?
Yes. An activist daily stages a dance of reform based on certain treasured ideals. An activist envisions a world where things assume colours bound to guarantee  progressive harmony for all the components or occupants of the secular space. The activist barks when there is a threat to the secular space. In doing this, the activist drives nourishment from functional viable progress-consolidated ideology – an ideology he places over and above the exploitative policies of the oppressive authorities.

He or she pursues his cherished ideals devotedly geared towards the emancipation of the masses. Similarly, the writer questions the man-made undulations around him and imaginatively creates the framework to actualise his vision of society.  So writing is a solid platform for extension of activism because writing empowers the activist to build permanent creative structures bound to guide and shelter the masses against the ravages of the oppressive juggernauts and lead them to the HEAVEN of the artist’s conception.

At what point do you divorce activism from literary intervention?
Activism and literary interventions are inseparable. Activist reflections, which usually stem from genuine feelings of empathy, give birth to literary interventions. What the activist wants to achieve is what a committed writer goes out to achieve too. Activism is the propulsion behind the literary interventions of a committed writer.

In literary interventions through poetry, drama and prose, the writer enjoys greater amount of freedom in the pursuit of his vision. In activism, some of the treasured positions of the activist may not be published by some newspapers possibly either because of sympathy with this or that, or the direction of the editorial policy of the paper.

But the writer who propagates his ideals through his literary interventionistic journeys freely as he has the freedom to build into his work all his heartfelt visionary revolutionary projections because he or she is the king of his world. I cannot divorce my activism from literary interventions because activism is my building block.

To what extent has activism challenged your  creative writing ?
Activism has challenged my literary interventions in all dimensions, particularly in relation to my recent works – A Sail in the Dark, The Wanted Man in Camp Four, Baidia: A Family of Imbeciles, You must leave Ekameta Tomorrow and Sandbanks in River Forcardos.

I am disenchanted with certain developments around me in Nigeria. These developments make mockery of the lives of my people. Anger daily engulfs me over these developments. I have a conviction that I can turn around the conditions of my people through construction of alternative route or road with professionally through my creative endeavour.