By Tunjy Ajibade, READING

Young Umari Ayim, a lawyer and a writer was the guest of Abuja Writers’ Forum for the month of August. In this piece, TUNJI AJIBADE highlights the thrills and frills of the event

“The mind of a woman is like a deep blue sea; mysterious and deep.” It is a quotable quote from Umari Ayim. And it’s a picture of what she poured out in her romance debut, Twilight At Terracotta Indigo.

Ayim read to her audience from this book on August 27, 2011 when she was the Guest Writer of Abuja Writers’ Forum (AWF) at the Pen and Pages Bookstores, Abuja. She had breezed into the venue of the event.

“I have a reading here,” she had announced with enthusiasm to one of the organizers whom she was meeting for the first time. And when she later took the ‘hot seat’, she told her audience with gestures of one who was excited by what she was about to do: “Please, don’t mind me if I fret so much.”

Umari Ayim reading from her novel.

But Ayim did not fret, she addressed her audience as one who believed in what she was doing, one with her own mind, intelligent and articulate. Not surprising, that. Lawyers are meant to be.

This young lawyer, under thirty, had said “I decided to take time off practicing law and write full time.” That surprised many in the hall, and a participant would say, “Writing full time in Nigeria?” when he stood up to comment much later.

Others saluted her courage, her determination to follow the path of her interest, at this time, and in this clime when writers confront innumerable challenges. Part of the praise for that from the participants went to her parents – Irandi and Masia Ayim – who were both present at the event.

It is only supporting parents who would allow a first daughter whom they trained as a lawyer to face writing full time. Every full time writer would need support, at some stage before they break even, everyone acknowledged.

But why did she take to writing in the first place? The interest of the Cross River state-born Ayim in writing started first through being exposed to a reading culture by her Dad at an early stage. As early as when she was eight years, he would explain William Shakespeare’s plays to her.

She eventually became fascinated by the play Macbeth which she read severally. She began to recite her favourite lines from the same book to classmates and teachers.

At secondary school she was drawn to several titles in the African Writers Series that had published works such as Chinua Achebe’s classic, Things Fall Apart. However, Ayim cited the African-American writer and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou, as a major influence on her writing and social consciousness.

Sola Abimbola showing Fulani Lady.

And as to how she came round to writing her first novel, Ayim says, “Twilight at Terracotta Indigo for me was more than a story, it was part of a healing process. I had just come out of a relationship, and I needed an outlet for my emotions. Coupled with my endless musing about life and the social practices I saw as unfair, I poured my heart out into the story.

There were those terror filled nail biting moments when I sorted through my lines, checking to see if the suspense had been maintained and the potential reading audience had enough to keep them turning page after page till they found answers to the questions that seemed to trail the lives of my characters.”

That shows in the work because Ayim writes like one who is at home with her genre – romance, and she has delved into her story from the onset with the hand and mind of a craftsman.

Participants at the reading understood the importance of craftsmanship in the success of any creative writing, and this drew comments on how the author had fared in writing her story.

“I finished reading the book in two days, and that says a lot about how much I was drawn into it from the very first page,” Judith Rapu, a lawyer, had said.

Rapu had earlier opened the day’s event when the Master of Ceremony, Seun Badejo, invited her to read of one of the shortlisted stories for the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, The Mistress’s Dog by David Medalie.

The year’s winning story – Hitting Budapest by Nonviolet Bulawayo – was read at the same event the previous month for the purpose of critiquing it. The Mistress’s Dog was about a wife who endured the fact of her husband’s infidelity into their old age.

She took care of the dog, the latest, of her husband’s mistress after both the husband and the mistress were dead. Her care for the dog was the platform from which the story was told, and it was a sad story.

The artist, Sola Abimbola, would subsequently take the participants through his world of paintings. He announced that he was dedicating his mini-exhibition to women; he said his collection for the day was to celebrate women.

It was enough reason for women in the house to clap, and another reason for the male folks to grumble that they were being left out. A male participant impatiently said, “Just give the whole of today to women, don’t bother about men,” when, along the line, Abimbola passed some comments in men’s favour.

If the artist had not started out saying he wanted to celebrate women, the fact would still have been obvious from his works because one of them showed ladies dancing rhythmically in abstract form.

He said he did that particular painting because women are always the better dancers, an observation that made men shake their heads, while women nodded and clapped.

Another painting, titled Fulani Lady, was to show off beauty, and a woman was in it, too. This painting was done in bright colours. The artist explained that he did the painting because women are naturally beautiful creatures.

And when he went on to state that the Fulani Lady’s beauty indicated that there was someone in the background, unseen, who must have been doing his duty well, men in the house understood him perfectly, and they laughed and clapped.

Sunny Sax, a saxophonist, added live music to the event, and there was a period when comments were invited from participants on what should be the role of writers considering the security challenges confronting the nation at the moment.

Commentators noted that writers have significant roles to play in terms of generating ideas as solutions to problems in the nation. Nnadozie Onyekuru, an undergraduate of the University of Maiduguri stated that writers had in the past proffered solutions and painted characters in their works that warned of the situations that have emerged in the Niger Delta and the Boko Haram issue.

In that case, he submitted, with creative works such as Path of Thunder by Christopher Okigbo as well as Waiting For An Angel by Helon Habila, writers have played their role as prophets to the nation.

He however added that that when government officials read some of these creative works, they saw saboteurs rather than people who used their imaginations to project ahead what problems could arise when leaders misruled.

Other commentators would point out that writers need to come to the forefront and let politicians realize that impunity can not continue. Writers, as creative artists, it was agreed, have the capacity to make projections and create scenarios of the course or step that groups such as Boko Haram may take before such is taken.

Ayim read a couple of poems and excerpts from her novel which encapsulate issues such as tribe, intolerance, increasing adoption of foreign culture, as well as class – the rich and the poor. The suspense created in Twilight At Terracotta Indigo right from the first page is a major strength of the book.

This has the effect of drawing a reader into the story and sustaining him. The main character is Marlene and there is the enigmatic Femi, her man. Marlene suffered emotional aches from her relationship with the man she had loved deeply.

It was a traumatic experience that took so much out of her, including her memory which she would later mercifully regain under an unlikely circumstance.

That unlikely circumstance did draw attention of one of the participants, and it made one of them ask during the Question and Answer session how the writer came up with so vivid a description of Marlene’s state at the point where she suffered from amnesia. “It’s a product of research.

I researched and it took me quite a while to complete the book,” Ayim said. And how come she was so strong on the description of a male body – Femi – in her book, with expressions such as “aquiline nose” and much more; “Did you read Mills and Boon romance series?

The author admitted she read every product of that world famous series while she was growing up.

And the characters in her book stood out, they resonated; how did she achieve that? “I used the power of my imagination to come up with some of the characters.”

What of her legal profession, what would she do with it – discard it totally? “I will like to write more books; I will continue writing, but I will go back to my legal profession later,” Ayim said.

How does she survive at the moment, writing full time? “Well, it is not difficult to survive if you cut down on some things.” Could she explain how the title of the book, Twilight At Terracotta Indigo, tie up with the story itself.

The word, Twilight, Ayim explained, means the time when the day sets, a time when everything gradually draws to a close. Marlene had a beauty studio and each studio had a name. One of them was Terracotta Indigo. When the story closed, it did in this particular studio.

As such, at the end of the day every question in the story was answered right inside the studio; all the open angles were covered, the characters were fully explained, and all the problems that Marlene had as well as their sources were fully made clear.

Ajibade is a Communications Consultant. [email protected]