Azuka Onwuka, a graduate of English from University of Nigeria, Nuskka is versatile writer, who feels at ease writing on literature, language, business or politics. His flair for writing started during his University days. Onwuka, who has authored two books recently published his first novel titled Wings of the Night. In this interview with Sunday Art, the young author talks about why it took him many years to publish the novel and other sundry issues.

Why did it take you 22 years to publish your first novel Wings of the Night?

I believe in the maxim that anything worth doing is worth doing well. After writing the story in 1989 just before my 19th birthday, I felt that I was not endowed with the necessary literary capabilities to produce a novel that would be reckoned with. I was honest to realize that my vocabulary was limited and inadequate.

My control of the English language was tenuous. Note that at that time, I knew the rules of English language and could write well, but the point was that having read literary works like Things Fall Apart, The Gods Are Not to Blame, The Concubine, Petals of Blood, Macbeth, and many other thrillers of James Hadley Chase and Agatha Christie, I knew without being told that my ability to weave words like these masters and hold the reader captive was still rudimentary.

So I waited till1992, when I felt that I had acquired some measure of writing knowledge and skills in the university when I decided to rewrite the story. After that I found out that the difference in the flow of the two variants of the story was crystal clear.

But in spite of this marked improvement in the quality of the writing, I was still convinced that it was not time to publish the novel. Upon graduation, I began working. I continued to read and edit the 1992 script. I went ahead to publish two books, English Incorporated in 2001 and 20 Success Secrets of Great Achievers in 2008.

*Azuka Onwuka

I read more books, did more writing as a journalist, an advertising practitioner and a public relations and branding consultant. In 2006, I typed the manuscript and began the serious work of re-writing it on the computer until in 2011 when I decided that it was ripe to be published.

What is the theme of Wings of the Night and how is it relevant to our society?

Wings of the Night has many themes, but the chief among them is that we should not give up in the face of challenges, no matter how weighty or insurmountable they may seem. Challenges are meant to bring out the best in us, not defeat us. There is also the theme of the need for us to know our genealogy or ancestry and not be ashamed of it.

I was thrilled when President Barack Obama came to Kenya while he was still a senator and was able to trace his ancestors to the seventh generation. How many of us know our ancestry beyond our grandfather or great-grandfather? That is one aspect of our life I am using this novel to challenge us to get interested in and pass on to our children.

A people without a past are a people without a future. I also want to use this novel to challenge this queer belief among our people of all religions that when tragedies befall a person, it is a sign of divine punishment.  I really think it is a petty and myopic way of looking at life.

So you are not an apostle of art for art’s sake?

Definitely not. I believe that art should teach and edify. But I also believe in realistic literature – literature that mirrors society rather than literature that tries to recreate society the way it is not. For example, anyone that writes about colonialism in Nigeria and creates a situation where Nigerians defeated the British will be guilty of historical and literary falsehood, because the British actually conquered us and colonized us.

That is why our religion, dressing and language have changed to those of the Whites. But I believe that art should either directly or subtly teach society a lesson. That is why I like the realism in Achebe’s novels. In Things Fall Apart, even though the Whites defeated Okonkwo and the people of Umuofia, we are made to see that what they achieved was a sort of pyrrhic victory, a hollow victory that even the victor should be ashamed of.

In trying to pass on some messages in Wings of the Night, I was also careful to ensure that it is a book teenagers can read without being sexually charged. At the risk of being accused of sounding prudish or holier-than-thou, I must say that I am shocked at the amount of eroticism or, rather, sheer pornography, present in some of our literary works, that after reading some of these books, I find it hard to give such books to my teenage relations to read. I like writers who employ double entendre or sexual innuendoes that are witty and funny.

But more importantly, I also have noticed the degeneration in our spoken and written English. Once these wrong expressions are introduced into our lexicon, they remain as immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar. And regrettably, many of our novelists and journalists are sucked into this trap. I ensured that, to the best of my ability, these expressions were written correctly in Wings of the Night.

But why is Wings of the Night not big?

I have noticed that there are two main reasons people shy away from reading literary fiction in Nigeria: first, most novels are unnecessarily long; second, most novels are not unputdownable. Someone would read a John Grisham that is about 500 pages but would not want to read our novel that is about 300 pages, because Grisham presents the exciting periods in the story and links up the events so well that you don’t want to drop the novel until the last page.

It is true that crime novels and thrillers cannot be compared to literature books, yet we literature writers need to borrow a leaf from them by ensuring that our stories concentrate on the most important events in the story.

But what I have done in Wings of the Night is to intentionally cut off all the fat and bones in the story, leaving the reader with only the flesh. Wings of the Night starts in the middle of things or in medias res, as the classical Greeks would say, and ends shortly after in just about 140 pages.

I believe that it is not the size of a novel that determines its quality. The most read African novel Things Fall Apart is among the smallest. So my view is that if a writer has the capacity to hold his readers captive in 300 pages, no problem. But if he can’t, there is no need punishing his readers by making a novel drag on forever. Our ambition as novelists should be to compete with crime and thriller writers in the ability to hold the reader’s attention till the last page.