Abdulbaseet Yusuff on African Literature and the Ambiguity of Art
Abdulbaseet Yusuff is a Nigerian poet and essayist. His works appear or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Rattle, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Kalahari Review, Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry, Cutleaf Journal, among others. He’s on Twitter @bn_yusuff.
In this conversation, our Interviews Lead, Kayode engages him on his writing and motivations, African literature, and the open-endedness feature of art. Find below:
Kayode: I am in awe of your writing, Abdulbaseet. It wouldn’t be a gainsay to admit that I’m a fan, which is why I would like to know how it all began. Can you share with us how you got into writing? How did you find yourself in the literary bracket?
Abdulbaseet: Thank you for the kind words. How did I find myself in the literary bracket? By reading literature. Anybody who has buried himself in the pages of a fictitious world has ventured into the literary bracket. You read; you are fascinated by the writers; you worm yourself into the writer’s lives and the lives of their characters, and before you say jack — you’re in the literary bracket. It’s easier now with social media. There are vibrant literary communities on Twitter and Facebook. What motivated me? Honestly, at first, I was just thrilled to find myself on Google. It gave me a brief moment of celebrity. There is no grand motivation. I’m grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the literature.
Kayode: One of the things I appreciate most about your writing is its versatility. I can’t seem to say which you write better, poetry or essays. I read both and they resonate almost in sane measure. But I’m curious. Which comes easy for you? Which is your niche and could you tell me why?
Abdulbaseet: I like poems, and I think I’ve written a couple of poems that I love. I like essays too, and recently, I have found myself leaning more towards that. I’ll attribute that shift to reading Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things. Before then, I didn’t think I wanted to write essays. I can’t say for sure which of those two genres is my niche (but I guess I could say poetry since I’ve written more of that), but I know that fiction is not it. That’s not to say I haven’t tried my hands at it; there’s just something lacking.
Kayode: Literature is an innumerable center of many cultures and imaginations. Could you please, in your own terms, educate us on what African literature is, and how important is the fusion of African cultures into her literature?’
“I think that there’s nobody in a better position to tell the African story than the African himself."
Abdulbaseet: That’s a difficult question. People look at it in two ways – African literature as a genre or as literature of Africans. I am more comfortable with the latter description. African literature is any literary piece written by a person of African descent (bonus points if the story is set in Africa — historical or futuristic). But it opens up complex conversations — whether a piece of literature written about Africa by a non-African could also pass off as African literature. Some may argue that it could (and maybe they do have a point), but I think that there’s nobody in a better position to tell the African story than the African himself. Literature is the bedrock of history, and if people are concerned about cultural preservation, they must invest in controlling their narrative. Poets are not just entertainers — they existed as griots in days past. They were historians. Now, oral literature has nosedived, and the world feels somewhat like a monolith; cultures are all flattened out (annihilated by the cultural machinery of the West). It’s refreshing to find something that feels homey, and African literature is probably that earthen footing we need.
Kayode: Stars are big suns is a prose-poetry published in Praxis Magazine. I read it and was able to understand it to some extent; maybe not how you view it. You know, this is the beauty of literature - you do not look at it solely through an author’s lens. Many times, it’s beyond what an author sees. But I would like to think that I understand it through your lens.
If the poem is personal or not, you’re surely talking about unrequited love, isn’t it? You write, “we see how the sun burns; how it smiles everyday and how nobody looks at it. They say it’s too clingy and they turn their eyes away// we were told to starve our sun – our love – until they become little fragments – say, stars….”
From a woman not reciprocating the poet’s love, to the poet talking about aging as his children offer him love, you write, “we watch our sons, in later years, bark and become barks of old mango trees. they cloud their suns – their love – to impress us. we watch them become us// we age. we start to lose our light…. we see questions on their knees begging to be answered. their eyes ask whether they have impressed us. their eyes shakily ask whether we love them" - here, I see African parents who barely profess their love for their children.
Could you shed light on this beautiful work and the connection between the aforementioned quoted lines?’
Abdulbaseet: That’s one of the beautiful things about art. Open ends. Art allows both the reader and writer to contribute to the work. The writer writes; the reader interprets. I like to think that there are times when even the writer cannot say for sure what he has intended to achieve with his work. The work is about love — all right — but not unrequited per se, more like repressed love. It’s the kind that’s common with the average Nigerian home. The father expresses love via service — long work hours, food on the table, school fees — but hardly ever with words. Conduct a survey: ask Nigerians how many of them have been told they were loved by their fathers. We would have interesting results. Now I don’t think it’s wrong to provide, perhaps only that kids could probably use less transactional air at home. The boys in the family grow up to watch this; they internalize this. Some of them perhaps are not that way by nature; they do it only to show that, well, they could be men too. I think that there’s the belief that expressing love too much can cause the kids to undermine their authority. Maybe it’s true to an extent. I don’t know. I can’t claim to be a parenting expert. I have spent zero days at the job. But I think it’s always safe to establish a balance.
Kayode: What inspires your work, your style as a whole? And what do you do to unwind when you’re frustrated by words not turning into lines as you expect, or you have it easy always? I want to think you have it easy (laughs).
“There’s poetry everywhere. In the mundane. In the extraordinary. And in science textbooks, too.”
Abdulbaseet: Ha-ha. Some works come fully formed. All you would have to do is write. I have had encounters where I write in one sitting — you know, like a stream of consciousness — and it comes out fine or with minimal editing needs. Other times, I task myself to write. The idea is there, but the words are not. It’s like wringing water out of a dry towel. Sometimes it helps to change the writing medium. You can also work magic if you change the typeset to the famous Garamond font, or change the structure of the work entirely. These may seem superficial, but the changes help me see the work in a new light. Deadlines help too. I say, on deadlines, we are briefly superhuman. As for inspiration, I don’t know. There’s poetry everywhere. In the mundane. In the extraordinary. And in science textbooks, too. The latter is something I’ve turned to many times. So, there’s that.
Kayode: Your poems and other short works have been published in a number of magazines, what do you say about putting out a body of work for your readers? Is that happening anytime soon?
Abdulbaseet: It is something that I would like to do at some point, and it could happen at any time. I cannot say when it would be.
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About the Interviewer: Ayobami Kayode is a Literature in English student at Usmanu Danfodio University, Sokoto. He is the Interviews Lead of Book O’Clock Review and the editor in chief of The Poetry CLUB UDUS. His works have been published or forthcoming in konya shamsrumi, punocracy, àtẹ́lẹwọ́, BBPC anthology, icefloepress, Iman collective, cult of Clio and elsewhere. He was the second runner up in the Green Write Poetry Contest (2021). He hails from Ibadan, Oyo state, Nigeria. He tweets @AyobamiKayode15.
