Author’s Hangout with Zizi
Tares Oburumu is a poet, a cut above his contemporaries. As someone wrote of him, “Oburumu is a poet whose language stirs the senses.” Oburumu laces words into poems with passion and profound fluidity of imagination. You have to consume and digest his poetry slowly to appreciate the meaning behind his words or suffer poetic indigestion.
I have read some of his poetry chapbooks and I’m not surprised Oburumu’s manuscript, Origins of the Syma Species, won the 2022 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets.
In this interview, Tares Oburumu talks about his journey to becoming a poet and bares his heart out on his travail, hardship, turbulence, frustration and fascination with water, a recurring theme in most of his poems. And also, his ordeals as a single father to a wonderful daughter.
Tell us about yourself?
I am Tares Oburumu. I am from Bomadi Local Government Area of Delta State, a few kilometers away from Warri. I studied philosophy at the University Of Benin.
How and when did your writing journey begin?
I can’t tell when exactly the journey started. All I can remember, quiet vividly, is the time I was in primary school. I can’t tell the class I was, maybe three, maybe four, when I had a fierce scolding from an uncle, never to get close to his dictionary; Oxford Advanced Learners which had several missing pages, dog-eared and dusty. He said I was too young for it and not too bright either at that young age to make anything of it.
Before then, I was fascinated with the usage of words and I couldn’t help memorizing a few to be used in daily conversations with not just my peers. To memorize them, I had to own an exercise book for the purpose of writing them down. The form they took on the notebook excited my young sensibilities at the time, so I started writing; composing a few sentences of my own out of the words I had on the pages of the notebook.
This became a habit and it continued to have me tethered to my father’s small cupboard size library where I exposed myself to novels among other books. I read a lot of them, I can’t remember now. It was during and towards the end of my secondary school that I began to write poems just after reading the poem “ Building The Nation” by, I think, a Ugandan poet. Nothing held me more spellbound in such times for such longer hours than poetry. Then there was Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Okara, John Pepper Clark and T.S Eliot. I started my idea of putting poems into book form around 2014.
Why did you choose to write poetry?
Poetry chose me. Looking back in my formative years and how exposed I was into books, it is more convenient to say poetry chose me. I read a lot of books, not just Literature. Not only books on Philosophy, nor science books. I was drawn in prose in a way that was more taxing in the manner I learned from it than poetry. Oftentimes, I write down a novel, like transcription, word for word in a notebook.
If I am writing poetry today more as I do write any other genre, I think it’s because I later found poetry to be more concise on the part of poetry and laziness on my own part due to personal traumatic experiences, that I found the prose genre too long and sedentary an art. Sitting long months to get a novel done, was too taxing for me amidst the trauma. Poetry gives a sort of balance, or it’s a balancing of trauma. A kind of antidote.
Where and how do you get ideas for your poems?
Everything I can see and imagine. It could be a boy running down the street, a cloud forming, a personal experience which I trust more than anything else. It could be a line or word from a book. It could be smoke in the air, questions people ask; it could be anything.
Is there any author or book that influenced you in any way either growing up or as an adult?
Christopher Okigbo cleared a road and I had no choice than to walk on it until I learnt that I could clear a forest, make a road of it and walk my own path. He was phenomenal to my formative years.
Tell us about the challenges in getting your first book published?
My first book is still not published. Around 2015 before or perhaps after the birth of my daughter, Sasha, the idea of publishing a collection of poems formed most haphazardly. The idea intertwined with an obvious intention or an inner statement of some sort; to raise money to feed my daughter.
I believed, among other things, not knowing the rigors involved, that I can publish a book and make money from it. This intention or sole responsibility towards my daughter after I lost my job with the Delta State government and the subsequent experiences of being lugged into single parenthood, after Sasha was abandoned by her mother to make my trauma more of a tragedy than a psychological evaluation of my life as a nomad, I brought the ambition of publishing a book to light. It was a collection of about two hundred poems running to about three hundred pages. With it, I approached a number of publishing firms, and it was agonizing to know that I needed about 1m (a million Naira) to publish the book.
At that time, I was looking for a paltry sum of #50, 000 to start a business that could feed my daughter and myself. Someone asked me to divide the book into three parts without a moment’s hope of getting it published. After the excruciating task of dividing the volume, nothing came out of it. I traveled long distances, met friends and people who had the luxury, but none of them could help me. It turned out to be an odyssey; a long walk to publishing a book. That book is still unpublished as I type.
How do you market your work?
What avenues have you found to work best for you and has it been rewarding? I live off such markets and avenues because I couldn’t publish a book. I think one can only have a knowledge about such if one has published a book and has the privilege the market and such avenues offer.
Your recent poetry book, Chatham House is a brilliant feast of words. What inspired the writing?
I wanted to crowd Nigerians around the question, why vote? I was born at a time elections were annulled in this country and I have witnessed quite a good number and having studied the history, the electoral history and the electoral behavior from the postcolonial Nigeria, I personally think a democracy practiced on any electoral system in this country will not work. A change is possible, but not through the votes. There’s a lot to the Nigerian problem that we do not see, or don’t want to see. The truth is there. It can’t be sullied no matter how much denial is thrown at it. It goes beyond us as a people.
If you look closely at the events that brought us into being even in the colonial days, you will understand the British and the powers that are Northern, or what we can call the powers of the unknown. You will understand why we are poor and why the mental state of the rich and the intelligentsia are one and the same thing.
I wrote Chatham House for a people that do not know why they are Nigerians and will continue to be Nigerians if they do not dream of facing the truth. And it’s as I predicted in the course of writing it that Nigerians do not read and they do not understand, not even the intelligentsia, believe me.
How long does it take you to write a poem?
Minutes. Seconds. Sometimes a year or two. It all depends on what I want to achieve, the readers and the state of my mind.
Do you intend to write any other genre apart from poetry?
Essays, plays and a few novels.
What is your work schedule like when you're writing?
I take one line at a time, one day at a time. I don’t rush things. I only trust the process.
Did your environment and upbringing influence your writing style?
My childhood was traumatic. I had no childhood save a few moments of being here or there with a father that was doing well at that time. My mother was all I had. My grandmother was amazing. Fishing was what we survived on. Farming too. And these became for me, a modus operandi. My poetry is just about where I come from, the people that matter and the experiences I had growing up. It’s impossible to separate me and water, being the past, the present and the future of my art. I am fascinated by origin and when I write, I seem lost in it.
How many poetry books have you written? Any favourite and why?
I have not written any serious book. I have written six chapbooks of poems and each came as a response to national questions and about how I grew up with my mother; a single parent, who raised me in a manner I have yet to come to terms with. How can a woman of no education bring me up in such an amazing way. I could have been a local uneducated fisherman, or farmer, but my mother made sure I don’t go to bed without reading a book.
What are the challenges you face as a poet?
Besides reading and writing, how do you relax?
I go out with a few friends, eating and drinking a little, go home to bed.
In your writing journey what are the most important lessons, you’ve learned?
Writing is hard. Patience is what makes good writing.
Give us an interesting fact about the writing of your poetry books?
I don’t sleep at nights. I finished my chapbooks of poems in a week or less than that. All the chapbooks I have written. I don’t see this as an act of genius. I needed to write them and I needed food on my table. I had to finish them in such a space of time, so they don’t get in the way of my daily bread.
What do you consider your best accomplishment?
The Sillerman prize for African poets, no doubt.
What was your reaction when you were announced the winner of The Sillerman Prize for African Poets?
I have always dreamed of being a poet. A poet with little or no recognition. I always see myself in that light. I had no expectations. No ambition. I just write. And I relish the written word I put down even if it’s not published by some ambitious journals or magazines, or publishing firms. I just write.
Also, I am not someone who loves sending out works to be published in online journals and magazines. I don’t have the energy and money to enter my works for literary contests. Even now, so I just write. I would have pulled down the building the night the email came in that I have won the Sillerman prize. I screamed in a way that could have ruined a few eardrums if they were that close.
How has winning the prize impact your writing career?
It has made me believe and accepted the fact that I can be a poet.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I read a lot before writing. Prior to writing anything, I pick a lot of poems, essays, or books before writing a single poem. This way, I don’t rest when I start. I’m a workaholic.
What’s your family reaction to your writing career?
My family doesn’t even know that I have won a prize. And even if they know, they won’t understand how important it is. They live far away from Literature or the literary world that they can’t make anything of it.
How has being a writer helped your personal growth and where do you see yourself in the coming years with your writing?
I expect nothing. I don’t like expectations either. I will continue to write and make plans as necessary, but wherever I find myself, so long as I am teaching and writing poetry or any kind of book, I will be satisfied with my life. Writing has placed me above my wildest dreams. It has shaped me, no doubt, into a man.
What advice will give to aspiring writers, especially in your genre?
Don’t give up.
