Fmi Dda Addn is a lecturer, essayist, scriptwriter, poet, playwright, play director and a family man. The teacher of teachers, highly principled, well travelled Femi is an incurable optimist when it comes to Project Nigeria but who sees his hopes, aspirations and projections for his great country slowly slipping out of his hands like a broken egg. He speaks with GREGORY AUSTIN NWAKUNOR how he writes and what influenced his latest work, Death's Laughter.WHO is Fmi Dda Addn'I'm a world citizen resident in Nigeria, born in Ibadan, schooled in various areas of Nigeria, from Owu-Ijebu, Ijebu-East LGA in Ogun State, Nigeria. I attended St Michael's Primary School, Owu-Ijebu, and later, I was at Ijebu-Ode Grammar School, Ijebu-Ode, for my secondary education. My teachers' training programme was at Methodist Teacher Training College, Sagamu and Ogun State college of Education (now Tai-Solarin University of Education) Ijebu-Ode. University education was at University of Calabar, Calabar, University of Lagos, Akoka, University of Ibadan, and Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. I have Ph. D in Creative Writing.To your question, Femi is a wordsmith and an ethically sound individual, a former campus journalist, socialist ' who had been disappointed by many renegade comrades. One who while ensconced in his traditional cultural norms, mores and values is cosmopolitan enough to realise that what is needed in existence is balance. He believes in the sanctity of human life, the causes of the underprivileged and the fact that we all came naked into this world and that nobody had ever been buried with his/her cars, houses, billions of currencies, shares, properties or jets. That what we are left with when we die each day before being resurrected every other morning is our own six feet, the same six feet that we will get on our death day. Femi also strongly believe that we are all caretakers and that at the appropriate time we will all give copious accounts of what our creator ' God or any other name non-atheists call the creator of the universe- gave us gratis to do here on earth. To Femi, this world is a market and a school and at the end of the market day or the school year we will all go back home to give our reports.How did you get into writing' And since when did you start writing'My childhood and growth had been that of the 'teacher's boy'. So I came across books very early and had the eyes of my teachers all over me. So, I was not allowed the pranks and other activities of my mates. I buried my head in books and since the more I read, the more the gulf created between my mates and I and the more I navigated towards older colleagues and friends, I naturally drifted towards writing.Writing started early for me, first as a village letter writer at the age of nine, then in primary four, and later as traditional Yoruba poet in the secondary school, the teacher training college, the college of education and the poet, short story writer and playwright in later years. I started writing since 1967, though my first published work was in 1978 in students' magazine and some poetry journals. My first book, Timeless Thoughts, a poetry collection, was in 1991, and my first collection of short stories, Hidden Truth, was in 1992. This was a product of the creative writing class I taught at Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education, Oto-Ijanikin, Lagos between 1988 and 1991. The published collection had my own stories with my students' stories.What is the motivation when you write'The need to express my self and my inner turmoil and experiences and the need to comment convent on the injustices and the gross social inequalities around me. The burning aches to enlighten people about the need for compassion and empathy. The explanation of the realisation that excessive quest for materialism and gross indulgence in physical pleasures and hedonistic frivolities do not make a person but instead kills the soul. Also, to correct and commend the good within us as human beings, while I condemn the expurgation of our outstanding cultural values, norms, mores and essence as we rush headlong into the captivating arms of modern civilisation. Most especially, the righteous anger and indignation about the pin fall, strangulation and daily rape visited on Nigeria the well endowed and blessed country by a band of rapacious locusts who are dealers and not leaders, as we all look askance.Your latest work, Death's Laughter, what influenced the theme'Religion and its various dimensions influenced Death's Laughter's theme.The great gulf between appearance and reality and the issue of individuals not living their beliefs but their beliefs leaving them led to this work. The crass commercialisation of religion and the underbelly of religion this day birthed the novel. This, in addition to the paradox of Nigeria being so full of churches and mosques with cacophonous 'Halleluiahs and Allah- Akbar' while we are so full of sins made this novel germane.Why did you choose to make the work eclectic'Eclectic' Yes, it is because the novel is a broad selection when it comes to narrative techniques, styles, characterisation and linguistic choices. The question of why it turned out this way however, is not easily answered because what happened was that I wanted to write a novel that will engage my readers, make them to contribute to the reading process and also appeal to their imaginations and creative power in deconstructing the narrative. If I achieved these objectives it is for my readers to say because I cannot confirm this except through their reactions to the novel.Don't you think it has limited the readership, as the Yoruba idiom and worldview is given more prominence than the actual narration from major character'No, I do not think so. The novel is an exercise in 'globality'. Trying to explain a universal theme from a local point of view. What happened to Pastor Jude could have happened to any individual in any clime in the world. The Yoruba idioms, worldview and other elements from Yoruba culture only foreground the story's tapestry. The Yoruba worldview is preponderant because that is my background and the actual view I am familiar with. It could have been Kalabari, Ijaw, Efik or Bekwarra, Kanuri or Igbo if I had been born in any of these areas. The Yoruba idioms however, do not dominate the work because close scrutiny will show the fact that they only constitute some of the epigraphs in the novel. There are also epigraphs taken from the Bible, works of literature, quotations and also historical sources. The epigraphs and reference to Yoruba culture is just a way of introducing meta-narratives into the novel in order to make it unique and different from other novels. The core of the novel however is the story being told, though in a different way from the way stories are told. The novel is that in which the main character is not the one narrating his story or that in which an omniscient author is narrating the character's story. The novel is one in which various characters narrate their own stories and through their stories we form a whole picture of a main hero that is passively active in the novel. The purpose of using this style is to help the reader to make up his/her mind and reach conclusions about the main character without the bias of the omniscient narrator or the first person narrator being forced on him. The unique structural, and narrative styles with the suspense within the novel will draw any reader from any clime in. To make the reading easier, footnotes and translations are used to ease the burden of the non-Yoruba readers.You used so many characters you called dramatis personae, was it a way to have plural heroism'No, it was a method of giving different perspectives to the picture of Pastor Jude being painted. The various characters came across pastor Jude and in telling us their own stories and not his story; we are able to have a mosaic of the pastor. This mosaic helps us better in understanding pastor Jude's individuality, his motives, motivations, philosophies and perceptual worldview without him telling us or an omniscient author telling us. As we read the novel, page-by-page we start peeling pastor Jude's personality like a person peeling an onion layer by layer.Don't you think it would have made more sense if you had taken time to review the socio-political dynamics of the work and play it down for the romance, which has given the book flesh'No, the romance while giving the novel flesh is not the book's core. The novel explores the socio-political dynamics of the cultural milieu and political setting that birthed a Pastor Jude. The socio-political dynamics also serve as means of not only explaining away how pastor Jude came to be but also why a good person like him turned out to becoming who he becomes. The romances built into the story were only a means of explaining the synergy between the individual, his community, environment, and social setting, world-view and what the individual becomes.You said the work is a product of your doctoral programme in Australia, what were the challenges of getting the supervisor understand the Yoruba idioms and worldview'There were challenges and the use of footnotes in the novel- a unique aspect of the novel- was the author's way of coping with these challenges. The supervisor however understood the Yoruba worldview and idioms because as a well- known Australian writer herself, Marcella Polain was more interested in the character, the story itself and the manipulation of various elements to deliver the narrative.Your favourite causeMy favourite cause is education because I believe that education serves as a bulwark against ignorance, indoctrination and human bestiality. It is important to make a distinction here between being knowledgeable and being educated.Your favourite booksThere are many who had book knowledge and are literate but are uneducated whereas there are many who are educated but are not vast in book knowledge or literate in the main language of communication. I am eclectic when it comes to books because I am an avid reader and would read anything in search of knowledge. I have so many favourite authors spanning varied areas. Some of my favourite authors are Bertolt Brecht, Henrik Ibsen, William Shakespeare, C.S. Lewis, Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Plautus, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Plato, St Augustine of Hippo, Steven Covey, Richard Warren, Michael Crichton, Alvin Toffler, Irving Wallace, James Clavell, Ahmed Yerima, Ifeoma Okoye, Jeffrey Archer, Sidney Sheldon, James Grisham, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy to mention a few. Some of the books that have touched my core include Bolt's A man of all seasons, Dickens's Christmas Carol, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Ibsen's An enemy of the people, sfsan's Once upon Four Robbers, Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels, Altine's Wrath, Soyinka's Season of Anomie, Dance of the Forest, The Road, Homer's Iliad, J.B. Priestley's An inspector Calls, Toffler's Third Wave, Grisham's Time to kill, The street lawyer, Irvin Wallace's Seven Minutes, The Almighty, Yerima's The Bishop and the soul, Aristotle's Nichomacean Ethics, Symposium, Plato's The Republic, Lao Tzu's Art of War and C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity, Narnia Chronicles and Screwtape Letters to mention a few.
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