MY SIMPLE STYLE IS AN IMPULSE_ BY SUMAILA UMAISHA

_As Niyi Osundare marks his 79th birthday, I share an excerpt from the interview I had with him as a literary editor with the New Nigerian Newspapers on his style of writing 26 years ago_.

My academic area is stylistics. First, I am always interested in the communicative bridge between the encoder and the decoder. When you have stood on the podium and talked and talked, and in the end the people asked; "What has he said," it means you haven’t communicated at all.

In addition, oral literature, which has an overwhelming influence on me, is essentially simple. They are simple but at the same time very delicate and complex. They have the transparency of a deep river. You can see the sand from feet above, but you dare not jump into it unless you know how to swim. I believe that there is nothing, no matter how complex, a good writer should not be able to say in simple words. My most difficult poems are my simple poems. I tell my creative writing students this all the time. It is not difficult to string words together. All it takes is to open a thesaurus and start writing _Gbidibility, Gidigidibility_, and put them together and call them a poem. And your reader will sweat and sweat and throw the thing away and never want to read anything by you again. Not only that, they may even be discouraged from reading things by other people.

So I said let’s put it simple, straight, but let’s put it in an artistic way. I was anxious to create an audience for poetry in Nigeria. That’s why I started this poetry in newspaper in 1983. And I discovered that at the time I was doing this, the _New Nigerian_ newspaper had a thriving poets’ corner, edited by Al-Bishak. I was collecting the poems and using them in the classroom. And, in fact, I did something on newspaper poetry in Nigeria as an academic research. So my simple style is an impulse. And finally, I believe there are so many social problems in Nigeria that need urgent attention. And writing has to be relevant in finding the solution to all those problems. You cannot solve the problems if you don’t touch the people. You cannot touch the people if you speak in the language they do not understand.

© SUMAILA UMAISHA 

- Nigeria