TO A NIGERIAN WRITER CONSIDERING THE MFA

Dear X,

I always return to Teju Cole’s Eight Letters to a Young Writer, not just to remind myself of the rudiments of the craft, but also to recall who I was ten years ago when I first encountered those words. Naive, starry-eyed, high on the immense possibilities of my writing. Just like you, I thrifted books with an unmatched obsession. My friends and I traded illegal PDF files of novels we couldn’t find or afford. Far into the night, I read those books with care, dissecting and imitating the text, searching for the keys to the “Literary Kingdom”. But it was in reading Cole’s letters that I was sneaked to the backend of literature, where the essential tools were laid at my feet.

The sixth letter, “Home”, makes a poignant observation about the widespread preoccupation to leave Nigeria, steady on the minds of many young people, including writers, who believed moving continents was their next step to literary acclaim. “I hope you haven’t fallen prey to such thoughts,” Cole warns. The literary establishments and resources are in the West, he agrees, “but what is here are the stories.”

I took those words seriously. I pledged to stay and mine the stories at home. I believed I could achieve remarkable feats from my corner of the world. I also believed I was a more authentic Nigerian writer since I was closer to the stories. I didn’t view my rigid stance as a fool’s errand. I held a purist lens over my work and was bent on doing it for the love of arts and for country. I prided myself on writing well without bowing to the institutions that be. None of them will anoint my head with oil.

In 2019, a mail arrived from Yaddo, the prestigious artists’ residency, affirming my ambition. With less than a 12% acceptance rate, I got in. Goals. My vision was aligning. I was gaining access to high places solely on the basis of my portfolio. At the residency, I met creative writing professors who had applied for years without luck, and there I was, with no fancy pedigree.

My writing was the only ticket I needed.

At Yaddo, in the space of weeks, I built the scaffolding of a novel, writing thousands of words a day. And for the first time, I experienced what it meant to create with ease, to write without worrying about the battery life of my computer, without the distractions of daily existence. No boss sending me to search for the best gbegiri in Lagos, no long commute from Ketu to Ikoyi. My productivity alarmed me and slowly, I realized how much time is stolen from your craft when basic amenities, such as constant power supply, are absent. I was in a controlled environment designed to make work seamless and I saw the stark difference between creating from a hard place versus creating from a place of ease.

Home was hard.

After two months, I returned to Nigeria jobless. In my former life, I had been a banker who quit her job in Nsukka and moved to Lagos to get closer to the literary world. But job after job, Lagos proved an impossible place to live with dignity. My dedication to writing was threatened each day. To save me the indignity of scrounging for urgent 2k, I moved back to my family house in Umuahia. Gratefully, a Nollywood producer, Ozioma B. Nwughala, took me under her wing and we wrote screenplays together. Yet, I wanted to write prose. I wondered where in the world was the possibility of living a life of letters without pledging allegiance to poverty. No writer is promised wealth, but there were those who had found ways to put a decent roof over their heads.

I wanted that decency, even a slice of it. In my newfound desire, my fealty to Nigeria began to yield.

To write solely for love, while living in a hard place, required a level of altruism I was not sure I had the bandwidth for. I was young, I was talented, why hold myself back? The professors and writers I met at the residency urged me to apply to MFA programs. Like you, I started considering it.

On Twitter, the anti-japa and anti-MFA rhetoric were loud. The umpires of these discourses almost demanded martyrdom from writers, forbidding the mingling of the pursuit of arts with the pursuit of comfort. Their absoluteness did not make sense. Most of them were no longer writing, most of them were past their prime and had grown disillusioned with the art. Despite their dictates, they had made havens for themselves but demanded from other writers a loyalty they could not muster.

Some Nigerian writers who found reasonable acclaim without the MFA had privileges of global access and were mostly dual-passport holders who did not need to queue for an F-1 or a tourist visa. Same as you, I don’t come from a family with the means to travel the world. Most of my education happened in inept Nigerian public schools. My final consideration: the current pulse of global literature. If I was serious about this “writing-thing”, as one boyfriend called it, I needed to position myself and my work accordingly. It would hurt to look back and say I didn’t give this my best shot, that I refused to take up space with my work, that I played it small.

The MFA was my best option. So I grabbed it.

In my preparation to leave, I began to think of myself first as an individual writer before a part of a collective — Nigerian writers. The local literary community was growing tepid by the day. Conglomerates that supported literature were withdrawing their endowments yearly. If I needed to step away from home to gain a bigger perspective on life and craft, so be it.

No one was promising me automatic acclaim once my feet touch Western soil, but what’s the harm in trying?

The consequence of this individualistic approach to writing is the feeling of a dwindling literary community in Nigeria. I noticed a reduced fervour for local events: the festivals that brought together writers from all over the continent, the gatherings at Freedom Park. I am careful in my nostalgia for those heydays because, in their insularity, the Nigerian literary scene was a perfect breeding ground for all manner of abuse, a shelter for men on the prowl for eager writers who wanted to be the next Adichie. Blame it on our respectability culture. Blame it on scant opportunities that made writers scramble for crumbs. If an MFA was a ticket to bypass all that nonsense, how diabolical it would be to begrudge any writer this escape.

I arrived at my MFA program with a healthy portfolio. At that point, I had written extensively for close to a decade. My expectations from the program were minimal. I already knew no one was going to wave a magic wand and transform me into a stellar act. I was looking to become a better writer, but above all, I had come to position myself in the Big C literary community.

I also arrived suspicious. MFAs do not have the best PRs. You are aware of what creative writing programs are rumoured to do to writers, especially we writers of colour. You’ve heard stories of workshops as dress rehearsals for the pages of the New Yorker, workshops as preening for the white gaze. I was alert to an attempt to tweak the flavour of my voice until it accommodated Western palates. My antennae stayed high.

Junot Diaz’s “MFA vs. POC” confirmed for me the reality of writers of colour in most programs. You, writing from the margins. You, sitting in class with people who may know Nigeria only through the lens of CNN reporting. You, taught by professors who swear by dead white male authors. You, fighting impostor syndrome, wrestling the voice that says you are only here to add some colour to a puddle of whiteness.

You, a foreign thing.

Gratefully, the MFA vs. POC wasn’t a battle I needed to start. Other writers of colour had fought and won some ground for writers like me. Some programs were adopting books such as The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom. Some programs were confronting institutional racism.

My promise to myself remained to write what I’d be proud of, not what Nigerians wanted me to write in the name of Nigerian literature, nor what the West demanded of me. I wanted to write my own stories. I was bent on protecting my voice and my work at all costs. I freed myself from the pressures of ‘Nigerian exceptionality’, the temptation we often fall into in the bid to prove we are better than our peers. I shed the exoskeleton of haughtiness and embraced not knowing certain things without shame.

Here’s an honest review: I have become a more confident writer since enrolling. I don’t know when it happened. I think the great distance between here and home, how much I gave up to be here, spurred me to work hard. Perhaps it is the library and the unbridled access to books. It could be the classes, sitting with writers from different parts of the world, exchanging knowledge and craft secrets.

A writing program is a buffet. You make it what you want. You choose what serves you and walk away from what doesn’t benefit you. Hopefully, you find professors that get you and your work and study with them. An independent study I took two semesters ago was the highlight of my education. Our focus was “Nigerian Books with Global Appeal”. I and the professor read Chimamanda Adichie, Lesley Nneka Arimah, E. C. Osondu and Eloghosa Osunde. It is hard to forget how animated we were when we read Vagabonds! We marvelled at the audacity of language, the deliciousness of the prose and how brazen a writer could be to create such work.

I also enjoy teaching. Most programs require that from you. I didn’t know I was capable of this until I was thrown into a classroom of twenty students and commanded to instruct them. Teaching gives me a chance to play dress up but most especially, I love that I am responsible for the education of others.

Some days, I enjoy workshops. Some days, the feedbacks aren’t quite helpful. But in all, I am learning how to talk about the works of others, and I love how the workshop mandates you to write more. Most importantly, I love that a book-length creative thesis is expected of me upon graduation.

But I’d be remiss to whitewash America for you. A well-structured place can also be oppressive. The honeymoon stage ends quickly when you’re paying bills, when you are adjusting to a new culture. Always, there’s a constant tug-of-war happening to you even outside the classroom, where you have to gauge how much acculturation you should permit yourself. Soon the glitz dissolves and you realise you are in a racialized country and Black people are at the bottom of the racial food chain. You are black and black bodies in America are more prone to all forms of violence. I enrolled in a literature class centring on contemporary Black authors to understand better what it means to be Black in America. The class cured whatever separatist mentality I arrived in America with, especially as a Nigerian who is tempted to think I am a different kind of Black person, a good Black person.

Racism sneaks up on you. I recall someone saying I was getting more published than my peers in the program because I am Black and Black stories are in vogue. In that casual statement, my talent was dismissed, my hard work and how I push past a myriad of rejections on Submittable — all waved away and attributed to race. Such things can make a writer create less and less or even drop out.

You may also wonder why some writers leave social media when they migrate. Reasons vary. The need to silence the constant chatter online. Book-length projects. An escape from the heightened scrutiny from family members. Growth.

You can weigh the risks and make a decision based on your own reality. After all, the MFA is not a guaranteed path to a successful career. Many quit writing afterwards and find jobs at places like Meta or Spotify. You can create your own workshop experience outside of a writing program. Find friends who are passionate about writing, meet often and swap works with each other. Set deadlines. Enter for prizes together. For me, beyond the doors an MFA degree can open, what I remain certain of is my craft.

However, if you decide to apply, there is something you should know. Leaving home is a spiritual journey. It is reckless to fling yourself to any part of the world without asking hard questions and making investigations. But even when you ask all the questions, how would you really know the answers until you arrive? Upon acceptance into a program, so many things occupy your mind as you prepare to leave home. Visa documents, flight fare, settling scores with your al mater, hoping they release your previous academic records in peace. So many issues and distractions and so little time to solve them.

In my case, I prayed. I abstained from food for days to gain clarity. I didn’t want to land myself in the belly of the beast. I didn’t want to experience what could break my spirit. I prayed for safety, I prayed for community, I prayed my path would not be lined with monsters.

So far, my prayers have been answered.

I have also found my people. I found them in church, I found them with my classmates, I found them in the African Student Association. I get at least three hugs a day. Loneliness would have driven me crazy and every day, I am grateful it doesn’t know me by name. I whet the edge of my craft each passing day, testing new doors it could open. I’m good. I’m glad I’m here.