Write What You Feel: A Dialogue with Ola W. Halim

Ola: I’m not always that person who sends out stories immediately after I’m done with them. I don’t think I’ve ever done so. Although The Road was a first draft, it was not sent out immediately; it definitely was not sent out with all that rawness and unruly sentences characteristic of most of my drafts. Micro edits and changes/considerations regarding, for example, POV and beginning sentences had to be made.

Uchenna: Oh. Okay then. It takes a lot of confidence to submit a story right after writing it. But does that not reduce the thrill that comes with writing? I read somewhere that the real writing begins after writing. And I agree. Those rewrites, those changes, those periods of imposter syndrome, those breathers taken to figure out if the direction of the story is good enough, that is what makes writing exciting. And I do not think any writer is willing to trade that for such confidence. We be ‘suffer head’ o. (laughs)

Ola: That is true: a piece doesn’t breathe until a second glance, but like most things, there are exceptions, although I’ve never experienced any. Some of my stories, though, do not take full-fledged rewrites to come out as polished as I’d want them; this is because I plan a lot before the actual writing. I’m a strong plotter or perhaps a writer too suspicious of major surprises along the way as he writes. Beforehand, I have to at least know the fact and fiction behind the story, understand character motivations, and have a grasp, no matter how vague, of the ending.

About any writer willing to sacrifice the thrill of discovering a story after it’s penned—there are definitely writers like that. Most growing writers share a common problem: impatience. They want to write and have someone look at it for them, to correct every punctuation and grammatical and chronological error, to do all of these within the shortest time possible, so they can submit it to magazines and receive acceptance emails and even go on to win major prizes. At this stage, they should be—I don’t know—finding their voices or something, reading works and craft lessons, all of that. But the moment I suggest that it feels to them as though I was an enemy, and off they go looking for someone else to tell them writing follows a straight and Nollywood-kind-of-predictable trajectory. And again, there are exceptions: stories that come fully complete, but still, I just can’t.

Uchenna: Very good points made here, Ola. Not the editor in you rearing its head. (laughs).

There is something else about your story I found really interesting and I would like us to dwell on it a bit. In mourning and remembering the Tega each of them knew, a new friendship begins to sprout between Ejiro and Ehimem. The circumstance of this friendship is what I find interesting. There they were bonding over the same person whom they had experienced differently, both knowing that the other loved Tega so dearly. Can you talk about this depth of love? To love so much that it transcends envy?

Ola: I do not think I have mentioned that The Road, like most of my stories, is a ‘response-to-annoyance’ story: something—no matter how petty everyone would consider it—pisses me off and I find a way to address it, mostly to remind myself that things could happen my way. While drafting The Road, I was confronted over and over again with the mentality that love, feelings and intimacy are all terms used sexually or romantically. Many, for instance, can lay their lives on the tarred road swearing that ‘innocent’ friendship cannot exist between a man and a woman; there has to be a little more.

That was what I had in mind while drafting the Ehimen/Ejiro subplot. I wanted intimacy and love and all other feelings that defy nomenclature and categorisation, and so their bonding was born. Just like lovers, they had to experience phases and challenges and conquer them (in the span of a day, I’m afraid): envy, anger, indifference, despair, and whatever.

I think their friendship—or whatever we might call what they are having—blossomed because of these shared emotions. Both Ejiro and Ehimen are angry at the world for its injustice and inequality and cruelty and seeming chaotic assignment of fate. Then, when they meet, they’re angry (or envious?) at each other, with each thinking they have been cheated (on) by Tega—and you know what happens when you, for example, meet the person your partner is cheating on you with! (If we’re to be objective here, the question of Tega cheating on them is out of the way because did he actually cheat?) Both characters do not question that feeling; before things soften, they thrive in that jealousy, even employing it to throw vocal jabs. And then the one shared emotion I think is most moving, although barely mentioned in the story, is loneliness.

Ejiro has obviously never talked about Tega as deeply as she does with Ehimen. You can sense how she does almost desperately, sometimes dishing out information in spurts as though compelled by some higher force. This is therapy for her, I think, and also the beginning of her healing. Apart from the brokenness that comes with losing her supposed husband, she’s also lovelorn, weary, and confused by the phenomenon of being gay, despite how much she’s willing to understand it. By opening up about it, perhaps, she thinks Ehimen can help her see more clearly.

There is evidence to prove that she had never talked with Tega as deeply as she now does with Ehimen. The same applies to Tega: in the desert, the cold nights and dry sands, he finds in Ehimen a pair of listening ears. Ehimen, therefore, doubles for Ejiro and Tega as the channel through which they could express their feelings, and lay bare their most silent thoughts.

One of the most solid foundations upon which genuine friendship can be built is emotional honesty/vulnerability. While this is sometimes a conscious decision to make and could take a considerable amount of time and energy, there are times when we have borne so much that we can’t keep bottling anymore; we explode, let it all out, only (most times) to look at ourselves with wonder or awe or shame or the three combined, wondering how we’re able to achieve that. I think this is the case with Ejiro, and this is what makes whatever she and Ehimen experience at the end of the day so beautiful: she talks about Eguono’s condition which she’d otherwise not share with a stranger who’s just come to inform her of her husband’s death; she lets this stranger into all the unsaid captured by cameras: Tega’s happy pictures, Tega’s father’s bad eye, Tega’s mother; she cooks; she holds back her tears for so long that when they finally pour, towards the end, it encourages Ehimen (who’s been holding his back too) to be vulnerable, to be naked, to cry too. This is what defines friendship, the audacity to strip bare in the glare of a thousand lights, to strip before someone who is naked too, who feels what you feel, who is not reduced to footnotes by shame and gender stereotypes.

Uchenna: It was beautiful to read and even more beautiful hearing you talk about how intentional you were about writing them this way. And yes, I picked on the loneliness, and the irony of the loneliness too. How you can feel alone, even when in love. Both loved Tega, yet somehow still felt like they were alone. This feeling did nothing to their affection for Tega, but the loneliness remained like a stubborn stain. Perhaps there was an emptiness to Tega, a depth neither could reach so what their meeting did was a platform to share their misery and misery loves company. Could you talk about this emptiness to Tega that extended to the people in his life?

Ola: Tega can be a lot of other things, but grief, sadness and loneliness seem to define him the most. Here is a man who loses his mother as a child, who even bears witness to the horror of her death, helpless. There’s his father, the only parent he grows up with who should have filled in the space left by his mother, but instead, we see Tega trying to fill himself up, trying to apologise to his father (by wanting and trying “to change the way he felt about boys” early in life) even before the former discovers his “crime”. And as if fate has a bag of worms stacked up on his head, he ends up harming his father while trying to change himself. There’s Ogaga too, an embodiment of Tega’s romance in the plainest (but probably most abusive) form; Ogaga who could not see through the fog of Tega’s misery, who thought by invoking God into everything, problems vanished. Tega knows all of this, that Ogaga is not what he wants, but he sticks to him till his death nevertheless because, perhaps, he cannot imagine being with someone better, can’t even imagine someone better exists. 

That’s the thing, Uchenna: sometimes we are so deep in the dark that the simple act of imagining a slash of sunlight becomes a cosmic impossibility. Perhaps, Ehimen would have been able to offer him sunlight. Perhaps, he’d have been able to find sunlight himself by opening his eyes wider, looking away from the crannies, searching for alternative perspectives to life and all, but that’s it: he has come to accept his state of mind as the unalterable reality.

And why do these feelings seem to seep into the lives of those closest to him? Well, let’s talk briefly about energy, you know, energy is a kind of force or presence upon which entities are said to vibrate. Someone walks into the room and brings with them good energy: soon there’s light, soon there’s space to breathe, soon there’s music. While some people do not catch the energy, some are so empathetic they catch a whiff of it. Ehimen seems to be an empathetic person; in trying to love and unfurl Tega simultaneously, he catches his energy and sinks into the abyss from which Tega cannot envisage even an imaginary escape. Although we can say, of all the people in the story, Ehimen knows the most about Tega, there is still a lot he does not know. Perhaps, it’s not that Tega outrightly does not want him to know more, but he just cannot. He probably does not know how to open up completely. And also, this thing, the idea of opening up, is not as easy and quick as we think; it can take years upon years, even with constant encouragement and therapy, for someone to let you into their unfiltered world. Perhaps, if Tega had lived longer, Ehimen could have seen him in clearer lights. Then, there is the Ogaga stumbling block, and ironically, Tega seems to be guilty of what he accuses Ogaga of—there is no single time he asks Ehimen how or what he feels; it is just him talking and talking all the way. Apart from Ehimen’s internal voice here and there, he does not really get to voice his feelings to Tega. For the five years between Tega’s death and Ehimen’s visiting his family, we can be sure he never talks to anyone about the encounter. He, too, has morphed into a Tega: sad and alone (although, thankfully, he still has some chances of redemption).

I think Ejiro’s loneliness is easier to talk about. Think about a cis woman falling for a gay man with a history of depression and the like. But then, like every other story, there are nuances; layers that, when poked at, make her tale way less stereotypical. Like: why does she remain in the marriage? Why does she have Eguono? Is she hoping for the impossible, a miracle? Does she think the miracle could only happen if she had a child for Tega? Or was it her father-in-law who made her do it? 

She does all of this, yet Tega leaves, and she remains, catering to his memories and their autistic child, hoping, even after five years, that the miracle would still happen. And, just like Ehimen, in trying to unravel Tega, sinking deeper into the loneliness that has spanned all of her marital years.