At the second edition of the Ake Art and Book Festival (AABF) in Abeokuta, Ogun State, last month, Okey Ndibe featured in a book chat on his latest book, Foreign Gods Inc. Assistant Life Editor, TERH AGBEDEH, was at the exciting gathering where Ndibe talked about how the idea for the book came to him, among other issues.
Where did the idea for your book, Foreign God’s Inc, come from?
The original animus impetus was a story a cousin of mine who owned a shop in Cambridge Massachusetts told me that the statue of a deity in my hometown had disappeared. If you are a writer and you are presented with such an intriguing development, you want to understand it. As one great novelist said, what a writer does essentially is to see just the mere tail of a huge beast moments before it disappears into the jungle, and just from the tail, you are able to construct for the reader the entire monster. This story so seized me. Who could have taken this deity? It was returned finally, but it didn’t lessen my fascination; so I decided to explore that narrative. Initially, I wanted to write a novel where there would be a fiery Pentecostal pastor who encourages his congregants to go steal the deity and destroy it, to show the superiority of his own God over the deity. But about 60 pages into the novel, one day it hit me and I said: wow, what about if there is a shop as it were, a god shop either in London or in New York that buys and sells these deities and certain objects from different cultures of the world for a lot of money? And how about if there is an immigrant Nigerian, who, like my immigrant here, Ike Ozondu, has been to school in America and has studied economics and has got a very good degree in economics and his desire is to get a job in the corporate world. But he spends years looking for this job without getting one. And part of the problem initially is that he doesn’t have a green card. Once he has a green card, he finds out that his accent, which is particularly strong, stands in the way of his getting a job and so has a life as a cab driver until he reads a magazine story about this gallery called Foreign Gods Incorporated that buys and sells deities for a lot of money. He remembers that back in his hometown there is this god that used to be the god of war for his people. He feels there are no wars anymore, so the deity’s offices were no longer urgent; hence he makes the decision to embark on this adventure to steal the statue and sell it to the gallery.
Where did the name of the god, Ngene, come from?
Anyone who is Igbo will know that any Igbo community would call any stream Ngene. So, Ngene is a name that stands for stream, though not in every community. In my hometown, there is actually a deity called Ngene. The deity that was stolen, which was returned, is called Ngene.
How about the town in the book?
When I was growing up, there was a town which seemed so mythical to me. I had a friend whose father was a transporter and he went to Utonkon. So I was so fascinated because Utonkon seemed to me to be a fairyland. So when I started writing fiction, my first novel has the same Utonki, so it is a kind of adaptation of Utonkon.
What theme in this book do you want readers to pay more attention to?
Any writer should refrain from being a dictator of a reader’s response. Any reader who reads my work becomes a co-creator of meaning. When you read a work of art, you see things in the work that sometimes even the author was unaware of. So I will not be tempted to stipulate how my novel should be read. I think that a good novel is like a universe; with different parts. So there is the immigrant part, there is the extended story about the idea of greed, there is the subject of the ways in which we consume, especially one another’s illusions. There is a fascination with the idea of the way we turn everything, including the sacred into commodities. In the novel, we find that the one religion that keeps standing at the end of the novel is a religion of money. So, it is everything. I think if I am going to prescribe at all, I would say that it is a universe rather than the one tiny aspect; the universe is what I will encourage readers to look at.
While researching the book, did you come across people that are doing this as a business?
It is interesting that when I started writing the novel, I was teaching at Trinity College, and I offered to give the faculty, my colleagues a reading. When I read the opening of the novel, one of them said, “yeah, I know what inspired it”. It turned out that The New Yorker magazine had just written a story, I think, about an Indian businessman who was trafficking in Budha heads and selling them for a tonne of money in Europe and America and had been arrested. So he thought I had seen that, and that was what inspired me. I wasn’t aware. I thought I was writing something that was so out there imaginatively, that there was no replication in life, only to find out that somebody had beaten me to it and was actually dealing in gods.
Subsequently, a Nigerian friend of mine read a section of the novel and told me that in Marlboro, Massachusetts, there was a man who owned a shop where he sold African deities. He said he had been there and was disturbed by the atmosphere; the air was very heavy and smelly and that they had to run out of there.
So, here, I was thinking that I had invented this idea of a shop that sells gods, and people had beaten me to it. When the novel came out and it was getting all the reviews in January and February, some young men went to a community in Anambra State and stole a major deity. They were making away with it in a car when the police caught up with them. I think they must have read the reviews and didn’t realise that it is a novel that is made up and must have stolen this deity to sell it to this foreign gods in America and make money.
I remember at a media event in New York arranged by my publisher and I said, “I want there to be good food”, which is usually Nigerian food for me. So we chose a Nigerian restaurant in Brooklyn and there was an old Yoruba man there drinking and who wanted to know what was happening. I told him what the book is about and this guy got so angry. He said, “where is the guy; I will kill him. He is an idiot”. I was not afraid to tell him that I made it up, because he could have slapped me.
Did you receive any criticism for this book?
If you are a writer and you write a book, and it doesn’t receive any criticism, then you ought to be worried; it means you have written something really boring. Like a good person, nobody is complaining about you, but you are not an interesting person. You have to make people uncomfortable; some people would say, this aspect of the novel rubs me the wrong way. Others will say, that is what I love about the novel. That is the stuff of greatness. On the whole, I have received extremely positive reviews, but there is criticism, then there is ignorance. There is a Nigerian reviewer who basically accused me of plagiarising Chinua Achebe. To prove this point, he finds some proverbs in my novel which he finds in a few of Achebe’s novels, and he finds Ngene and says there is Ngene in Arrow of God. It was on facebook and I wasn’t going to respond, but somebody called me and said “you are being killed on facebook”. I went back and people were saying, “Okey, this novel oyibo people are praising, so he just copied it? He is a thief?” So I had to write a response where I educated this guy on something I thought that would be self-evident that no writer, even one as great as Achebe, owns proverbs. Every day in village gatherings, people are using the same proverbs, so before I use them, I have to call Achebe and say: please sir, can I re-use (that proverb)?