Monday 10 August 2015

Our driving force is to get Nigerians read -El Nukoya




ADA DIKE
A Nigerian writer, El Nukoya, on August 2, 2015, launched his second book, ‘Baron of Broad Street’ in Lagos.
During the questions and answers section, he shared how someone asked him sometime ago whether he was in a cult for him to write a fiction that relates to cult activities in his first book, but someone in the audience responded before him and asked the person who asked the question, “how do you know how accurate things are inside the cult? For you to have been able to describe it with accuracy, then, you were in a cult yourself.”
“To me, it is imagination. It is a validation that somewhere along the line, you probably know what you have written. As a writer, you are creative. You can imagine anything. There was a time I struggled with lines and rhymes. It was my personal experiences. It is fiction. The general perception is that before you empathize or sympathize, you must be in that situation. You necessarily have to come from a place to be able to sympathize,” he explained.

He explained where money he invests into writing books comes from as well as those that will buy the book by saying: “It is a service, a responsibility and I am so happy that this is not a commercial project. I grew up at a time it was fashionable to have a James Hadley Chase rather than Levi. Then, the Levi would so much fade but the knowledge from James Hadley Chase would show. We would sit and discuss about the books we read such as, Chase, Jeffery Archer and so on, while some ladies read Mills & Boon.
“We can’t just sit down and say Nigerians don’t read. We have to make an effort and see how we can change that idea and make it more fashionable for Nigerians to be reading. Our aim is to tell our story from our perspective to our people and to the rest of the world. What is driving us is getting Nigerians read again so that people won’t see us and say, “If you want to hide something from a Nigerian, put it inside a book.”
Asked whether an adaption of the book could be turned to a movie, El Nukoya said he had proposals about Nine Lives but the proposals were not followed up. “We have a proposal about Baron of Broad Street, so watch out for these two movies.
The winner of the Ana-Jaccaranda Prize for Prose, read chapter 15 of his book to the admiration of guests.
His first story, Nine Liveshttp://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=afrbooclu-20&l=as2&o=1&a=9780795790 tells a story about the pains a young village boy, Olupitan Ogunrinu (aka, Pitan) goes through to become a man.  The first of three children, he has come to enjoy the serenity and peace associated with village life comes from a poor rural fishing community. But his life changes abruptly, when he gains admission to study at a university in the city.
Synopsis of Baron of Broad Street
Baron of Broad Street chronicles the polarized worlds of the Lagos impoverished and the affluent, living side-by-side, yet a world apart. It captures the limited prospect for mobility in an often negligent society, and the determination of a select crop of youths to take it upon themselves and change this seemingly rigid equation, by all means necessary.
Disun Falodun and his bosom friend Ige are young boys growing up within the squeeze and squalor of Makoko. As they sit on the banks of the Lagos Lagoon, they contemplate life on the other side of town, the exclusive district of the Metropolis covering Ikoyi, Victoria Island and Broad Street that mysterious area, so distant, yet so close. Disun is the optimistic of the duo, resolute in his faith in a fair chance at success in Lagos, his ordinary background notwithstanding. Ige, on the other hand held by a vibrant, radical mind reasoning that the expectation of a fair chance was utopian, entrenches himself in the firm belief that the only reliable choices open to them were illicit. The road to realizing this ambition is lined with real dangers. Would they prevail? And if indeed they would, what prices are there to be paid...and, perhaps, more importantly, of what texture would their residual soul be?
  “The book focuses on contemporary Lagos; Conflicts (of a different kind - class, culture, identity, moral); Consciousness; a fresh conversation about who we are and a daring confrontation of the realities thereof,” said El Nukoya
 Written over a period of seven years, El Nukoya’s new book has received several endorsements and many accolades from the literary world. 'Baron of Broad Street’ is available nationwide at selected bookstores, online or directly from the publisher.

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