Meet the Nigerian author, Chigozie Obioma whose book ‘The Fishermen’ has been shortlisted for Man Booker Prize

In 2009, I was away from Nigeria, in Cyprus, and I was homesick. I had a call from my dad one day, and during the conversation he mentioned my two oldest brothers who used to have a sibling rivalry growing up that would sometimes spiral into violence. My dad mentioned that they were so close now, in their early 30s.

After the conversation, I started to reflect on what was the worst that could have happened during those days when they would beat each other up. Also, around that time I was reading a book by Will Durant titled The Story of Civilisation, in which he stresses that a civilisation cannot be destroyed from the outside, but from within. The idea of writing a story about a close-knit family came up, and then I wanted to explore the idea of an external force that would come from the outside and destroy a united family.

On a secondary level, the novel is a commentary on the idea of Nigeria as a nation. The country is a construct of the British, and it is a contraption that is not sustainable. Nigeria is a montage of different nations. The Igbo nation, for example, is about 40 million people, and that’s just one tribal region. Thriving nation-states, with their own identities, were merged together. So, just as the nation-states yielded to the force of this external power, the boys yield to the external authority of the madman whose prophecy alters the dynamics of their family.

The structure of the novel was born out of two philosophical ideas: first, that children mostly remember things by association with whatever they are fascinated about. A child bullied at school might come home and narrate a tale about a boy “as strong as a lion” beating him up. And once you represent, say, the death of the brother by an association with a sparrow, it makes the impact of the death less tragic. Secondly, I wanted Ben to believe in the idea of a parallel universe – in the sense that there is an interdependency of creatures and other living things – and that the story of a human can be told from the perspective of a tree, the story of a country through a wormhole, or the story of a woman through a bird. This led me to create two narrators who are one in order to represent the nature of remembering. Hence, the story is linear, but not necessarily chronological. The story ends, and picks up again, and begins – even when it ends – from its beginning. I wanted to create a point of view in which the older Benjamin recounts the events of his childhood by going back to the court where he’d first told the story about his brothers and himself. Hence, I have two narrators telling the same story at the same time.

The plot of the novel is centred around the Igbo ideas of destiny. What happens in the life of a person? Are we in control of what happens to us? We are a very superstitious people, and in the Igbo imagination, there are no coincidences. Everything is preordained. Hence, we live a life that is mixed with myths, and force penetrates our lives every hour. A man may try to lift himself up by hard work, but that same hard work might be what kills him in the end. The tragic flaw is a central concept in classic Greek and Shakespearian tragedies.

Culled from the UK Guardian

• Chigozie Obioma was born in Nigeria and now lives in the United States, where he is professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Nabraska-Lincoln. The Fisherman is his first novel.

Chigozie Obioma's 'The Fishermen' stacked with other shortlisted books