Rushdie's got us all a-twitter

OK. What could be more amazing than finding Ben Okri on Twitter and learning that "Ben will be here from time to time to share his poetry and writing, but otherwise this page is maintained by Rider Books"?

It's finding Salman Rushdie. The author of 'Midnight's Children' is on Twitter and rearing to go.

It began when @SalmanRushdie1 wrote on his twitter account, "With some trepidation, I am beginning to tweet. If you want to hear what sort of noise I end up making, please follow me."

Why 'SalmanRushdie1'? Well, because, there was already a 'SalmanRushdie' on Twitter, and Sir Salman said as much on his first profile, revealing that Twitter was refusing to verify that this indeed was him. One of his first tweets was to stare down at his own shadow, so to speak, to confront the man, woman or thing masquerading as 'Salman Rushdie': "Who are you? Why are you pretending to be me? Release this username. You are a phoney. All followers please note." [Update: Rushdie has since dropped the '1' from his handle, having reclaimed 'SalmanRushdie' from the imposter]

Twitter may have been refusing to verify, but readers recognised an original voice straightaway. Thousands signed up to follow Rushdie between yesterday and today alone. And they were amply rewarded. For where else will you have a great author chatting on tweeter with Kylie Minogue, Patrick French, Mia Farrow, Stephen Fry and Margaret Attwood ("Hi Peggy, I just joined the madhouse...")? Or refraining from going into the details of Christopher Hitchens' illness in public ("Allow me to not say more, please...")?

Rushdie racked up the excitement further by declaring that he was going produce a whole new short story, titled A Globe of Heaven, starting today, entirely on Twitter. Shrewd negotiator, the author noted this morning that he'd pulled in nearly 10,000 followers, and promised that once the magic number was reached, he would start tweeting the story. In minutes, 10,000 followers were in the bag, and the story began.

A thousand retweets, two profile images later, and Twitter verification almost almost a certainty, Rushdie posted his third bio in less than 24 hours: "...As Popeye the Sailor Man said, I yam what I yam and that's what I yam."

We know. We know.

This is going to be so much fun, and Rushdie no doubt is enjoying himself. No doubt whose fingers are tapping out those tweets, definitely not some publishing rep. It's the real article.

But for any writer tempted to stay glued to Rushdie's twitter account permanently, a note of caution from the man himself. As he said in one tweet to another author, "I've just handed in revised MS of my memoir, so I have time to waste here."

--Follow Rushdie on Twitter

--Update The Guardian: Salman Rushdie's Twitter debut

Ben Okri & Sarah Ladipo Manyika talk Bars

My recent post about Ben Okri's appearance on CNN's African Voices got me thinking back with fondness to my one encounter with the Booker Prize winner. A very special encounter at that - a filmed interview at the Random House building on Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, on November 28, 2007.

There's an hour-long film of the interview, commissioned by Farafina to coincide with their publication of Okri's 'Starbook' and I have a 7000-word transcript of the same. One of the great surprises of the interview was Okri's insistence that The Famished Road is not Magical Realism, since the magical elements are what Azaro the spirit child sees in the 'I' of the narrative, and not part of the poetic world of the story, as would obtain in, say, One Hundred Years of Solitute. As I understood his argument, the idea of a spirit child is an authentic Nigeria belief - "We believe this," Okri told me - rather than something the author plucks from the air. In other words, the Abiku is 'real'.

We had an "alchemy" during the interview, to borrow one of Okri's favourite words - we got along. He asked which part of Yorubaland I was from and I told him 'the Ilesa axis - Ijesaland' and he told me he'd been in those parts before. It was a fun and inspiring afternoon. Many months later, a couple of weeks before my relocation to Lagos from London, I got a call from him; and when I told him of my intended return to Nigeria, he was encouraging, warm and generous in his praise of my humble talents. Coming from the author of one of the seminal works of my reading life, 'The Famished Road', it was, shall we say, enchanting. "Enchantment" is another of Ben Okri's frequently used words, and I asked him about it during the interview. When you asked him some questions he would smile and say: "You're going to get a riff!" and that was what you got - worlds invoked by words that flowed like the strains of a rhythm guitar.

I had some treasured pictures I took with him at Random House. But a move across continents, one desktop and two laptops and myriad flash drives later (some with corrupted folders), the pictures are gone in the wind, cant be found. I shall keep looking... but there's this mugshot of me that sometimes accompanies my published work, taken with my camera by Okri himself (see the pic at the bottom of my story 'Smoking Bamboo' here).

I recount all this now because the memory alone sure makes me wish I were in London for tomorrow's African Writers Evening discussion between Okri and Sarah Ladipo Manyika. It should be quite something, as the two writers discuss the role of the Bar in literature. There's Madam Koto's bar in 'The Famished Road', of course; and if I remember correctly, there are bar scenes in the Jos section of Manyika's debut novel, 'In Dependence'.

I have some pictures of Manyika reading in Lagos in 2009; will add them to this post tomorrow if I can locate them. Until then, here are excerpts from my 2010 interview with Manyika, followed by my review of her book...

'Africa needs good writers'
‘In Dependence' is published in the UK by Legend Press and in a West African edition by Abuja-based Cassava Republic Press. A blurb on the book notes, in a complimentary tone, that "even the sex is well mannered." Why has Ladipo Manyika not gone with roaring sex scenes, as is de rigueur in contemporary novels by Nigerian female writers? "Just wait till my next book!" she jokes, then adds, "I personally find some of the most enticing... a lot can be left to the reader's imagination." The allure of many a romantic scene, she suggests, "is not about the roaring sex but the anticipation of what is to come."

Love in the swing of time
“One could begin with the dust, the heat and the purple bougainvillea” - so reads the languorous first sentence of Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s novel, ‘In Dependence’. It sets the pace for the evocative narrative journey that the reader embarks upon in this self assured first novel. The first chapter is over very quickly, but not before introducing many of the side characters in the Nigerian leg of the continent-hopping story of Tayo and Vanessa, the lovers in Manyika’s tale.

Event Details:

Ben Okri & Sarah Ladipo Manyika

African Writers Evening, Level 5 Function Room, South Bank Centre, London SE1.

Thursday, 7 July, 2011. 7.45pm.

Ben Okri on his 'difficult apprenticeship'

In CNN's African Voices, the Booker Prize winning author of 'The Famished Road', Ben Okri, reminisces about his time sleeping rough on the streets of London, unable to finish university, hungry and seeking the warmth of back doors to crouch in. It was difficult getting food and shelter, but "you could always get books" so he did a lot of intense reading because, "By then, I'd already become infected by the creative dream." He got to see London from "a most heartbreaking perspective". Looking back, the celebrated author reflects that his mother would have been horrified to know her son went through low times. However, "If she were here, I'd like to say to her: it was a good thing. It was a good thing."




"It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said... The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader."

In the Review

Miles Davis famously baffled adoring European audiences time and again by turning his back on them as he played. Turned out the mean, moody persona he cultivated was deliberate, at least some of the time. "Whites love it all too much when we blacks monkey around," he believed, so the turned back was a kind of racial protest; and a refusal to 'monkey around'. No need to wonder about the protest in Strange Fruit, the heart wrenching anti-lynching song immortalised by Billie Holiday. In Review of 18th August, writer Caryl Phillips took another look at 'the greatest song of the 20th Century'.

My love affair with 'the book' - Derek Walcott's first book of poetry that is. VS Naipaul first heard of it as a school pupil in 1949, laid eyes on it in 1955 and met its author in 1960. Walcott at 18 was already a legend of the islands. In a rhapsodic 2-page spread (and an extract from his forthcoming book, 'A Writer's People - Ways of Looking and Feeling'), Naipaul writes about his fellow islander, Walcott.

Excerpt - "The competing empires of Europe had beaten fiercely on these islands, repeopled after the aborigines had gone, turned into sugar islands, places of the lash, where fortunes could be made, sugar the new gold. And at the end, after slavery and sugar, Europe had left behind nothing that could be called a civilisation, no great architecture, no idea of local beauty, no memory of style and splendour (the splendour created by the sugar wealth would have occurred elsewhere, in Europe), only the smallest small change of civility. Everything that remained was touched with the pain of slavery: the brutalities of the popular language, and the prejudices of race: nothing a man would wish to call his own. And when, in the 1940s, middle-class people with no home but the islands began to understand the emptiness they were inheriting (before black people claimed it all) they longed for a local culture, something of their very own, to give them a place in the world.

Walcott in 1949 more than met their need. He sang the praises of the emptiness; he gave it a kind of intellectual substance. He gave their unhappiness a racial twist that made it more manageable."

And let's not forget this profile of the Booker winning author of The Famished Road, Ben Okri, whose new novel, Starbook will (as is the wonderful fad these days) be published in Nigeria almost the same time as the UK.

About the new book - This book, he says, was "the fruit of a personal transformation through fire and suffering, and eventually through humility". He admits a link to a period of bereavement, when his mother, Grace, died in 1996 (an "appalling, emptying experience") and his father, Silver, in 1998. "It's Mum, it's Dad - it's Africa," he says. "Africa's pain, invisibility, misconception. One's living it all the time. Not just the media perception of it, but in terms of individual lives - the stuff you see in people's eyes. How Africa's perceived; how we perceive, and fail to perceive, one another."