Q & A

What does your name mean?
Rosemary, of course, is not a Nigerian name (my father didn’t want people butchering my name, especially given a language where sometimes a slight change in intonation can give you a completely different and horrible meaning). Esehagu, my grandfather’s name, means “The sacrifice is over.” Rosemary, by the way, means “Dew of the Sea.”

Why did you switch to vegetarianism?
It is not for the reason you’d expect. Here goes . . . The weather was terrible (by that I mean cold) and I felt bored and restricted. I needed something to distract me. I loved chicken a lot, so much so that, in Nigeria, I had a pet chicken (I think you can figure out what happened after a while). Anyway, I wanted to see how long I could last without eating chicken. The challenge was to do it for a week. But surprisingly, I didn’t crave chicken as much, and once I stopped eating chicken, I didn’t want to break this new pattern. Then I reasoned that since I was not going to eat chicken, I couldn’t discriminate against the cow by eating its flesh. This same reasoning then extended to anything that can breathe and has specific locomotive structures. That is how I became a vegetarian. Hey, I see that look you are giving me!

Do you like to cook?
No, not really. However, every so often (when I feel inspired or especially happy or especially broke) I go to the kitchen cabinet and start pouring things into the pot, and then I wait to see the finished product. Sometimes it is surprisingly good, but other times, well, let’s just say that my tongue and stomach are not happy.

Any pet peeve?
I don’t like it when people take the labels off my things. My 13 inch TV, for example, still has the label “V-chip” plastered on the corner of the screen—and people always want to take it off. It also absolutely bugs me when people mark books, especially library books. I feel it is a violation of the book. It really is. The giant of all my pet peeves is most definitely smoking. My body and mind has an allergic response to smoking: severe irritation.

What are some things that your friends might say about you?
They will probably say that I am a bit quirky, that I do quirky things, or that I challenge myself in quirky ways, and they will probably also say that I am a bit of a drama queen.

What is your secret to attending to all these passions of yours?
I discovered the power of having God as my strength, power, and focus. Since becoming a Christian (not just a believer of Christ), I feel like the superwoman version of the Rosemary I use to be. I can do all things I wish to do through God who strengthens me (Phil 4:13). It is about keeping everything in the right perspective: first God, then everything else.

Who is God to you?
He is my hero, my helper, my mother & father, my friend, my psychiatrist ($0/hour), my teacher, my comforter, my joy, and, on some occasions, my rebuker.

What is one thing that you have learned from your life so far?
Challenge yourself to do things you would never have thought to do (within reason). You’d be amazed at where you will end up, and at the very least, you’ll have a story to tell.

You are a Christian. Was it hard writing a story (The Looming Fog) where God, in any of the three forms, wasn’t in it?
I wrote this story before I became baptized into Christ. But the story is set in a time and place where any insertion of God the trinity, of Christianity, would have been highly inappropriate and incorrect even for fiction. It is amazing though that even in places where Christianity has not yet spread; humans have a divine search for the Supreme Being, for the divine. Even back in Hidaya (the fictional village in my book), people were aware, on some level, that there’s more to life than just human beings, that there is a being that knows infinitely more than we can ever grasp. In this book, it is subtle, but I try to show how we sometimes view our relationship with God (through the “gods”).
That said, I did make a conscious effort not to give the “gods” their proper names, and I tried to keep them in plural form.

Tell me a little bit about your mother’s experience?
My mom is the last (and remaining) child of twelve or so siblings. Most of her siblings had been sickly and so had depleted her parents of their resources. Growing up in a house with aged, poor parents, no brothers, and, consequently, distant relatives lead to a series of bitter childhood experiences. Her experience is one of a surviving child, pulling the weight of her small, poor family, while suffering the burden of not being the right type of child (a boy). Probably the most painful of her experiences is that of her relatives’ complete neglect of her and her aged mother, once her father died. To this day, my mom cannot talk about her youthful years without tears.

By the way, to Nigerians, one’s family is one of one’s most (if not the most) valuable resources, so to have a neglectful family is to sentence one to a very difficult life. Yet, neglective families are quite common. Why this discrepancy between one’s values and one’s deeds? What is at the root of a neglectful family or society?

Your intention was to write about your mom, how did that extend to writing about an intersexual child?
Well, as I started getting my mom to tell me the details of her experiences, the memories of it were too difficult for her, so I had to use my general knowledge of her experience, of the environment, to create a fictional story. As I started deciding whether the narrator should be male or female, I thought maybe I should have a third-person narrator, or a narrator whose sex is irrelevant. Somehow, I just thought about what the life of someone whose sex is not “obvious” would be in such an environment. I instantly knew then that this was the voice of my story: the character and narrator through whom I would explore the essence of my mom’s experience. I realized that the problems that an intersexed person would have in such an environment would easily predict some of the experiences that my mom had, and vice versa. The Looming Fog, in this sense, is not about an intersexed child or a poor girl, or any disadvantaged person, but rather it is about an environment, a social environment. I believe that understanding the environment will predict the nature of the lives of its inhabitants. The environment that I drew up in The Looming Fog is a mixture of the modern and the rural. If one is honest with one’s self, one will see the similarities between one’s environment and that of The Looming Fog.

So what would you say is the mission of The Looming Fog?
I would say that The Looming Fog is about exploring how a person’s social environment can cripple one’s mind and self and make one prone to doubting one’s value to the community.

Can you shed some very basic light on the way intersex conditions come to be?
Well, boys (XY) and girls (XY) start out with identical private parts. Then about 7 to 8 weeks or so after conception, the genes on the extra X of the female prompt it to develop into the standard female body, and the genes on the Y of the male prompt it to develop into the standard male body. There are many steps before one gets to the standard male and female body (with all its internal parts and external look), and disruption of any of these steps can lead to a variety of intersex conditions, one of the most common of which is AIS (androgen insensitivity syndrome). Basically, these people with AIS are genetically males (male parts inwardly; XY), but they lack the fully-functional messengers that deliver the message from testosterone (the hormone that says to look like a male) to the body. So testosterone is floating around with no media folks to broadcast its message to the body, but with the help of somebody called Aromatase, it changes itself to estrogen (the hormone which says to look like a female). So this person with AIS (who is genetically male) is a female or looks like a female, except that “she” can’t menstruate because “she” doesn’t have the female tools (on the inside) to cause menstruation.
This is a rough and simplified sketch, of course.

Does the character in the The Looming Fog have AIS?
No, if he or she did, The Looming Fog would be quite a different story. The people with AIS look and develop, for the most part, like females. My character’s body, since birth, makes that determination of “boy” or “girl” a little harder. The kind of intersexual that my character is doesn’t have as neat an explanation of how he/she came to look that particular way.

Are there other issues that are important in The Looming Fog?
One big issue is that of poverty, about societies’ role in creating or reducing poverty in their members. Another big issue is women’s place in their community. In my story, it isn’t really man vs. women, but woman vs. woman—how do women help or hinder their status in their community? Can women hinder their status? If so, how? Why? And answering these questions will take us right back to dissecting society’s environment and the benefit or harm of that environment to its members.

What was the hardest thing about writing The Looming Fog?
Creating a character that comes to the end of life mostly filled with regret, especially since the character is part of a minority. I tried to write it in another way, but this is the way the story wanted to be told.

What kind of book is The Looming Fog?
It is a psychological-philosophical novel in the sense that it is quite introspective in style and in that it aims to reveal some ideas about the humanity of a society. You are dealing with characters that are quite powerless in their physical world, so their minds, their thoughts become their main source of power, of claiming and controlling their world. I wanted to give the readers an impression that they are blind, and so they have to rely on the eyes of an ignored population for insight into the world.

What are some things that you notice about yourself as a writer?
I am particularly interested in what goes on in the mind of characters. Sometimes I do not recognize myself in other people’s actions, but when they expose their thoughts, I start seeing similarities and am less able to avoid self-analysis. I have also noticed that I like to explore what things are by looking at what they are not. For example, I would explore normality by looking at “abnormality,” happiness by looking at sadness, sanity by looking at insanity, etc. Lastly, my writing tends to have a dramatic or lyrical flare. I like to express things in unusual ways and to bring the subtle things about behaviors, attitudes, and people into the spotlight; after all subtle things are the fabric of our being. Moreover, owing to my upbringing, the fact that to this day my parents still speak to me in proverbs, my writings tend to have quite an insightful feel to them.

What motivates you to write?
I am motivated to write by the struggles I perceive around me. So I take, for example, worries and pains and make them into a body of experience—I capture them by a camera that happens to display in words—and by so doing, I hope to free them from their owners, and vice versa. You know, sometimes we cling so tightly to our pains.
The act of writing also motivates me. Writing is a great hobby; it is something I do because it allows me to explore the life of others (something I thought only actors/actresses could do), because it fulfills a cathartic role for me, and because it makes me infinitely more aware of myself. I do not have to write, but I am a whole lot happier when I do.

When do you do your best writing?
At night when my mind has had time to accumulate some things and can now start masticating them and building them into something new (without distractions).

Is there another book in the works?
Yes, in fact there is, and it is called “In the shadow of a vestige.” You will hear more about this book as it gets closer to being born. It is quite different in setting and topic from The Looming Fog, but it is still about the process of discovering one’s path in life.