Syl Cheney-Coker is a Sierra Leonean poet, novelist, and journalist. Born in Freetown in 1945, he was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Oregon, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He returned to Sierra Leone but went into exile in the 90s after he was targeted by the government. Cheney-Coker is the author of several novels and anthologies including The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, which won the Africa region of the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He now spends his time between the US and Sierra Leone. In this interview, he talks to the Poda-Poda Stories team about how literature shaped his work and writing through exile.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ngozi: Your memoir, Jollof Boy: The Early Years, was released this year. It is a rich account of Sierra Leone during the colonial era when you were a child. Why now? Why have you decided to share these stories with us in your memoir at this time?
Cheney Coker: I never really thought about writing my memoir. The best way to get to know anybody is through an account of what we see about our society and whatever contribution we may have made. And in my case, being a writer, I felt that I have been doing that through my books.
However, last year, Mallam O, the publisher of the Sierra Leone Writers Series, said to me “have you started writing your memoir?” So I thought about it and said, why not? Especially as Sierra Leone is not the Sierra Leone it was before. So seeing where we are at the moment- an incredibly bankrupt society-I just felt that perhaps I should go ahead and write this memoir and reflect on a period of glory. It was not perfect, but I think it was better.
Ngozi: You've gone into exile because of your work as a writer in Sierra Leone. Can you talk about how being in exile changed your relationship with Sierra Leone over time?
Cheney Coker: I always tell people that I never left the country, because it is Sierra Leone that gives validation to my being a writer. Without Sierra Leone as a stimulus, I wouldn't be a writer and I don't want to be a writer that is not tied to my heritage. I'm sure you've been reading African literature quite a lot. The current scope of African writers, mainly those under 50, delight in bashing the African continent. They're all writing about an escape from their various problems and the problems of society into which they were born. They’re coming to the West and saying “take me, give me a new name.Things are so bad in my country!”
But it's the madness of escapism.
My relationship with Sierra Leone has not changed and it will never ever change because as I speak to you right now, we are putting the finishing touches to my house on Leicester Hill. I don't know how many more days I have left on this planet so I'm looking forward to going home to reconnect with what is still there.
Of course, I'm not unaware of the fact that a lot has changed. For a start, the landscape has changed. In addition to destroying all moral values, we’ve also destroyed the ecology and the environment of our society. Everything has been chopped out while we delight in being a barren landscape. And we have all of these ugly metallic buildings, concrete buildings going up. So Freetown has become, in my view, a concrete jungle and it's not what I expected Freetown to be like because I've been to other African capital cities and it's not like that.
Having said that, I'm going home hopefully sometime this year. For good.
Charmaine: I recently graduated from an MFA program in creative writing from Texas State University and a conversation that kept coming up among us African students was how much someone's writing changes based on geography. One Nigerian classmate in particular, felt that being in America stifled his writing which is usually set at home in Nigeria. Could you speak to this: do you think wherever the writer is geographically affects the quality and the content of their work?
Cheney Coker: Congratulations on doing your MFA! Having said that, I don't believe that an MFA makes someone a writer. I think an MFA allows you to teach, particularly.
To be a writer is to be consumed by passion that no other expressive cultural form does to you because writing is a lonely vocation, as opposed to being a composer, a musician, or a painter. A painter has a palette and she begins to draw to paint images and colors. A composer or musician has an instrument, and the instrument talks back to you, right? But a writer, you wake up in the morning and all you have is a blank screen, or in my day before computers came to be, you have a blank piece of paper, which you've got to fill with words, and those words must be extremely very close to you. One thing the writer does not want to do is to lie to himself or herself because literature can be extremely vindictive and very treacherous. So writers who think that they can lie about their heritage or their experience just to fulfill a publisher's request are making a mistake. It's always going to be terrible when it comes out.
“My soul is that of a poet’s.”
Syl Cheney-Coker
So my response to that is that it depends on what background the writer is coming from. Nigerian writers of my generation came from a very rich background and it didn't matter where they were. Take Wole Soyinka for instance, who spent many years in exile and still wrote some of the greatest plays like Death and The King’s Horseman, which are about his Nigerian heritage and his perception of what Nigeria was going through at various periods. No one could draw a line between whether they were written in Nigeria or written abroad. I have been in exile for a good many years and I have still been able to write about Sierra Leone. Emotionally and culturally, I'm very deeply enamored of Sierra Leone and I'm very deeply enamored of the background that I inherited.
So, it all depends on whether you bring your country or your heritage with you when you leave, or whether as soon as you get out and step into the so-called melting pot, you feel like you must become someone else.
Charmaine: What authors, poets and novelists shaped your journey as a writer when you were growing up?
Cheney-Coker: African literature was not taught in schools during my time. We went through the grinding machine of colonial education. So strictly speaking, the two people who shaped my perception into being a writer, were writer and physician, Raymond Sarif Easmon, and then the journalist Ibrahim Taqi, who was sent to the gallows by (then president) Siaka Stevens.
I never really fancied myself becoming a writer. I actually wanted to be a journalist. I came to the United States during the sixties, and it was the period the Harlem Renaissance was being brought back into being, and all the writers, like James Baldwin were being taught. Of course David Diop and Leopold Senghor had all become part of the Negritude Movement and we were all being swept up into consciousness by what was going on at that time. That’s when I realised there was something in me that was empty.
I also felt that my Krio identity was not any different compared to the Harlem Renaissance or the Negritude school. I had been fed a lot of crap by colonial education and there was a subterranean journey that I had to undertake to find myself. That journey could only be achieved by becoming a writer.
Charmaine: What were some taproot texts that inspired you to became a writer? And you’ve written poetry, creative nonfiction and novels. Which form have you most enjoyed writing in?
Cheney-Coker: I’ll answer the second question first. My soul is that of a poet’s. I think anyone reading my work would realize that. Even in my memoir you can see that it's of a poet writing. I express myself much more passionately in my poetry, because it's personal to me. Fiction gives me an opportunity to write about the collective in a wider and more dramatic format.
To the first question, when I started writing poetry, I discovered Leopold Senghor and other negritude poets and my favorite for a long time was the great Congolese poet Tchicaya U Tam'si. He's probably the most famous French writing poet at that time from Africa. Then there was the great Peruvian poet César Vallejo whose poems I really love. The English speaking writer I admired the most because of his approach to landscape and someone's existential crisis, is the Australian writer Patrick White, particularly his books Voss and The Tree of Man. It was Patrick White who showed me that it's possible to look at a vast landscape that has not been populated before and to try to make sense of it.
I also like One Hundred Years of Solitude. When I read the first page I thought “oh my God, this is an African book!”And what Gabriel García Márquez taught me was that it is possible to write a political novel and infuse it with magic and culture.It is possible to write a political novel that is not boring.
Ngozi: I remember reading your poem, the Colour of Stones, and just marveling at the beautiful imagery that you used to describe our culture. Can you just comment on how you've examined the interiority of Sierra Leonean lives in your work?
Cheney-Coker: Culture becomes extremely central when I write about Sierra Leone. It isn't just my own immediate culture, but the general culture as a whole. I'm deeply enamored of all the cultures of my country and I may not speak the other languages, but I recognize their beauty and validity because this is what makes Africa as a continent extremely very important and different from other societies.
We are truly in the real sense of the word, a melting pot, but we don't destroy the individual ingredients that contribute to that melting pot. It's like in Sierra Leone, we have plasas, but you would taste the efo nyori, or cassava leaves or egusi.
And so I recognize the nature of our cultural dynamics. For example, when I visit a place like Port Loko, I'm not looking for the influence of Freetown in Port Loko. I'm looking for Port Loko in Port Loko. I'm also very particular about expressing the culture which I was raised in. I try my best to recollect, to re-narrate and to express as best as possible the chapters and the passages that, my mother especially, passed down to me. And I hope she'll be very proud of me. Infact she was the inspiration behind the character, Jeanette Cromantine in The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar.
Ngozi: What a beautiful tribute to her! And that’s a great segue to the next question. The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar recently went into reprint and Charmaine and I have our copies! The book tackles a lot of themes like the effects of the Trans Atlantic Slave trade and nation building. What does it mean for you for this book to go into reprint?
Cheney-Coker: I'll tell you a story about Alusine Dunbar. In 2012 or thereabouts, I was at the University of West Virginia in Morgantown. I was the keynote speaker at this conference and a woman came up to me and said “do you know how much I paid for this copy when I realized you were going to be the keynote speaker because I wanted you to autograph this book for me?” The book was selling for anything between five hundred and a thousand dollars! And not one penny came to me. I don't know how this happened.
Ngozi: Yeah, I was looking for a copy on eBay and it was around that price, so I had just given up.
Cheney-Coker: Yeah, and not one penny came to me. I would get so mad I would say, how is it possible that my book is being reproduced and people were selling it online. But anyway, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar is back. It never should have gone out of print. And so it was this new publishing house at Bloomsbury who bought some of the rights of the Heineman books.They reached out to me and said they would like to republish it. So I am glad Alusine Dunbar is back in publication and circulation and I plan to bring some copies to Sierra Leone later this year.
Anyway, how do I see some of the things related to Sierra Leone today? When you get towards the end of Alusine Dunbar, about 30 years ago, I started predicting that what is happening now, was going to happen. I saw the collapse of all moral values. I saw the greed and hunger in our intellectuals who were always sitting by their telephones waiting for calls. In those days there were only landlines. They were sitting by their telephones waiting for a call from Siaka Stevens or Saidu Momoh, so they could abandon teaching, and become ministers, et cetera, et cetera, so they could line up their pockets.
But I'm happy to see that your generation is changing everything. I'm happy there are so many writers in Sierra Leone right now, especially the poets, writers and editors like you and that is the greatest reward to me as a writer. It is not in the many books I’ve written or the dissertations on my work. What brings me the greatest joy, and I mean that sincerely, is to see that in my lifetime, there are so many promising young writers in Sierra Leone, especially women. I would not have thought this possible, given the destructive influence that my generation and the generation immediately after mine imposed on Sierra Leone. Because what is going on now is toxic. Not even the worst days of Albert Margai were like this.
Now people are afraid. I get letters from people who say they are afraid. Since when did we become a society where people are afraid to communicate? We are supposed to be a society where regardless of where we are from, we are one nation, one country, one people, and that is what makes Sierra Leone unique.
Charmaine: What is your advice to young Sierra Leonean writers?
Cheney-Coker: The epochs are different. By which I mean, I came into writing at a different epoch, and so my narrative is different. And you're writing during a completely disorganized and dysfunctional period where all the threads that held our society together - and this applies to Nigeria, to Kenya, Cameroon or Senegal - have disappeared. But in those other societies, they have not disappeared as they have been allowed to in Sierra Leone. There is still some semblance of cultural preservation and societal responsibilities that we no longer have in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is a complete collapse of anything pertaining to the maintenance and the integrity of the state, and that is what frightens me.
So, your generation has a much more difficult task than my generation did. We had a lot to feed on. Ours was an expressive period. We were expressing the norms and the passions and the traditions of society. You are now singularly charged with rebuilding society.
The other problem you have to contend with is publication. There's only a small publishing house in Sierra Leone. So, we need more publishing houses but also we need a couple of good bookshops. There's not a single good bookshop in Freetown, which is a shame! I hope other Sierra Leoneans will invest and support publishing in Sierra Leone.
Ngozi: Something we always ask writers we talk to is how has writing saved your life?
Cheney-Coker: Without writing, I probably would be dead. I could not become a doctor because the only branches of medicine that I like are pediatrics and veterinary medicine and I can’t stand seeing children and animals suffer. I hate the legal profession. I've not balanced my checkbook in the last twenty years, so I could not have become an accountant.
So, writing saved my life in the sense that it gave me a dimension to express myself about my society and my role, without my drinking myself to death if I had done something else. And it’s also saved my life in the sense that it has exposed me to the validity of other societies, to other people and other traditions which have made me much more humane.
I cannot tell you how grateful I am that I can write and express myself in that way. Writing imposed itself on me in the sense that I never set out to be a poet or a novelist. It is just that I found that when faced with a particular situation to express myself, I picked up my pen and I started writing.
The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar is available to purchase from Bloomsbury. Sacred River is available to purchase from Barnes and Noble. Jollof Boy and other books by Cheney-Coker are available to purchase from the Sierra Leone Writers Series.
