“There are No Short-Cuts to the Top of the Palm Tree”. In Conversation With Ayesha Harruna Attah.

It was a breath of (unmasked) fresh air to sit down and speak with esteemed author, Ayesha Harruna Attah last week. Ayesha kindly shared what the power of the pen has meant for her with Grace, Songhai’s group of African female change-makers. The award-winning author of four novels: Harmattan Rain; Saturday’s Shadows; The Hundred Wells of Salaga and the Deep Blue Between, Ayesha gave her top-tips for unleashing one’s inner scribe. She also impressed on us the importance of being earnest, as an African woman speaking to the present and future generations. Here are some of the highlights of our conversation - enjoy!

Mentored by Matriarchs

Typically, across the continent, the elderly form an integral part of the family dynamic and with a rising ageing population, this is unlikely to change anytime soon[1]. Caring for the elderly tends to be a family affair, with nursing homes still quite a new phenomenon[2]. Grandmothers tend to be the bearers of encyclopaedic local knowledge about traditions, faith, agricultural practices and family history and it is from within this context of storytelling by the matriarchs on both sides of her sprawling family that Ayesha drew inspiration: “I grew up in Ghana and spent most of my childhood there. I come from a huge family with a matriarch on both sides - formidable mother figures. Storytelling was part of the furniture”.  

Listen to the Still, Small Voice

There is a long-standing joke among Africa’s Generation X and Millennials that career choices which meet the approval of parents can be simply clustered into three categories: doctor, lawyer, engineer. C’est fini! The Nigerian-British comedian Gina Yashere put her experience thus: "At school I had a drama teacher who was like, 'You should be an actor or an entertainer…my mom was like 'Actor? No, no, no. You can act like a doctor when you become a doctor.' There was absolutely no chance of me going into the arts[3]". For Ayesha, though born to liberal parents who were both journalists, she still felt a certain pressure to curtail her passions, such that she ended up studying biochemistry at Columbia University in the US. But at some point en route to becoming a doctor, she had a wake-up call and decided to pay attention to “a voice that had always been there” by plunging herself fully into writing. But as romantic as writing is, Ayesha cautions that: “these professions can be lonely financially and socially. Make sure you have your own support system. Know who you are and how you work and take baby steps”. 

Tell your own story

Even though the world’s oldest library is situated in Africa (Fez, Morocco), the paradox is that the story of Africa’s storytelling history isn’t often narrated. Yet increasingly, contemporary African writers, artists and entrepreneurs are bucking the trend and sharing the truth from their vantage points. Ivorian social enterprise AyokoAfrica which is focused on the production of audio books, has been inspired by the desire to develop children’s content which will preserve Africa’s oral traditions. It is in this spirit of cultural preservation that celebrated Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o said during his keynote address at the 2019  International Publishers Association’s Africa Rising summit that African publishing houses should publish stories  in indigenous languages: “If Iceland, with 300,000 people, can sustain literary culture, why not Africa, where there are 40 million speakers of Yoruba, or 60 million Hausa, and 100 million speaking Swahili[4]?”

According to the Nigerian Publishing Association, the continent’s publishing industry is valued at USD1 billion, which we can only see expanding as more contemporary writers join the fray. Content creators and film producers like Jay Engmann are always on the hunt to capture the myriad stories across the continent and Ayesha is no different in this regard: “Every time you leave your house on this continent there’s always a story to share or story ideas”. When asked about whether she feels the weight of responsibility of writing about African history for her son, his peers or for generations to come, she replied: “I feel honoured to put things down for posterity…a book I’m working on is about the kola nut. We all use the kola nut in West Africa but it’s only grown in a few places. [Writing] is super important for putting down our customs which are slowly getting erased”.

Write Down the Vision…and Follow Through

The African adage “to try and to fail is not laziness” is one which resonates with Ayesha. Once she had fixed her mind on the goal of becoming a writer, she started taking writing classes, and even though at the start she says (though hard to believe) that she was “just averaging”, she developed her craft by being persistent, which also applied in her early days of going door to door to various publishing houses in New York for her first novel, Harmattan Rain. For any budding writers out there, Ayesha’s advice is sage: “Train yourself, write a short story and use what is around you”. Her routine consists of a daily dose of writing 500 words per day, allowing herself to write a “bad first draft- that nobody sees” before refining in subsequent edits, which is freeing because there’s “no pressure to be perfect. No performance anxiety. You just show up to the page every day. And even if [you feel like] you’re failing, keep trying, keep trying”.

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[1]The WHO forecasta that by 2050, the continent’s elderly population will be 163million, up from 43 million in 2010.

[2]https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2019.00025/full

[3]https://www.kgou.org/post/there-was-no-chance-me-going-arts-says-comedian-gina-yashere

[4]https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2019/06/26/135385/africa-rising-summit-african-publishing-is-the-new-frontier/