By Olamide Babtunde
Olatunbosun Taofeek is a writer and a lecturer with Mountain Top University, Ogun, where he teaches literature. He has worked as an editor, presenter, researcher, trainer, planner, strategist and consultant to several organisations, associations, political parties and individuals as well. He has been a judge on literary/writer’s boards, a facilitator in literary workshops/programmes, as well as occupying various seats in writers’ associations. He is an author with a strong liberal philosophy.
Taofeek prefers stage plays and poetry but is broadening his genres. “I prefer to write poetry, because it is for the noble minds. You cannot find an average reader reading poems, because poetry is subtly coded in such a way whereby the reader’s mind is highly built, he/she may not be able to understand poetry. Poetry is quite difficult to read and understand by some people because of the way they are written,” he tells me in an interview in the university.
“It is generally believed that when an individual writes a thousand sentences, it can easily be converted to poetry in just two lines of poetry because it is for the noble mind,” he adds. Not everyone might agree, but he strongly believes that the best of knowledge that anybody can really use to do things that are new in this world can be gotten from poetry, but, undoubtedly, poetry is an outstanding part of literature which he finds endearing.
His first publication, The Greatest Search, is a travelogue written in 2009 and inspired by the longing to see how a young man travelled all his life in search of knowledge, where he met an old man who was able to put him through. After this first attempt, he penned Mr Grammar, a case note of what a typical average Nigerian suffers through a rotten society.
In one of the chapters in the book, a police officer is miffed by Mr Grammar, because he brought a journalist into the police station, and that was the major problem that they had with him –a pointer to the ineptitude of security agents who lack competence in dealing with the society as professionals.
Like a patriot whose land is home, his writings take on a reflection of what the society is and should be. He trains his effort on the things that are under the lens and issues which are too important to be overlooked. As part of the environment, there is no turning a blind eye to the Boko Haram saga and other societal ills that threaten the sanity of good citizens. Of course, charity begins at home, hence, “Anything that I am doing, let it start from where I have a grasp of it. Any serious author pays attention to his environment because the environment is you and you are also part of the environment.”
How he became a writer was his mother’s doing. Stories upon stories he heard from her while growing up made his mind a curious one that got him asking a lot of questions. With what he had, he tried to make sense of it all accepting some and discarding some along the way.
While it has become a rather curious claims of some writers that they started writing from their mother’s womb, the Mr Grammar author has reservations over such declarations. “I don’t believe such people when they claim to start writing from
their mother’s womb. How would people say a child whose brain is yet to be formed completely can write?” The child needs to be loaded with experiences of knowledge before they can decipher from their left to right.
“Whatever anybody is doing now is a product of what he/she has learnt in the course of their existence. There is an adult playing the role, and they are ascribing it to a child. You cannot say that child between the ages of two to five will be able to write something that is germane? What experience or where did the child get the knowledge from? Basically, my late mother played a fantastic role in making me to become a writer and I appreciate her for all what she did to me in terms of writing.”
Having practised long enough, he is of the opinion that digital books should be widely accepted by Nigerian readers as opposed to paper backs, after all, the world has become global. It is, therefore, a question of where and when the reading is done. E-books certainly makes it easy to keep up with authors whose books are only available online, top that with the convenience and ease of having ten books in one’s bag .There is no denying both forms are essential.
“Without e-books, we cannot move forward, while hard copy books are still very essential, especially for the libraries and public consumption, yet acquitted with e-books. The only possible glitch, agreeably is the availability of stable internet facilities for e-book lovers,” he says.
This is not to say paperbacks are absolved from any challenges. In his part of the world, publishers play a significant role in the availability of books as well. Authors suffer a great deal when there is no firm to get their works out and this has led to a foray of young writers with foreign publishers or like some have done take the high road to self-publishing.
For Taofeek, he seems to have hands on the best local publisher within Nigeria. He believes Nigerian publishers are not doing badly, but it is the state of the economy, the people in charge in the affairs of the country and their misplaced priorities, which is seriously affecting publishing in Nigeria. So, he holds nothing against those who go into self-publishing, which he thinks stems from the difficulty in getting a deal with traditional publishers.
“There are many self-published authors who have made more money than some of the writers who went through traditional publishing. Some writers would wait for traditional publishers to publish their works which they may not do. I admonish young writers that, if they want to go into self-publishing, they should have a good editorial team that will put their script in a good order, and they should look for a good printer who will help them print something that will represent them well,” he says.
His next title, Merchants of Trouble, is looking to be something that prods and directs attention to the consciousness of the society, religious and financial institutions –a reminder of how taut they have pulled the economy.
He explains: “Merchants of Trouble focuses on the religious aspect of Nigerians. It addresses the issue of Boko Haram, and I intend to put the book on stage and some religious people may not be happy with the book, because they come into this matter without looking at it objectively. The issue of terrorism has to do with the financiers of these organisations.”