Rotimi Babatunde

Rotimi Babatundeis a Nigerian writer and playwright. Quotes I see writing primarily as a means to discovery, not as a mere prelude to publication. So the creation of a literary work is satisfactory in itself. The created work, even if it forever remains a manuscript, is its own reward. Rather than hankering after publication, I am happy to keep on revising a work for years, discovering new things about it. Interacting with dramaturgs, directors, and actors at venues like London’s Royal Court and the Young Vic, Stockholm’s Riksteatern [Sweden’s National Theatre Company], and Chicago’s Halcyon Theatre has privileged me with insights into the art of drama. I don’t discriminate between dead, old, or young authors, and I don’t care much about nationality; the important thing is for an author’s work to remain urgent and alive. The ‘pastness’ of historical events is often illusory and ghosts from the past tend to intrude into the present. Acknowledging the connections between the past and the present serves not only to retrieve and possess the past but also to rediscover the present. I am also quite suspicious of it because I don’t think we can understand the present without taking the past into cognisance. Some people have argued that the zone of experience being explored by contemporary writers connected with the continent of Africa is way too narrow. I think more needs to be done by our writers of fiction to illuminate the present by refracting it through the prism of history. I consider writing as a continuous discovery of the self and as a dialogue with other works of art. The latter was the reason why Auden described art as ‘breaking bread with the dead’. I would love more formal experimentation and more narrative adventurousness, as well as more playfulness and humour, in contemporary writing from Africa. External links Category: living people