Interview: Adedapo Adeniyi
Adedapo Adeniyi is a promising 20 yo abstract SF author from Ilorin, Nigeria.
Disclaimer: you should read The Dilemma of the He and His House, House? then Mosquito Farm before reading the interview.
Which Nigerian city do you live in? Can you describe it for us?
I live in Ilorin, it's in Kwara State. I think Ilorin is great, I've lived here all my life, it's claustrophobic and surreal, simultaneously very big and very small, like it's breathing, there's also an eerie air here that a lot of the artists that live here can attest to. My favorite part about it is that we're in what I like to call Ilorin's renaissance era, where the youth are becoming more sensitized to art and exploring themselves in relations to the emotions and mindspace of the city.
In your Abstractism Manifesto, you mention God multiple times. What is God, from your perspective, and what role does He play in your life?
(note from SFSS: Abstractism is a term coined by Adedapo, defining it as a genre/philosophy that functions as an amalgamation of solipsism, surrealism, psychedelia, psychology and the subjectivity of reality; he proposes the dissolution of form into true abstracts.)
I like to think of God in many ways, of course as the ultimate entity, divine, the creator of all, and also as an expression of our true selves.
I grew up Christian, I'm still Christian. I have a very different relationship with God now where I'm constantly asking who He is in me, and not just who. He is like I'm trying to study Him.
Gemini's synopsis of The Dilemma: This is a story about a man who is confused about his identity. It discusses his house and its origins. The man tells others the story of the house, but he cannot remember it. He eventually realizes that he is the house.
In your story The Dilemma of the He and His House, House?, that we'll call The Dilemma for brevity purpose, you write at one point: “I will stop trying to encompass it in words. It is the truth”. What do you mean by that?
I like to think that there are certain symbols or aspects of my work that can't be expressed through familiar language, because there are no words to use to describe them, they're otherworldly, true, void of the taints of this reality.
What does “void of the taints of this reality” mean?
A psychedelic trip, an orgasm, a feeling of being possessed by the Holy Spirit. There's a lot of ways you could try explaining how they feel, but the language we know doesn't have all the words to express these feelings, these experiences. They're religious.
In The Dilemma, the hero is being told: “You are closed to the knowing, you should open yourself”. Is this a reference to the word Ephphatha in Mark's Gospel? Can you explain what this means to you?
(Note from SFSS: Ephphatha, which means open yourself, was said by Jesus to a deaf-mute man in the book of Mark)
Huh, I had no idea what that meant, I just googled it, funny how these things work. When the main character, The He, is told that phrase, it's because he's still in doubt that he's the God figure in the story, and for him to realize that, he has to kill the doubt and start thinking in maybes and what ifs.
It's solipsism logic, open yourself to the knowing that all exists because of you and it becomes so, close yourself to it and you remain oblivious all your life.
Adedapo's synopsis of Mosquito Farm: Mosquito Farm is a story set in futurist Nigeria about Jomi, an enforcer who after making a grave decision, descends into insanity and faces the conflict of the fact that he's been living a lie.
Mosquito Farm reminds me of Philip K. Dick stories. He's an influence of yours, right?
Yes, PKD is my favorite writer, I love how he revolutionalized paranoid fiction and the idea of subjective reality in science fiction, so Mosquito Farm is in a sense a product of that, but with Nigerian sensibilities.
Funny how you mention “air addicts” in Mosquito Farm. I always thought that my addiction to oxygen was healthy
I'd say it's healthy right now, but when we consider pollution and the amount of toxins we're exposed to every day, it isn't far off to say that the air we're breathing casually now can in decades become toxic and hallucinogenic.
I think it's my duty as a sci-fi writer to consider worst case scenarios in the future over best cases.
At the beginning of the story, two characters have a simultaneous thought. This happened to two friends of mine (one of them was my best friend and died last year)
Oh I'm so sorry to hear that.
The idea of simultaneously having a thought with another person came from my belief that us humans are evolving towards telepathy, it's happened multiple times to me with people very close to me.
Of course, the root of the thought they're sharing is revealed at the end of the story as a shared obsession amongst people in Eko Futura.
Your description of people addicted to air and hallucinating reminded me of people I know who suffered from mental illness as a result of Covid lockdowns
The story definitely grew from my perception of a post pandemic world and how it affected consciousness.
With us being in lockdown for almost a year, it affected our mental health, and that was us not interacting with infected air, I flipped that and made the insanity air borne.
At one point of the story, one of the characters say: “Thank God for Western medicine”. I don't know how Western medicine is perceived in Nigeria, but in the west there is for sure a growing mistrust for it, especially since the Covid vaccines
There's a growing mistrust for it here as well, but the idea of the story was that the people in Eko Futura have a complex against the infected people living outside the utopia, and when they say “thank God for Western medicine,” they're thanking God for its accessibility to them.
At another point of the story, someone has to decide whether he should kill a child or not. I know an Irak veteran who had to do it, he got PTSD
Oh yeah, the blueprint of the story is this fast-paced PTSD, where what he's done starts to haunt him as soon as he does it, just because he's never been confronted with something as grotesque as killing a child before.
In your story, a character makes a prayer. Here is how I pray: I talk to God spontaneously, and it helps me clarifying what I'm living/doing
That's kind of what he does too, he asks God for clarity.
At the end of the story, the hero has to make a tough choice. I think he'll make the right one
I guess we'll never know.
I have trouble understanding abstracts, that's why I didn't really understand The Dilemma. I understood Mosquito Farm, though, because it's much more concrete
Mosquito Farm is definitely more accessible, but The Dilemma was the first story I wrote after the manifesto and it perfectly encapsulates abstractism ; Mosquito Farm leans more towards Africanfuturism and paranoid fiction with abstract sensibilities.
On your X account, your pinned tweet says death to poetry. However, I think that this story is full packed of poetry
I grew up around calculative, systematic poetry, my work is a rejection of that.
What are you currently working on?
Well, I finished my first novel a couple months ago. I'm currently doing research for my next one and learning how to make short films and experimenting with visual language.
Where can we buy your novel?
It's not out yet, sadly.
A lot of my readers are atheists. What would you say to them?
I don't think anybody's really an atheist, I think we all have a strong connection to some entity, albeit ambiguous, but yeah I think I'd ask them what they think is out there, or who.
If you had one Nigerian tune to share, what would it be?
You're very gifted, please keep practicing, one day you'll be famous, maybe
Thank you for this. I really believe it too. I want to reinvent literature and cinema as a Nigerian, always been my future.
Thank you for this interview, Adedapo
Thank you as well, Guy.