TALK ING POINTS
Edna O’Brien’s courageous new
novel gives a voice to the schoolgirlskidnapped by Boko Haram
FR EEDOM
FIGHTER
BOOKS
By ERICA WAGNER
This October sees the launch of our second annual Bazaar Art Week,
a programme of events held at some of London’s leading cultural
institutions. Take part in curator-led tours of must-see exhibitions at the
Barbican and the Serpentine Galleries; indulge in a champagne lunch
onboard a barge from Coal Drops Yard to Frieze Masters, with Sotheby’s art
experts on hand to help you navigate the fair; or celebrate emerging talent at the Young
Masters Art Prize show. Plus, join in a lively discussion about why the future of creativity is
female at the London Edition Hotel; and master the art of draughtsmanship with a tutored
session led by the London Drawing Group at Covent Garden’s Henrietta Hotel. FH
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I
am settled happily in Edna O’Brien’s sunny South Kensington
sitting-room; every wall is lined with books, and in the course
of our conversation she will occasionally gesture at them as if
they are dear old friends. Great literature has been O’Brien’s
companion and inspiration throughout her 88 years – though she
won’t thank you if you remind her of her age. ‘My publisher always
says, “in her ninth decade”, and I say, oh please, couldn’t you keep
that off the flyleaf? No – it’s in every time!’ She laughs a little ruefully.
It’s true she climbs stairs a bit more slowly these days; but then, it’s
also true that she spent 10 weeks in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city,
researching her extraordinary new book.
Girl is O’Brien’s 18th novel – there are, too, many collections of
short stories, poems, plays and books for children. She burst onto the
literary scene in 1960 with The Country
Girls, whose depiction of the social and
sexual lives of two young Irish women in
the 1950s caused a scandal at the time of
its publication; it is now widely regarded
as a classic. Over the past 60 years, she
has kept her focus, broadly speaking, on
the lives of women: Girl i s a b o l d a d d i t i o n
to her canon, a reminder (if one were
needed) of what a fearless writer she has
always been.
In 2014, nearly 300 girls were kid-
napped from a government secondary
school in Chibok, in north-eastern
Nigeria, by the armed group Boko
Haram (in local Hausa dialect, the name
means ‘Western education is forbidden’).
The kidnapping sparked a viral cam-
paign, #BringBackOurGirls – supported
by Michelle Obama – but five years later,
more than 100 are still missing. The pro-
tagonist of Girl, Maryam, is a young
woman abducted and silenced, but given a voice by O’Brien. It is a
formidable topic to take on, but one that the author felt she had to
tackle. She thought that her most recent novel, The Little Red Chairs,
would be her last; then, in a doctor’s surgery, she picked up a news-
paper. ‘I saw a tiny little article about a girl called Amina, who was
discovered by vigilantes wandering in the Sambisa Forest,’ she says,
speaking with a rare intensity. ‘She was found with a baby, nothing
in her breast, no food, no milk, crazed. She didn’t know her name.
She didn’t know who she was – and there and then, in that anxious
waiting-room, I thought, “I will have to write this story.”’
O’Brien travelled to Nigeria twice, with the assistance of the Irish
embassy (she wanted to ‘search out the ground’, she says). She met
with doctors, psychiatrists and trauma specialists, and heard the
stories of girls who had escaped Boko Haram. ‘I would say, I am not
writing about you in particular. I want what you are willing to tell
me, and I will pool that with all the other stories and fragments of
stories,’ she recalls. Maryam’s voice in the book is pure and true;
brutality is described with a heart-rending clarity. O’Brien is aware
of some of the criticisms that may be levelled at her: ‘I k now people
w i l l say, no Ni g er ia n g i rl wou ld t a l k l i ke t h at – too ba d .’ J M C oe t z e e
has called the novel ‘an astonishing work of imagination’, which,
says O’Br ien, is ‘what novels a re supposed to be’.
I t i s m o v i n g t o h e a r h e r r e fl e c t o n t h e s e u n i m a g i n a b l e e v e n t s. ‘ O n
television, we see people in camps, we
see the sea with bodies in it,’ she says.
‘ T h e r e ’s n o s h o r t a g e o f w h a t w e c a n o n l y
call terrible human stories, biblical in
their proportions.’ She pauses, sighs. ‘It
makes you feel bewildered. I feel so –
impotent.’ Still, literature, she knows, has
a vital role to play in the way we engage
with the world around us. ‘It helps us
to understand, even if it doesn’t help us to
stop these things,’ she says. ‘There is
Auden’s famous line, “poetry makes
nothing happen”. But art offers more
than consolation.’
Indeed, spending an hour in O’Brien’s
company offers a reminder of the
urgency and power of writing. ‘It wasn’t
that I loved this book so much; it was that
nothing and no one would prevent me
f rom c re at i ng it ,’ she says fierc ely. B efore
I leave, she goes to fetch for me a little
pamphlet printed by the Library of
America in honour of the 80th birthday of her friend Philip Roth,
who died last year. She smiles fondly at his memory. ‘It baffles me:
here is a Jewish madman from Newark; and an Irish crazy person
from the bogland of County Clare, who had so much in common to
talk about,’ she says. ‘The conversation never ceased.’
O’Brien waves me off from her doorway as I stride out into the
London afternoon. In her ninth decade (I do hope she will forgive
me for that), this writer is still a force to be reckoned with.
‘Girl’ by Edna O’Brien (£16.99, Faber & Faber) is published
on 5 September.