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IN THE SPOTLIGHT: AN INTERVIEW WITH RASAQ MALIK GBOLAHAN

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Rasaq Malik Gbolahan (RMG) is a graduate of the University of Ibadan. His chapbook, “No Home In This Land”, selected for Chapbook Box edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, has been published. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, LitHub, Michigan Quaterly Review, Minnesota Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Rattle, Salt Hill, Spillway, Stand, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He won Honorable Mention in 2015 Best of the Net for his poem Elegy, published in One. In 2017, Rattle and Poet Lore nominated his poems for the Pushcart Prize. He was shortlisted for Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2017 and was a finalist for Sillerman First Book for African Poets in 2018. In this interview with CỌ́N-SCÌÒ MAGAZINE’s features editor Ehi-kowochio Ogwiji, RMG talks about his writing, depression among writers and increasing concerns about plagiarism and originality in the literary scene.

“Writing is not what everybody should do –especially the lazy ones.” You made this statement in a 2017 interview with Blueprint Newspapers. Now, can you tell us who a lazy writer is?

RMG: Well, what informed that response was the art of being a writer, the task of carrying the burdens of generations, the endless encounter with rejection letters and the resignation to silence birthed by the troubling question of being or not being enough to survive as a writer. In many ways, I have had my share of frustration and doubt. I started writing a decade ago, and the journey has been terrific. There are days of hunger, years of editing/reediting, weeks of arranging verses, and months of aridity. These inevitable events are enough to scare us into silence, to haunt us forever. Because they evoke fear in the most courageous of us. They beset us with things that can traumatize us. Reading Rainer Rilke “Letters to a Young Poet,” aided my beginning as a poet studying the poems of the masters. I found myself enmeshed in the webs of thoughts, and those thoughts enabled me to map my literary journey. For to be a writer is to seek an acceptance into a world governed by one’s constant interaction with humanity, with history, and with events beyond the mirror of time. Your words become a boat that ferries hope across generations. You become a light that illuminates the dark paths of existence. You speak to the souls, and you weave the fabric of hope in the time of disaster. When we consider these, writing, as elevated as it is, becomes mysterious. Thus, being lazy is antithetical to what this profession craves.

Your poem made a Poet Lore Pushcart Prize Nomination and made the 2017 shortlist for Brunel Poetry Prize. In addition, you have several works published in prominent journals and many consider you a successful writer. How long did it take you to work on your craft before achieving these feats? Were there any important growth influences?  

RMG: I am skeptical about success as a writer. I mean writing doesn’t offer you the kind of success you desire. I think it offers fulfillment. When people see you and say they read your work and like what you do with language, with ideas, with meanings. This has nothing to do with money, with prizes. All my life I have always been zealous about writing. I have this unalloyed passion for it. I understand that there is no perfection, and there is never going to be one. Because writing opens into diverse things that teach us the fragility of existence. This frailness emanates from the gradual study of the world. We always quest for wholeness, which also reveals our vulnerability, our inability to conquer life. For me, I never started writing to win prizes, or attain the title of award-winning. The first journey was love. It is love, till date. When the love erases other interests, the rest is history. I remember vividly my first day at the university’s bookshop. I had visited the bookshop to get acquainted with poetry books suggested by a friend. Before that time, Akeem Lasisi’s “Night of my Flight,” had become a trusted ally, as I carried it with me like a passport. I bought Niyi Osundare’s “The Eye of the Earth,” and other compelling books. I started reading voraciously.


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