A Navy Pilot Pivoted to Writing, Spurred by Surrealists

When Umar Abubakar Sidi appeared at the Umuofia Arts and Books Festival in August, an audience member asked him about his writing style. For years, the Navy pilot-cum-poet had worked in a surrealistic mode, producing books that disobey order and tinker with conventions of form and structure.

The first, The Poet of Dust, released in 2019, is influenced by Sufism. The poems often included chants and lamentations about dust and the particulate nature of the universe. They rely less on conventional poetics, on painting with metaphors and imagery, and more on impressionism. The second, 2022’s Like Butterflies Scattered About Like Art Rascals, shifts his gaze towards artists, concepts, and places he admires: Paul Eluard, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.

Both books were mystical, playful, and chaotic. They felt removed from mainstream Nigerian poetry, which at the time was being lampooned for its perceived uniformity. Sidi’s poetry, wrote the critic Paul Liam in a contextualisation of the poet’s rise, is “rooted not in the formation of an original poetic leitmotif but in the adoption and revival of seemingly forgotten poetic tradition whose own emergence was rooted in deviancy against the formalities of reason and logic.” The books, Liam argues, are “an embodiment of dissidence that belies the contemporarity [sic] of new Nigerian poetics.” 

The result was that the books catapulted Sidi as one of the wider read poets, and earlier this year, both collections occupied the Nos. 1 and 2 spots in the poetry category of the 2023 Rovingheights Bestseller List: Presented with Open Country Mag. Like that of the 2022 list’s overall topper Damilare Kuku, Sidi’s placing was a revelation. By the time his debut novel The Incredible Dreams of Garba Dakaskus was released this June, he had established himself as a writer with a distinctive style.

He started the book in 2009, in a small northern Italian town called Bella. It was “at a time when I was not satisfied by the kind of novels being written by Africans,” he said at the festival. “Everything sounded the same. And, you know, there is this saying that the soul is attracted to the unfamiliar. I then read other writers like Italo Calvino, and Calvino led me to other writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Orhan Pamuk, and they changed my perception of fiction.”

The Incredible Dreams of Garba Dakaskus is about the frenzied search for a 1,000-year-old book containing secrets. It is divided into “Books” — in the vein of Abrahamic texts, without the indexing — and reads like a scripture of surrealistic narratives, a wheel of micro stories. It has the occasional tone of the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, Sidi’s editor had told him. 

“There is a way the Hadiths are written: there is a chain of narrators, and then you have the message itself,” Sidi told me. “And if you noticed, in ‘The Book of Mysterious Narration,’ there is always a quotation of the book, there is almost a narration or someone. The reason is that, in those parts where the book was in a different millennium, I wanted to reconstruct the messages of the world of those times. I felt that one of the best ways to do it is to try to write in similar ways to books and manuscripts written in that time. I was trying to evoke the history, the feelings, the intellectual nature of that period.”

Even as it attempts to relay its story without a strong connective thread, each part of the novel has its ambience, reflecting whichever character is searching for the book. The storyline with a traveler evokes the feeling of traveling. The sections with a detective read like a detective novel.

For much of its 276 pages, the novel expresses itself in an internal dialogue, a dual soliloquy of sorts, a self-interaction in a stream of consciousness, and the reader is a puzzled spectator. “Were you coerced into turning these pages?” the narrator addresses the reader by the third part, titled “The Book of Sorcery and the Evolution of Superstitious Allusions”:

Didn’t you see that I am an ill-tempered son of a bitch? Didn’t they tell you that it is easy for me to catapult your soul into deep dark pools of perpetual damnation? They should have named me Book of Death, or even better, Book of the Devil.

The reverse psychology eggs the reader on, until he realizes that the book in his hands is the same book that the characters are searching for. The novel, you realize, is the mysterious book in narration of itself. The effect is like that in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

Sidi achieves another effect with his motif of alphabets. In its continuous reference to the secret of letters as a potential answer to the mystery, the novel seems to ask the attentive reader to pause and consider how profound an activity reading truly is. It is a case for the urgency of knowledge. In one scene, book bandits raid the library of the Italian medieval novelist Umberto Eco, but rather than be enraged, the library manager claims that “Eco would love a world in which everyone steals a book. It would be one giant world of book thieves.”

Sidi agreed with my reading. “I got the idea of the secret of alphabets from Sufism,” he told me. “I come from that tradition where knowledge is highly respected. I believe that man’s greatest invention is the alphabet. Every other thing is a footnote.”

Where realist writers like Joseph Heller and Teju Cole have said that they do not construct their novels to say anything, I think that a surrealist like Sidi constructs his fictional chaos on the open admission that all forms of surrealism emanate from pre-existing realism. This is why, near its end, The Incredible Dreams of Garba Dakaskus begins to find a sense of order. The novel’s achievement is in how it illuminates the function of structure, how it creates a vacuum which the mind of the perceptive reader must then fill.

Sidi’s preoccupation with fictional journeys reflects his own life of adventure. Influenced by his poet uncle, he developed a love of reading and writing. Inspired by his elder brother, who studied at the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna, he joined the military, attending both the Kaduna academy and the Nigerian Military School, Zaria, where he joined the aviation department. He became an officer of the Nigerian Navy, began training as a helicopter pilot in 2009.

His first time in the cockpit was for a familiarization flight, and for a few minutes he handled the controls. “I remember, upon landing, I began to think of how to pack my stuff and leave because I thought I won’t be able to complete the training,” he recalled. “I equate the initial flight to an initiation, breaking a man from a ground being to an airman. It was magical and frightening.”

Eventually, he began to connect flying and writing. “I relate high-powered, adrenaline-pumping manoeuvres like acrobatics and autorotation to some of my literary interests, like mesmerism and ecstasy and multi-perspectivity.”

Nigerian literature has a small but storied history of military men. Christopher Okigbo was a leading poet when he joined the Biafran forces as a major during the war; he died at the front in September 1967, and was posthumously awarded the National Order of Merit of Biafra. Mamman Vatsa was serving in the army when he started writing poetry. He was part of the counter coup of July 1966, which animated the pogrom of Igbo and Eastern peoples in the North, which in turn led to the Biafran War. Later, when he was imprisoned for treason by General Babangida, the trio of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and JP Clark went to beg the head of state on his behalf; Vatsa was executed the same day, in December 1985. In 2013, the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) inaugurated the Mamman Vatsa Writing Village. Since Okigbo and Vatsa, few have straddled both vocations since.

Sidi sees both as complimentary. “The regimentation of the military job is balanced by the freedom you get when you immerse yourself in literature. Some seek that balance by playing tennis and engaging in all sorts of extreme sports and extracurricular activities. Literature creates that balance for me. The military job is a career that uses creativity a lot. The thinking of the commander must be creative and unique. Operational art. As a commander, while conducting operations, you must think uniquely, you must bring creative techniques. Being a poet makes me a better military officer.” 

That may be why, despite being a full-time military officer, Sidi is already at work on his second novel. While his forebears, Okigbo and Vatsa, wrote through the genocide of Biafra and the decapitation of the Nigerian state by military rule, respectively, Sidi has been writing in a time of unprecedented non-wartime insecurity in the country. There are the war crimes of Boko Haram terrorists and the massacres by Fulani Herdsmen in the North and Middle Belt, respectively. And in the Southeast, it is the military who are committing extrajudicial killings, targeting young men, many of them innocent, in a bid to oppose the secessionist group Independent Peoples of Biafra (IPOB). Everywhere else, it is the police unit SARS killing young people, culminating in the EndSARS protests of 2020. Within the military itself, there have been accusations of wide-reaching corruption and the non-equipment of soldiers in a war against terrorism.

Surrealist writers and artists have traditionally been politically engaged. When asked about the emotional toll of the conflicts he had been part of, Sidi declined to answer, citing the military ban on discussing service issues with the media except in official capacity. 

But “I can discuss art freely,” he volunteers. “I intend to write about military life or some aspects of the military profession. It is one rich, unexplored territory with compelling stories. For instance, most of us are unaware of how, and I mean the specifics, the Nigerian Armed Forces significantly liberated Liberia and Sierra Leone. The military is shrouded in mystery due to a dearth of literature, and I intend to make contributions in that direction. It is a reality I cannot escape from.” ♦

Edited by, and with contribution from, Otosirieze.

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• The Poet of Dust
• Like Butterflies Scattered About Like Art Rascals

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