BY OUMAH OTIENOH

Tony Mochama is the Secretary General of PEN (Kenya), an association of Kenyan writers and a subsidiary of PEN International. He has written a couple of award-winning paperbacks such as; Meet the Omtitas (2013) and Run, Cheche, Run (2016). Mochama is also a regular contributor with Kenya’s mainstream newspapers.

He spoke to the City Review about fictional writing and literary caucuses.

You trained as a lawyer but preferred the pen more than the bar. What was your innermost drive to the daunting task of writing?

Law is a narrative that seeks to arrive at truth, while writing is the creation of narrative(s) to arrive at certain inner timeless truth. Let’s say that although my head enjoyed the challenge of legalese, the sheer rationality of it, my heart was really in literature.

Talking of writing, you’ve penned a couple of books such as; Princess Adhis and The Naija Coca Broda (2011) and Nairobi, A Night Guide: Through The City-in-the-Sun (2013). What’s your salient tale writing such titles?

I lived near Deep West at the time I was writing Princess Adhis. So the whole Chinedu/Akinyi saga inspired that story. My Night Runner book was an ode to the city of Nairobi where I work and live in. It was also a sort of ‘goodbye to youth’, being in my thirties, and about to hang up my party animal boots.

So many of those places like ‘Mad House’ have since disappeared but they will always exist in the book as I eternally captured those nights of 2013 in Nairobi: A Night Runner’s Guide.

I’m working on a tele-novella, The Italian Trial.  It’s about an immigrant African footballer who is framed and falsely accused of a crime he did not commit. I’ve always wanted to write a proper legal thriller, with a court case, which hasn’t been written by any Kenyan author.

Evan Mwangi’s barbs: ‘On Tony Mochama and how not to write even when one has really nothing to say’ (Saturday Nation, September 26, 2016) aimed at your book; Nairobi: A Night Guide was more of attacking the artiste and not the art. What was the beef all about?

Those who can, write and those who can’t, criticize! Prof. Mwangi was simply pissed off at an objective analysis that I’d written in the Saturday Standard which lightly touched on his textual approach to literary criticism.

Since that axe-job on my book, I have penned legion books; Modern Poetry for Secondary Schools, Run, Cheche, Run and the long Afro-fiction novel 2063: Last Mile Bet.

As a three-time winner of the Burt Award for African Young Adult Literature and a prong of other regional literary prizes; what’s the place of literary awards in the East African region and beyond?

Literary awards are a wonderful way to silence one’s critics, like Mwangi, and get some pocket change from the process.

For example, Meet the Omtitas would never have happened if not for the Burt Award. At the time, the then Phoenix Publisher’s CEO, John Mwazemba, called and asked if I could write a Young Adult book.

‘Are you kidding me?’ I retorted. ‘I’ve just done ‘Adhis,’ and am thinking of doing a sequel for ‘Story Moja‘ in the same genre.’ ‘There’s a half million prize called Burt if you do a YA novella,’ he said. ‘Ok,’ I responded. Three months later, I delivered the 130-page manuscript, ‘Meet the Omtitas,’ and have since written three other YA books. So, yes, prizes can make one even experiment with new literary genres, out of one’s comfort zone.

Egara Kabaji once referred to you as a literary gangster, a label that made you pen an anthology of poems; What If I Am A Literary Gangster? (2007). Did the ‘gangster’ tag in anyway influence your later writings?

            First of all, for the record, Egara Kabaji and I are now good friends, and I look forward to his invite to give a ‘lit’ talk at Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology.

To be fair to the man, I’ve always been a bit of a literary rebel, going off the beaten path of literature, to explore what is in the wild woods of imagination. The best stories should be densely plotted, sure, but also with a wild streak running through them – something to grip the reader’s interest, and linger on after the story is long read.

As a moderator of Amka Literary Forum, a literary hub for nurturing female writers, what gains has the forum so far made in this front?

Amka is the only regular writers’ workshop in Kenya that nurtures female writers, but also encourages the boy-child attendants to put pen to paper, and ink their tales.

Okwiri Oduor, Ndinda Kioko, Faith Oneya and our facilitator, Muthoni wa Gichuru, all underwent their baptism by fire at Amka.

We are grateful to our founder, Lydia Gatirira, as well as Goethe Institut’s ‘greats’, Moraa, Liz and Lily, for their facilitation. I’ve been a moderator since 2009, alongside Dr. Tom Odhiambo, since the heady days of director Johannes Hossfeld,

You’re a literary globetrotter crisscrossing the world from St. Petersburg in Russia to Ourense in Spain and Venice in Italy. What’s ever in your in-tray during such voyages and who foots the bills?

My trip to St. Petersburg was sponsored by Summer Literary Seminars founder, Prof. Mikhael Iossel. I studied creative writing under Man Booker prize winner George Saunders, in these trips. I was at Ourense in 2016 for the 82nd PEN International Congress. I was in Venice courtesy of a grant provided by the Emily Harvey Foundation.

Parting shot? Let’s grow the East African literary space.

The writer is a Kenyan contributor on literature, art and culture. He is also a travel enthusiast.  oumahotienoh2009@yahoo.com