Interviewing Wole Talabi
Hellooo!
I recently reviewed the great Shigidi and The Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi where Yoruba Gods, a powerful succubus and a heist come together to give us a really entertaining and thoughtful story. I was very lucky to have the chance t ask Wole some time about this book, how it developed and what is coming up!
How do you like to booktempt people into reading Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon?
Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon is a character-driven godpunk thriller in which a former Yoruba nightmare god, an ancient succubus, and a reincarnated Aleister Crowley team up for a heist to retrieve an item (the titular brass head) from the British Museum. Its reverse Indiana-Jones-Meets-American-Gods-By-Way-Of-Bonnie-And-Clyde. But of course, there is more to the story. Its more than just a heist story, it’s also a globe-trotting historical story, a love story, a story of self-discovery and a social satire about capitalism, cultural theft, and religion. Expect fun. Expect heart. Expect gods, monsters, demons, magicians, giants, all jostling for power and belief. Sounds tempting enough, eh?
In the afterward you mention that Shigidi started in 2016 with a short story – how did he evolve into a novel. What challenges did that create for you?
This book represents the confluence of 3 things. I have always been interested in the nature of faith, religion and mythology. Particularly Yoruba mythology but all mythologies really (and gods/creatures from other pantheons make appearances in the book) and in the commodification of those beliefs (something I grew up around – as we say in Nigeria, church business is big business). Because Shigidi is a minor god in Yoruba mythology, I wanted to take him and turn him into an unexpected hero. Thats when I wrote the short story called I, Shigidi, around 2015/2016 which went though several iterations before being published as a novelette in Abyss & Apex magazine.
I wrote the first short story featuring the novel’s co-protagonist, Nneoma, back in December of 2015 and she was inspired by both Judeo-Christian mysticism and classic Nigerian movies about dangerous, beautiful women that turn out to be spirits or strange creatures in disguise who will tempt men away from their good Christian wives, have sex with them, and steal their souls or condemn them to some horrible fate – movies like Nneka The Pretty Serpent (1994). I wanted to subvert that. Tell a different story about that kind of character.
I put Nneoma and Shigidi together because I kept thinking, 'A reluctant Nightmare god and misunderstood succubus are a good pairing.' Also, lust and fear make good bedfellows. Nneoma makes an appearance in the final version of I, Shigidi. But I always wanted to tell a bigger story with them as the main protagonists, I just wasnt sure what story. I had lots of ideas though.
The final spark that set what became this novel alight came when I went back to London (where I used to live before moving to Oxford and then Malaysia) for the Caine Prize ceremony in 2018 (I was a nominee), and I visited the British museum again. I felt really uncomfortable being there because I was more aware of just how many things in that museum were of questionable provenance, held there against the will of the people that owned them in the first place. I felt an urge to take some of those items back and that feeling stayed with me. Eventually all my ideas for Shigidi and Nneoma and the heist at the museum coalesced there, and I came up with the idea for the novel.
The main challenge with expanding the story came with trying to fill in the world that Shigidi and Nneoma inhabit – thinking about how much of our modern world is reflected in the spirit companies. And also trying to intersect Nneoma’s long past with a lot real-life historical events.
Nneoma is an equally important character in the story. How did you want to flesh her out from simply a powerful succubus?
Yes, I refer to Nneoma as a co-protagonist. She is a character that popped into my head fully formed, and she's a synthesis of a lot of my reaction to the a lot of the fear of women and female sexuality I was exposed to growing up. Its in a lot of global myths and religons – the insiuation that all of the evil in this world was brought on by women. Eve and the apple; Pandora and the box. The classic ‘evil temptress’ framing that women and sexuality are dangerous. In Nigeria, we have a lot of movies, that are obviously religiously inspired, about evil women that are spirits or mammy water in disguise who will tempt men away from their good Christian wives, have sex with them, and steal their souls or condemn them to some horrible fate (I mentioned Nneka, the Pretty Serpent earlier). A lot of that framing lot of that struck me as misogynistic and wrong, and I wanted to take that idea and invert it, and make her a main character, her own person, complicated and messy and just as human as any of us. That was my approach. She is a powerful succubus, yes but she is so much more. So I chose to flesh her out borrowing elements of Jewish mysticism about the origins of the succubus and the first demons that entered the world to give her a sense of being an ancient, weary being who, like many of us, finds herself in a situation, a changed world of spirit corporations who just wants to get by and survive on her own terms. I tried to show her actions not as evil, but more amoral. She does “evil” things they do because that's who she is fundamentally and that is how she survives. But, over time, you see her vulnerability, humanity even.
In the story we have the concept of religions as corporations that Shigidi is expected to work for. What led you to that idea and how did Shigidi as a freelancer develop?
It started from Shigidi himself. Shigidi can mean a few things in Nigeria. In some places Shigidi is an aspect of other gods in the Yoruba pantheon (the Orisha) like Eshu. In others, Shigidi is used as a general term for small idols people pray to. Some older sources cite Shigidi as a nightmare god, and states that people make these small clay or wood statues which they pray to and use to send nightmares to or try to kill their enemies with. I've always found that version of Shigidi, as a tiny, ugly statue creature whose entire job description was “be ugly, give nightmares, kill people” really fascinating, along with the mythology around it. "The rest of the Yoruba pantheon is full of larger-than-life gods: Yemoja, the goddess of the sea; Shango, the god of lightning, who is always imagined as this big, loud, brash character. And so on. Then there's Shigidi, who's just this tiny statue giving people nightmares. I've always thought, “This poor guy -- it sounds like a terrible job”. That's where I built up this idea of the pantheon as a company and Shigidi at the bottom of this corporate heirarchy, having to do this shitty job just to maintain his existence. And it all blossomed out from there, drawing on my own experience in the international corporate world to fill out this setup.
The idea of Shigidi as freelancer came when I tried to fit Nneoma into this world of spirit companies I had created for Shigidi to inhabit, I realized there had to be a class of spirit entities that didnt fit in the pantheonic company structures, that operated on their own. People like Nneoma. And I liked the idea of her tempting him to leave a job he hates to come exist on his own terms, even with the associated risk. Something I’m sure many of us have dreamed of.
How much fun is designing a magical heist? What did you enjoy the most in writing it?
So much fun! I’m a big fan of heist movies and while I was writing the novel, I watched and rewatched a lot of heist movies. I had already seen many of them because I watched a lot of international cinema when I was younger and in fact, I wanted to be a film director in my teens (ha!). But when I wrote Shigidi, I went back to films like Set It Off, Ocean’s Eleven, Rififi, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Italian Job, Inception, and many others, to remind myself of what made a good heist story work. And then I did a lot of research into the British museum itself to have some grounded sense of it so I could work that all in to set up the heist. But once I had all that, then I let my imagination run loose, coming up with surprises and obstacles for them to overcome during the heist. Thats the most fun part of any heist – the way things go wrong and how characters respond.
What three words describe the next Shigidi story?
Ha! What makes you so sure there will be a next Shigidi story?
OK fine, yes there will be. I do set it up in this book. And I have a sequel all outlined.
So, three words for it:
Epic. Revealing. Divine.
What else can we look forward to from you this year and where can we find out more?
I have a new book called Convergence Problems coming out on Feb 13. A collection of stories (12 short stories, 3 novelettes and 1 novella). The novella “Ganger” is one of my favourite things I’ve ever written. It's almost 30k words long and is the centrepiece the collection. It’s at once a retelling of the Yoruba legend of ‘the hunter and the boa constrictor’ as well as an exploration of where our current obsession with computer technology and geoengineering the climate crisis could lead us, extrapolated to an extreme.
The collection as a whole features me experimenting with different formats, forms, and lengths of story. It has received two (!) starred reviews from Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly who called it a modern classic. I’m glad reviewers like it and I hope readers do too.
I’ll also have a few new stories appear in some anthologies and magazines, so I’m excited about those.
Readers can find out more and keep up with me by subscribing to my blog - https://wtalabi.wordpress.com/subscribe/ or following me on social media (I’m @wtalabi on Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram and TikTok)
What great books have you read recently?
Oh. I loved Lauren Beukes’ Bridge. A trippy and surreal story about a woman jumping across universes to try to find her mother before a terrifying interdimensional hunter does. It's a tightly plotted, tense and entertaining story about family and the choices that make us who we are. Its wildly entertaining with memorable characters and a particularly terrifying villain.
I also enjoyed Temi Oh’s More Perfect. A "reimagining of the Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus" and, to my reading, influenced by the Yoruba legend of Queen Moremi. It has a great premise and is full of big ideas about connection and consciousness. Set in a near-future London, Moremi, a British-Nigerian girl and Orpheus, a biracial boy get entangled in a beautiful story about the potential of technology, relationships, parental legacy, dreams, corporate and government overreach, privacy and so much more. All rendered in beautiful prose.
One more. I just finished John Wiswell’s novel Someone You Can Build A Nest In and it is pure Wiswell, with a monstrous, protagonist, lovingly and thoughtfully rendered. Its sly, fun and darkly humorous with a bloody, beating heart. And always keenly aware of what is truly monstrous in all of us. If you liked the messy ‘monstrousness’ of Nneoma and Shigidi, you might enjoy John’s book, which is very different but plays similar notes with different strings.
