Behind The Book With D. Nandi Odhiambo, author of Amapiano Eyes
Today, we invite D. Nandi Odhiambo to the Book*hug blog to share the story of how he began writing his latest novel Amapiano Eyes! While he initally set out with the goal of taking a break from writing, the book grew organically out of fragmented sentences jotted down during the Covid-19 Pandemic, with Nandi finding further inspiration from philosophical writings, personal loss, and Amapiano DJ sets on Youtube. Take it away Nandi!
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After moving to the North Shore on O‘ahu a decade ago, I started reading books on philosophy, in part because work I’d struggled through in my early twenties was suddenly easier to access. It was no longer like learning a foreign language. So, around the start of the pandemic in early 2020, I went all in, continuing to work on a book of literary criticism read through the lens of philosophy. While writing The Minoritarian and Black Reason: A Philosophico-Literary Investigation, I took notes for a companion piece, a philosophical novel set during the pandemic. When the book was done by the following year, I was eager to write fiction. However, I hadn’t taken a break since working on my previous one, Smells Like Stars. I’d also had some lingering health issues after getting a COVID shot. I needed to reset. Or so I thought.
It’s never clear to me how much time to take between books. Writing is an all-consuming form of life. The hours spent sifting through sentences have to be carved out of the seemingly impossible bustle of the day-to-day. So, I committed to being sensible and staying away from writing for a few months. The focus would be on getting healthy, teaching literature and creative writing at the university, and being better at reaching out to family and friends. Recently, my Dad’s health had declined because of early-onset dementia, and so I found myself looking back at emails I’d exchanged with him over the years. Many of them, written when he couldn’t sleep, reflected on philosophy and the history of Africa, the continent where our family had lived before immigrating to Canada in the late 1970s. Also, my sister, Debra, had recently gotten me watching Major League Djz Amapiano Balcony Mixes on YouTube, recorded at a variety of locations. Rooftops. Balconies. Stadiums. Mountainsides. Nightclubs. I put together a playlist on my iPhone and, good to go, I embarked on my healthy regimen.
Part of me enjoyed the freedom from the compulsive obsession that can take over when I’m dropped into a project. Another part was restless. I’d vaguely (idealistically) thought the pandemic would lead to greater cooperation between human beings, everywhere, finally joined by a common cause and fighting a common foe. But that hope quickly fell apart with the increasing divides over how to deal with COVID. Mandates, Restrictions, Boredom. And I began to wonder whether our own self-destruction as a species was written into our DNA. Sleep, always a challenge, became even harder to come by. So, instead of lying awake with my unsettled thoughts, I got up and began piecing together an outline for a story from my notes. This didn’t technically mean I was working again, I thought, since I was only writing lists made of sentence fragments. That was it. But unsolicited, the fragments became sentences, and soon paragraphs followed. Since I’ve always enjoyed working late at night before the commitments of a day encroach, I focused on a storyline set in the 1930s with Kwaro, the protagonist’s grandfather, who had been exhibited in human zoos staged in different European cities. However, this writing didn’t really count as work, I told myself. I was merely laying a foundation, priming a canvas. Yeah. I hadn’t made a commitment to the project yet. And as the words piled up, I saw more clearly the central relationship between Daliso, a DJ and existential philosopher, and Norrie, his girlfriend.
The late-nighters weren’t sustainable, and I needed to find a way to (not) write more efficiently. So, I stopped doing them. Cold turkey. I went all in, sticking to a daytime schedule: at least one hour, five days a week (not the full seven, like when I’m in the swing of things). During this fruitful time, Carmen, my wife, and I moved to the leeward side of the island on the south shore, and running with our newly adopted dog, Asta, helped tire me out enough to get longer stretches of sleep. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but the routine was working. And one day, while lost typing pages on a computer, Carmen asked how my break from writing was going.
I was quick to explain that technically I wasn’t working at all. No. I was reading what presented itself as thought, in fact. And remember, I concluded, I was only doing it five days a week.
She was unconvinced.
I tweaked a schedule that began at 4:30 in the morning. And despite dips in energy in the afternoons, I was getting a handle on how to write a philosophical novel that didn’t get its meaning from scientific, psychological, or anthropological frameworks. Not that I had a particular beef with any of them. Daliso did. For him, their emphasis on objective description and measurement led to logical abstractions. Instead, he was drawn to existentialism’s emphasis on lived experience, authentic thought, and fundamental concerns about existence. While figuring out the way forward with his ideas, I listened to a great deal of Amapiano music. Nice. Funky. Inflected with Africa. And after four months of (sort of) working, I had a decent first chunk of a draft.
To be honest, looking it over was a setback. I only saw the gaps. The lack of a sufficient break was to blame, I thought. I should have taken a month off. Or two. Maybe more. Why was I always chasing the next idea as it percolated out of somewhere, nowhere? When I began to question whether writing was ever enjoyable, and ask myself if I was wasting my time, I figured I should talk to Carmen, mein Herz. She reminded me that I always went through these periods of doubt (I’d forgotten), and offered to read what I’d put together. While awaiting to hear her thoughts, I made a point to remember that I’d been here before. Since Carmen is the person I talk with the most about our work as writers, I braced myself for a delicately worded confirmation of my misgivings. So, later, when she told me, enthusiastically, how much she liked what I was doing, I felt hope returning. Calm, I thought. A slight wobble. Happens. Pushing on, I shared the pages with Malcolm Sutton, the editor I’d worked with on Smells Like Stars. He, too, was encouraging, and so I returned to the manuscript in earnest. The aim was consistency without burning the candle at both ends. If I couldn’t write during the day, I’d put in the work before I went to bed.
However, despite all of this positive momentum, Dad’s health was deteriorating, and it weighed heavily on everyone in the family. Our conversations were becoming increasingly difficult, and it made me realize how much I’d depended on them over the years. However, one topic we continued to circle around was the importance of getting an education. Mum had been a school teacher who had all the kids doing homework, even in the holidays, and Dad, a lover of books who, as a boarding school student, would read Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle at night under a blanket, with a flashlight, in his dorm. In fact, one thing I appreciated was getting to tell him I learned about writing by first looking at and then learning to read the lengthy novels, biographies, philosophies, and histories he collected on our bookshelves. But our chats were getting shorter. Change was coming, and I felt helpless in the face of it.
When Dad passed away in the summer of 2023, I was heartbroken.
After the funeral, working on the manuscript was the last thing I wanted to do. It took months before I could return to it. I missed him.
Oddly, it was an envelope from Mum, with notes Dad had written for a memoir he’d envisioned, that drew me back to my novel again. They were handwritten in italics on green notepad paper, a style I’d imitated as a child while learning to write (and to become a writer). Knowing that he, too, had struggled with insomnia, I imagined him, at his desk, working on ideas he felt compelled to explore when sleep would not come, the whirl of a life pressing in around him. Births. Bills. Marriages. Deaths. An emphasis on the importance of caring for others, the way he made it through.
And as I looked at those green pages, where sentence fragments became sentences and then paragraphs, I felt close to him.
