In ‘Juju Eyes’, I look at women from the point of vulnerability, a feminist fire burning inside me, says Omatseye
* The idea of royalty haunts our politics, gave birth to gofatherism
By Anote Ajeluorou
AS part of the reading tour to promote his new book, Juju Eyes, Mr. Sam Omatseye was a guest of the Department of English, University of Lagos, Akoka on Tuesday, June 17, 2025, and engaged with students and faculty members. Among faculty members who attended were Professors Hope Eghagha, Patrick Oloko and Chris Anyoku. Others were the Head of Department of English, Dr. Abiodun Adedeji, Dr. Lola Akande, Dr. Yewande Ntekim-Rex and Dr. Abayomi Awelewa who moderated proceedings. Dr. Ademola Adesola of Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada also attended, including some media professionals.
After reading two excerpts, Omatseye began to respond to questions from his audience, and one of such questions was his penchant for exposing female characters in his novels, from Crocodile Girl, My Name Is Okoro to his recent offering, Juju Eyes.
“MY Name Is Okoro is about the civil war,” Omatseye explained. “My favourite character is actually Nkechi, who stands for the pride of the Igbo culture against the sexually predatory military officer from the north, and I saw that as a feminist fire burning inside me. Someone asked, what’s my issue with women – from Crocodile Girl to My Name is Okoro and now Juju Eyes. Perhaps, I’m looking at women from the point of view of vulnerability, and I think that you can always tell the story of society from looking at its underbelly, and from there you can really track the foibles of patriarchy, and see the weakness of the victims, because sometimes the victim is seen as a saint, but sometimes they are not. So, those are things that interest me when I write sometimes. In My Name Is Okoro, it is there, and in the case of Juju Eyes, it is very much about a victim who is sometimes a predator. Yes, that’s what this lady is.”
And as to what prompted him to write, the Editorial Board Chairman of The Nation said, “The subject I interrogated here is because I wanted to write about a male figure who has been in my consciousness for a long time. He is a well known, recognisable figure in Nigeria who gets away with anything he does. He lives on fluff and flash, but he gets everything he wants, and so I find it very fascinating, because he is extraordinarily brilliant, and he would get by just by the substance of his own intelligence, but he understands the society so well, and its vanities and its penchant for celebrities, and he is exploiting it very well. But somehow I switched to a woman.
“During Covid-19, I was surfing the net one morning and there was the story about this Nigerian young woman, I think in Ireland, who is married to a white man, and the white man discovers that everything he knows about this woman was false – her educational background, parentage, everything about her. He told that her he would have married her anyway, that she didn’t have to come up with all the lies about her background. But she wanted to get by. She’s from a poor background in Nigeria, so she had to put up a front. So this is a story I thought I could explore.
“Then I also remembered that there is one very well known Nigerian, who has a mother who is a cripple. But she is a well known celebrity, but she is hiding her mother, because somehow she feels that her image, with all her beauty and the florescence of her majesty, that somehow the image of the crippled mother can pull her down; she’s paranoia. There was another one in America who was in the media space. She had to publicly apologize to her parents, because she didn’t want the public to know the kind of background she came from; she denied her parents. I think she had a remorseful epiphany, and had to come out and apologize. So, those were the kind of things that you see among celebrities, and that was what set me going on this story.
Prof. Hope Eghagha (left); guests author Mr. Sam Omatseye; Head of Department, English, Dr. Abiodun Adedeji and Prof. Patrick Oloko
Faculty member Professor Oloko noted the kinship between contemporary fiction and Nigeria’s filmic culture, known as Nollywood, and drew parallel between the two artistic forms from the prolong of Juju Eyes that Omoatseye read. He noted that the fire that gutted Okumo shrine could be equated with holy ghost fire often invoked in many Nollywood films over evil. To this Omatseye expressed fascination with the analogy, noting that from his reading tour, many interpretations had been given to some aspects of the novel that seemed new and even revelatory to him as the writer.
“Holy ghost fire! Anytime I do a reading like this, I hear new things I never thought of about the novel,” he said. “When I went to Ibadan, I read Henry Akubuiro of The Sun‘s review who asks, ‘is it possible to kill a god or goddess and survive?’ I didn’t know that that is in the novel. Then Anote Ajeluorou wrote and talked about Shay’s mother being the most interesting character in the whole book. I didn’t look at her that way. So, today I’m hearing of the fire being holy ghost fire, and I didn’t look at it that way. I’m also hearing about film and literature. I am sure you guys have been studying it here. The two have been meeting at certain places. It’s not only here. It’s all over the world, because sometimes the word has to be seen. The most important thing about a writer is to create a picture, the ability to make the reader see, and what clearer way to see than in film?
“And we can see there is also a rage by a certain section of Hollywood to dramatize novels. The problem though is that what the film does that the novel can do better is what is called sensibility. The film tends to want to pick certain dramatic parts, but whether it is capable of making a journey into the interiority of the character is another issue entirely. That is why literature is probably better, but this idea about holy ghost fire (where the shrine of the goddess is set ablaze) is really interesting to me, because I never really thought of it that way.”
IN what is easily the collective unconscious at play, Omatseye said Agura forest shrine setting in the novel just came to him, that he didn’t know any real Agura forest is somewhere in Bayelsa State that a student pointed out to him: “I never knew there was an Agura forest somewhere in Bayelsa State. The word Agura just came to me. Now you are telling me there is an Agura forest in Bayelsa; it helps the story. There is a strong Niger Delta dimension in the novel. The white man, who is Shay’s man, is abducted and taken to the forest where you have all these militants, and it is another civilization entirely in that forest. When you read it, you see all that transpires in that forest, and then you see the culture of the Niger Delta merging with that of Nigeria, and holding spellbound that space.”
The protagonist Shay might have survived the fire that razed down the shrine of the goddess she is to be entrusted as priestess for life but from which she escapes, but Omatseye wondered whether Shay actually survived or escaped the ineluctable fate and clutch of her village goddess that goes up in flames, couched by a student as her innocence and rebellion against the goddess.
“Someone also said something about her innocence and rebellion,” he said, “I never thought the girl asserted her rebellion even before she grew up. This is very interesting reading, because throughout the book she’s fighting against something. Someone said she couldn’t believe Shay actually survived (the fire incident at the shrine), but did she really survive? Her life was one of turbulence, pains, frustration, even though she was always in the limelight, with money and all that. ‘Is it possible to overcome fate? That is part of the struggle that the novel is about… Then someone asked about interrogating the African culture, whether it works or not. I don’t think I have the power to say whether it works or not. Are the gods to blame, according to Ola Rotimi or Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God? Are we the gods? Can we destroy the gods, or are we the ones that create the gods and make them appear as if they exist?”
Although there’s politics and a hint of godfatherism in Juju Eyes, it’s not central to the overall theme of the novel, according to Omatseye. Rather, it’s how vain man can be in his pursuit of all forms of happiness, including possessing political power that grants a lot of access but not using it for public good.
“I didn’t think of it as control, godfatherism and control; I wrote before Governor Simi Fubara’s troubles happened in Rivers State,” he said in response to the relationship between Chief Lambe and Osa in the novel. “I thought of the idea of godfatherism, but what was more interesting to me was the whole idea of vanity. Why do you want to fake things in order to get things? I was not consciously political when I wrote it, but I believe, as someone said, that every story is political.”
Omatseye explained that he tries to set his journalism aside while doing fiction, but whether he succeeds or not is up to the read-critic to find out: “I often try to decouple myself from journalism when I try to write fiction, but it’s a struggle, because I believe that journalism can kill it, but you know reality has become part of the definition of contemporary literature. Some people say that Ake was the real reason that the world started looking at Wole Soyinka as a Nobel quality. It was Ake that opened the window to some of his works, especially those difficult ones that we have not really paid attention. If you love Ake so much, which is amazing, because Soyinka is a theatre man, but he had to write prose. He told me that we are in need of growth, so he had to write prose to draw attention to his drama, which is an interesting.
“I try to decouple myself without much success, I think, because you cannot not be who you are. I’ve been a journalist all my life. In fact, I wrote a short story one time and my wife said this is journalism, and I said there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s still me. There’s this Norwegian writer who wrote a very autobiographical book and it became so popular he was given a Nobel prize and there are a lot of people who read the book and were fighting with him. They said, ‘what you wrote, that was not how it happened. You misrepresented the fact,’ and he said, ‘no, that was what I saw.’ So you can see how it can be like that. Even journalists, when they go and report something and read it in one newspaper, they look at it one way and they say this paper is lying. It’s a reporter’s perspective. One time at Concord newspaper (now defunct), people came there for interview. So I asked two of them to look out the window each at a time, then I asked what them they saw. One said he saw a tree and the other said he saw a car, but they were looking out of the same window, and there a tree and a car outside! So, it’s a matter of perspective.”
Omatseye also spoke about the intersection of politics and culture, arguing that politics acquires the tone of the culture in which it is being practised.
“Politics is part of culture,” he explained. “That’s why we talk about Lambe trying to burn money. We were sacrificing human beings and animals and lot of things. So, it was just a forerunner to what we are experiencing today. When you hold rallies in Nigeria, it’s different from when you hold rallies in London. We sing particular songs and dance particular dances; so, its part of our culture. You cannot take them away. The idea of royalty haunts our politics. That’s where godfatherism comes from. We still have that royalty in our system, that deference to authority, to patriarchy, and so it all comes from our culture. Culture says you have to respect your elders and make sacrifices. You have to kill sometimes to get things done. You have to assert the subordination of a woman. These are all part of the struggle. The Caribbean poet, Dereck Walcott wrote, ‘I met history, but it didn’t recognize me.’ So you see it. We fight with it, we want it, it denies us, we still embrace it. You have to go and meet it if it denies you.”
In his intervention, Dr. Adedeji spoke about Carl Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ theory as being evident in parts of Omatseye’s fiction, especially when he said he wrote things that just came to him, particularly the Agura forest in Juju Eyes. Adedeji said he had a similar experience sometime ago when he wrote a story and used a name and street that he didn’t know were real, and he was accused of being intentional, but he denied knowing that such person or street existed. He also intervened in the debate about fate in African consciousness a student raised, saying it was a real phenomenon in the African imagination. He explained the duality in the fate phenomenon among the Yoruba, with one being cast in iron that can’t be changed while the other that can be changed through necessary appeasement by those versed in spiritual manipulations through good babalawos – alsos known as ‘atorise’.
He also weighed in on what the writing enterprise consists of, saying it’s two-part, with one part being for the writer to put pen to paper, while the other is for the reader, which takes place in the canvas of the mind. Adedeji noted, “What can strike the reader’s canvas of the mind can be different from what the author has in mind. That’s why there’s usually disagreement between what the reader thinks of what the writer has written and what the wrote believes he wrote. Again, that’s why a reader may have a different impression about the same book 10 years later from what he had when he first read the same book. The first time I read Soyinka’s poem ‘Abiku’, I actually admired it so much, but when I became a parent I cursed ‘Abiku’. It’s what makes the reading experience very rich and inviting.”
Mr. Sam Omatseye reading from his latest novel, Juju Eyes at the University of Lagos
ON his part, Prof. Hope Eghagha commended Omatseye for being a regular reading guest of the English Department, saying, “We met at the level mysticism, Christian mysticism, that is. Now Juju Eyes, if somebody says someone has juju eyes, of course, you’d be worried and they will be afraid of you. Juju connotes evil within our socio-cultural environment.”
Prof. Eghagha went on to cite the authorial power to kill or make alive a character at will by equating it with God’s ability to do both in the bible: “In writing, an author kills characters at such a time you didn’t expect him to, but that’s his own consciousness at that time. If he can do so, it means that as a reader, you can also kill and make alive; you loose consciousness of that character, because he does not meet your expectation.”
He enjoined the students to take such visits by published writers seriously, and narrated his own transformative experience as an undergraduate at the University of Jos, when he met Somalia-born novelist Nuruddin Farah, saying, “a very simple man, quiet and always in solitude, because he was anxious about his homeland. And he said there was nothing to be excited about; he was almost anti-social. He carried the burdens of his home country back here to the University of Jos. His was akin to Prof. Awojobi, how he wore the problems of Nigeria like clothes and suffered mental breakdown. But Sam is coping well, and he’s doing well.”
Prof. Oloko gave the vote of thanks, and decried the short attention span of people, especially students who always want to get away from such events, but quipping that they get away just to look at their phones. “In a discourse like this,” he said, “we just simply pour and engage ourselves. Something very fascinating returning, the literary and reading culture, but it’s returning in a very elitist way. You have not just a captive audience like this, but people who are really interested in the book. And that’s why many such people are here in this room. This discourse will continue.”
Prof. Oloko also raised a critical issue about the return of the true Nigerian fiction, citing the two curated excerpts Omatseye read, and noting, “The novel is coming in its Nigerian form. The two excerpts that you carefully curated show the uniqueness of the sensational storytelling that makes the Nigerian novel thick.”
