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Though not much has
been heard from Bunmi Oyinsan since her last novel, ‘Three Women’ was
published in 2006, the writer, who now lives in Canada, has not exactly
abandoned creative writing.

“I’ve been caught
up with working on my doctorate. I’m actually currently working on my
dissertation and so I haven’t had time for any extended creative work.
I’ve been mostly engaged in flash fiction (short-short stories),” she
explains. ‘Moonlit Dreams’, ‘Touching Home’ and ‘No Thoroughfare’ –
Oyinsan’s short stories, were published in the Maple Tree Literary
Supplement in 2009.

Writing for women

‘Three Women’,
Oyinsan’s last novel focuses on three generations of women of the same
family. There is a multiplicity of women’s voices in the story and they
also vocalise issues differently. Why are men not portrayed in a good
light in the novel while the women, Aduke, Ibidun and Oyinkan are?

“Honestly, I don’t
think that’s a fair assessment because the women are not angels either.
At least, that’s one thing I was determined not to do. First, it was
written in various forms of first person narratives. As much as
possible, I wanted to have the voices of women of different generations
alive on the pages of this novel and in doing that, I wanted to
actually get into the heads of people of the particular era in which I
have placed those women.

“The kind of men
that each of them encountered, I would think — at least based on my
research, were what I think came out in the characterisation of the men
in the book. Just like the women, they were people who have their weak
points mostly because they were socialised a certain way just as the
women themselves were socialised in a certain way and that’s what
reflected in the book.

“At least I know
the third generation male character in the novel, Moyo, Oyinkan’s son,
comes out with positive character mostly because of the benefit of the
strong women in his family but also because he had a very good father.
A good father in Kole, not necessarily a good husband but a good
father. I think the characters are nuanced enough for people not to
make that kind of judgement.”

Will she write about women who oppress men too?

“If I’m inspired by
such stories I don’t see why not. I’m a feminist but at the same time
I’m a wife, a sister, a daughter, a mother of sons and I think I know
men well enough not to be blind sighted about them. Before I started
serious work on my dissertation, I had actually started work on another
novel, ‘Ladders of Home’ which I hope to get to when my dissertation is
finished.”

Writing for children

The winner of the
ANA/Matatu Prize for Children’s Literature with her ‘Fabulous Four’ in
2000 hasn’t done much writing for the young since then probably because
of circumstances surrounding the writing of the book.

“I went into
writing for children for very selfish reasons, I guess. My children
were avid readers when they were very young. The greatest punishment
you could give my daughter, Tobi, when she was growing up was to say
you are not going to the library on Saturday. She would be begging you,
she would be so repentant and all of that. But I found that they had a
bias for foreign writers Enid Blyton and the Nancy Drew series and I
got worried that they were not reading us. I kept trying to get them to
read African authors but their first impression was they are boring. So
I felt challenged. I started writing stories for them and one of the
stories grew and grew into Fabulous Four.”

Literature and filmmaking

Bunmi’s filmmaker
husband, Soji, played a role in her becoming one too. “I honestly
cannot deny that. My passion was for writing and literature but I had
friends who were in the film school and sometimes I participated in
their projects. Of course as a film student, you couldn’t afford to pay
actors so I went and acted for them and they paid me by taking me out
for a meal. That was as far as it went until I met Soji who was already
working in film. I am a TV addict. One of the reasons I also became
interested in TV was because as soon as I started publishing, I was
upset by the lack of reach that our literary writings have.”

Bunmi Oyinsan is expected in Lagos for the African Women in Film
Forum, holding at the Colonade Hotel, Ikoyi, Lagos, on June 16 and 17.