NEWSLETTER #3

Jan 2022 - My Life In Novels

Welcome to 2022. What will this year bring?  So far, an Omicron-induced runny nose and seven days of self-isolation! Down the line, I will think about how to include a global pandemic into a novel! On a more positive note, I have finished Developing for Afronia. 10 Years in a Decade, the third volume of my Prose, Poems, Pictures series, is almost completed.

… And this brings me onto thinking how my personal life story, interspaced with global goings-on, find their way into my books.  It is true, or certainly is in my case, that everyone has a book in them, and that many authors - creatives writ large - will draw from their experiences.  It is with this in mind that in this newsletter I will consider a few of my life happenings and which have made their way into my stories as I'm a man who has inhabited many lives and from which come multiple novels in a myriad of styles.

There are 6 volumes of the Afronia Series, the story of contemporary Africa encapsulated in an amalgamated fictional country notionally located in the Horn of Africa and loosely based on Eritrea.

The happenings in the country are based on African fact, the series referencing contemporary African events, such as the mass looting of state funds in Malawi (commonly known as Cashgate), the 2014 Al-Shebab Westgate Mall terrorist attack in Nairobi, the post 2005 election massacre in Ethiopia, national service in Eritrea, President Mugabe’s lavish birthday parties, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and, President Mobutu’s of Zaire (Now DRC) lavish palace in Gbadolite.

Throughout the series, I tackle social, economic, cultural, religious, and political questions which many countries on the continent, and indeed globally, are currently grappling with. In doing so, I hope the reader will understand a little bit more about the curses of corruption and nepotism, a little bit more about how so many have so little and, how absolute poverty sitting side-by-side with a lack of human rights in the shadow of an elite can drive ordinary people, like you, to desperation and drastic acts..

I use a range of characters so that the reader can peer into the daily lives, fears, challenges, and opportunities that a refugee, housewife, militiaman, army colonel, student, journalist, entrepreneur, activist, etc. who lives in such a country as Afronia, might think, feel and experience. I hope the reader will gain new insights into the effervescent though often misunderstood continent that is Africa and, that some universal issues raised through the medium of Afronia will provoke considered thinking once new perspectives have been discussed.

How can I write about such a country as Afronia? Well, I have lived in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania for the last 15 years, and traveled to many more African countries. During this time, I met and married my Malawian wife, brought up our 4 children, and started a consultancy business.  While I have not been an army colonel, student, or journalist, I have chatted with them. Similarly, I am no president! But I read the papers and have had many good conversations about the incumbent over a bottle or two of beer.

Africa has been where I have lived the majority of my adult life, and so when I say that Africa - as a continent embodied in Afronia - is generally moving in a positive direction… but there are still many challenges and which I believe are often catalysed or elongated by those who will do whatever they can to keep the status quo, whether that be a corrupt president, neo-liberal businessman or economic coloniser, I write with passion from my personal experience.

There are +/- 85 poems, 90 pictures, and 70,000 words in each of the 3 volumes in the Prose, Poems and Pictures series, which is a first-person, present tense, dirty-realism account of a white male in his early 40s. A child of the eighties and a product of Thatcherism, the narrator shouts his mouth off on every topic and especially when his melon is twisted. Like me, the narrator doesn’t have a perfect life and she so doesn’t paint a false picture, but rather he lets it all hang out, life in all its rotten splendor of success and failure, opportunities fucked-up and challenges too great to overcome. Like the chronicler, I freely admit I’m like a hippopotamus on a trampoline attempting to solve the Rubik's Cube of life.

The series is told through the media of prose, poems and pictures, three creative versions of the same him, different angles on the same story. Each chapter has at least one poem and a sketch. Why poetry? In our short form world, it’s appropriate. It’s like texting or sending a WhatsApp message, a thought reduced to the minimum number of consonants and vowels. Saying more with less. Being mindful of every letter and comma. A quick way to tell a story or articulate a thought. Sketches and doodles allow the reader to further understand the soul of the protagonist. Using poems and pictures allows the audience to engage with the storyteller through multiple forms… and if you were a psychologist, psychoanalyst or any other sort of mind-bender, it would help you decipher who exactly he is. It was also a creative challenge and one that I thrived on and thought original.

18 Reflections and 3 Statements of Relief is a story about a man who comes to various crossroads in his life, this the original title. I too have come to many junctions and not sure if I should turn left, right, move forward or go backwards.

• From 7-18 I was at boarding school, and aged 19 (1997) I was a gap-year volunteer teacher in Tanzania for 9 months before going to university.
• When 25 I had to decide if I wanted to do a corporate job in London or become a salesman in Ireland and where I quite literally walked the streets knocking on every door to sell my wares.
• At 28 (2006) I changed career and moved from Ireland to Malawi (Africa). In doing so, I professionally went back to 0, my relationship status crashed and, I handed my house keys back to the bank. I had virtually no income for 18 months.
• I’m now 44 and 2022 looks like it will be a year where rubicons will need to be crossed.

Like the protagonist in the story, I am a poster child for Generation Y, namely, better educated and more travelled than my parents (at the same age) but also less well-off and having lower job security. I to reminisce of things going well, this from running marathons, leading a group of students up Mount Meru (Tanzania) and being on top of a Scottish hill in -5 Celsius when training with 31 Signal Squadron, Royal Signals Regiment Reserve. To, bad… being mugged on more than one occasion, drunken escapades and broken hearts. Throughout it all, it has been friends and family who have, and still are, playing a crucial role in helping me continue from one day to the next, just like in the story.

The lead character in Paperback Writer, is a novelist, as am I. It took me, as well as the fictional storyteller time to get started, there being many a false beginning. I know where the protagonist, and creatives more generally, get their inspiration: overheard conversations, reading articles in newspapers and online, eavesdropping on arguments and, deciphering what the colours of clothes reveal about the wearer. All sources of creativity are incorporated into my, as much as his novel. Like Jules, I contemplate where I have plot inconsistences, poor grammar and unconvincing characters. And, that writing a first draft is just the beginning of the process towards a final copy ready for submission.

So, there is my life in novels. There is only 1 Chris Statham and it is the stories, characters and cultures of my life  which gives me locations, protagonists and plot lines for my novels; I have a reservoir of experience for my imagination to build on.