Forster, Dayo

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Friday, August 22, 2008

www.dayoforster.com

I was born in The Gambia, a tiny strip of a country in West Africa’s coast. We lived in a house that overlooked a medical research centre which contained huge cashew trees. A taste for tree climbing and adventure developed in order to go cashew hunting on the other side of the fence. As a much younger sibling among five, I was known to spend hours in the bathroom – the only secure place to escape household chores – either reading, or staring at the floor, which had speckled grey grains embedded in white tiles. I used to daydream patterns and pictures in my head, as one does looking at clouds – or the ceiling, as my protagonist in Reading the Ceiling does. Our house was close to the ocean, and I could always hear the sea at night as a child, crashing away against the rock cliffs jutting out into the Atlantic.

My family is one of a group of Krio speakers who emigrated from Sierra Leone into the Gambia during colonial times. As a child, our extended family was large, and also included a host of friends of our parents who we called ‘aunt this’ or ‘uncle that’.

When I was eighteen, I left home for university. As there were no universities in The Gambia at the time, everyone who aspired to one had to leave to study overseas. I studied statistics and computing at the London School of Economics.

Although I have always been a keen reader, my interest in writing was mostly restricted to a series of teenage diaries, chronicling life, friends and daily intrigue. During a brief flare of interest in the student college magazine, I published a single article in the Beaver, a review of some sort.

I took up writing aged 35, while living in America, essentially to figure out a way of expressing opinions and publishing essays on various topics. I stumbled into fiction while attending a writing workshop. The optional assignment was to extend a character in a story someone else had written. I tried it – and was bowled over by the power of virtual reality – the ability to create someone else’s world and be able to view everything through that person’s eyes. And to feel God-like, able to make things happen, yet be sensitive enough to continue to inhabit a character’s skin.

I attempted various kinds of pieces, essays, biographical pieces, the occasional short story, a couple of abandoned novel ideas. It was at this time that I started working on Reading the Ceiling.

I have since published a short story in Kwani?, a Kenyan literary magazine, and have participated in the 2006 Caine Prize Writer’s Workshop, during which I produced a new story, which was published in an anthology, The Obituary Tango.

(Source: www.dayoforster.com)