Bayo Ojikutu is a hopeful man.

Over coffee in Wicker Park's Filter, the author discusses his new novel, "Free Burning," just released this Tuesday, the follow-up to his award-winning 2003 novel "47th Street Black." He speaks with gestures; he uses his hands. Ojikutu, with only one book, made a reputation for himself as being a true Chicago writer, using the South Side streets as if they were characters, neighborhoods not only as settings but as plot tools.

"I feel a certain responsibility to it," he says of his origins, "to transmit my sense of the place in my work as a writer."

Ojikutu's father immigrated to Chicago from Nigeria in 1968, right in the middle of the Biafran War, the civil war in Nigeria that tore the country to pieces. He went to medical school, started a family and eventually opened his own clinic and settled in the South Shore area, roughly 79th Street and South Shore Drive. As a boy, Bayo attended Catholic school, and just as he was hitting adolescence in the early 1980s, the family moved to south suburban Glenwood, where he attended high school.

"It was a tough time to move," he admits, because of his awkward age. "At the time it appeared to me that it was a shift in the world, that I was leaving one world for a world of which I had a different perception. I was a city dweller, though. A young city dweller, but a city dweller nonetheless. I always felt displaced [in the suburbs]. I say I'm from Chicago. My mother's family lived in South Shore. That was home and family for me. We would come back to the city as high-school kids, with my friends, and I'd be the tour guide. It was always my imagined home."

Ojikutu says that at 12, he knew he wanted to be a writer. "It was near the time we actually moved," he says. "Stories started to pop into my head. It was my sort of self-medication. Even then I knew that if I didn't start putting them on paper I was gonna start losing them."

He says that at that age, he was much more influenced by film than by literature, which came later during his high school and college years. He cites Steven Spielberg--"as commercial as he is"--as one of those inspirations, not so much for the blockbuster entertainment that his films provide but more so because of the way Spielberg would inject his own experiences and origin into each story. "There was always a sense of self, where he came from," Ojikutu says. "He did it all through storytelling."

After high school he was off to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where he studied political science. "My parents wanted me to go to law school," he says. He interned at a law firm during his junior year. "It wasn't for me. Not to disparage the profession, but it wasn't an environment for me."

It was toward the end of his undergrad years when he began working on "47th Street Black," as well as other short stories. He also met his wife there, who he's been with for sixteen years, seven of them in marriage. He finished his graduate studies at DePaul in the writing program, and at the end he had completed his first draft of his debut novel. It was during this time that he truly embraced literature. "I'm a self-learner," he says. "I read a good deal of things, caught up with things I had missed, that I wouldn't have missed if I had been an English major. I read a lot of Morrison, Philip Roth. Roth, he conveys his sense of self, his experiences through his storytelling, yet it's not memoir."

While also citing Faulkner and Salinger as influences, it's obvious that summoning the "sense of self" in writing is very important to Ojikutu. Yet there's another literary influence who would seem rather unlikely: "Stephen King. I was a very young reader, but he was an influence. I don't know if any of that was personal shit or not. I hope not."

Seven years passed between the time that Ojikutu wrote "47th Street Black" and when it was finally published. The book, vigorous and gritty, tells the story of two young black men in 1960s South Side Chicago, seduced into a life of crime. One goes to prison, the other becomes a leader of the neighborhood crime organization. Aggressive slang, effective in execution and frankness, fills the pages as Ojikutu recalls a decades-old Chicago, a not-so-distant-past of blood and murder. He says he learned of the time period by simply listening to the stories that his mother's family would tell time and time again, about growing up in the area during those years. "I used those stories as inspiration," he says. "I had those voices speaking to me." The book went on to win the Washington Prize for Fiction and receive overwhelming critical praise.

"I knew there was a value in the work," he says, "at least I had hoped there was. I was happy I could convey something that touched readers who were willing to engage the book seriously. I did a reading at a library [in the neighborhood where the book is set] about a year after it came out, and the audience was mostly older people, those who grew up around 47th Street. They had knowledge of the things I was writing about. They were asking me, `How did you know this, how did you know about this?' It was reifying."

"Free Burning" finds Ojikutu returning to his old neighborhood, South Shore, to tell the story of Tommie Simms, a well-educated black man who grew up on tumultuous streets but escaped the temptations to live a life of crime and went on to college and then got a job with a corporate insurance firm. He loses his job when the company goes sour, and he's forced to dive into crime with his drug-dealer cousins in order to support his wife and daughter. The deeper and deeper he gets, the harder it is for him to get out, and to see that he has other options. It's a staggering novel, superior to "47th Street Black" in many ways, a successful balance of drama and societal criticism. Ojikutu's prose, the poetic and flawless way he manages his characters and their words, sparks great lines of dialogue like "Together, me and you, we can end this life of pigs and prey, let birds swoop down from stank air without worrying, cause we've got eyelids to hide our dreams."

He's says going back to his roots as the setting was a natural thing. "We write as a product of our experiences, our observations, our homes," he says. "My inclination to write was planted in me at an early age. This place, which I consider home, is where I find interest. Personal interest. Sociological interest. My connection to home has been a catalyst, a wellspring for the stories that have come to me over time. My desire to write is born from my place of origin."

He acknowledges that he felt some added pressure while preparing his sophomore release. "At the time I was working as an adult-education director at a state-funded agency, working with people under disenfranchised circumstances. I think my experiences talking to them created characters in `Free Burning.' If there was pressure on me, it was pressure based on my observations with those people, using them as inspiration."

He strongly disagrees with certain interpretations of his work that brand his characters as "hopeless," that they simply do not have a chance at escaping the confines of their hellish environment. "I guess I've been more driven to express the complicated ideas that exist around fighting with contentment and confinement," he says. In fact, the predominant message of "Free Burning" is not that these characters are completely lost, but instead trapped inside their own worlds, whether they are on the crime-ridden streets or in office cubicles. He much more prefers the term "desperate."

"The place, South Shore, conveys a sense of entrapment," he says. "The idea of desperation, it shows that something must exist outside, you just gotta find it. You can have confinement in a neighborhood, a job, but there [must be] the idea that there's opportunity and liberation, whatever it might be. It's like a beacon of light in the distance. How do you get to that thing? There's a body of water between where I live and that thing, and I can't swim. How do I get there? The need to have hope to continue living. That's part of the human drive toward survival."

He says his Tommie character, "Free Burning"'s narrator, symbolizes what we all go through in our lives, juggling our sense of self, sifting through the muck in an attempt to find what we really want. "I like the interpretation of `desperation.' I don't like when people say that they are hopeless. Tommie is not hopeless. We live in a society that's shaped in the fashion where entrapment and desperation are functions of our commercial, political and social relations, particularly at the bottom of the social structure."

But Ojikutu strongly feels that in order to escape these traps, people have to rely on more than just words. "It has to become more than a metaphor. You're here, there is some sort of hope. You're alive. But at the same time, you think that if you're a part of the middle class everything's gonna be okay, and it's not okay. There are still things wrong with it. You're in a box, an office, a cubicle. What is it that would elevate all this existence into a place where you want to be?"

He feels very grateful for his upbringing, that he didn't fall into these "traps." "My parents gave us the opportunity to see beyond restrictions," he says. "That there's something larger than that, something out there, something I'd like to pass on to our children. That's where hope resides. As long as we're alive, I don't see that there's hopelessness."

Ojikutu teaches full-time in the English department at DePaul University and currently serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago. He lives on the South Side, at the border of Woodlawn and Hyde Park, which he calls "one of the last frontiers in Chicago." An avid jazz fan, he and his wife frequent the Green Mill, Checkerboard Lounge and Velvet Lounge (they haven't been to the new space, however). He wanted to learn to play the saxophone as a kid, but as an asthma sufferer, it just wasn't possible. "I really wanted to do it," he says. "The saxophone is so powerful, just looking at it, and the sound it makes. I imagined it as some sort of liberating force. But I didn't have the air to do it."

He says that with "Free Burning," he, foremost, wants to express that there are options for those born into, or tempted by, bad environments. "All humans tussle with ideas. We [shouldn't settle] for easy answers. [Readers should] see this character not as a social statistic but as a human being trying to fight his way in the world."

And that the end of the book is hopeful?

"Well," he says, "that's my hope."

(2006-10-03)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment