The Review of "A Ritual of the Monkey"

I first fell in love with the story of Ezra and Sacha Cantrell when I studied Political Science at the University of Ibadan. I was twenty-five years old and had been commissioned an officer in the Nigerian Air Force. But it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I thought about writing something that involved Ezra and Sacha's story. I’ve probably attempted to write this book for over a dozen years and in over a dozen ways.

Initially, I started writing it as a screenplay. Later on, for a number of reasons, I kept getting distracted by other writing projects, and after that, several other endeavors. So I let the piece sit for a while, trying to figure out a new way to approach the material. I wanted to capture what I felt was most significant about the story: Its contemporary relevance, the way the same story could be told of people living today. Perhaps that’s why I returned to the book. To try to figure out how to balance my situation as a husband, father and a friend with people who have differing lifestyles and coping with the demands of life in an ever judgmental society.

Around that time, I met a young man who’d grown up in Baltimore, and we ended up in a lengthy discussion about the way I was interpreting what had happened between Ezra and his sexuality. At one point, he said, “My sexual orientation wasn't a choice, this is the only way I know. I'm totally not turned on by the opposite sex,” and for some reason, that impacted me deeply. What I’d been writing, until that time, was still a traditionally-conceived historical novel without any thought of an alternative lifestyle, but that night, when I got home, I wrote what would become a chapter in "A Ritual of The Monkey:" Immediately, a parallel story began to emerge, narrated by a contemporary man living his life amid societal dicta, and through fact and fiction the story diverged sharply as the novel unfolds. There are more parallels between life and fiction in this book than in any project I’ve worked on.

Over the past few years, my research has taken me to London, Budapest, and mostly recently, to Vienna, Austria where I met a gay priest. Then back in the U.S., I chatted with a gay professor who proudly stated that he'd visited Lagos, Nigeria. Though I did not know the ending of the novel before I was writing it, I knew all along that the book would end in Washington D.C, and that, somehow, the two stories—present and past—would connect.

I’ve also developed interests in America's foreign policy and radical Islamic jihad — and how the two opposing ideologies intersect and conflict. These new interests will, no doubt, appear in a future.