Most writers cite other authors when they talk about their influences. Bayo Ojikutu cites directors. “When I was younger it was mainstream stuff–Spielberg and George Lucas, John Hughes even,” he says. “Scorsese was huge for me as I embraced writing with some seriousness. Mean Streets and After Hours–there is this visual poetry at work in that film, its rhyming images, its jarring exposition.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This month Three Rivers Press published Ojikutu’s second novel, Free Burning, which has the kind of rich, cinematic realism you’d expect from somebody whose imagination was sparked by movies. Set in Four Corners, a neighborhood near his native South Shore, the book is narrated by Tommie, a young father who’s displaced from his corporate job after 9/11 and winds up doing small-time drug hustles to get by. Full of flashbacks, tangents, and expository riffs, Ojikutu’s writing has the unhinged, lyrical freeness of postbop jazz and the tightness and macho intensity of contemporary hip-hop; he can outline the grim, hard edges of a whole neighborhood or masterfully illuminate the details of a couple fighting. And it’s a rare tale about the drug trade that concentrates on the people who get no glamour out of the life: Tommie drives a Taurus.
Now living in Woodlawn, Ojikutu teaches composition at DePaul, and he follows the same dictum he presents to his students. “You gotta write what you know,” he says. “Everybody knows folks like Tommie–people doing a little something on the side. It’s a grim story, and it’s rarely treated in fiction. These kind of stories are rarely told or heard. We don’t get to cross the trick borders. These sort of stories are the ones that deserve to be told.”
