Book: Wildflower; an intriguing tv series
Author: Omoseye Bolaji
(e-book)
Omoseye Bolaji, a prolific African writer has just published a
book titled WILDFLOWER: an intriguing tv series. The work is the text of a
discourse of his weaved around the blockbusting Filipino tv series, Wildflower.
Here he briefly talks about this his new work which is now digitally available
as an e-book.
QUESTION: Many of your readers are surprised you could write on such a topic! Apparently nobody knew you even liked tv that much....Why Wildflower series in particular?
BOLAJI. Yes I don't watch tv or 'soapies', drama, etc much... but over the decades I got to love some of them, and enjoyed watching them on a regular basis. Like Dallas... like Isidingo (SA)... like Fresh Prince of Bel Air... Sunset Beach...Those in the know would actually have expected me to write something about Sunset Beach because I really liked in the past. The characters...like suave, dashing Ben, who could have been a cruel serial killer! Annie, so conniving and seductive, Cole Deschanel, smooth... Eddy, the unedifying cop, Maria, so enigmatic - and her esoteric Mom! But anyway, in recent times I have rather liked Wildflower series. That's just the way it is.
Q . You show a lot of competence in the work, as regards most of the major characters, special dramatic scenes, effects, psychology, overview etc. How did you pull it off?
BOLAJI: Actually the truth is I was rather sloppy in putting it together, but at least it's an attempt. For example, there were certain episodes/scenes that should have been included by me, certainly the stirring, dramatic moment when Ivy or Lily rose from the dead (she had been buried alive!) and she came back to shock and startle the Ardientes family... at a glitzy event. You know in real life the actress Maja Salvador is also a model, which she uses to good effect in the scene - sinuously making her way, model-like towards the Ardiente family ...then announcing that she is in fact the elusive Lily Cruz! Camia's daughter ... yes, something like this should have been included in the book.
Q. Hmmm. And what about the scene where Camia is shot by Julio? At least that is in your new book. I like the correlation or juxtaposition with a scene from one of your books (Tebogo and Uriah Heep ) where a man agonises dramatically over a dead daughter. In Wildflower, it is Diego who is in great agony over Camia's plight...
BOLAJI. Quite. But there are differences...or at least one or two major differences. In Wildflower, at that stage, the viewer is led to believe that Camia has been fatally shot... Camia's alluring fine hair sort of spread-eagled as she lies on the ground. (Adumbrations of Soyinka on 'King Lear's mane on asphalt heath' ... something like that...). But in the series, Camia in fact did not die. In my own book the young lady was certainly dead, and it was just a ... reminiscence, as it were.
