The Ambrose Ehirim-Chika Unigwe Q & A Interview

THE AMBROSE EHIRIM FILES INTERVIEW

Image courtesy of Chika Unigwe

Chika Unigwe is the author of fiction, poetry, articles and educational material. She won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition for her story "Borrowed Smile", a Commonwealth Short Story Award for "Weathered Smiles" and a Flemish literary prize for "De Smaak van Sneeuw", her first short story written in Dutch. "The Secret", another of her short pieces, was nominated for the 2004 Caine Prize. She was the recipient of a 2007 Unesco-Aschberg fellowship for creative writing, and of a 2009 Rockefeller Foundation fellowship for creative writing. Unigwe's novel "On Black Sister's Street" about Nigerian prostitutes in Belgium won the 2012 NLNG Prize for Literature.

EXCERPTS:

Tell me a little bit about yourself

I was born and raised in Enugu. I got my first degree from the University of Nigeria, and a Ph.D from the University of Leiden, Holland

When did it start occuring to you that writing was going to be your major art?

I have always enjoyed reading and writing. I published a book of poetry while I was an undergraduate, but I did not begin to call myself a writer until after my second novel was published

What had influenced that?

I grew up surrounded by readers and books. There seemed no better way to spend my free time than by doing either.

After discovering the potentials of your talents in writing, what followed next?

I wrote and sent off stories blind to publishers. It was a blind submission that got me my first book contract: two Macmillan Readers, published years ago , and used in primary and secondary schools in some African countries.

Reading "On Black Sisters Street," your second novel, one finds out it's focused on the alarming pandemic of prostitution with Nigerian women abroad. What had compelled you to write on a disturbing subject?

I was very curious about why NIgerian women would travel so far to work in the sex industry. Curiosity was the initial driving force

Why was the plot located in Belgium?

There are many Nigerian prostitutes in Belgium, and since I live here, it seemed the natural location.

The characters in "On Black Sisters Street", especially Sisi, whose dreams would not be known, I would imagine, how did you find yourself so comfortable relating to the characters -- Ama, Joyce and Efe -- the way you portrayed them in the book?

Every writer has to be able to live in the head of her characters. I had to make myself a blank blackboard for the characters to inscribe their lives on me. I had to wipe off that board every time a new character had to be created and totally surrender myself to that new character.

Let's talk about the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Literature Prize. You came out a winner among a cast of the nation's promising and great writers. What was your reaction upon hearing that "Chika Unigwe is the winner of the 2012 NLNG Literature Award"?

I screamed. I tend to do that a lot when I am too happy for words

How did the news reach you?

I saw it on Twitter.

On your fellow competitors, what were your thoughts about them, particularly when the race had been downsized to three and here you are caught up with the best two for the $100,000 prize money?

My thoughts on them?

Yes, your thoughts.

I was curious to read the books on the intial shortlist that I had not read. I am always delighted to discover new writers and new books.

Let's talk about Nigeria and literature. It has often been said Nigerians don't respect writers. If you'd agree and in your opinion, what would you say had been the problem?

I have been in Nigeria a few times in the past two years, as a writer, and I have never felt disrespected. The organizations I have worked with have been very professional.

If you have been following up, what's your take on an unstable religious and political situation in Nigeria?

I think it's a tragedy that the government seems unable or unwilling to tackle a situation that is getting worse by the day.

What takes your time when you are not writing?

I read. I raise children. I take lessons in French and Logic.

You have an extra $100,000 to spend, what's on your list of things to be done? Anything we should know?

I have absolutely no idea!

Weep, Beloved Nigeria: Three Contemporary Nigerian Writers On A Theme

THE GUARDIAN NIGERIA

WRITERS are like town criers. And between the year 2000 and 2011, Nigerian creative writers have worriedly depicted the downward slide to criminality in the Nigerian polity. At the turn of the century, writers like Maik Nwosu (Alpha Song, 2001), Omo Uwaifo, (Fattening House, 2001), Wale Okediran (Dreams, Die at Twilight, 2001), Fola Arthur-Worrey (The Diaries of Mr. Michael, 2003), Chim Newton (Under the Cherty Tree, 2003), and Toni Kan Onwordi (Ballad of Rage, 2004), have shown Nigeria as a nation adrift. The writers listed above are discussed by this writer as “fleshly” (1), lamenting that Nigeria, after military rule has become a nation without a soul, a rudderless nation that had emerged from military dictatorship, into the raging fire of corruption, prostitution, debauchery, and mindless hedonism.

Within the same decade, another set of writers, as if on cue, began to scream at the level of moral decadence into which Nigeria had fallen in so short a time. They concentrated on seemingly new crimes which just reared their ugly heads, as if the engagements of the “fleshly” school of writers were mere dress rehearsals to new crimes that just emerged: kidnapping, ritual killings, selling of body parts, and human trafficking. Writers who have especially written on human trafficking are:

(a) Chris Abani: Becoming Abigail (2006)

(b) Jude Dibia: Unbridled (2007)

(c) Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo: Trafficked, (2008)

(d) Tony Alum: Images From A Broken Mirror (2008)

(e) Chinedu Anyaso: My Daughters’ Trouble (2009)

Now, “Three Nigerian writers on a Theme” which is the subject of this paper are: Chika Unigwe: On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) (2) Ngozi Achebe: Onaedo, the Blacksmith’s Daughter (2010) (3) and Olusola Olugbesan: Only a canvas (201. Strangely what unites these three writes is their united pursuit of the theme of human trafficking and prostitution abroad by our women involving all other collateral crimes including murder and the international slave trade, plus general insecurity within the Nigerian polity which these crimes engender.

We may begin with Olusola Olugbesan’s Only A Canvas, without forgetting the general theme of this study which concerns the unhappy events in the Nigerian polity: corruption, prostitution and human trafficking. Only A Canvas opens on an isolated rural environment, segregated because they are Osu, with Eze and a local wrestling champion, Joe, with his 3 wives (Nneka, Ifeoma and including Ngozi), Amaka his daughter, plus a devious friend, Obi. On the non-appearance of Okafor for the wrestling championship, Joe became triple champion. Amaka met Jane who gave her chocolate bars, and Edgar, a photojournalist was there.

Only A Canvas while decrying the rot in the Nigerian society is written in the thriller tradition. The setting is “romantic” in its remoteness, an isolated Osu society segregated from other communities. As in the true thriller tradition, there is plenty of adventure, crime and criminals, cop and robber chase, a serious manhunt, sensational and action-packed scenes, law agents and criminals on the run. In a thriller, there is a happy ending, engineered by the victory of the hero (the good character) over the villain.

Only A Canvas in addition to reading like a thriller also reads like a fairy tale where Amaka, the protagonist, is Cinderella the Enchanted Princess who, in the end, does not marry Tom Bridge, the Prince Charming. If read like a fairytale, Mrs. Anna Bridge becomes the fairy godmother who not only protects Amaka but provides her with a magic wand - travel, education - all enabling her to excel and ride unscathed, to freedom and wealth, In a fairytale world, Amaka is a waif besieged by Obi, the ogre and demon- king. Amaka’s father, the wrestling champion becomes the culture-hero who in the end overcomes the machinations of the demon-king. As in fairytales, those who are good are so good they have no faults, and those who are bad have no redeeming features. Mrs. Anna Bridge, Amaka’s fairy godmother, is so good, but her husband Donald, ever corrupt and ever womanizing, has no redeeming features. Other good characters like the Eze of Umuise, police officers Nasir and Danladi are painted as saints. While police officer Bama (who rapes women in his office) and Mama T., end disastrously.

In spite of everything, Olusola Olugbesan on the evil-infested, corrupt-ridden polity called Nigeria that accommodates human traffickers like Obi, corrupt officers like the DCO in the Kano office, and devious white men like Donald Bridge. Although the story of Amaka ends on a happy note, Only a Canvas is not a happy novel, considering the criminal and human trafficking activities of captain Obi and his marauding gang.

Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street is set mainly in Europe (Antwerp, Belgium) to be precise. It reflects unhappily the fears, exploitation, shame, murder, humiliation of being a prostitute in Europe. But the major issue is what pushes Nigerian women to Europe for prostitution: personal ambition? Problems with joblessness in Nigeria? Limited opportunities? The answer may be: all of these.

Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street is a story of four mature women (Ama, Joyce, Efe, Sisi) who willingly trafficked themselves to Europe under the aegis of a one man criminal syndicate headed by Mr. Dele. Although these women were not forced, the fundamental issue is why each agreed to go abroad. The reason is that Nigeria failed them as a country to fulfil their dreams, and negates their longings to live a self-fulfilling life. But irony is the weapon used by the author to mock their ambitions. Chisom (Sisi) the most ambitious, with big dreams about the future because she is a graduate, is the most frustrated. She is murdered, not by racist Belgians, but by her own fellow Nigerian, Segun. Her death leaves everyone weak because of its seeming senselessness, at a point she was about to achieve her aim through marriage to Luc, a Belgian banker, Her murder has the implications of a double tragedy for she was an only child through whom her parents hoped to achieve the dreams of their frustrated lives: buy a car, own a house. Of the four prostitutes under madam’s control in Antwerp, Sisi reluctantly submitted to prostitution, a humiliating criminal way to make it to wealth and influence.

Irony skirts Sisi’s dreams for she never realizes any of the castles she built in the air:

She would work for a few years, keep her eyes on the prize, earn enough to pay back what she owed Dele, and then open up her own business. She would resurrect as Chisom, buy a house in Victoria Garden City. Marry a man who would give her beautiful children. And her beautiful children would go to private schools. She would have three house girls, a gardener, a driver, a cook. Her life would be nothing compared to what it was now. And nothing compared to her parents’. (pp. 102- 103).

Ama, who was violated at the age of eight by her step-father confessed: “you know what Joyce? I made this choice. I came here with my eyes wide open” (p. 114).

On Black Sisters Street is not a happy book. Its central theme is frustration. The four girls: Sisi, Ama, Joyce and Efe left Nigeria out of frustration and incipient despair. Sisi is frustrated because Nigeria could not offer her opportunities for a self-fulfilling job after a degree in Banking and Finance. She is further frustrated because she could not lighten the burden of her parents’ dreams since her joblessness compounded the frustrations of her parents. Ama’s frustration stemmed from the fake existence in her parents’ house. Her mother who was hailed by her husband Brother Cyril, as an angel and a virgin had actually come to Brother Cyril with a pregnancy that they had covered up. Brother Cyril, a sanctimonious “Man of God” in white, raped Ama at eight and when she later confronted him, to further cover up their fake existence forced Ama out of their house, to live with Mama Eko from where Ama escaped to Antwerp through the services of Dele.

Ngozi Achebe’s Onaedo, the Blacksmith’s Daughter joins Chika Unigwe and Olusola Olugbesan in expanding the imaginative terrain of African literature. This writer in an earlier study had accused African soil, while European writers imaginatively invade other continents. It has cited EM Forster’s A Passage to India and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as examples. The three writers under discussion have each extended their stories to Brazil and America (Ngozi Achebe); Antwerp, Belgium (Chika Unigwe); and London, England (Olusola Olugbesan). They collectively give readers the impression that Nigerian literature is still evolving.

Ngozi Achebe’s Onaedo, the Blacksmith’s Daughter still harps on the unhappy theme of human rights abuses within the Nigerian soil as it touches on the vexed issue of the beginnings of the trans-Atlantic slave trade especially to Sao Tome and Brazil. Historians have graphically described the trans-Atlantic slave trade as an unhappy episode in our history. But Ngozi Achebe’s Onaedo, the Blacksmith’s Daughter is historically important by giving us rare insights into how criminal-minded Portuguese merchants, Alvarez and Pasquale, using criminal-minded natives, Ideheno and his comrade-in-crime, Oguebie, hounded out fellow citizens, and captured them, under the guise of working in the white man’s farm.

Through flashbacks the reader is given insights into a slave outpost in Sao Tome, a halfway house for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Life in Sao Tome is shown to be depraved and degraded both for the slaves and for the white slave holders. Diego da Silva, owner of the plantation in Sao Tome is shown to be debauched, depraved, and immoral, with his several wives, mistresses, and slaves. Diego sleeps with his female slaves at will, is an inveterate gambler and alcoholic. Although there were initial moral qualms among the white slave traders, this was brushed aside. When Pasquale objected to brutally capturing fellow men as slaves, Alvarez reassures him: you have to trust me. Slave trading is a business like any other. The only difference is we’re transporting workers instead of goods”.

The story of Onaedo is that the quest and struggle for freedom is an unending and eternal one. In the end Onaedo in spite of mind-numbing suffering and tribulations regains her freedom as well as the freedom of her three children, born under slavery.

In sum, these three authors, writing about prostitution, slavery, human rights abuses and all kinds of insecurity in the Nigerian polity give readers cause for worry. That about all the writers mentioned in this study, writers writing in the first decade of the 21st century harp on the same unhappy themes should alarm the Nigerian government. And it is indeed alarmed, having in recent years established the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), committed to rescuing Nigerian women engaged in prostitution abroad. How much energy it commits to this alarming pandemic remains to be seen.

Charles E. Nnolim,

NOTES:

Charles F, Nnolim. “Contemporary Nigerian Fiction”. Issues in African Literature. (Yenagoa, Treasure Books, 2009).

Chika Unigwe. On Black Sisters’ Street (London: Vintage Books, 2009).

Ngozi Achebe. Onaedo, the Blacksmith‘s Daughter (Lagos: Mandac and Best Publishing, 2010).

Olusola Olugbesan. Only A Canvas (Ibadan; Mosuro Publishers, 2011).

Book Review: Dreams Of A Better Life, Fueled By Prostitution

By Jessica Gelt, Los Angeles Times

"On Black Sisters Street," By Chika Unigwe
Random House (254 pages, $25)


In Chika Unigwe's novel "On Black Sisters Street," the snow-covered streets of Antwerp, Belgium, are a beacon of freedom to the four disadvantaged African women who serve as the book's protagonists. Recruited in Lagos, Nigeria, by a fat slug of a sex trafficker named Dele, the women work as prostitutes in glass stalls along the byways of Antwerp's seedy red light district. They dream big, though, and they never make excuses about why they are there.

In fact, big dreams are why the women decide to work in the sex trade in exchange for passage to Europe, which they view as a paradise of opportunity and riches, far removed from the crushing squalor and bleak opportunities in Africa. The question of what makes a victim is very much at the core of this chilling piece of fiction. And the women - Sisi, Ama, Joyce and Efe - refuse to characterize themselves as such, no matter how tragic the circumstances that pushed them to choose life as prostitutes.

It is this defiance that gives the fierce women their strength as characters, and it is this defiance that makes the many men in the book look even more vile. If the book has one major fault, it is that. The men in the story are so contemptible they come off as stereotypes, all fitting into one of five too-neat categories: weak, cruel, cowardly, vicious and evil.

The story begins after Sisi has been murdered, leaving the other three to sit in the flat they sublet from their callous madam to ponder what happened and why. This leads them to reveal their histories - fragmented, sorrowful memories still tender to the ear, that they packed along with their clothes and girlhood trinkets when they left Lagos for an uncertain future in Europe.

Unigwe was born in Nigeria and lives in Belgium. In the book's acknowledgments, she writes of her gratitude to "the nameless Nigerian sex workers who allowed me into their lives, answering my questions and laughing at my ignorance." So, while the novel - Unigwe's second - is a work of fiction, it is drawn from a pool of vivid experience.

The story is told in flashback, with a different chapter dedicated to each woman's story. These chapters are bookended by small moments from the present, and a running description of the final days of Sisi's life, concluding with a window on her death. In this way, the book reads almost like four short stories strung together by a common thread of hardship.

If the women made poor choices, they were driven to them by the predatory ways of the men around them. Ama was repeatedly raped by a man she thought was her father. She learns that he is her stepfather only when he kicks her out. Joyce was forced into a refugee camp in Sudan after the Janjaweed militia - armed Sudanese Arabs who have been at the core of the Sudanese conflict for nearly a decade - killed her family in front of her and then gang-raped her. Efe was impregnated at 16 by a much older, married man who left her when she made her shame known.

Ironically, Sisi's story is the least overtly terrible. She grew up very poor and was encouraged to go to college, which she did. But she could never find a job and feared a life languishing in a tiny, dirty apartment in Lagos like her father, who never amounted to anything.

The women meet Dele, who promises to pay their way to Europe, where they will work as prostitutes until they pay off their debt. When they have paid him, he says, they will be free to achieve their grand dreams in the West. Ama, for example, once wanted to go to university, but now dreams of becoming a pop star.

"I imagine that I am standing on a podium posing for my fans. I imagine them screaming out my name, shouting out for autographs. I imagine that my real father hears about me, his famous daughter and reveals himself to me," she says, after Joyce says she thought she'd become a doctor, and Efe says she wanted to be a famous writer.

They then wonder what Sisi's dreams were. They will never know, because Sisi takes her secrets and hopes to the grave. But the reader knows that she has been pretending to be a rich tourist on her days off and that she has fallen in love with a kind Belgian man who stays with her after he knows her trade. He also asks her to leave for him. She was leaving the day she was killed.

The senselessness of this death amid a jagged landscape of words that reveal the ugliest sides of poverty, desire and greed is breathtaking. "On Black Sisters Street" is not an uplifting book; instead, it mirrors life itself, where bad things happen to good people who are simply trying to build delicate fortresses of well-being around their vulnerable psyches. They may fail often and their defeat may be bitter, but when the sun rises, they will get up. They will try again.