Collecting Little Pieces through Observation: A Dialogue with Joyce Odera Nwankwo

Joyce: (Laughs.) There are. There’s a sex scene that had me thinking, “Do I really need to add this here?” At the end of the day, I am who I am and I’m also a storyteller. Whatever happens isn’t as relevant to my experience as it is to the fact that I wrote every part of this novel in my way.

Thank you for your remark about overcoming the shame of comparison; I appreciate your sincerity. As far as comparisons go, I had friends who read the first draft and tried to draw strings here and there, to which I said, “Quite frankly, if I wrote about myself, it would be far more compelling.” But I don’t have the courage to do that. Not yet.

Davina: When I read “…think of it like learning how to be Nigerian,” I instantly thought of Elnathan John’s Be(com)ing Nigerian: A Guide. The ‘How to Worship the Nigerian God’ section opens with a clarification about the importance of prayer:

…a few people confuse being a worshiper with complicated things like character, good work or righteousness. The fact that you choose to open every meeting with multiple prayers does not mean that you intend to do what is right. It nonetheless means that the opening prayer is important. Nothing, I repeat nothing, can work without it. If you are gathered to discuss how to inflate contracts, begin with an opening prayer or two. If you are gathered to discuss how to rig elections, begin with a prayer. The Nigerian God appreciates communication. When you sneak away from your wife to call your girlfriend in the bathroom, and she asks if you will come this weekend, you must say — in addition to “Yes” — “By God’s grace” or “God willing” or “insha Allah”. It doesn’t matter what language you use. Just say it. The Nigerian God likes to be consulted before you do anything, including a trip to Obudu to see one of your [other] lovers. Sometimes, when you have impressed one of your many lovers with your sexual prowess and they look at you in amazement, just say: ‘Baby, I give God all the glory.’

Every time I reread John’s book, I find something new to laugh at. Its title could easily be Be(com)ing Ugandan: A Guide. The similarities between Nigeria and Uganda are equal parts comforting and disturbing!

Joyce: I will absolutely read Elnathan John’s Be(com)ing Nigerian: A Guide. That was such a hilarious excerpt.

Davina: Please, please, please get a copy. That book will kill you properly. I no longer read books when I’m using public transport because other passengers side-eye me whenever I laugh aloud at something on a page. The ones at the front kept turning to give me “…but who is this mad woman that’s daring to disturb our peace?” looks. 

Joyce: (Laughs.) Oh, they don’t! 

Davina: They do! What is the funniest book you’ve read recently?

Joyce: The funniest book I’ve read recently, this year actually, is Born a Crime by Trevor Noah.

Davina: Ah, Trevor Noah. I love him. When my sister and I had just discovered him, we’d go around imitating his accent and repeating parts of his stand-up routines to each other: “eeeh weeeh aaapa…we want to know: where does this lightning come from?”

Joyce: I didn’t only enjoy his ability to explain serious issues in a humorous way but, at multiple points, while reading, paused to reflect on and ponder a couple of points he raised. It’s a brilliant book.

Davina: When I mentioned John’s book, I also meant to ask about the title of yours.

Joyce: Honestly, Davina, the first title I came up with was Nigerians Will Have My Head for This. 

Davina: You worried about backlash!

Joyce: Oh, yes, definitely. I wrote about a protagonist who openly defies certain social norms most Nigerians live by. It’s only natural to expect the “How dare you?” eye-roll. Although I also think the title was exaggerated for effect. It only changed when my editor pointed out that it didn’t quite capture the essence of the novel, at least not in a serious way.

Davina: Is this a professional editor that you keep on retainer, or a writer friend you regularly rely on for guidance?

Joyce: I worked with a professional editor, although not on retainer. (Laughs.) From the onset, I wanted to work with someone who is open minded – someone who can appreciate finer nuances. I was lucky to work with Kelechi Njoku, who helped me refine the structure of the story. I’m not sure we would be having this conversation without what he offered.

I wanted a title that reflected what I believe to be the mental state of the protagonist, Dimma, and he helped me bring this idea clearly into focus. Throughout the novel, we see Dimma undergo a painful realisation of who she is. She’s forced to reexamine her values and the internal parameters she uses to experience and judge herself and others. In the process of this reexamination, she realises that she had been caged by what she had considered to be her value system. Hence Delightful Cage.

Davina: I like Nigerians Will Have My Head For This. Some day, you should write a book with that title. Perhaps a series of light-hearted and playful mini-essays?

Joyce: You know what? As you suggested, I will keep the title close; you never know what might pop up.

Davina: What did writing this novel teach you?

Joyce: I found a quote, by Paulo Coelho, that perfectly explains what I have learned: “Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”

There’s another quote, also by Paulo Coelho: “We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It’s one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it’s another to think that yours is the only path.” 

Before you say anything, yes, I am a huge fan of Paulo Coelho’s work. Other than The Alchemist, I highly recommend Veronika Decides To Die and Eleven Minutes. 

Davina: I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, Joyce, but where I’m from, one is generally required to speak of motherhood in glowing terms, and with hallowed language. I’ve learned that it takes more than the usual dose of bravery to admit to yourself or to someone else that your experience of being a mother was disappointing – nothing at all like what people promised it’d be.

In response to a question about how she came to terms with writing a story that “…shatters the myth of childbearing as complete bliss,” Ukamaka Olisakwe said, “I think it was a choice between insanity and truth”:

Every time I listened to certain songs about sweet motherhood, or heard the stories about the perfect childbirth experience where the mother emerged unscathed at the end of the story, or even when I saw those photos of the smiling, perfect mother holding her chubby beautiful child, they triggered something unpleasant inside me. Those songs, those images, had long become the single story of motherhood I grew up to. They said childbirth completes a woman and gives her prestige. They said the woman hears the cry of her baby at the end of a birthing ordeal and she goes on to live happily ever after. It turned out that that wouldn’t be my story. And there were no kind stories out there in my immediate community about my experience that I could connect to. Everywhere I turned to, mothers performed perfection or spoke in derision about mothers whose husbands chased after girls with firm bodies.

I’m thinking of this in relation to the scene where Dimma is in her mother’s room and her attention shifts to the photos displayed on the wall, which range from when Dimma is a month old to when she’s six-years-old. Dimma associates her sixth birthday with the time her mother started to find motherhood disappointing.

What choices did you have to make in order to properly write the stories of Dimma and her mother? 

Joyce: You know, Davina, I really appreciate you for pointing that out. I find that motherhood is such a sensitive subject and, more often than not, we prefer to think about it graciously. Unfortunately, this often isn’t the case, especially when people start opening up about the difficulties of being raised by a flawed person who happened to be their mother, or when a mother starts being honest about how much of herself it seems she has to give up to fit the gracious role of motherhood.

I grew up observing mothers, some of them my aunties, being resentful, often covertly, about all the things they had to give up in order to be a ‘good’ mother. I discovered that resentment doesn’t create a healthy environment for either the mother or child to thrive in. So, acting as if motherhood is always blissful, or is supposed to be an endless stream of joy, doesn’t permit mothers to share the more nuanced parts of their experiences. 

My relationship with my mother probably gave me the courage to forge ahead while writing the dynamics between Dimma and her mother. Primarily because for as long as I can remember, my mother has always been honest with me about her experiences and her failures. This has helped me see her as a person that has a life that’s set apart from her role as my mother. It has also allowed me to connect with her on a much deeper level – one that extends beyond the mother-daughter relationship. So, I guess, this foundation allowed me to explore such a sensitive topic.

My goal here is to present the characters in all their glories and with all their flaws. I think when we begin to see people as they are, we create room for understanding, forgiveness, and deeper emotional connections.

Davina: When Rachel Cusk wrote about her experiences and failures as a new mother in A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, she received severe criticism, some of which she addressed in I Was Only Being Honest:

On and on it went, back and forth: I was accused of child-hating, of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, most often, of being too intellectual. […] I was cited everywhere as having said the unsayable: that it is possible for a woman to dislike her children, even to regret having brought them into the world.

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad [one]. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next. This time, it was different. Again and again people judged the book not as readers but as mothers, and it was judgment of a sanctimoniousness whose like I had never experienced. Yet I had experienced it, in a way: it was part of what I had found intolerable in the public culture of motherhood, the childcare manuals and the toddler groups, the discourse of domestic life, even the politics of birth itself. In motherhood the communal was permitted to prevail over the individual, and the result, to my mind, was a great deal of dishonesty.”

Did you receive unfavourable reviews of your story? Did they influence how you re-wrote? Many Ugandans I know pride themselves in communality – in the idea that each of us is because we are. You spoke earlier of the need to see and meet people as and where they are; how did this play out vis-à-vis deciding whether to privilege the individual or the community?

Joyce: When I wrote the first draft of Delightful Cage, I was so unsettled by how the story would be received that I had a couple of friends and their friends read it. Here is why I was unsettled: it’s a contemporary novel, set in Lagos, that features real locations and deals with sensitive issues. I was afraid that I wasn’t telling the story properly or portraying certain things correctly.

If I took to heart some of the remarks I got, I would have abandoned the novel. In the end, I decided that if that draft could stir so many emotions, positive and negative, then the story must be worth telling. 

I privileged the individual over the community on purpose. The novel is written in the first person point of view, which allows the protagonist to shed light on her thought process, motivations, and actions. I can’t think of anything that gets more individual than that. 

Back to the excerpt you shared, I haven’t experienced motherhood; my ideas about what motherhood should look like and how it should feel are limited. However, I believe that, like most things, some people handle it better than others and that everyone should be allowed space for their truth. We can’t have a thriving society if some truths are treated as inferior or unacceptable; what that does is breed deception.

I think resistance to contrary opinions is based on the impression and fear that they invalidate our experiences. However, what different perspectives do is widen our view of an issue, a situation, a problem, and how possible solutions should be implemented. This is important because no one has a monopoly on what truth is: there’s no one with a 360 degree viewpoint. 

Without open conversations, we don’t give ourselves room to question what we believe are absolute truths. How then can we resolve, collaborate, and progress? I think what would be useful is to learn how to sit with the discomfort created by opinions that are contrary to the ones we hold, otherwise we will be polarised and lack the capacity for the kind of conversations that build community.