Fragile Distance amid a World of Woundedness: A Dialogue with Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike
FRAGILE DISTANCE AMID A WORLD OF WOUNDEDNESS
A DIALOGUE WITH UCHECHUKWU PETER UMEZURIKE
Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is assistant professor in the Department of English and Wayne O. McCready Emerging Fellow at the University of Calgary. His teaching and research interests include African and Black Diaspora literatures, postcolonial literatures, gender and sexuality, cultural studies, and creative writing. He is the author of Masculinities in Nigerian Fiction, there’s more, Double Wahala, Double Trouble and Wish Maker. He is a co-editor of Please Don’t Interrupt and Wreaths for a Wayfarer.
BY NKATEKO MASINGA
This conversation took place between Calgary, Alberta, Canada and Pretoria, South Africa, via email.
Nkateko: Hi, Uche. Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you about your forthcoming poetry collection. I am familiar with your work but I have to admit that I was wholly unprepared for the surge of emotions that the opening scenes of We Survived Until We Could Live would evoke as I began reading. I had to take a break after reading the prologue because I saw the scene play out quite vividly in my mind: Father tiptoes away from his sleeping wife and breaks the fourth wall with a whispered confession, directed at his silent, expectant audience: “I’ve never told my wife, not once—” and it is here, in this raw, vulnerable moment, that I am disarmed. The first person narrative allows for an intimacy that is almost manipulative. I am sympathetic.
The physician in my mind has already noted his olfactory hallucinations and is forming a differential diagnosis. As long as his wife is asleep and he is the solitary voice, I understand Father. This perception does not survive his son’s perspective, a shift which I am grateful for as it allows me to see glimpses of Mother, now awake but not yet speaking in her own voice. Son seems apprehensive at first, beginning with a recollection of his mother laughing with Father before letting us know that such moments are rare, and that he wishes they weren’t. At this point I am as intrigued as I am terrified that Mother’s perspective will once again shift the ground I am standing on. Do you see the state I am in before Mother has even said a word? Why does it take so long for us to hear her perspective, in her own voice and in her own words?
Uchechukwu: Thank you so much for your generous and profound comments on my book, Nkateko. It’s lovely to be chatting with you again. I am truly touched by the rich insights you’ve shared from reading We Survived Until We Could Live. Yes, you’re right that Mother doesn’t appear in the first few pages of the book until the poem, “While knitting, I catch my son looking at my hands,” because I wanted to heighten the dramatic impact and build suspense while preparing the reader for her own narrative.
I wanted Mother to linger in the background while the male voices share their stories, showing how the female presence, within the context of gender norms, often hovers behind the masculine. Yet, in that poem, we get a glimpse of Mother’s own memory – an especially traumatic one – as she reflects on human brutality, struggles to reconcile the past and present, and finds the words to speak of their shared wounds.
Nkateko: Thank you for sharing these beautiful poems with the world. The image of Mother lingering in the background while finding the words to express pain, not only her own but that of her husband and son, is so powerful. Her silence is not to be mistaken for stagnancy; she is holding space for their memories and carrying their grief, all while processing her own emotions. When we finally meet her, she is knitting, a seemingly mundane activity, but she catches her son watching her hands, which transports her to a memory of her younger self watching her own mother witnessing a traumatic scene involving her father. This image in Mother’s mind seems to be undergoing a type of Droste effect, which reminds me of the first stanza of a poem titled The House, by Warsan Shire. It reads as follows:
Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women.
Kitchen of lust, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy.
Sometimes, the men— they come with keys,
and sometimes, the men— they come with hammers.
There is an unmistakable fragility to Mother when we see her in “While knitting, I catch my son looking at my hands.” We glimpse briefly into the locked room in which she holds deeply traumatic memories of her childhood, with her son seeming to be the key to that particular room, although he cannot access it. There are things that Mother wishes her son could understand, but she is unable to verbalise them.
“I’m equally interested in the woundedness within the domestic or familial space, as I am in the wound of the postcolonial nation.“
Uchechukwu: I’m struck by the poignant details you gleaned while reading the poems. I also appreciate your reference to the Droste effect and its recursive quality. Structurally, I didn’t intend for We Survived Until We Could Live to have that kind of feel, but you’ll notice a hint of the recursive and self-referential in the poems, as if each poem is a poem within itself, or a story within a story. It’s like each poem echoes another while also relating back to itself. Perhaps knitting has a recursive, spiral-like, if not mesmerising, effect on anyone watching the needlework or the hands at work.
As an art form and creative practice, it also grounds both the person knitting and the observer. While writing that poem, I reflected on how memories sometimes emerge during mundane moments, collapsing time and space – a form of transcendence, if you will. In a way, I wanted to highlight how the haptic – a simple, everyday act such as knitting – can be a means of accessing memory. Additionally, I wanted to show the intergenerational trauma loop, and this moment between mother and son appears to illuminate it.
And you’re correct in the connection you make between trauma and language, and I think, for many people, trauma is ineffable, or beyond words. Yet that’s not a failure of language, but perhaps it’s in the dappled space between the ineffable and the expressible that empathy begins. Therefore, what lies beyond language calls for empathy. In that poem, Mother, seemingly lacking words to express Son’s suffering and her own, still creates a small tactile space to explore empathy – or to empathise with Son, even if it is not spoken or verbalised. By the way, Warsan Shire’s poetry is a delight for me.
Nkateko: For me as well. When asked why I write, I reflexively respond that poetry is a form of therapy. In hindsight I realise how this answer, in its simplicity, may sometimes come across solely as a reflection on the writing process being cathartic, rather than an acknowledgement of how other writers’ work has and continues to comfort and heal me. Your expression of delight towards Warsan Shire’s work reminds me how important it is to read each other’s work. We do not write in isolation but in community with, in solidarity with, and in response to others and their art.
The imagery of the poems in We Survived Until We Could Live echoing each other is incredibly powerful, particularly in reference to “While knitting, I catch my son looking at my hands” because earlier in the book, in “Wars only ghosts survive”, Son describes how Mother tends to ‘men in pain’; that she rests Son’s head in her lap the same way she cradles Father when he needs to be soothed. That image echoes when Mother looks at Son while knitting and realises that he wishes her hands were on his head, comforting him instead of knitting.
As a reader, a scene you have described in painstaking detail in one poem comes back to my mind when you mention it in another poem, even in one word. Based on this observation, I have a theory on why the form of storytelling you have chosen for this book works so well, but I am curious to know when it became clear to you that this would be a poetry collection. As a writer who is skilled in multiple genres, was there ever a point when you considered the narrative being conveyed in a different form, considering the fact that there was so much to be said by each person, about themselves, others, and the war?
Uchechukwu: I, too, sometimes wrestle with that seemingly simple question, “Why do I write?” My first book, Dark through the Delta, was written out of anger, anguish, and a disillusionment with the Nigerian political climate. I’ve come to understand that I write each book for a different reason. I’m not sure whether it is therapeutic or cathartic for me, but I write in the hope that someone, somewhere, might identify with or recognize something about the world as I experience it – even if that experience is radically different from their own.
To answer your question about whether I ever considered writing this book in a different narrative form, I’d say no. It was always poetry. When I started thinking about intergenerational trauma and how to tell stories about violence – both public and private – and the lingering effects of war on families, poetry was the first thing that came to mind. And since I was uncovering stories that were quite raw and intimate, I wanted the brevity and subtlety, even opacity, that poetry can offer. Poetry provided a different texture of immediacy and intimacy that a novel couldn’t.
Now, I’m interested in hearing your own theory, Nkateko. And yes, that trope of tending, Mother tending the pain of Father and Son, appears in some of the poems, including “Wars only ghosts survive,” as you mentioned.
Nkateko: My theory is rooted in a longstanding preoccupation with the relationship between an author’s intent and their reader’s interpretation of the work. As an interviewer I have the opportunity to indulge this preoccupation through questions that explore authorial intent beyond what a preface can offer, while also being a temporary stand-in for the reader who is yet to receive their copy. Our conversation therefore becomes a microcosm of that universal relationship and a point of reference for the next interviewer. In the introductory note of this book, you anchor the reader, with vulnerability and care, to a past that many are still healing from.
You share that you are a child of war survivors and speak of the devastating impact of the Nigeria-Biafra war and the memories that still haunt survivors. It is here, in this generous note, that I meet Son for the first time. So my theory is already alluded to in your reference to intimacy, particularly with Son, who I spent the most time with in the book. I met him with empathy and sensitivity, then explored the relationship between him and the other personae through that lens. I acknowledge that the “I” is not always an author’s reference to the self but rather an invitation to lean in closer, so I found this book quite confronting. I saw Son and his family, but also the fragility of the relationships within my own family and the wounds we are still tending to, individually and collectively.
Uchechukwu: I don’t take the relationship between an author and their reader for granted because, for me, every poem is an invitation into the smallness of the author’s world, but within that smallness lies an expansive vision of what we understand as the fact of being flesh and blood. This is why the book aims to shed light on a family’s woundedness, whether emotional or psychological, produced by historical traumas such as wars. As you can tell, I’m equally interested in the woundedness within the domestic or familial space, as I am in the wound of the postcolonial nation. The central question of this book is: What does it mean to survive after a war is over? In other words, how does one live with ghosts?
I’m glad you spent time with Son because his voice not only captures the tension between innocence and experience but also shows how we should understand his proximity to violence and trauma on one hand, and his distance from historical trauma on the other. I suppose even this distance is fragile and porous. For example, in the poems “The giant tree” and “Lemongrass,” Son draws the reader into another world of woundedness, that of a fellow boy, whose father has a different relationship with historical trauma. Nevertheless, both boys are, sadly, intimate with violence and trauma.
Now, there’s a temptation to equate the “I” with the “self,” and this is common in lyric or confessional poetry, which I had to navigate while writing this book. Yet the “I” in poetry is both discrete and relational, bounded and boundless, sparse and abundant. So, I appreciate how you describe the “I” as an “invitation to lean in closer,” which, to me, shows the intimacy that each persona – Father, Mother, or Son – extends to the reader or the interviewer. This is what the book’s introductory note suggests: an overture or invitation, so to speak, for the reader to lean in just a little closer as they observe a wounded family making sense of love, intimacy, and life.
Nkateko: It is interesting to witness the juxtaposition between the boys’ budding friendship and their fathers’ enmity. Son is attempting to navigate the boundaries in this relationship and has made the distinction between home, school and the soccer field, where home is the territory in which he has to be on guard and cannot engage with the other boy, or the boy’s sister. Their fathers are waging a war in which their children are the casualties and we see Son becoming aware of what his new friend is going through at home, just by observing him. The “smaller wars” in domestic settings have far-reaching consequences, don’t they? It makes me fearful of what would happen to these children if their parents found out about their friendship, which has developed significantly from them tentatively beginning to speak to each other in “The giant tree” to them resting on the grass together after a soccer game in “Lemongrass”. Their mutual silence has graduated from one of apprehension to one of contentment and comfort.
Can you take me through the process of determining the order of the poems in the book? It is so perfect in its chronology that it reads like a novel in verse.
Uchechukwu: I understand that fear. I sometimes ask my students at the University of Calgary, when we discuss texts that complicate our understanding of home and belonging: Where is home if it has become a site of violence and harm? Yes, the “smaller wars” in the domestic space are consequential. Their impact and the psychic violence they inflict on victims are not always confined to the home – a reminder that, for a nation as fraught and inflammable as Nigeria, ethnic tension seethes in the shadows and hostility may flare at any moment. I remember growing up in Lagos and realizing that boys in the neighbourhood still managed to become friends, even though their parents avoided each other and barely spoke. It makes me think of how children rarely inherit their parents’ animosity. In We Survived Until We Could Live, I wanted to represent the reality of these boys from different ethnic groups whose parents were enemies during the war.
It was important for me to touch on the tension underlying their budding friendship and to show that there is space for a different way of being with others in the world, one untainted by suspicion and hatred. Despite the ethnic distrust and traumatic history between their parents, the boys recognize their shared vulnerability and cautiously explore a connection, however nascent. This is a question I am trying to unravel: How do we find a space to recognize one another’s wounds without perpetuating the harm and violence of the past? In other words, how do we repair relationships shaped by decades of enmity?
I like the idea of a novel in verse. A fellow poet, Ndubuisi Martins Aniemeka, said the narrative structure reminded him of an Ibsen play. I rearranged the poems in the book a couple of times and felt a little frustrated after a while. I struggled because I wanted the poems to follow a narrative structure with a prologue, a beginning, a middle, an end, and an epilogue. Thankfully, my amazing editor, Helen Hajnoczky, at the University of Calgary Press, noticed my struggle and offered a few ideas. It was a lightbulb moment, and I saw what I needed to do. Helen’s suggestion encouraged me to reorder the poems in an elegant way to highlight critical, telling moments in the lives of Father, Mother, and Son. We wanted to present readers with a compelling story of the family’s intimate yet troubled life.
Nkateko: Thank you for sharing those thought-provoking questions, Uche. I will be sitting with them as I reread the book. Thank you also for showing how this labour of love passed through many hands before it reached mine and soon, those of other readers worldwide. I wish you a successful book release season, where more questions will be posed and pondered. I am grateful to have entered the arena of thought and dialogue around this book so early and in such amazing company. You are a brilliant light and it was my absolute honour to be in conversation with you. I wish you the very best.
Uchechukwu: Thank you, Nkateko, for engaging with my work so thoughtfully, attentively, exquisitely, and graciously. I am grateful that my latest poetry book, We Survived Until We Could Live, resonated with you in so many radiant and affecting ways. It’s always a delight to chat with you about the arts and literature! Stay buoyant.
Photo credit for featured image of Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike: © Layne McKenna
Nkateko Masinga is an award-winning South African writer whose poetry has been translated into French, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada and Romanian. Her latest book, Daughter Wound, was published by UK publisher Hazel Press in April 2024 and was named Book of the Week at the London Review Bookshop in the first week of its release.
