Writing paths
At the heart of the silences and despair of Nigerian migrants, with Chika Unigwe
Audio 04:16
Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe in the studio at RFI (April 2022) © Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint/RFI
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
7 mins
Author of four novels and a collection of short stories, Chika Unigwe shares her life between Nigeria and the United States where she lives today after having lived in Belgium for fifteen years.
Her novel,
On Black Sisters' Street
, which has just been published in French under the title
Fata Morgana
, has established this writer as one of the major voices of African literature.
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"
The world was exactly as it should be
"
,
thus begins
Fata Morgana.
With this scathing irony about the human condition
.
The world was very far from what it should be.
It is precisely the discrepancy between the world as it is and as it should is the real subject of this novel.
Fata morgana
, which in Flemish means "mirage" or "illusion", is the first novel to be translated into French by Nigerian Chika Unigwe.
Published in English in 2009, this moving story recounts the life rich in hopes and dramas of four Nigerian prostitutes in Antwerp.
Fata Morgana
made
Chika Unigwe
known throughout the English-speaking world.
"
Let's talk about sex
"
Its protagonists, Sisi, Ama, Efe and Joyce are "hunkering down" in the red-light district of Antwerp.
Victims, consenting for some, of a fresh meat trafficker from Lagos, the four women landed in Belgium, dreaming of being able to fly on their own, once their debts to their Nigerian "protector" had been paid.
The novel opens with the discovery of the corpse of Sissi, brutally murdered.
This tragic news item is the starting point of this choral novel in the pages of which the stories of this feminine quartet intersect and intersect, seeking their salvation in the mirage of Europe.
Born in Enugu,
Nigeria
, Chika Unigwe lived for fifteen years in Belgium where in the 1990s she accompanied her husband, a Flemish engineer.
She already had great literary ambitions, but she never imagined that she would one day write about prostitution.
The novelist likes to say that in her Catholic family in Nigeria, which is particularly pious, it was forbidden to pronounce the word "sex".
"
When I was a teenager, I loved the song
Let's talk about sex by Salt-N-Pepa", she told the microphone of RFI.
The teenager circumvented the difficulty by replacing the word “sex” by “bread”.
"
Let's talk about bread
" sounded less scabrous to parental ears!
It was during a trip to Brussels that the novelist witnessed, for the first time, the sad fate of African women exposing themselves in lace bustier and thigh-high boots in shop windows, in the brothel district of the Belgian capital.
The book was born from several months of surveys that the author conducted with prostitutes, in order to better understand the trajectories, the family and personal motives that push Nigerian women to go to Europe to trade in their bodies.
The result is a breathtaking dive into the bare truth of life, in a style that brilliantly blends pathos and verve.
Path
“
As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to write
,” says the novelist.
Her father kept his daughter's diaries in his family museum for a long time, as well as her first notebooks, which included a lot of poetry.
It is indeed through poetry that Chika Unigwe entered literature.
She published her first poem at the age of 15, in an influential anthology of Nigerian poetry, published in 1989. This was followed by two collections of poetry,
Teardrops
in 1993 and
Born in Nigeria
in 1995, two volumes of eclectic mix of sensitivities "
which in no way reflect my current concerns or my style
", warns the author.
Having moved on to fiction a long time ago, Chika Unigwe has not given up on poetry.
“
Poetry is harder to write, so I hardly write any more,
” she says
.
But I continue to read poetry and I write a poem every year.
Also, in the creative writing classes that I teach, I recommend that my students read poetry.
Poetry teaches us to distill words and to express being and the world with a remarkable economy of means.
There is in poetry a concern for brevity and conciseness.
Novelists would do well to learn from it.
»
If in her poetic productions the young Chika Unigwe celebrated love and other intimate subjects, her novels are intended to be committed.
The question of uprooting is at the heart of Chika Unigwe's fiction.
The novelist has taken up the theme of African migration, the dramas and impasses of which she recounts through poignant stories.
Its protagonists often have women.
The loneliness of migrant women trying to rebuild themselves despite the horrors of exile and racism, was the subject of her first novel,
The Phoenix
, with an oh so significant title.
A powerful, innovative, almost autofictional story, as the author explains at the microphone of RFI: "
The heroine of my very first novel is a Nigerian migrant, who has lost her son.
She must learn to live with this loss in a foreign country where grief is experienced very differently from home.
It was a worry I experienced myself when I left Nigeria.
In Belgium where I was, the mourning of the deceased is done according to a decorum that has nothing to do with what I knew in Nigeria.
He is more discreet.
We are not allowed to shout.
I like to explore, in my novels, the mysteries of life and the existential questions that torment me personally.
»
Chika Unigwe has also written a historical novel, based on the Memoirs of Olaudah Equiano, a black slave who lived in 18th century England and became famous as a leader of the abolitionist movement.
The story dedicated to her by the novelist dwells on the intimate aspects of Equiano's life, in particular his concern to integrate into his host society and his long mourning following the death of his wife, who was , she is white and of British origin.
Beyond the public figure, it is his personal questions about the place of the black man in Western society, racism and human trafficking that make Equiano, according to the novelist, a very contemporary personality.
"
The beautiful and great Igbo civilization
"
Today author of four novels and a collection of short stories, Chika Unigwe belongs to the new generation of Nigerian writers whose major figures are
Chimamanda Adichie
, Teju Cole, Helom Habila, to name but a few. the.
This generation is characterized by its writing anchored in the here and now and the uninhibited look it has on their society.
A lucidity that she owes, according to the novelist, to the authors who preceded her and who cleared the controversial ground on African history.
"
I grew up learning the history of Nigeria in school, which invariably began with colonization,
" she recalls.
Leaving these courses, I had the impression that there was only a sidereal vacuum before the arrival of the colonists.
It was while reading The World Is Collapsing by Chinua Achebe that I understood that this was not at all the case.
I understood that to establish their domination, the colonizers had destroyed in Nigeria the beautiful and great Igbo civilization that they had found when they arrived.
For our generation, it was a capital discovery, without which I would probably not have become the writer that I am.
Without Le Monde s'effondle by Chinua Achebe, I wouldn't be here recounting the fortunes and misfortunes of the women who populate my novels.
Achebe revealed the truth about the balance of power that was colonization.
In turn, we recount the consequences of this colonial servitude.
»
How do the four protagonists of
Fata Morgana
, a novel full of grace and gravity, fit into the colonial and postcolonial history of Nigeria?
This is what we will see next Saturday in the continuation of this column dedicated to one of the most promising voices of modern African literature.
Fata Morgana
, by Chika Unigwe.
Translated from English by Marguerite Capelle.
Globe, 304 pages, 23 euros.
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