Writers tend to become one with their stories – Nnani

Chioma Nnani is author of a collection of short stories, ‘Because Home is…’ and a novel, ‘Forever There for You’. A 2016 Creative African Awards finalist in the category of ‘Best Fiction Writer’, she is also a two-time UK BEFFTA (Black Entertainment Film Fashion Television and Arts) Award nominee, in the ‘Best Author’ category. Here, […]

Chioma Nnani is author of a collection of short stories, ‘Because Home is…’ and a novel, ‘Forever There for You’. A 2016 Creative African Awards finalist in the category of ‘Best Fiction Writer’, she is also a two-time UK BEFFTA (Black Entertainment Film Fashion Television and Arts) Award nominee, in the ‘Best Author’ category. Here, she talks about her latest book, the relationship between writers and their works, and more. Excerpts:

 

Bookshelf: Your recently released collection of short stories, ‘Because Home is…’ is about finding, going and being home. Why did you choose such a theme?

Chioma Nnani: It was something I had to do. A long time ago, I read a novel written by Faye Kellerman in which one of the characters said ‘everyone is either running away from or towards something.’ So, people tend to run towards (their perception of) pleasure or away from (their perception of) pain. Everyone wants to feel safe in some way. And that’s what you find at home, whether home is a person, place or thing. And it takes everyone a different amount of time and process to find, go to and function with who or where or what they call home. It’s a vocation or life calling, it’s that relationship, that physical place where you are safe even if you’re challenged to grow. It’s the perfect symbol of ‘naked and unashamed’.

Bookshelf: Cassie, your central character in the titular story, went through a lot trying to make a living in the United Kingdom before she made it back to Nigeria. Many Nigerians in the UK could relate with her experience. What do you aim to achieve with the story?

Nnani: To teach and to make people laugh. Some of the things in that story are funny and some are quite tragic.

 

Bookshelf: The stories explored love and Nigeria’s social lifestyles. In the story ‘25 To Life’, questions on marriage and traditions were raised. What inspired this story?

Nnani: A lot of things I had seen and heard. Sometimes, people feel like there is just one way that’s acceptable and fail to see the beauty in other things that they’re too afraid to explore. Some people are so weighed down by dogma and doctrine, they forget to look at the essence. And that has been a recurring theme in my life, where I have had to come to the understanding that relationships, whether romantic or filial, are and will always be more important than religion or where someone is from or whatever peripheral thing that is part of their experience. You can’t expect to thrive if you insist on turning every experience into an existence.

 

Bookshelf: How did writing begin for you?

Nnani: I started writing when I was maybe six years old. I didn’t think it was anything major. It was just something I did.

Bookshelf: Traditions are arguably very strong in Nigeria. How will you say your stay outside the country has influenced how you view these traditions? 

Nnani: It helped me be more vocal with questions that had been marinating on my inside for a long time. The tag-line of my blogazine is ‘Irreverent. Compelling. Unfettered’. And that’s apt because that’s who I am; I’m not afraid to ask questions, no matter how politically incorrect they are or whose ox is gored. And I have this way of asking questions that’s very direct. When I beat about the bush, it feels like entrapment, which is a technique I probably have a problem with given my Law background. But direct questioning tends to shock, even without me meaning to.

 

Bookshelf: You seem to have raised a lot of questions in this book. Do you think it’s possible for a writer to separate herself from her stories?

Nnani: To a large extent, no. I mean, even when something isn’t your direct experience, you tend to take it on…it’s like with method acting, where you become. You’re not interpreting a role, you’re not even acting anymore. You have become the character. And writing is a bit like that. Many decent writers are quite introspective. So you do have that thing where you’re not afraid to ask questions, even when the questions are not yours. They might be stuff you have heard from other people.

 

Bookshelf: This is your debut short story collection. Before now you had authored a novel. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, winner of 2016 NLNG-sponsored Nigerian Prize for Literature has described short story writing as a sprint and working on a novel as a marathon. What was it like working on short stories this time?

Nnani: He is so right. It was different. I had to be cognizant of the word limit, which I don’t have to do with a novel. With a short story, you need all the elements to play well together within what I consider a constrained space. I like to think that I pulled it off with “Because Home Is …”

 

Bookshelf: You have won several awards. How has this impacted your work?

Nnani: I work hard so it’s nice to know that I am recognised for my work. It’s very important to me, especially as a woman in this industry-because it tends to be the case that for women in media or in the public eye, there is unnecessary attention on everything but our work. The way we do or don’t do our hair, whether we are wearing designers or high street gear, who wore what better? The man we’re dating or married to or whatever else. Like I said, everything but our work. So for me, it’s important that I am not appearing on some list primarily because of what I look like, but because of my work. The last one was the 2016 BEFFTA Award for ‘Blog of the Year’. I don’t set out to do stuff because I am trying to win an award, but this was really important for so many reasons. A lot of people know that I started with fiction first, but here I am winning one of the biggest awards in Europe for blogging. My blogazine, called ‘Memo From A Fearless Storyteller’ was actually birthed in 2015 and to win the award a year later was massive. I remember talking to one of my mentors (Dr. Nkem Ezeilo) about it in the summer of 2015 and I had all these doubts and she said, ‘I don’t see what the problem is; go and do it. You will do well because this is just one more thing you know how to do, but you don’t know that you know.’ She passed on, on September 11, 2016 and I won that award at the end of October, 2016. As you can imagine, the irony is still bitter and I feel robbed. It’s something that I’ve sort of written about in the story titled ‘The One’; there’s a young woman in that story whose mentor dies of cancer and she has to figure out some stuff on her own, but she finds out that her mentor set up certain things and people in place for her without her knowledge. And to a large extent, I feel like Nkem set up certain things for me when she was here, even without telling me.

 

Bookshelf:  What are you working on at the moment?

Nnani: My company, The Fearless Storyteller House Emporium, is about to release a novel by one of Nigeria’s most incisive investigative journalists. We have also got a bouquet of online writing courses and I love the feedback that we have gotten so far. I’m also writing a trilogy aimed at teenagers.