Chinelo Okparanta is the author of the novel Under the Udala Trees and the story collection Happiness, Like Water.
Chinelo Okparanta is the author of the story collection Happiness, Like Water and the novel Under the Udala Trees. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, among others, and she was short-listed for the 2013 Caine Prize in African Writing. She won the 2014 O. Henry Award and the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies by Bread Loaf, the Jentel Foundation, the Hermitage Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Hedgebrook. She was born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
To read an exercise on manipulating chronology in order to create character, click here.
In this interview, Okparanta discusses finding the emotional heart of a story, writing within an omnipresent past, and whether a writer’s present location affects her writing.
Michael Noll
The novel has an interesting sentence in its first chapter: “So, the story begins even before the story, on June 23, 1968.” It comes after a quick overview of the war and is accompanied by this sentence: “There is no way to tell the story of what happened with Amina without first telling the story of Mama’s sending me off.” And this: “If I had not met Amina, who knows, there might be no story at all to tell.”
It seems that you’re directly addressing a problem that a lot of writers have with novel drafts: where to begin the story? Were these sentences the result of your own process of finding the story, or were they designed for readers, to help guide them from war in general to a particular story about particular individuals?
Chinelo Okparanta
I already knew where the story would begin, and those sentences were simply a natural aspect of the storytelling. Back in the day when my mother used to tell us folktales, sometimes she grounded the folktales in this sort of language, just a natural set up to the story, and perhaps also a signal for us children to know what we should be listening for (i.e. the emotional heart of the story). In the case of Under the Udala Trees, these sentences do signal to the readers where the emotional heart of the story lies.
Michael Noll
I’m curious about your sense of the novel’s audience and how it affects the story you tell. Obviously, the book was published in the United States, where you live, and in English. Some Igbo words and phrases appear, but they’re often translated, either directly, like this (Chineke bi n’eli! God in Heaven! How can this be?) or through context. How aware are you of audience, that it’s primarily American/Western? Can the novel be separated from this audience? In other words, how different would it be if you were writing for a Nigerian or Igbo audience?
Chinelo Okparanta
While writing the novel, I kept in mind various possible audiences, but my main audience was not American/Western. My main audience was my fellow Nigerians. In some ways it was just incidental that it got published in the West first. The truth is that current physical location is oftentimes irrelevant to the story that a writer tells. I have written about Nigeria from Nigeria. But I have also written about Nigeria from Greece, the Philippines, the USA, France, Italy, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. When I write many of my stories, regardless of where I am, my mind very often is back home in Nigeria.
Chinelo Okparanta’s novel Under the Udala Trees tells the story of a young girl displaced by the Nigerian Civil War and the love affair that she begins.
Which is all just to say that the book is exactly what it is—and exactly what it should be—for having been written primarily for a Nigerian audience. We Nigerians speak in a natural mélange/interspersing of our traditional languages and English. This is exactly what the book does. It’s important to keep in mind that Nigeria is a country in which hundreds of languages are spoken. The purpose of the book is to open conversation amongst all ethnic groups within the country, so it would have made no sense for me to write the entire thing in Igbo, with no context clues at all, thereby alienating quite a large segment of the nation’s population. There are also Hausa words in the book, and of course, there is Pidgin. But English is Nigeria’s lingua Franca. As such, it also the novel’s lingua Franca, and the language that best serves the purpose of the book: unity, rather than division.
By extension, because the purpose of the book is to be accessible to all of Nigeria, it also winds up being accessible to Western audiences, and hopefully to audiences all over the world. Sure, I wanted to write a book that invited Nigerians to have this LGBTQ conversation amongst themselves. But of course, it’s a good thing that the book is accessible to non-Nigerians. It’s always a good thing when literature speaks to universal human experiences, but it is an even better thing when the language of the literature facilitates a reader’s engagement with those human experiences.
Michael Noll
The chapters in the novel are fairly short, often a few pages long. It seems that some revolve around particular scenes, but there are many that move through time or move beyond scenes in various ways. What was your approach to chapter structure?
Chinelo Okparanta
I was going through a phase where I enjoyed reading books with shorter and more straightforward chapters. I decided to write the kind of book I enjoyed reading. Maybe for my next project I’ll be enjoying a different kind of book–the kinds with long, sprawling chapters, or those with no chapters at all. If that winds up being the case, I might also write that sort of book.
Michael Noll
The novel begins with the Biafran War, which ended 45 years ago, but now there are new protests in the region, to the point that, at least in the news outlets that I read and listen to, there’s some concern that they might lead to another civil war. Is this something that you thought about as you wrote the novel? Does the past of the novel seem truly past to you? Or were you trying to capture tensions that remain?
Chinelo Okparanta
Look at the United States and its history of slavery. That history haunts all Americans even today–at least, it haunts any socially aware American with an active conscience. Recently in the US, racial tensions have triggered worries of civil unrest. The past always leaves its stamp and oftentimes the stamp is waterproof. Maybe it fades a bit, but it is still there. So, yes, our past is the past, but it is also the present, and it will likely affect the decisions we make for the future. Which is why I’m always thinking about the nation and ways in which to flip our history of colonialism, and ways in which to better deal with the division caused by the British geo-political division of the country. We don’t have to be beholden to the past. We don’t forget—and perhaps we should not forget—but we certainly owe it to ourselves to rise above it. It seems to me that all of us have the power to flip unfortunate aspects of our pasts and use them positively, constructively, to make ourselves stronger. It’s just a matter of how. A united body people who are sincerely in it for the common good. Good leadership. A well thought out and thoroughly outlined plan. Expert organizational skills. These are some of what all healthy nations need.
March 2016
Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.
Read to Write Stories 