“When I write child characters, I think about how big some of my childhood moments felt and I try to channel those moments as much as possible” – Uche Okonkwo.
By Chimezie Chika
The Nigerian writer, Uche Okonkwo, has been quietly building up her reputation for the better part of a decade, especially for her short stories. Over the years, these stories have appeared in many prestigious literary magazines and anthologies, including A Public Space, Zyzzyva, Kenyon Review, One Story, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Lagos Noir, Ellipsis, Saraba, and others.
Her accolades include residencies, scholarships, and grants from MacDowell, Elizabeth George Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Art Omi Writers’ Residency, Anderson Center, Tin House, and Bread Loaf; a 2020-2021 George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellowship.
Uche Okonkwo also has an MFA in Fiction from Virginia Tech, a master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester, and is presently a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Uche Okonkwo’s debut story collection, A Kind of Madness, which was released by Tin House in the US in 2024, has enjoyed critical success. The Nigerian edition was published in March this year by Narrative Landscape Press. In this interview with Afrocritik, she speaks majorly on the book as well as on related craft matters.
I found the title of your book, A Kind of Madness, quite intriguing. Is this filled with gothic stories of mysterious lunacy? I wondered. At first, I thought it was the title of a short story in the book. It was only when I finished the book that I realised the title’s efforts at thematic cohesion. What inspired this title?
Madness was never an organising principle for the stories while I was writing them; it’s a theme that emerged much later. The idea of “madness” came late in the process, when I was thinking about a title for the book, and it felt fitting because all the stories in the collection have to do with some kind of flawed thinking. At least one of the stories deals with literal madness, but for most, the madness is more figurative. Specifically, the title came from a line in the first story in the collection, “Nwunye Belgium.”
Most of the ten stories in this collection revolve around children and adolescents. In short, the world of children and adolescents litter your stories, whether as main characters, which is most of the time—from stories such as “Eden”, “Debris”, “Animals”, “Milk and Oil”, “Burning”, etc—or as peripheral ones. Why really young characters?
There’s something magical about childhood, and I sometimes think that my affinity for child characters might be a way of dealing with my nostalgia for my own childhood.
When I write child characters, I think about how big some of my childhood moments felt and I try to channel those moments as much as possible. Writing child characters also makes me more aware of the illusions of control that we hold on to as adults, and puts me back in that space where the adults in charge of you basically shape your life.
Also, I feel like the innocence of childhood, and the ways in which children try to mimic the adult world, renders the strangeness and hypocrisies of adulthood starkly.
It’s interesting that you say that about childhood. Perhaps that was why I was more often than not thrown off by the distinctly adult-like thoughts of child characters in stories such as “Milk and Oil”, “Burning”, “Shadow”, etc. Do you genuinely believe children think like adults?
A piece of advice that I have heard about writing child characters, and that I have observed from stories that do justice to child characters, is to take their concerns—no matter how whimsical or how much you know better from an adult perspective—seriously. Children may not have the language for everything they see or feel, but they are capable of complex reasoning, perhaps more than we often give them credit for.
One consistent theme that seems to feature in many stories here is mother-daughter relationships and its complexities. In “Nwunye Belgium”, it takes the guise of a comic-tragic pursuit of a fortuitous marriage ambition; in others, it seems to be predicated on the respective religious or attention-seeking compulsions of madness. What is it about mothers and daughters that fascinates you as a fiction writer?
I am drawn to the emotionally complex dynamics between families and close friends because I think that through the lens of these interpersonal relationships, we’re able to capture the wider structures and politics and hypocrisies of the societies we live in. I also really enjoy reading mother-daughter stories because I find them compelling; I think there’s an inherent tension that mother-daughter relationships often hold.
Mother-daughter relationships can be at once tender and sensuous, while also being fraught with contradictions and power struggles as the mother seeks to shape the daughter. I’ve been inspired by books I’ve read about mothers and daughters recently, including The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan, Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, and many others.
This may be partly why your stories work strongly as irony. The plots stretch ironies to their limits. This may be due to the contrasting effect of your matter-of-fact prose on stories with comic or satirical themes. It has led me to wonder, in a general sense, what your writing process is like. How do you begin a story? What comes first? Image, plot, character? Do you think about themes when you write?
I try to never think of themes while I write. This quote from Rick DeMarinis’s The Art and Craft of the Short Story rings true to me: “the term ‘theme’ is part of the critic’s vocabulary, not the writer’s.Don’t analyze a work in progress for its deepest meanings. Don’t think of your work as having a major theme before you’ve produced a draft. You might hamstring your imagination if you do.
Remember this: You don’t begin with meaning, you end with it”(61, 62). Of course, during later drafts, and while revising and editing and considering feedback from trusted readers, I then give some thought to possible themes, but while writing early drafts I avoid thinking about theme.
And it’s important to remember too that readers will bring all kinds of meaning to your work, uncovering themes and interpretations that you may not have considered yourself. I think that’s part of what makes writing and reading so rewarding.
When thinking of a new story idea, the first thing that I start with is the situation, or an inciting event, or even the climax, and then I try to work my way through the rest of it: how do we get from A to B to C? Who are the characters? Where does this story take place?
As a Nigerian, every detail in your stories—language, attitudes, consumer products, cities—is familiar. So close are they to the Nigerian reality that they may even be sometimes uncomfortable or even painful. That is what I felt with “The Harvest”, which for me is the best story in the book. It is the kind of unassuming satire of Nigerian Pentecostalism that is bound to elicit a certain touchiness if read to a Nigerian audience. What particularly stood out for you while working on the story?
I can see how “The Harvest” might cause feelings of touchiness. The world that Alfonso inhabits is one that I think is very recognisable to many Nigerian Christians. I’ve often wondered how it feels to be on the other side of the pulpit, but with “The Harvest,” I primarily wanted to dramatise the slow death of a dream.
Sometimes I think that Nigerian Pentecostalism, and prosperity preaching more generally, encourages this view of faith as a kind of currency. But what happens when it fails? I wanted to explore that through Alfonso’s failures and resentments, and also through the breakdown of his relationship with his wife.
Let’s talk about boarding schools, where a couple of stories in your book are set. As a boy, I did not find the boarding school experience a pleasant one. The girls in your boarding school stories would apparently agree with me, though they of course have very peculiar female experiences. The important thing in those stories seems to be the fact that they are not narrated by the protagonists. Do you think this device helps with your portrayal of the Nigerian girls boarding school experience?
I was not consciously thinking of specific narrative devices with regard to “Long Hair” and “The Girl Who Lied.” With each story, I try to figure out what I think would be the most interesting or effective lens from which to view the story’s events.
My boarding school days were not particularly pleasant either, although there were fond moments sprinkled throughout. It was a very formative time, and a Nigerian boarding school is a great setting for all kinds of drama.
A lot of drama indeed. As a whole, how was the experience of writing A Kind of Madness and how long did it take to write it?
I did not start writing with the intention of putting together a short story collection, and so the experience of writing the book is not necessarily a cohesive one. I kept writing single stories until I had enough to put into a collection, and at that point, reading the stories together as a single text was an interesting experience—it let me see what obsessions and themes were recurring in my work, and how the stories speak to each other across a long span of time.
What next are we expecting from you? A novel? Another collection?
Without going into the details, I’ll just say that I have a few projects in the works. We’ll see how things go.
Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1