By Chika Unigwe

…The first time I knew I wanted to be a writer, I was in primary school.

My classmate was the daughter of Flora Nwapa, the first African woman to be published in the United Kingdom.

chika unigwe

Flora Nwapa published Efuru in 1962, four years after Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I did not know all of this then at that age but I was fascinated that she was a writer because whatever else that occurred to me that African women could be, writing was not one of them. We had had career days right from kindergarten where we were exposed to all the available career options that awaited us.

Writing was never one of those career options. And of all the books – all the children’s books I had at home, none were written by an African woman. And there was probably none by an African man for that matter. If I am honest, I’d say that they were all books by Enid Blyton – the Magic Faraway Tree, the Enchanted Forest and so on. They were all books with white children who sat on wishing chairs and went to fairs and grandmothers with jolly faces baking cakes. It made me yearn for their lives.

I enjoyed reading these stories, but what it did to me was that it also made me feel rootless because in my imagination, I joined these children in adventures I could only approximate, never having lived in any way like them. This was not such a big problem until I began to write. Children begin by imitating their parents and so I imitated Blyton. So when I wrote, what little childish poetry and stories I wrote then, I had people “ice skating on a winter day.” I had no desire to meet the people I wrote about because I feared that we would have nothing to talk about and that they would reveal me for the farce I was.

So when Flora bustled into our class one day with children’s books she had written and published and distributed it to us to keep us occupied while she had a chat with our teacher – it was magical. The children in the book had adventures I could identify with. They had kinky hair and brown skin. Their grandmothers did not bake but told them stories.

The imaginary landscape I shared with them was more familiar, more intimate and therefore much more profound. She displaced Enid Blyton making her the foreign aunt I visited who I never wanted to imitate again. I fell in love with Flora Nwapa and wanted to be everything that she embodied. I also felt free for the first time. Free to write about children like me, who ate bananas and groundnut and skipped rope. She opened my eyes to those possibilities. For the first time, I was not afraid to meet my characters.

As I got older, I read her for instruction. I read her for herself but I also read her as an antithesis to the male Achebe. I was constantly comparing the two: their female characters, their storylines and their plots. I wanted to write like she did, creating strong women characters in village settings. My first stories as a young teenager had characters who lived in the sort of villages Nwapa placed her characters in. Once more, never having lived in the village, and as I was at an age when children still mimicked their mothers, my imagination was limited by my restricted knowledge of village life. Writing became tedious but I had no idea why.

At some point, I discovered Buchi Emecheta and fell in love again. Her characters were strong, independent women but more importantly, they also lived lives I could identify even more with. Their dilemmas were on the whole more modern. Being as fickle as any other writer I know, I allowed Emecheta to displace Nwapa and relegate Nwapa to the role of the nice step mother in the village who told tales by midnight.

I stayed with Emecheta for a very long time, finding relevance in her works for me as a would-be writer. When I read Emecheta again, years later, as a mother struggling to write in Europe, my writing morphed. It brought me to a home I was comfortable in. Emecheta became my literary mother because she also wrote across cultures. She lived in the UK and wrote about Nigerian immigrants struggling with retaining their Nigerian identity in a foreign land. She wrote about migration and the loneliness that goes hand in hand with migration in way that resonated with me- her daughter of the wind.

I read her and she gave voice to not just the way I felt, but also the stories I wanted to tell. It was only in being able to tell those stories that I could begin to make sense of my physical sense of belonging. The first novel I wrote, De Feniks, true to form was therapeutic. I took everything I felt for the Nigeria of my past and the Belgium of my present: anger, joy, helplessness and transferred them into my main character. This book gave me a sense of belonging. It freed me to tell other stories. It also helped me to root myself as a writer, the identity I valued above all else and the identity I had a conscious choice in choosing unlike my Nigerian identity (accident of birth) and Belgian (accident of chemistry).

By the time I started my second novel and several short stories later, I had found my voice and flown the nest. Along the way, I have met literary uncles and aunties, with whom I visit, from Leo Pleysier to Wale Okediran, and more relevantly, literary siblings with all the consequences of siblinghood. I borrow what I need from them like I would borrow my biological siblings’ clothes and, of course, there is the issue of sibling rivalry, admiration and envy rolled into one. My literary siblings are from everywhere. But my voice is mine; I have found myself.

Chika Unigwe holds a PhD from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Her latest novel, On Black Sisters’ Street was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape and will be published by Random House NY in 2011. She lives in Belgium.