Photo Credit: Dario Lozano-Thornton
Interview by Chimedum Ohaegbu
Francesca Ekwuyasi’s debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), was a contender for Canada Reads and was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The book moves through three perspectives, telling the intergenerational story of twin sisters Taiye and Kehinde and their mother, Kambirinachi, as a traumatic event divides them and they find their way back to each other. In this interview, Ekwuyasi discusses the craft behind her writing of the characters’ points-of-view, the importance of chosen family and platonic heartbreaks, and queer Nigerian diasporic experiences.
Chimedum Ohaegbu: I was really interested in the choices of perspective you made in Butter Honey Pig Bread–Kehinde is written in first-person, Taiye in a close third (save for her first-person letters), and there are some second-person, tour guide-styled sections, like on page 181’s discussion of Halifax. How did you decide which character got which point of view?
Francesca Ekwuyasi: I was interested in creating a sense of intimacy between readers and each character, so it was a bit of an experiment to figure out what perspective best suited the emotional quality of the characters. I wanted first-person for Kehinde because she is the character for which control is most important; Taiye is more malleable, and more subject to flowing based on perception, so I found a combination of close third and first-person best suited her personality.
CO: I’m particularly interested in the narrative tug-of-war in Kambirinachi’s sections. Hers come through in a third-person that, we learn, is actually restrictive: she struggles and eventually gets to narrate to the readers directly in first-person toward the later parts of the book. Same question as above, just separated this out because the craft of it intrigued me the most!
FE: The narrative tug of war was also a bit of an experiment to illustrate how, for Kambirinachi, external perceptions played a formative role in the character’s story, so her taking control of it was a rather on-the-nose way to show that.
CO: What, where, and who keeps you writing?
FE: Stories have always been a respite for me, since I was small–reading and writing have continued to provide a free space for exploration and escape for me. Writing is an opportunity to engage my imagination in ways that feel useful and healthy for me, so it’s truly a pleasure to write, even when it’s challenging.
CO: How has that changed since COVID-19 arrived?
FE: I’ve had to cultivate a lot of self-compassion and patience with my capacity during this pandemic. My mental health has taken quite a hit, as I imagine lots of people’s mental health have taken a hit during this rough time, so I’m having to readjust my expectations about my ability to be focused and be creative. This means that I’m having to be a bit more disciplined in having a routine; where in the past I’ve sort of just written on the fly, now I have to carve out intentional time for it, and be patient with myself if/when I’m not as productive as I’ve been in the past.
CO: In Butter Honey Pig Bread, there’s a really involved interplay between mental health and spirituality in what happens when an Ọgbanje chooses to become flesh. Could you speak to this?
FE: I have intentionally refrained from diagnosing Kambirinachi because I’m not a psychiatrist! But also because I’m more interested in exploring what can happen when we believe her perception about herself even when we are not experiencing the world as she is. I think there’s a lot of room for empathy and imagination when I don’t focus on squeezing or reshaping someone else’s perceptions into my own frame of reference. From a realism perspective, the experiences of a character like Kambirinachi can be interpreted in many ways–some of those ways are related to mental health, but I’m inviting readers to consider other interpretations, and even, perhaps, believing the character.
CO: Not necessarily part of the question, but to contextualize it a bit, I wondered if you’ve read Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, which looks at this topic too.
FE: Yes, I love Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, as well as Ben Okri’s The Famished Road Trilogy, and Wole Soyinka’a poem Abiku–all of which look at the themes of the Ọgbanje and non-human spirits.
CO: One of the heartbreaks of the novel is the drifting apart of Taiye and Timi–though they do return to one another, in time. How did you approach writing this, as opposed to writing Taiye’s other relationship struggles (familial, romantic)?
FE: The friendship between Timi and Taiye is, to me, the most important of all Taiye’s relationships. I wanted a moment to centre non-romantic and non-bio family love. Friendship and chosen family are incredibly important in general, but I think particularly for queer folks who may have troubled family lives. Both Taiye and Timi are queer Nigerians in the diaspora, and I was interested in illustrating that there isn’t one queer African experience; for example, Taiye’s queerness wasn’t a source of conflict or rejection in her family, but Timi’s was.
CO: Which books and readings affected your writing of this novel, conception of characters, etc.? What research did you have to do for this novel, and how did you do it?
FE: I started writing Butter Honey Pig Bread in the summer of 2013; between the time I wrote the first words and the time I submitted my final edits I started and finished graduate school, immigrated, wrote and published several essays and short stories, participated in a few writing and artist residencies, created art about queerness + faith + belonging + loneliness, entered into and stepped out of several relationships, read, listened to, watched, and immersed myself in all the stories, music, podcasts, films, plays, and art that caught my interest. I say this because I believe all the things I’ve done–essentially the life I’ve been living–affected my writing of this novel in the same way as it affects all the work I have and will create.
For research I had the opportunities to participate in research and writing residencies; one of them was at ARTEXTE in Montreal. I researched histories and geographies of the locations in the book. I researched recipes, beekeeping, bread making, monozygotic twins, childbirth, Mormonism, Childhood Attachment Theory, animal butchering. I visited and interviewed folks at artist-run centres in Halifax and Montreal. I researched and listened to Nigerian music genres from the seventies, eighties, and nineties. I am interested in writing with as much depth and texture as possible, so it was a pleasure to dive into all the learning required to give the book soul.
CO: Imperfect motherhood and conflicted daughterhood affect a couple generations of the characters in Butter Honey Pig Bread. What considerations did you keep in mind as you explored these themes?
FE: I considered inconvenient, perhaps even painful honesty while exploring those themes. No one is perfect and I’m interested in writing real people, so the fact of imperfection, disappointment, messiness, flaws, pain, and love were necessary in writing these relationships.
CO: What’s your writing process like?
FE: It was a messy and inconsistent process, which may be why it took so long. But I’m working on discipline.
CO: I read about your doing interviews about faith and queerness with people while they cooked, and combined with the way food and faith are portrayed in Butter Honey Pig Bread, I wanted to ask, how do food, faith, and dialogue buoy one another, to you?
FE: I think that the process of cooking for someone, particularly while they watch or help, and the act of eating together are quite mundanely intimate things. Sharing stories over food seems to me like one of the most natural pairings. For my faith+queerness project, cooking and eating was a helpful container for the participants and I to have vulnerable conversations. For the novel it was a vehicle to propel the narrative forward while grounding it in the senses.
CO: What’s a question you wish interviewers would ask you?
FE: I wish interviewers would ask why I write/why I wrote Butter Honey Pig Bread.
CO: So then, why do you write, and why did you write Butter Honey Pig Bread?
FE: I write because it helps me make meaning of my time and of my mind, and I wrote Butter Honey Pig Bread because I wanted to and I’m grateful that it was possible.
Francesca Ekwuyasi is a writer and multidisciplinary artist from Lagos, Nigeria. Her work explores themes of faith, family, queerness, consumption, loneliness, and belonging. Francesca’s debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread, was long-listed for the 2020 Giller Prize, was a finalist on CBC’s 2021 Canada Reads competition, and a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards.
Her writing has been published in Winter Tangerine Review, Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, the Malahat Review, Visual Art News, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, GUTS magazine, the Puritan, Canadian Art, and elsewhere. Her short story “Ọrun is Heaven” was long-listed for the 2019 Journey Prize.
Supported through the National Film Board’s Film Maker’s Assistance Program and the Fabienne Colas Foundation, Francesca’s short documentary Black + Belonging has screened at festivals in Halifax, Toronto, and Montreal.
Chimedum Ohaegbu is soon-to-be graduate and an amateur ornithologist. She’s Uncanny Magazine’s managing and poetry editor, and her fiction debut was long-listed for the Nommo Award for African Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her work has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine and Strange Horizons, among others. Currently, she writes and edits from Treaty 7 territory in Calgary, Alberta. Find her online at chimedum.com, or (infrequently) on Twitter at @chimedumohaegbu.