Interview by Kufre Usanga
Uche Umezurike’s new collection Double Wahala, Double Trouble (Griots Lounge Publishing, 2021) touches on human relationships, the complexities of life, ecological degradation, police brutality, banditry and militancy, and masculinities. Umezurike illuminates various shades of troubles that individuals confront in postcolonial Africa as they attempt to make sense of life, love, and intimacy.
Kufre Usanga: You are a widely published and established poet—what moved you towards the short story form?
Uche Umezurike: I’d rather see myself as a maturing poet. To be an “established poet” conveys this sense of finitude, of completeness—that a poet is already complete, fixed in their poetics. Poetry, for me, is not about perfecting or perfection, a phantasm itself. Instead, poetry is my way of being receptive to the mundane or the ethereal, which I cannot directly wrap my mind around. To be receptive, then, is to be maturing, growing in tune—or perhaps out of tune—with the world. Short fiction has always charmed me—its urgency, its density, and its embrace of brevity. I took to short stories during my undergraduate years when I got bored of reading public administration textbooks assigned by my professors. So short fiction has been a tonic ever since.
KU: Double Wahala, Double Trouble has a certain momentum to it—from the distinctive title all the way to the presentation of the stories. What consideration went into the ordering of the stories?
UU: I have Kimmy Beach to thank for the way we arranged the collection. She was one of my first readers and editors, and she suggested I order the stories in such a way so as to project the sense of a journey, through beginning from the bizarre and finally back to what appears as bizarre, so that the reader might come away with a thrill of disorientation.
KU: The stories in the collection are captivating and urgent, and the language is vibrant and playful, yet sad. There is an ominousness that pervades the pages of this book. Is this symptomatic of the ailing Nigerian society in which these stories are set?
UU: That’s a beautiful way to summarize Double Wahala, Double Trouble. Life is saturated with the ominous: a leaf sails off the tree and one looks for an omen; a passerby chances upon an iguana, and he thinks of a message from ancestral spirits; a woman hears a serenade in the call of the loon, and she recalls a lost love, and so on. While revising the stories, I wanted to capture a smidgen of the ominous. I also wanted to thread the collection with an urgency that highlights the frequency of tragedy for many people. You know how some Nigerians seem to be in a rush, as if they’re whizzing through life, so I was hoping to depict an aspect of the ubiquity of death in Nigeria. There’s a line in “know thou well this world its state” by Khushal Khan Khattak, a Pashtun poet of the seventeenth century, which goes, “Short is life, and many its troubles, for what is, is; what is not, is not.” You could say my collection aims to snapshot absurdities of postcolonial Nigeria.
KU: Double Wahala, Double Trouble touches on the complexities of life, including human relationships, environmental crises, police brutality, and masculinities. What insights did you gain during the writing process?
UU: Every form of writing I’ve undertaken has afforded me a unique way of sensing the world anew—its contours, complexities, and rich messiness. I write to probe preconceptions that sometimes sneak up on me, especially when I’m tempted to feel snug in my comforts. Writing always offers me insights into appreciating the fragility of life—of things we cling to and think we couldn’t live without. I’ve come to realize that writing hones my senses to become more receptive to the resonances of our dappled world.
KU: I find myself returning to “Rain,” a story that immortalizes the Aluu Four Lynching Victims. What was the creative process for this story? Was it different from the other stories in Double Wahala, Double Trouble? I’m wondering what it takes to weave words like a garland around a tragedy so irrevocably vicious and haunting.
UU: “Rain” was one of the most painful stories I’ve ever written. I was at Civitella Ranieri in Italy at the time, when a mob murdered those boys in Aluu, Rivers State. I read about the lynching, and videos of it proliferated online. I tried to watch one video, a terrible mistake on my part, but of course, I couldn’t manage to watch even a fraction of it. I couldn’t sleep that night, and the image haunted me for days on end. And because I was all alone in faraway Europe, without family and friends, I felt the haunting in more visceral ways than I imagined. I began writing about my incapacity to grasp this tragedy—which would eventually translate into “Rain,” a story about ambition, mistaken identity, and mob justice in society. Another story that felt painful to write was “This is how I remember her,” which focuses on mental health and abandonment. In that story, I tried to imagine what it was like for a young child to watch their mother lose her mind due to her inability to deal with her husband’s betrayal.
KU: You’ve also been at work on another book, Wish Maker. Could you say a few words about it?
UU: I’m glad Othuke Ominiabohs and his team at Masobe Books found the book fascinating enough to publish. Wish Maker is a children’s book that imitates magic realism in some way. It tells the story of a boy who meets a quirky and annoying stranger claiming to be an angel. There are lots of amusing moments in the book—I enjoyed writing it! I tried to unpack this preconception around strangeness and who is a stranger. I was interested in the subject of hospitality—an interest sparked by a grad seminar course taught by Dr. Michael O’Driscoll at the University of Alberta. It was on Derrida, and it got me thinking about what it means to be foreign, to be a foreigner, considering my status as an African migrant in Canada. It’s interesting how we associate strangeness and foreignness with impurity, abjection, peril, and infestation. Just look at some of the rhetoric of politicians about foreigners. A writer I respect so much, E.C. Osondu, has this powerfully brilliant collection of short stories called Alien Stories that examines various notions of alienness, of who is an alien. I hope Wish Maker can encourage its readers to question this notion of what it means to be a foreigner or a stranger.
Uche Peter Umezurike holds a PhD in English from the University of Alberta, Canada. An alumnus of the International Writing Program (USA), Umezurike is a co-editor of Wreaths for Wayfarers, an anthology of poems. He is the author of Wish Maker (Masobe Books, 2021) and Double Wahala, Double Trouble (Griots Lounge Publishing, 2021). Umezurike is a recipient of the inaugural Provost’s Postdoctoral Award for Indigenous and Black Scholars at the University of Calgary.
Kufre Usanga is a PhD student in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where she researches petroculture and Indigenous literatures. Usanga holds the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Award.