Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 117–132

“Bearing Gifts of Words”: Multilingualism in the Fiction of -Nigerian Writer Chika Unigwe

Elisabeth Bekers

“And before all that . . . The pilgrims came Each one bearing gifts of words Of worlds Of lives Of truths.” (On Black Sisters’ Street 16)

In 2003 the Flemish unemployment office VDAB organized a writing contest to pro- mote the profession of fiction writing to young people in Flanders, the northern and Dutch-speaking part of .1 The ten winning short stories were published by the Flemish literary publishing house Manteau,2 in a volume suitably entitled De eerste keer (2004), meaning ‘the first time’ in Dutch. One of the winning stories, “De smaak van sneeuw” (“The Taste of Snow”), poignantly captures how a young African immi- grant is bitterly disappointed with the utter tastelessness of snow upon her arrival at Heathrow Airport. The girl’s reaction implicitly connects her with the disenchanted migrants already living in Europe and presumably foreshadows the disillusionment that she too will experience as a “second-class citizen” in Europe, to borrow the title of Nigerian-born author Buchi Emecheta’s 1974 novel. The story was submitted by Chika Unigwe, a female student who had relocated from Africa to Europe in 1995. Born in in the year that her fellow countrywoman and literary example pub- lished Second-Class Citizen, Unigwe had followed her Belgian husband to the provin- cial Flemish city of Turnhout and had become an “allochtoon,” to use what was then in Flanders and the regarded as the politically-correct term for (descen- dants of) migrants hailing from outside Europe.3 “De smaak van sneeuw” was

“Bearing Gifts of Words” | 117 Unigwe’s first piece of writing in Dutch, and Dutch her third language after Igbo (her mother tongue) and English (her “stepmother tongue”4), but her talent impressed the competition’s jury. Two years later,when reminiscing on his first reading of Unigwe’s story, one of the jury members still waxed lyrical about its literary merits: “the daringness of its simplicity,” “the careful build-up of narrative tension,” and “especially the merci- less rhythm of the sentences” and “the powerful language.”5 This article focuses on the last-mentioned quality of Unigwe’s writing, namely her use of language, and more specifically the multilingualism of her writing.6 My aim is not a linguistic analysis or an aesthetic impression of Unigwe’s literary multilingual- ism, but rather an examination of its critical effect. Concretely, I explore how Unigwe’s polyglot writing challenges the strictures of what Yasemin Yildiz terms the “monolin- gual paradigm” (2) in her study of multilingual writing Beyond the Mother Tongue (2012). Since the emergence of nation states in Europe in the late 18th century, Yildiz explains, active processes of monolingualization have tended to obscure his- torical multilingual practices as well as contemporary realities of multilingualism across the world. However, as Yildiz also notes, globalization and migration are not without linguistic impact and “have begun to loosen the monolingualizing pressure” (3). They have given rise to “changed linguascapes” inhabited by increasingly multi- lingual communities and “speakers of languages that are not supposed to be ‘their own’ by right of inheritance” (169), at least not in a monolingual understanding of the world. I will show how Unigwe’s fiction helps to promote a postmonolingual world view and to “create a readership that is more open to linguistic and cultural differences” (87), as Lawrence Venuti words it in a discussion more specifically focused on trans- lation practices. Unigwe does not directly attack the homogenizing tendencies of the monolingual paradigm, for instance by exposing the linguistic dilemmas faced by non-native speakers. Instead, she envisions, through and in her fiction, a globalized postcolonial world in which linguistic pluralism is the standard practice, as I will demonstrate in my discussion of On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), the novel in which Unigwe’s creative use of multilingualism is at its most powerful.7 Asked recently whether she felt Belgian or Nigerian, Unigwe responded wittily that “it depend[ed] on the time of day,” and the same was true for her writing, she explained. Some stories needed to be written in English, whereas others could only be told in Dutch (qtd. Hutchison). From the onset, Unigwe’s career has been charac- terized by multilingualism. Before she entered the literary scene in Flanders, notably as the only non-native speaker out of the 450 contestants to have won the VDAB’s Dutch-language writing competition, she had already published creative writing in English: two easy readers for adolescents with the internationally-renowned publish- ing house Macmillan, A Rainbow for Dinner (2002) and Ije at School (2003) and two volumes of poetry with publishers in Nigeria (Tear Drops, Richardson, 1993; Born in Nigeria, Onyx, 1995). Unigwe went on to establish herself as a professional writer and

118 | Elisabeth Bekers