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And Better Never Than Late (2019): an Interview with Chika Unigwe

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And Better Never Than Late (2019): an Interview with Chika Unigwe City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research Bronx Community College 2020 On Writing Transnational Migration in On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) and Better Never Than Late (2019): An Interview with Chika Unigwe M Laura Barberan Reinares CUNY Bronx Community College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/bx_pubs/85 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL WRITING https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2020.1757202 INTERVIEW On writing transnational migration in On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) and Better Never Than Late (2019): An interview with Chika Unigwe Laura Barberán Reinares City University of New York, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This interview with Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe, conducted by email Chika Unigwe; Better Never over the course of three months in early 2020, addresses the ethics and Than Late; On Black Sisters’ aesthetics of representing sex trafficking and transnational migration Street; transnational ffi in her award-winning novel On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) and her latest migration; sex tra cking; representation of short story collection Better Never Than Late, which appeared in the US ffi immigration; trauma and in 2020. The author discusses the discourse on migration and tra ck- rape ing in both works, bringing much-needed nuance to the conversation. She pays particular attention to issues of “agency” and “vulnerability”, as well as authenticity, stereotyping, the “white gaze”, the publishing industry, and the recent controversy on Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt (2020). Drawing from her own personal story, Unigwe also talks in depth about the stylistic choices she made in depicting the immigrant experience in the global north and the difficulty of representing rape and trauma in fiction. Chika Unigwe personifies the transnational writer par excel- lence: born and raised in Enugu, Nigeria, educated in her home country and Belgium, and currently working in US universities (Brown, Emory, Georgia College), the author has earned her place as a compelling third-generation female Nigerian voice writing from the diaspora. Her artistic production ranges from award-winning stories and novels published in English and Dutch (her third language) on topics as diverse as the post- colonial “unhomeliness” facing immigrants in the global north, sex trafficking from Africa into Europe, and patriarchy and gender oppression in Nigeria. She is currently working on the life of Olaudah Equiano’s daughter Joanna Vassa. Given the primacy of immigration debates, fuelled by the rise of nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia, especially in Europe and the US, the focus of this interview, conducted by email over the course of three months in early 2020, was her award-winning novel On Black Sisters’ Street (Unigwe 2009) and her latest short story collection Better Never Than CONTACT Laura Barberán Reinares [email protected] Department of English and Literature, Bronx CC, City University of New York, 2155 University Ave., Bronx, New York, NY 10453, USA. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 L. BARBERÁN REINARES Late (Unigwe 2020), both centring on different facets of transnational migration.1 On Black Sisters’ Street (which in 2012 won Africa’s most valuable literary prize, the Nigeria Prize for Literature) brings to life the circumstances of four African women trafficked into Belgium for sex work. Better Never Than Late broadens the subject to include the experiences of several Nigerian migrants who also dreamed of a better future overseas after their own country failed to provide the jobs and stability they needed to succeed. Aesthetically ambitious and thematically important, these works offer a nuanced glimpse into the myriad situations that prompt individuals to migrate, the realities of immigrant life abroad, and the anxieties of living in exile. Yet none of these are conventional media- type representations of “the (illegal) immigrant”, a conflation of clichés merged into a static figure arousing pity in some and fear in others. Instead, Unigwe’s intimate perspective animates the daily, often mundane experiences of those navigating a foreign society that does not always openly welcome them, but still needs and exploits their labour. Ten years after the publication of On Black Sisters’ Street, Unigwe returned with an even sharper eye and gripping creative gift to tell the stories of immigrants in Europe. Her characters are realistic, relatable, flawed, and sympathetic – in short, profoundly human. Laura Barberán Reinares (LBR): In order to write On Black Sisters’ Street, you thoroughly researched the situation of women sex-trafficked from Nigeria into Belgium. I would like to start with a question on the theme of that novel, sex trafficking, which you have addressed in several interviews. My question to you is: how do you feel as a writer when audiences reach out to you as an expert on sex trafficking (rather than as a writer who interprets this issue in her fiction)? How did the “expertise” part play out in Better Never Than Late? Chika Unigwe (CU): It is a coincidence that I am responding to this just as I am about to leave for the 25th Nigerian Physicians in America Convention to speak on women’s health (but with particular reference to Nigerian sex workers in the diaspora) as an “expert” on sex trafficking. I think that all the spaces which On Black Sisters’ Street has given me access to (speaking to law enforcement agencies, health workers, etc. as an “expert”–recently, a Nigerian magazine referred to me as a “relationship expert”) demonstrate to me just how interconnected fiction is with life, and how our works are much bigger than ourselves. I am grateful for all the opportunities; it means the work is being read and appreciated, but I’m also slightly amused at my designation as an “expert” on a life I’ve never lived. It also says something about power dynamics. Who is allowed to speak for whom? Whose voice is allowed to be amplified? Whose storytelling is given validity? For example, the cops who invite me to share my research and give talks and share knowledge have access to these sex workers, but somehow, incredibly, my voice is considered more “authentic” than theirs. I feel complicit in something I cannot control. With the stories in Better Never Than Late, that anxiety is a lot less, perhaps, because some of the experiences my characters – particularly my female characters – have are experiences I share. For instance, having to learn Dutch, the loss of confidence that comes from being in a space where nothing one knows matters. And some of the stories are based on experiences people close to me have been through. For instance, the little girl in “Clearing for Take Off” believes that to be a teacher, she first has to be white. Or Prosperous, with her university degree, unable to get any job commensurate with her JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL WRITING 3 qualifications. I feel very strongly about telling these stories – the sort of stories that Prosperous and Agu and their fellow immigrants are privy to (as witnesses and as victims), but which their host community is mostly ignorant of. LBR: It is striking that the characters in both works are complex and layered, unlike the usual mainstream representation of illegal or sex-trafficked immigrants. Sex trafficking in particular is a very difficult topic to represent from a purely aesthetic point of view. While writing On Black Sisters’ Street, were you mindful of the way in which the audience might receive your descriptions of the women’ssex work, for example? How did you avoid exposing these women to a voyeuristic gaze? CU: I really, more than anything else, wanted to create characters that could have been anyone, forced to make a choice. How far would we go to fulfil our dreams, given the options available? The only audience I worried about was my family (and by that I mean my parents). I had to pretend they’d never read it or I would never have written some scenes. I always treated my characters, especially my protagonists, with respect. They were to me, first and foremost, regular women trying to carve a better life for themselves and their families. If I were writing a character who happened to be a teacher, I would not have spent every page writing them in the classroom, for instance. I wanted the char- acters’ stories to be propelled along by the normal things they did, and their desires – not by the type of work they found themselves in. I was also very conscious of not sensatio- nalizing their work because it would have distracted from the story I was trying to tell. Before doing research for this novel, it had never occurred to me that all the things I took for granted – education, a middle-class life, holidays – were things for which others were willing to sell sex. Privilege can be incredibly blinding. It’s easy to imagine that everyone lives like you if you’re surrounded by people like you. I believe that if I had concentrated on the sex-work aspect of the novel, it would have turned out no different from the documentaries on sex trafficking which completely ignore the lives the women had before becoming sex workers, or the lives they lead outside of the brothel. The fact that there are many moments in their lives when anyone seeing them could not guess what they did; that they could be standing next to you in church; sitting beside you on the train; that they are more than the work they do.
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