"When I left Nigeria for Belgium, I made my husband's home my own. But homesickness lodged like a stone inside me...
I have never been good with solitude. The sixth of seven children, I was ill-equipped to deal with it. Our house in Enugu was always full of people. Even after my oldest siblings left home, there were cousins and friends who stayed for any length of time. I am not one of those writers who work better behind closed doors with not a soul anywhere near them. Place Obioma (what I call my dependable laptop) and me in a café with customers chatting in a background and I thrive. The more alone I felt, the more lethargic I became. It was a vicious circle. I did not eat because I had no appetite. The stone in my stomach had grown to take up all the space in me so that no food could get in. It took most of my voice so I spoke very little. J had always enjoyed cooking, and would cook once he got in from work. I pretended that I had made something huge for myself during the day, or invented something I had eaten in town. I would eat a little to please him, finding no pleasure in it...
I have never been good with solitude. The sixth of seven children, I was ill-equipped to deal with it. Our house in Enugu was always full of people. Even after my oldest siblings left home, there were cousins and friends who stayed for any length of time. I am not one of those writers who work better behind closed doors with not a soul anywhere near them. Place Obioma (what I call my dependable laptop) and me in a café with customers chatting in a background and I thrive. The more alone I felt, the more lethargic I became. It was a vicious circle. I did not eat because I had no appetite. The stone in my stomach had grown to take up all the space in me so that no food could get in. It took most of my voice so I spoke very little. J had always enjoyed cooking, and would cook once he got in from work. I pretended that I had made something huge for myself during the day, or invented something I had eaten in town. I would eat a little to please him, finding no pleasure in it...
When I began to write again, I discovered that I was not writing the kind of fiction I would have written back home. Certainly not at first. I wrote about displacement and sorrow. The voices of immigrants filled my head and spilled out on several pages of short stories and then a novel, The Phoenix. My characters were mostly melancholic women unable to return home but lacking the tools (or perhaps the temperament) to fit into their new home. They were victims browbeaten into silence by an alien culture and an alien climate. Perhaps it was me wanting to pass on what I had suffered to someone else. Maybe it is human nature to seek revenge even when there is none to be sought."
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/chika-unigwe-sorrow-of-migration/
- Chika Unigwe
Probably one of the last most powerful treatises on exile as it was before the walls came down. An important document. Chika nailed this one, big time.
- Ikhide
- Ikhide
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