Kelechi Okafor
In Conversation
This week we spoke to Kelechi Okafor about her creative journey, Yoruba spirituality, and the story behind her debut collection Edge of Here.
Interviewed by Nancy Adimora.
NA: You chose to start your collection with an introduction, a sort of author’s note, where you said you never considered yourself as a writer — an actor and director, yes, but never a writer. I would love to know why this was, and when this changed?
KO: I guess I hadn't considered myself to be a writer because writing always looked so grueling. It just seemed horrid. Anybody that I knew who was a writer would tell me that they were in the pits and it was really hard, so it was never something I planned to do even though I loved writing, and I loved deconstructing texts. I studied English literature, then I went on to study Drama and Theater Studies with Law at university. I'm really into words but, in my mind, the kind of person who was a writer wasn't me. I love to take other people's words and act them out, or direct them because I really understand what is happening, subtext and all of that. Obviously, I have my own specific way with words on social media but I didn't think that all of those things could come together and I would be an actual writer. I just thought that was somebody else's job and then I would do my job of deconstructing the text and conveying what I found during that exploration.
I started to think more seriously about writing a few years ago when I wrote a particular thread and Daniellé Dash sent me a DM, asking me to stop sharing my words for free. I just thought, what do you mean? She told me to write articles or something but to stop giving out all of this knowledge online for free. Of course, I believe that we should still have a way to share knowledge online, but the point she was making was that there are people who would come on to my page to get an idea of something that they didn't know about, and then they would pitch it to publications and they would get paid to write that thing. So she thought that I should know that it's important that I write these things for myself. When I was ready to write my first piece, she introduced me to the editor of a platform and that's how I started writing in that regard. It really just started from another Black woman, seeing me and saying, try doing this instead. I fell in line after that.
NA: I love that answer. I'm curious to know when you transitioned from writing articles online to wanting to become a published author of a book, because you could have easily stuck to writing online and found success that way. Why was a book something you wanted to pursue?
KO: Funnily enough, it started with a viral thread I wrote at the end of 2017 where I said I was going to move into the home of white people and colonise it. I basically used the infrastructure of how Nigeria came to be, really. I used that framework to write this thread about what I will do in this home, how I'd stop them from speaking their language, and they could only speak this, and they could only do that. People were just so fascinated by the thread. They were like, this should be a book, and I thought, oh, maybe it should be.
NA: Lol I’d definitely read that!
KO: I spoke to my friend Dapo Adeola about it and he said, maybe I should introduce you to my agent, Sallyanne Sweeney. He introduced me to Sallyanne and I presented her with this idea. I wanted to call the story Ara Ile, which means ‘person of the house’ in Yoruba, translating to ‘family member’. I proposed the idea to her, and said I needed an advance to write it, but she told me that that’s not really how it works with fiction - you have to finish writing the whole thing before pitching to publishers. While all of this was happening, I'd had three different people who worked with publishing houses approach me and ask if I’d ever considered writing a book. Then a friend of mine was explaining to me that when editors are approaching you directly, it's a really good sign but I shouldn’t go with the editors directly. I needed to play it well and get an agent. I shared this with Sallyanne and I told her that there was some interest. She thought that was interesting and she said, you know when it comes to fiction, you're gonna have to write the whole thing first, but I was like I need money. So we talked about it and then it was suggested that I write nonfiction first, and then use that as a way in. Of course, there are a multitude of things that I like to talk about and feel that we need to have more public discourse about. Initially, I wanted to write about anger, and how anger can be a liberating force for Black women. When that was taken out as a proposal to publishers, just before 2020, they said, oh, but how do we make this universal? Essentially, if you're not talking about white women, that topic is not commercially viable. Offers were made, but I wasn't happy with any of the offers, because I felt like I deserved more for what I was about to write. Then 2020 happened.
Suddenly, the interest was back again. The publishers were asking if I still wanted to write that book and I just said no, I don't want to write it now. I'm seeing way too much happening in the world that I think I need to soak in, so when I do finally write that nonfiction book, it will be what I want it to be because there's still a lot to learn there. It was during that time that Sareeta Domingo approached me on Twitter, DMs again. She asked me if I wanted to write a short story for an anthology she was putting together, love stories by women of color. Immediately, I knew what I wanted to write. I just knew that I wanted to write The Watchers. That's how The Watchers came to be.
From the moment the idea of writing was presented to me when people read that thread and they said, this is extremely creative, you should do something with it, I think it was almost like I was waiting for permission, or for somebody to turn the light bulb or light switch on, for me to know that I could do something with all of the words that I was using on social media.
NA: I hear it and I love it. Picking up on the Sareeta piece, she came to you and presented you with the idea of writing a short story, and instantly your spirit resonated with that idea. When we first met at the Caine Prize award ceremony, Ben Okri said something about the unique beauty and power of short stories and I remember you resonating with his words then too. So my question is, when you think about fiction, or when you think about writing a book, what is it specifically about the short story form that calls you? Why does it feel like home to you as a writer?
KO: Oh, I love that question. When Ben Okri gave that speech, it was definitely what I needed to hear at a time that I felt like I was contending with people over the validity of the short story form. It kept being presented as if short stories were merely a precursor to writing a novel. It was weird to me, because I love short stories so much. I love that you can delve into a world really briefly and then leave, but you're forever changed by that vignette. I love having the autonomy as a reader that wherever I'm left with that story, I just have to figure out the rest for myself. It really speaks deeply to me because I've always felt like it takes a lot of skill to be able to write short stories that don’t feel unfinished, even if we don't get to see the rest of these people's lives. It's beautiful. One of my favorite short story collections is Alexia Arthurs’ How to Love a Jamaican. I also really love Danzy Senna’s You Are Free and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck. From all the short stories I've read, I just thought, yeah, that's what I want to do. I want to do that.
NA: That's a perfect answer. Now let's focus on this particular collection. The beauty of storytelling is that people can come to a piece of work, a piece of writing, or a collection of writing, and they walk away with their own conclusions about what it's about, but I would love for you to tell me, when we think about Edge of Here as a body of work, how would you describe it? What is it about and what is the intention behind it?
KO: Overall, I feel like the overarching sentiment is yearning.
I don't feel like Black women are given enough space to yearn and to desire, because we're too busy being strong, and too busy being ‘good.’ I wanted a space where the characters that we meet in the stories are yearning for something more. Across womanhood generally but specifically, when we look at Black womanhood, there’s this narrative that to want more or to desire more is uncouth. The constant question that you get is, how do you juggle it all? How do you do it all? There’s an idea that you're wanting too much, and you're not going to have the capacity to hold all that you are yearning for. I feel like we have enough capacity within us to be able to hold the expanse of our desires, so in each of the stories, we meet intelligent women, women who are embodied, yet, each of them is looking for something more.
Yearning needs to be normalized. We should feel okay to say, “I want more than that”. Whether it's money in terms of our work, whether it's our living situations, whether it's our romantic or intimate relationships, or our familial relationships, we should be able to say, I want more, and not be vilified for wanting that. That translates not just in the personal, but in the political as well. We don't have to settle for the way that for instance, the beauty industry is or the fashion industry is. We don't have to settle for things just because we've been told, that's the way that things are. It's time that we start making it clear that we want more.
NA: Amen! I love that your vision for these stories is so clear and you could have obviously approached it in a very straightforward literary way, but of course, you being you, you sprinkled a bit of futuristic Black Mirror-esque magic into the stories. Why did you choose to explore the stories in this way? Were you trying to almost force the readers to do some work in terms of critically engaging with the stories?
KO: For me, when I have conversations with people, I don't really enjoy surface conversations. I know that sometimes we need it in certain environments but I love to get into the minds of the people that I'm talking to. Anybody that I've had a conversation with, wherever I've met them, if we have really sat down to talk, I want to know, what are your hopes? What are your dreams? What are you scared of? These are the things that I'm interested in, because otherwise, why are we talking? Now of course, sometimes you want to build a real secure bond, and you have to have boundaries around certain things, but I just don't feel like we talk enough. We use our mouths and sounds are coming out but we don't actually talk. So I like talking to people.
When I was writing Edge of Here, it was important that I talked and I shared. It wasn't hard for me to write in terms of the ways in which the stories are structured, maybe just because of how I've explored my Nigerian heritage and spirituality. Spiritually, I've always seen the edge of what we call reality, our collective decision that whatever we're experiencing now is reality. I think that is interwoven into the ways that we speak and into our culture, but I also think that due to colonialism, and that interruption to our histories, there are certain narratives spiritually, that we assume to be demonic, because we've been told so. However, the further that I investigate these cosmologies, I see them as the path to our liberation. I see us going back to our indigenous practices and finding a way to reconcile them with what we might now believe and have been brought up to believe. That is the path to our liberation.
I push it further by saying that I don't feel like the African diaspora would have survived when taken across the Atlantic if they didn't hold on to our spiritual practices. When they were being told other things and taught otherwise, they had to find a way to shroud and cloak those beliefs so they could keep them alive. It's beautiful when you see places like Brazil, where people are still practicing traditional Yoruba spirituality in one shape or form even as it has evolved. I just felt like I wouldn't be doing justice to all that I know and all that I am if it wasn't included in the stories, because I don't just see this reality, I see all the other things that are taking place at the same time. We're talking about technology like artificial intelligence a lot now but if we look at Yoruba spirituality, specifically Ifa, we see the babalawo or Ifa priests practice a form of binary in their divination by casting cowrie shells. If the shells land facing upwards, or are facing down, that’s either 0 or 1. Where else do we deal with 0-1 binaries? Coding for computers. Yoruba cosmologies predate a lot of the conversations that we're having now. Even when we move away from Western ideologies, the next best thing we are raised to hold in high esteem are Eastern philosophies. Why are we left out?
It was important for me to bring it back into the narrative that if we're talking about technology, and we're talking about 0-1 binaries, we can't talk about that without talking about Yoruba spirituality. In Ifa etymology, there are 256 odus, which are essentially specific patterns of code that the priest gets from casting the cowrie shells repeatedly in a divination session. Each of those 256 odus have literary meanings that run into about 100 verses. That's a lot, and an Ifa priest has to know all of that by heart. We're basically talking about a human computer. Why then is it when we watch, for instance, Nollywood movies, these priests are depicted as poor illiterate old men with missing teeth and dirty clothes? There's something happening there, and it was important for me, especially in Blue, when I introduced the woman at the lake to bring the beauty back to something that is eternally beautiful.
NA: That’s fascinating, thank you for sharing. I'm also interested in the title because in the introduction you said that you’re “exploring the stories at the edge before it becomes the centre of here” and I found that really poetic. Do you resonate with Toni Morrison's quote about being at the edge, standing at the border, and claiming it as the centre?
KO: Yeah. That's my thing. As we were talking about earlier, a lot of Black women are preoccupied with trying to get into the centre, trying to assimilate with the centre. Being born in Nigeria, moving to England when I was five, I've pretty much always been an observer. I've pretty much always been at the edge, so I've always talked about what I see and what's happening over there. Because of the way that I speak, based on my directness and the topics that I talk about on social media, I'm kept out of a lot of central spaces. I'm not invited to certain things, but from my edge, I found a home. I'm not trying to go to their centre. Before, it felt like being ostracized but now it doesn't feel that way. Now, it’s fine and it’s comfortable. It feels like being free.
NA: It feels like being free. I love that. I've got two more questions for you. So Kelechi, you act, you direct, you founded a pole dance studio, you are the host of a very popular podcast, and you're now a published author. Like you mentioned at the start of this conversation, writing is not beans. It is not easy. It takes a lot of effort. It's not only physically tasking, it's also emotionally draining. From a very practical point of view, how do you incorporate writing into your busy schedule? How did you incorporate it into your professional world and balance it alongside your personal obligations? What was your writing process like?
KO: The writing process was rather interesting for me. I usually tend to have a lot of energy at nighttime, so I would mostly write at night after my son's gone to sleep. First thing in the morning, I would go running and go to the gym and then I'll do the things that are required of me for the day. I'm also blessed to have great studio management in terms of the team that manages the studio for me. Then I've got a great editor that helps me with the podcast.
I've realised that it's important to let people help you. It would be a fallacy to make it out like I've done all of this on my own. I've been blessed enough to be able to pick a team through trial and error — a lot of trial and a lot of error. I picked a team that does what they need to do, so it actually gives me space to do the things that I want to do. Also having my son in nursery is one of those sacrifices that I have to make financially, because nursery is not cheap!
NA: Girl, I’ve seen the prices.
KO: It's sickening. It's nauseating when they send that invoice. Anyway, because he’s at nursery during the day, I also have time to do some of the other things that I need to do. When he's back from nursery, we'll hang out, I’ll make some food, we’ll chill and when he's asleep, then I'll start writing. To me, it just needs to be done. Maybe it’s just how I am, but if I know that something needs to be done, I just get it done. I knew that this opportunity to write and tell stories required me to just get on with it, so even if there were days that I was just like, Oh, bloody hell, God, why? I would just carry on anyway. I'm glad I did because seeing people's reactions to the stories makes it worth it.
NA: Okay, final question. If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring authors, what would it be?
KO: I'd say be curious. I feel like curiosity is the beginning of liberation. Ask why a lot. Why is this that way? Could it be another way?
Asking why changes so much. If people didn't stop to ask why, I don't think we would have a lot of the freedoms that we have right now. Start asking why all of this looks the way that it looks. How did we get here? If we don't question things, if we're not curious, if we don’t channel our curiosity into our writing, then we can't be liberated.
Kelechi Okafor is a Nigerian-born, London-based lover of words-whether that's crafting works of fiction, articles, stageplays or screenplays; from directing others on stage to expressing her thoughts on society one episode at a time alongside esteemed interview guests on her award-winning podcast Say Your Mind. Edge of Here is her debut story collection.
You can read an excerpt of Edge of Here here.
