Erasure, Resistance and The Power to Remind: An Interview with Okechukwu Nzelu.
- luxjournal
- 2 days ago
- 14 min read
By Victoria Ferguson and Tadgh Gibson
“The dream shifts; the memory will not.” - Here Again Now, Okechukwu Nzelu
Our memories are our narrative, our exposition. How can we explain who we are without the evidence of how we came to be?
‘That experience shaped me’,
‘It carried me to here’,
‘You know me, you saw me when I was something else’,
‘You knew me in the place before’,
‘You watched with me—we were there—we remember’,
But do we?
In his work, Okechukwu Nzelu often explores the act of remembering and the haunting that accompanies it; the personal and collective repositories that sometimes overflow and sometimes come up empty. Intersecting personal loss and historical erasure, memory is inevitably a vessel of identity which entwines so tightly to culture that the inability to unravel and understand it presents its own kind of struggle.
We wanted to interview Okechukwu Nzelu for this issue of LUX Journal for his insights into his own characters, his knowledge of the colonial refusal to remember and the rejection LGBTQ+ histories, and of course, for a scoop on the novel he’s writing.
“I'm a novelist, primarily,” he tells us. “I've written a couple of novels. The first one, The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney[1], came out in 2019. The second one came out three years later. It's called Here Again Now[2] and I'm currently working on a third novel, which is challenging and fun and exciting and scary, and all of the things that we associate with writing. I’m on draft 5621, rewriting it, putting jokes in, making sure characters are where they’re supposed to be. It’s the fun stuff.”
Okechukwu Nzelu is a British-Nigerian who grew up in Manchester. He’s a Creative Writing Lecturer at Lancaster University, he’s won and been shortlisted for too many awards to count, and everybody calls him ‘Okey’.
We asked him for his first impression upon hearing that the theme for this journal and therefore his interview would be The Haunting and Struggle of Memory.
“Well, to be honest,” he says, “I thought, ‘Oh, this is really convenient,’ because my second novel very much had those themes in mind. Here Again Now is about lots of things, but it's about characters who receive second chances and sometimes they mess them up. And it's about characters who are haunted by memories of things that happen; things that could have happened and things that did happen. It's about characters who find themselves where they are; in part because of history and memories, which they don't always even have access to - but I wanted to give the reader access to. So, this seemed super, super relevant and I think it's such a fertile ground for novelists to explore.
"And I guess that ‘Sliding Doors’ thing of where would you have been if you'd made certain choices in the past? I think that novels can do that really well, and show us what could have been as well as showing us what still could be, and sometimes that is scary and terrifying, and sometimes it's optimistic and hopeful.”
Fiction has long been a space where memory is explored and examined; resurrecting spectrally in Toni Morrison’sBeloved[3], or both comfort and accusation in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go[4]. Shirley Jackson’s protagonist in We Have Always Lived in the Castle[5] hides within memory to shield herself (and perhaps the reader) from the pain of the past; in Giovanni’s Room[6] by James Baldwin, memories help sense a shape of self in a hostile society.
And in Here Again Now, memory haunts. It shapes without clear lines as to what and why, at least for the characters within the story. We asked Okey when we have lost or are missing a connection to our past does it influence our identity, or a feeling of lacking some integral parts of ourselves?
“Absolutely,” he answers. “So, my second novel I was writing with Nigeria specifically in mind in relation to LGBTQ rights. About thirteen years ago, an anti-gay, anti-LGBT (but really specifically anti-gay) law came into being, which criminalised homosexuality in Nigeria in a way that it hadn’t been before. Previous to this law, it hadn't been a paradise for gays, but it was different in that people described having a kind of a ‘don't ask, don't tell’ approach to homosexuality and there being more freedoms there.”
The Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA) that Okey refers to here was enacted in Nigeria in 2014[7]. Criminalising same-sex relationships with penalties of up to 14 years in prison, the law came with a ban on LGBTQ+ organisations and even public displays of same-sex affection.
“After that law,” Okey continues, “things became more draconian. I don't live in Nigeria but going off the research and accounts that I've read, and people I've spoken to, that's what I have come to understand. And I think that, unfortunately, this kind of legislation is really tied into what I think is a deliberate ignorance and erasure of the past. We're seeing it now in the West with trans people and the way that they’re being persecuted and the way that we are being told that trans people are some new invention that has been birthed out of TikTok or whatever. Rather than trans people being around for all time, and just our ways of understanding have changed.
I was writing about Nigeria with quite specific reference to gay men and the fact that of course, gay men have always been around in homosexual love has always been around. There are deliberate efforts to erase that from history, from the archives. Because of course, history and how history is taught and understood is a huge part of how we see ourselves. And there is real harm done by that.”
From Transgender History[8] by Susan Stryker to Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity[9] by Craig A. Williams, there is a wealth of literature and historical evidence that are currently under threat of erasure or distortion. In the face of the shouting, red-faced few who demand that not only the existence, but the entire history of a community and an identity is false or questionable, LGBTQ+ minorities struggle every day to maintain ownership of their own narrative.
Omitting and rewriting these histories not only threatens the communities under attack but is worryingly reminiscent of the same mechanisms of erasure and domination that characterised colonialism, where entire cultures and identities were systematically suppressed to maintain control over marginalised populations, as Okey points out.
“I think in the UK, as I mentioned, the way that trans people are being persecuted–we see that in terms of this very deliberate refusal to engage with the history of empire and colonialism.
"And that's really because it's a part of this nation building exercise where we conveniently forget certain things about what this country did and we don't ask questions about where certain monies came from and who has them now and what should be done with that, and we're starting to come face to face with that.
But there is a lot of resistance. I think the term that Carmen Maria Machado refers to is ‘archival silence’. It's a very deliberate thing that allows harms to be perpetuated, and it is very frustrating to see. So, I suppose that's one of the freedoms and powers of fiction is that while still being fiction, you have the power to remind and to recontextualise and refocus.”
In her memoir In the Dream House: A Memoir[10], Carmen Maria Machado emphasises ‘archival silence’ as a tool in the erasing of individuals and their stories. Possibly, this is inspired by Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work, arguing that much of history is repeatably silenced and suppressed by those in power.
“The production of historical narratives involves the creation of silences.
The very definition of what is considered 'history' is shaped by the choice of what is excluded, as much as by the choice of what is included."[11]
Both Mochado and Trouillot suggest that this idea of ‘silencing’ is not accidental, with the struggle to reclaim what has been silenced as pivotal to the experience, and is in fact at the heart of Okey’s first novel, exploring that when deprived of memories of our past, we are at risk of losing sight of where we come from, and therefore who we are.
“In The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney, I was trying to tie not just the personal with the political because obviously the personal is political. But I was trying to tie large scale, nation-level issues and experiences with personal, individual level issues and experiences. What Nnenna experiences through the prism of the family is a kind of loss that goes through and beyond her. She doesn't know her father, for reasons which are complicated, in which she has not been really allowed to understand. And he doesn't know about her. Because of that, there's not just the personal loss of not knowing your father, but it's also the much wider cultural loss. Her father is her access to her Nigerian culture, to the language that he speaks, and she doesn't (at least not at the start of the novel). Because of that, he's had access to a sense of belonging and a sense of, I suppose, completeness and questions being answered, that she hasn't had the opportunity to have answered before.
"That's why I started in the way that I did. One of the things I was trying to get at with that book is that often there is a sense of obligation, I think, particularly when it comes to trying to break down or undo or dismantle the work of colonialism, there is a sense that you need to be doing things the right way that you're accountable to someone or something bigger than yourself - in terms of how you identify with or negotiate with your identity.
"And there are reasons for that because as I say, the issues that Nnenna’s experiencing are beyond her, right? They're bigger than her. What she knows of her language and her culture is part of a struggle that is huge and has lasted a really long time and hurt so many people and taken lives. You know, colonialism is life and death stuff. It really is.
"So, there are completely legible reasons why there's a kind of a sense of accountability. But I also wanted to preserve something private to her about the real loss that she's experienced and continues to experience, and the confusion that she has and the joy that she has when she finds her way into her culture.”
The instinctive pull for Nnenna to connect with her heritage, through the needlepoint pain of the absence of her father and the confusing push and pull of different cultural identities is central to Okey’s narrative. And Nnenna’s experience is far from purely fictional, considering Okey’s earlier meditations on colonialism, and those who are denied access to, and have stolen from them, their history and language. Linguistic and cultural gaps are for Nnenna opportunities to take her identity into her own hands. And as many experience, the struggle is a catalyst for the joy that comes with a sense of belonging, and profound discovery, both in self and in culture.
“In the novel,” Okey explains, “she finds a way to Igbo culture through language. That's what she's really good at. She's a prodigy, really. But with French rather than Igbo or any other Nigerian language. So, for her, it's this personal journey that she undertakes herself, of trying to teach herself Igbo from books, which is really difficult.
I wanted to reflect and do justice to both sides of that, the kind of the sense of obligation – or rather of accountability. I think accountability is a better word, as well as that sense of privacy and ownership and the joys and the struggles that come with that.
Chinu Achebe, another Ebon Nigerian author called it ‘the burden of representation’. The fact that one person, one author, one novel, can never fully represent a culture. It is just impossible to do.
But I think that burden is not just felt in that kind of literary sense. I think that burden is felt probably more broadly, there is of course this joy and pride in representing your culture and your background, and I think there's really important positive work that is done by that kind of representation, but it is also a kind of work. And that means that it comes with boundaries and expectations and difficulties. And I think it's OK to acknowledge that.”
Chinua Achebe, regarded as absolutely central to modern African literature, explored cultural representation in his work and the inherent complexity therein, particularly in response to colonial narratives that misrepresented African identity. Things Fall Apart[12], his 1958 novel, challenged portrayals of Africa and sits as a benchmark for those who seek to investigate the waters between individual storytelling and collective representation.
Beyond literature, the burden of representation exists within individual stories and experiences, as we constantly come against the expectation of others and ourselves to encapsulate our specific cultures. Just as a single memory cannot represent an experience, a single story cannot be expected to fulfill complete rendition. Identity seeking is difficult to navigate, particularly as the world demands more and more of us; deeper accessibility, ‘truer’ authenticity.
With these thoughts of identity and community and discussions of transnational Nigerian heritage then, we also considered Okey’s local connection to the North, and ask whether it also influenced his writing.
Okey agreed, “It does. I was born in Manchester, and I still live there. I work in Lancaster. So, I've spent pretty much my whole life in the Northwest of England. I've been to Nigeria a couple of times as a child, but never lived there, so in a very real way, my identity is English and Northern, and I try to represent and reflect that in my fiction. I think there's a real power to it.
I feel a pride in the way that I've grown up because I've always lived in really diverse communities. I don't just mean diverse in the sense that there are lots of black people around (although that is true, I grew up in a black family) but as I was growing up, the schools I went to were also very diverse in religion and ethnicity.
I didn't realise that that wasn't normal until I got a bit older and started meeting people from other backgrounds, who didn't have the same experiences growing up. It became a real eye opener.
So, when I started writing my first novel at about twenty-one, this was something for the project to pay tribute to, though I didn't want to make it seem like conflict never happens because of course it does. In my first teaching job at Oldham, for instance, I learned about the race riots and the racial segregation there. Which I found incredibly shocking. I can't think of anywhere else in Manchester or even in the country where that's happened as recently as Oldham. It was a real education, and the fiction had to reflect that in an honest, yet at the same time, positive way. I think you can do both in this case.
There are also interesting black stories to be told outside of London, where our black history cultural output receives the most focus. I believe around 80% of the black population in this country live in London, so there are reasons for it. But I believe there’s really important, positive work to be done on celebrating the diversity of different backgrounds in the North too.
This notion of national nostalgia is familiar—‘The good old days,’ ‘Things were better when...’. There even persists a nostalgia for those who experienced the close-knit community sensation of the Second World War. We asked Okey though, whether it was useful, to be sentimental about the past in this way, or whether it only serves to skew the present?
He was glad we brought it up and was more than happy to “Get on my soapbox. Because you're right, there is this very interesting selective nostalgia. That is the nature of nostalgia after all, it is selective. You're not taking the entirety of your experiences. It's picking and choosing what you wish you could relive.
One example that springs to mind has been this country's approach to Ukrainian refugees and the way people really opened their homes to them in a proactive, welcoming way. Which is wonderful to see. But at the same time, I'm very conscious that it was extended to white, European refugees. For reasons connected to race, and to proximity, and to a sense that the war in Ukraine mattered in perhaps a more important way than other global conflicts which are still displacing people in huge numbers. If you look at the political rhetoric around refugees and immigration in the general sense, and then look at what was said about Ukraine, there is a really distressing disparity there. Which cannot be explained by anything other than racism, xenophobia, and that selective nostalgia that you described. Until we get to grips with that and have an honest conversation about it, which I do not foresee in the immediate future, these patterns will continue to repeat.”
Okey’s observations about the response to the war in Ukraine and the broader rhetoric on immigration is a telling example of how nostalgia can be allowed to function and mutate in damaging ways—rather than reflecting truthfully the events that have taken place, but as self-serving in sometimes ethnocentric favourability. Sentimentality attached to certain historic moments as opposed to others can serve to leave behind that which was preferred not to remember, or perhaps never deemed worthy enough to record, shaping an experience into a memory to comfort or to fit convenience, whilst letting other complexities and injustices fade, seemingly unobserved and un-worthy of remembrance.
As we wrapped up, we were interested to know how Okey approached the exploration of grief as a theme. There's the potential for a lot of power there, in the idea that grief can be a harrowing yet transformative experience. We asked Okey to consider whether the memories that haunt us make us better people, collectively and personally?
“I should just preface this,” Okey replies, “by being honest and saying that, when I was writing my novel, Here Again Now, which was largely about grief, I was writing about things outside of my experience. There is a character who dies, but I've never lost someone as close to me in that way.
"So, I was drawing on experiences, outside of my own, on accounts that people very kindly shared with me or that I read. But I can't speak from my own experience of grief, which I want to be clear about that because I know there might be people reading this who have experienced, or are experiencing grief, who might see things differently, and I want to hold space for that.
"But what I was trying to say about grief in the work is that it is painful and confusing and nonlinear, and it shows us parts of ourselves that perhaps we didn't realise were there.
I think there's maybe a relationship between grief and nostalgia in that nostalgia selectively reveals things about ourselves, in a way we’re not fully aware of. With grief, it’s similar, except that it’s memory acting upon us rather than the other way around. It has a way of reminding us of things that we might have forgotten, showing them in a new light, which can be really painful. You can wish you'd have said something sooner when somebody was around, to have certain conversations with that person.
"I was really interested by the fact that you referred to the power of grief, though. I think there’s something in the way that we can respond to that, that can be empowering. Some people talk about a refocusing of priorities. I have a friend who lost her father some years ago when she was very young. And she talks about how her mother never saves anything anymore, like a bottle of wine for a special day--she just enjoys things in the moment, which I think is wonderful and again empowering.
"Grief can empower you to make changes because it reminds you of that temporariness and fragility of life. But it can also remind you that things can change in larger ways that you can survive and grow from.
"I guess that's what I was trying to do in my novel, to try to honour that, and celebrate the human capacity to grow from periods of difficulty and pain.”
LUX Journal was highly grateful to Okey for sharing his insights with us throughout this interview on the haunting of memory. He can be found at, https://www.nzelu.org/ and we cannot wait for what writing awaits us in the future.
[1] Okechukwu Nzelu, The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney (London: Dialogue Books, 2019)
[2] Okechukwu Nzelu, Here Again Now (London: Dialogue Books, 2022)
[3] Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987)
[4] Ishiguro, K. (2005) Never Let Me Go. London: Faber & Faber
[5] Jackson, S. (1962) We Have Always Lived in the Castle. New York: Viking Press
[6] Baldwin, J. (1956) Giovanni’s Room. New York: Dial Press
[8] Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008)
[9] Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999
[10] Machado, C. M. (2019) In the Dream House: A Memoir. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press
[11] Trouillot, M.-R., 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.
[12] Achebe, C. (1958) Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann