“Why We Centre Igbo Culture And Language In Our Writing”
Chika Unigwe is a Nigerian professor and author of Igbo descent. To accompany the launch of Service95 Book Club’s August Monthly Read, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half Of A Yellow Sun, Unigwe explores the importance of Igbo identity – a central pillar of the novel – and explains why Igbo writers past and present celebrate the Igbo language and culture in their work
Kasimma Okani, the author of the short story collection All Shades Of Iberibe, insists on including her Igbo ethnic identity at the end of her biography. Wherever her prose appears online, there is always a line stating that she is an Igbo writer. For her, and for many of us Igbo writers publishing globally in English, there is an intentionality to centring our Igboness in our narratives.
However, it would be impossible to talk about our writing, our use of Igbo words, and our narratives as portals into the Igbo world without referencing the Igbo Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe, AKA the father of African literature, and Flora Nwapa, its matriarch. Both of their debuts, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Nwapa’s Efuru (1966), centre the Igbo world and are set in pre-colonial Igbo villages. Achebe’s was written two years before Nigeria’s independence from Britain – when most of Africa was still under colonial rule, Nwapa’s followed six years after that, when ‘the African’ was seen as ‘the exotic other’. The writers’ aim, understandably, was to depict a culture as valid as that of the colonialists and to show that the Igbo (AKA ‘the African’) is not the simpering, exotic man-child colonial literature made him out to be, but rather, a full, functioning human.
The new generation of Igbo writers – to which Okani belongs – is less concerned with proving the humanity of the Igbo than in celebrating a culture and language that we are very proud of. Take Chikodili Emelumadu’s debut Dazzling, a YA fantasy novel published in the UK earlier this year about a small girl who must ‘eat the leopard’. ‘Eat’ in this sense would be considered a metaphor by non-Igbo speakers, but it is how the Igbo express initiation. I taa. One who ‘eats’ witchcraft becomes a witch, for instance. It isn’t a metaphor as much as the real act of becoming.
Ukamaka Olisakwe’s debut, Ogadinma Or, Everything Will Be Alright (the latter part of the title is a direct translation of the former), was published in the UK in 2020. It was important to Olisakwe that ‘Ogadinma’, which any Igbo speaker would recognise as a stock phrase used to comfort someone going through a hard time, was in the title. In 2016, Chinelo Okparanta published Under The Udala Trees in the US and UK, and made no attempt to explain what an udala is in the novel. When a student asked me, I told her to Google it. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Akwaeke Emezi, EC Osondu, Okey Ndibe, Chigozie Obioma, myself, and all the other Igbo writers who write decisively as NdiIgbo, regularly sprinkle Igbo words and prominently centre Igbo culture and worldview in our works, regardless of where they are set. I am deliberate about putting Igbo on par with English by also not italicising Igbo words.
Whereas our predecessors used their narratives to showcase Igbo to the world, we are inviting the ‘other’ into our world. Not merely to gawk at it like a piece on display, but to experience it with all their senses. The European/Western audience isn’t the one we are talking to. We do not need to prove anything to them.
However, the West is welcome to our party to eat the abacha and the ugba and the jollof rice and the pounded yam in abundance. One of my proudest moments as a professor was when one of my American students, who has never been to Africa, greeted me with “kedu?” He had picked it up from two years of taking classes with me and reading Igbo writers. None of whom ever translated the word.
Sadly, although Igbo is spoken by over 20 million people, it is on UNESCO’s list of vulnerable languages and, in 2012, was predicted to be extinct by 2025. It sounds ridiculous, but I know from visiting southeastern Nigeria that the danger is real. On one visit, I went to church in a working-class to middle-class neighbourhood, and all around me, children spoke English. In a country where English is privileged, it was important to the parents that their children should learn it.
So, for me, writing intentionally as an Igbo artist isn’t just a way to share my pride in a culture and language that is so diversely rich and vibrant, with a lush and colourful vocabulary. It is also an act of necessity and a matter of urgency. My favourite Igbo proverb goes: ‘Ka ana achu aja, ka ikpe n’ ama ndi mmuo.’ Let us do our bit by making the sacrifices required of us so that the gods take the blame if things do not work out. May Igbo never die. Iseeee.
Chika Unigwe was born and raised in Enugu, Nigeria and lives in the US where she is an assistant professor at Georgetown College & State University and Georgia College & State University. Her latest works are the novel The Middle Daughter, and the children’s storybook Obioma Plays Football, which is also available in Igbo
