In this edition of A Short Talk, the 8th, Nigerian essayist and journalist Kosisochukwu W. Ugwuede speaks with Joseph Omoh Ndukwu, associate editor at A Long House, about writing and photography, among other things. Of her writing and photography she says, “I think about both as separate lines that sometimes touch but continue on by themselves.” Her views on nonfiction, the literary form to which she is largely committed, are expansive, searching, and perceptive. She speaks about her love for the form and all the affordances that it provides. There is an intimacy, an almost nostalgic delight, when she speaks about craft in her writing and the place of photographs in her work, attempting to examine and elucidate how they help her explore her own aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional landscapes. She speaks also about the books that have shaped her thinking about place and memory. And her thoughts on faith and the supernatural, important themes in her work, reveal invaluable insights into why they form essential aspects of who we are as individuals and as societies. In this interview, Ugwuede shows us, with great lucidity and unfading curiosity, how art can illuminate home, memory, interests, and life.
A Long House
You almost exclusively write nonfiction. Why have you stuck with this form as opposed to fiction or poetry?
Kosisochukwu Ugwuede
I’ve just read too much great fiction and poetry, and written very terrible fiction and poetry, to keep at it. That’s very humbling, wouldn’t you agree? More seriously, though, these are genres I’d say I am least practised in, and so picking them up now will require the humility and patience of being a novice fiction writer or poet. There’s nothing wrong with being a novice, but so far, reading remains the extent of my interaction with both genres—a good novel is often an invaluable lesson in empathy, and a good poem offers me a necessary and occasional jolt of current to the soul.
‘Stuck’ does make my relationship with nonfiction sound less pleasant than it actually is. One of the primary reasons why I’ve remained a writer is that writing is epistemic. Like many writers, this is how I make sense of being a person alive in this specific moment, how I learn or clarify what it is I claim to know. Poetry and fiction did allow me to do these things when I was much younger, but now nonfiction—essays, specifically—continues to feel like a more fitting landing place for my writing practice. No other genre, in this phase of my writing career, gives me the satisfaction of having written like an essay does—and I feel this way about reading good nonfiction (literary essays, features, longform journalism, etc). I love the opportunity to explore a curiosity, to meander, to begin at one point and wander off into a totally different place in search of something that may be unknown to me, to think and show thinking, to surprise myself with where my curiosities take me. I love the opportunity writing essays affords me to go beyond the facts of my own life by way of research—all of the beautiful things writing an essay, however you define it, allows one to do. Essays, I find, are a kind of alchemy, tearing apart and remaking existing knowledge—including of oneself—into something new, and singular.
It’d have been nice to work across all three genres; a number of my favourite writers did not restrict themselves to specific genres. But, when I think of multigenre or multidisciplinary artistic work, I think and dream of working in other kinds of mediums entirely. I photograph, and I am very interested in films, though I’ve not gotten around to exploring that interest meaningfully. I wonder if I might do something in fashion later in life—that was an early interest of mine—if I get over the fact that we don’t need as many fashion items as we currently manufacture. But in terms of text-based mediums, nonfiction it is for now.
A Long House
Religion and faith are important concerns for you, and they have featured quite a bit in some of your essays. Could you tell us about your view of faith, especially in Nigerian life, and why it is important to your work?
Kosisochukwu Ugwuede
Beyond ‘religion’ and ‘faith,’ I’d include that my preoccupation is really around all the ways that we’re constantly seeking out the metaphysical or the supernatural in order to explain the material world. That, broadly speaking, is what I find interesting and what I am often trying to get at in my work.
Much of my upbringing, like many Nigerians, was steeped in religious practice. We were practicing Catholics and occasional Pentecostals, and there were several “seeing”* ministries we, my family and I, visited in my adolescent years. As a teen, I witnessed and participated in exorcisms and spiritual retreats in boarding school, was deeply devoted to saints and martyrs, curious about stigmatics and Catholic doctrine, and developed a habit of reading the Book of Revelations in its entirety at least once every school term, compelled as much by a futile attempt to decipher its terrifying prophecies as I was by its fantastical telling of them. And then, somewhere along the way, a nick. In probing that nick, I’ve ended up with a gaping opening into which it feels like I’m eternally staring, trying to find something—firmer reasons for my belief, though this, I think, is counterintuitive to the nature of faith.
Nonetheless, I strongly believe that in interrogating the spiritual and fantastical landscapes of our society, we might come close to understanding something deeper about ourselves. A friend of mine often says that the only artistic genre with which one can truly explain Nigeria is through magical realism. So it is well beyond the Abrahamic or Protestant faiths—you can reach back into our indigenous cosmologies or reach forward into New Age Spirituality because these frameworks influence not only who people choose to believe and how they interact with the divine but also how the divine manifests in everyday life and in cultural phenomena.
We’re a people for whom the notions of divine supremacy influence everything from how we are named to how we are buried. Whom we marry, where and how we work and socialise, how we approach sex and friendships and daily irritations or monumental disappointments, how we interpret failures and successes, how we converse or dispute, or think about reward and punishment, even who we elect, we filter all of these through a uniquely religious and fantastical lens that I am curious about.
A Long House
In addition to being a writer, you’re also a photographer. How does one practice feed or inform the other, or do you view them as separate practices, each with divergent ends?
Kosisochukwu Ugwuede
It isn’t entirely clear cut to me what relationship exists between both practices, if one exists. When I first started photographing ‘meaningfully’ in 2018, I believed then that I’d extended my medium of expression, that I was going to, through photographs, build upon the themes I was drawn to in writing. More recently, however, I think about both as separate lines that sometimes touch but continue on by themselves. I also think that both practices draw from and feed different parts of my skillsets and creative life respectively.
On my wall currently, just above my desk, are three of some of my favourite photographs. They’re all in black and white. Two were made by the sea and one at a friend’s dinner table. When I look up in the middle of work and gaze at them, they elicit a certain mood or memory that is tied very firmly to the places where the photographs were made. I did not intend to write about or from them while I was photographing, and when I consider that endeavour now, it feels almost impossible to write in such a way that I can convey to someone else what these photographs really mean to me on a very visceral level. Most of my photographs, I’d say, are of the kind that John Berger refers to as “private photographs.”
There’s a yearning for both intimacy and expansiveness that my photographs seem to reveal to me about myself in a way that my writing doesn’t, not anymore at least—I used to be much more sappy as a younger writer. In that sense, my photography practice feels private. I am often capturing, it seems like, an experience or feeling that only I can understand, which is epistemic in its own right. While my writing practice tends to lean more towards a desire for intellectual rigour and love for craft, my photography practice can be very ‘feeling-forward’, very nostalgic and sentimental, very moody and melancholic. It can also be very touristy. Whenever I visit or live in a place for a stretch of time, of course, I’m going to photograph said place. I like to figure out what it is I’m inclined to document about the place because I want to remember it.
A Long House
How do you decide when a subject should be written about, and when it should be explored through photography? And what, in your opinion, are the strengths and limitations of each medium?
Kosisochukwu Ugwuede
If there’s a subject I am curious about enough to explore artistically, I am primarily thinking of what kind of essay it could become. Lately, I find myself thinking about films as well; what kind of short film could this become? I think my photography practice tends to be more incidental, organised largely around places.
As a recording tool, photographs support my writing in that they can serve as a portal into a time or moment past—this can be a crutch sometimes, I can relinquish recall totally to photographs. But ultimately, in spite of its present ubiquity, I understand when John Berger argues that there are several elements (knowledge) that must come together to read a photograph as accurately as possible. So it is not explicit in the way that writing can be, in the way that words can be. Photographs are also momentary records, so there’s a before and after that you cannot capture (or you could attempt with a series of photographs) and for which a viewer would need some context in order to understand or interpret, but writing? Except a writer is intentionally opaque, literature doesn’t come with those kinds of limitations. Sontag says, after all, that “only that which narrates can make us understand.” But narrative, too, though able to, because of its continuous nature, has limitations: of memory, of inexactness, of opacity, of dishonesty or distortion.
A Long House
Your essay “Down the Aisle, in Search of Pulse” was published in the second issue of the magazine. What was the process of writing it like? Also, how do you know when an essay you’re working on is successful—or, at least, finished?
Kosisochukwu Ugwuede
I began writing “Down the Aisle, in Search of Pulse” several months into living in Oregon, where I’d moved to in late 2021 for an MFA program. By “began writing”, I mean I’d begun to pay attention to my experiences with food—the American food system specifically—and to observe the discomfort, dissonance or fascination that often compel me to write about something. Towards the end of that year, I began writing what was then a sweeping, book-length essay about those experiences for one of my graduate classes. When it came time to begin my thesis, that sweeping essay began to disintegrate into separate, more thematically focused pieces.
I think the actual writing that resulted in this specific essay began from another class exercise. If I’m remembering correctly, we were taking apart essay building blocks and attempting to write complete pieces with individual elements as a way to figure out their strengths and limitations in a piece of nonfiction. For instance, one exercise was to write a short essay entirely in scene, and another was to ‘prove something’, to investigate how writers present fact-based and verifiable information in personal nonfiction writing.
And so the piece began as a nearly all-scene essay recounting a visit to an African store or market in Portland with my friends. I then began to layer that essay with past experiences, stuff I’d written in the original sweeping essay, and to do some more reporting around the topic. Graduate students had a small career development stipend, and I asked for mine to travel the Pacific Northwest, to visit as many African stores/markets as I could. At first, I wasn’t quite sure how all the pieces I was assembling fit together or even what I was getting at with my inquiry. But this is one essay I can say for certain that I felt an element of surprise with what it revealed to me about my discomfort and fascination with markets, grocery runs, and locales, by the time I arrived at what felt like its end.
Endings are very difficult for me. It’s tricky, isn’t it? You want to grab a reader’s attention with your first line or paragraph, and if you’ve been lucky enough to keep them engaged till the end, you do want them to leave feeling as if they’ve just come to the end of a [insert preferred adjective here] journey. You’ve got to really stick the landing. The longer I’ve written, the more I realise there’s an internal sense of release and surprise that tells me I’ve wrestled with a topic as honestly as I can—that tells me I’ve been successful, but not exactly finished with an essay.
I tinker a lot with my work. It is actually never-ending unless I put a hard stop to it by imposing a deadline or letting an external one influence how long I can continue to tinker with a piece. But all of that tinkering is really then on a craft level, because that is important to me: Can I hear the rhythm of my sentences? Are there jerky transitions? Are there words I’ve mistaken to mean one thing when they mean the other? And, of course, as a purveyor of so-called truth, I am also anxiously fact-checking and ensuring I am presenting information that is factual where necessary, or makes clear the limits and ironies of memory, if applicable.
With every essay, I try to ensure ‘success’ which simply means I have wrestled with my subject rigorously: in thinking, researching, reporting (which is a practice I borrow from my work as a journalist), in essaying. Finished? I think my work is technically finished only after it’s published.
A Long House
Memory, home, and nostalgia are strong currents that run through your work. What books have you read that profoundly examined these themes? Can you speak briefly about what you considered the greatest strength of at least one of them?
Kosisochukwu Ugwuede
It’s a long list. It’s impossible to recall everyone but I find that, ultimately, a lot of us are writing about home and memory: the places we come from, what we remember of those places and the people who shaped our being in those places, and how what we remember of those periods influence who we’ve become in relation to the themes that preoccupy us as writers.
Recently, however, books that center home that have moved me include Safiya Sinclair’s How To Say Babylon, Melissa Febos’ Girlhood, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, Chinua Achebe’s Home and Exile, Yemisi Aribisala’s Longthroat Memoirs, Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart, Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, This is the Place (an anthology edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters), Louise DeSalvo’s On Moving: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again, Pádraig Ó Tuama’s In The Shelter, and Erica Bauermeister’s House Lessons.
On memory, the narrators in Lauren Slater’s Lying and Catherine Cho’s Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness were frighteningly delightful and left me pondering about how memoirists work around the inexactness of memory, particularly how both books were assembled.
I took a lot of notes when I read Louise DeSalvo’s On Moving last year. It’s an essay collection about writers moving houses and trying to make a home in new places against the backdrop of DeSalvo’s own move. I read On Moving at an interesting time in my life: I lived with housemates (all of us former strangers) and had been thinking very often about the house where I spent the latter part of my childhood in Enugu. While the book is as much about the eccentricities and restlessness of the writers whose lives she looks into and the economic and social capital that allowed several of them to move in the manner and frequency that they did, it was inadvertently about the bodily and psychological experience of being in a place and how that is always in flux. “What will I become in my new home? What will become of me?” she writes in “A Home, Dismantled”. I think that’s often the undercurrent of my writing about place and home.
A Long House
What is the most important writing advice you’ve received or come across, and why is it important to you?
Kosisochukwu Ugwuede
Living is also writing—several writers have put forward this advice in different ways. There’s the reading that you must do, and the learning that you must do, sometimes in solitude, but there’s also the living that you must do, especially as a nonfiction writer. But living is not enough. Being attentive to your life is crucial, too. Now, there’s a double-edged sword to constantly “being on the lookout for your material”; too much of it and your life becomes a laboratory of some sort, lived only in service to the writing. But in a year that’s nearing its end, one in which I’ve done very little creative work, I find this advice very useful and comforting: I can go about living as meaningfully as possible, and instead of fretting over not actively working on X or Y, allowing my writing or photography feed off that abundance in the in-between periods where I am not held captive by my day-to-day obligations.
*Seeing ministries were fringe church groups that claimed to divine people’s predicaments or futures.
