Skip to main content

56 Years of Nigerian Literature: Suzanne Ushie

Photo via the writing disorder

It's day four of my celebration of Nigerian women writers, and today the focus is on Suzanne Ushie, whose recently released story, Let's Talk About Something Else, I had the absolute pleasure of reading yesterday. Published by Saraba - in anticipation of their forthcoming Power Issue - the story follows Uzilibe - a young woman living in Lagos, who quits her job after her boss gropes her, and then heads to London to clear her head and stays with her friend, Bendeustu. But leaving a great job is ridiculous, right? Especially when it was just a grope, right? It's really not a big deal? All he did was brush against her breasts and squeeze her bum? Clearly she overreacted, right? Totally overreacted! Beautiful story on a not-o-beautiful topic, sexual harassment in the workplace and how people react when you react (instead of ignore it).

Cover photograph by Magda Kapa. Source: Saraba

Beyond this new fiction supplement, Ushie - who (used to?) work in advertising and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia - has had her stories in a number of print and online publications, including Dissembling and The Ghost of Joy in Sentinel Nigeria, Above the Line in Overtime, Swans in Conte Online, From an Empty Place in Fiction Fix, We Don't Sweep at Night in The Writing Disorder, Home is Home in Lunch Ticket and Fine Red Dust in Gambit: Newer African Writing. 




Speaking of Gambit, four years ago in an interview with Emmanuel Iduma for The Mantle, Ushie shares her thoughts on the art of creating and more, such as what fascinates her about the writing process: 'The inexplicable thrill that comes with finding a potential good story.' And on the internet as a platform for new and emerging writers: 'The Internet has made life easier for me and tons of other emerging writers.' As well as how her 'experiences as an ad woman occasional show up in [her] work.' There's also this op-ed Ushie wrote a few years ago on finding writing:

For as long as I remember I've always wanted to be a writer. I wrote my first book titled 'The Mahogany Caves', borne out of an imagination shaped by Enid Blyton, just before I turned nine. In those early years I played ten-ten and hopscotch with my sisters in our compound in Calabar, and during our frequent adventures, I imagined that the orchard where my father grew his precious fruits was really a secret garden. There was always something to daydream about, to write about.
Although in the earlier interview on the Mantle, Suzanne Ushie states 'I don't really write nonficiton ...  I may write [it] to help clear my head in those moments.' There are a number of non-fiction pieces written by Ushie, which can be read here: The Serious Guide to Becoming a Seriously Unfashionable Writer republished in Saraba's Fashion issue, with some satire which even provides a handbook with 10 points on how to look more like a writer: No. 2 -  say goodbye to that 'sixteen inch Brazilian weave for a brand new dreadlocked diet', and maybe even cancel that 'eyebrow waxing appointment at the Day Spa.' There's also The Gravity of Faith and Lipstick, Eyeliner & Everything in Between in Brittle Paper. 



from bookshy http://ift.tt/2dIK28I

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more