Interview with Chinelo Onwualu

Part of a series promoting the Problem Daughters intersectional feminist speculative fiction anthology. Please share the fundraiser and call for submissions.

---

Today, Problem Daughters editor Rivqa Rafael talks to Chinelo Onwualu about the two magazines she edits, African speculative fiction, and her own writing.

Chinelo Onwualu is a writer, editor and journalist living in Abuja, Nigeria. She is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion West Writers Workshop, which she attended as the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. She is editor and co-founder of Omenana, a magazine of African speculative fiction. Her writing has appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including Strange Horizons, Brittle Paper, Ideomancer and AfroSF: African Science Fiction by African Writers, and Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond. Follow her on Twitter or check out her website.

(As far as I’m aware) you’re the editor of two ambitious speculative fiction magazines. First, I’ll ask about the more established one, Omenana. I love your two-pronged mission here, showcasing African speculative fiction and challenging “normative ideas” – not to mention the gorgeous art and stories. What can you tell us about the magazine and its growth over the years?

Well, the magazine was actually the brainchild of my co-founder Mazi Nwonwu. He’d been thinking of creating a platform for the kinds of speculative fiction that he and a lot of people he knew were writing, but which just weren’t getting any attention from the arbiters of mainstream “African” fiction, a lot of whom are in the US or the UK. I’d expressed an interest in starting some sort of platform as well, so he reached out to me.

It’s been so much fun working on Omenana. I’ve read so much more African sci-fi, fantasy and horror in the past two years and I don’t think I’d have had the opportunity otherwise. The first couple of issues we had to solicit for stories, but by the end of the first year we were getting quite a number of submissions. This last issue we received nearly 50! I had no idea that so many writers were doing such amazing things with the genre.

Every month it’s a bit of a scramble, especially around our art. Plus, we became a paying platform last year – just when the Nigerian economy went into recession and our currency lost more than twice its value – and that hasn’t been easy either because we run it out of our pockets. We’ll be crowdfunding later this year to raise money to keep the whole thing going – so look out for that.

Despite it all, the African speculative fiction continues to grow – even beyond the magazine. Last year, a bunch of us writers, artists and filmmakers formally organised the African Speculative Fiction Society. We’ll be awarding our first prize for novels and short fiction, the Nommos, this year. Members are currently in the nominating process.

As for the magazine, we’re looking to expand our online presence and create more of a hub for African speculative fiction, with news, podcasts, and forums for discussion. Mainstream African stories have always had a speculative element to them, but to see how the boundaries of what is speculative are being pushed has been such an honour to witness, you know?

The first issue of your other magazine, Anathema, is forthcoming this year, and it will exclusively feature queer authors of colour. How did this project come about, and what are you looking forward to seeing in this new magazine?

Full disclosure: I consulted my co-founders and editorial partners, Andrew Wilmot and Michael Matheson, on this, and this response was formulated with both of their inputs. So the first issue of Anathema will actually be out this spring. We’re still in the submissions phase this month. The idea for the magazine really began at a lunch gathering at a friend's place. Andrew and Michael were discussing their frustration at seeing the way academia was co-opting the voices of cultural insiders in a way that felt uncomfortably colonialist. From there, I joined the conversation and we started discussing which underrepresented and marginalized voices we wanted to see more of and how we could help give those voices a chance to speak for themselves, to provide them with a platform. The ideas took on several forms and had several different people involved (at one point we thought about starting a press) before it settled into its current form as a tri-annual magazine.

Basically, we wanted to start something that would allow us to showcase the voices you don’t get to hear very often in the genre in a way that suited our various tastes and personalities. I think it is especially important in the era we live in today where a lot of civil society is being squeezed and human rights are under peril in a lot of parts of the world.

As for what we're looking forward to, we want to further the existing queer-lit conversations in which people of colour are often relegated to the sidelines, providing the exotic line or two as a nod to diversity. Whatever topics they want to speak on, whatever stories they want to tell, we just want to provide the space where they can do so without fear of censure. Already we’ve got some amazing stories and art, and we’re seeking more. We can’t wait to share them with the world.

Much of what I’ve read of your fiction and non-fiction could fit into either of these publications. Is this a conscious decision, or something that's happened naturally?

A bit of both, really. I made a conscious decision to shift my storytelling closer to home, but other than that, the rest has just been my natural inclination. I’ve always been interested in speculative fiction – though I had to struggle with seeing it as a legitimate form of writing. It seemed so frivolous to write about magic and spaceships when there were issues like poverty and abuse all around me. It was complicated by the fact that, until about a decade ago, I’d never read much speculative fiction by non-whites. So when I first started writing, my stories weren’t speculative at all. They were set in Western countries like the US and filled with white characters.

After attending Clarion West in 2014, I realised that there was a niche I could fill by writing about the world I came from and the issues that were important to me while still being true to my love of the speculative. I realised it wasn’t something that just white people did. Since then, I’ve tried to keep my writing true to the things that most inspire me.

Are there any writers you'd like to publish, but haven't yet? Please tell us about their work!

Lesley Nneka Arimah is a Nigerian writer whose speculative story “Who Will Greet You At Home” was published in The New Yorker in 2015. It was such a chilling, well-crafted piece of work that I’ve been eager to hear from her since then. I would love to see one of her stories in Omenana. It would totally make my day.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of representation of African women in Western media, I can still think of tired tropes and stereotypes about them (and about Africa in general, of course). Is there one in particular that you'd like to never see again?

Oh man, I think I would like to see the Strong Black Woman trope die in a fire. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the badass black women in literature, film and TV, but often their toughness is taken for character. Being able to make your way in a hostile world is a quality, not the sum total of who you are. Strong Black Women are often portrayed so one-dimensionally that they can lack basic humanity.

In general, I think the association between black women and violence in the western imagination needs to be broken. Black women in Africa are often portrayed as helpless victims of violence, while black women in the Diaspora are often seen as perpetrators of it. Either we’re mutely suffering some horrible situation and waiting for our white saviours to come, or we’re loud, vulgar, and angry – one moment away from beating someone up. It’s ridiculous.

What else does 2017 hold for you?

I’m very, very slowly chipping away at a YA novel. It’s set in a future Nigeria and it’s got spirits, goddesses and two wily teenagers trying to stay one step ahead of the chaos. It’s a blast. Of course, a friend recently reminded me I’ve been talking about a novel for over a decade now, so yeah… I’m also hoping to put together an anthology of African women in speculative fiction, to showcase some of the amazing women I’ve come across. So let’s see about that.

Interview with Nick Wood

We are delighted to be joined today by TFF author and friend Nick Wood. We invited him to talk about his stories and, in particular, the dystopian novel “Azanian Bridges” he published this year for NewCon Press. Nick's debut novel has been recommended by the Guardian as one of the best SF story of the year.

Nick Wood is a South African clinical psychologist, with over twenty short stories previously published in Interzone, Infinity Plus, PostScripts, Redstone Science Fiction, Fierce Family and AfroSF V1 and 2 (with Tade Thompson) amongst others. He has a YA speculative fiction book published in South Africa entitled ‘The stone chameleon’ as well as a debut novel ‘AZANIAN BRIDGES’ (NewCon Press: UK). Nick has completed an MA in Creative Writing (SF & Fantasy) through Middlesex University and is currently training clinical psychologists at the University of East London (UEL). He can be found at @nick45wood or nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz

The Future Fire: Your story The Paragon of Knowledge in TFF#33 features a panopticon-like dystopia, disability, race and an almost all-powerful posthuman protagonist who reasonably enough thinks he’s the good guy. Do you think it’s possible to write a story with only one issue? Or even one main issue?

Nick Wood: Well – maybe if it’s a relatively short flash-fic piece – and with a strong unitary focus. Otherwise, with intersectional identities existing in fully formed characters, as well as the complexity of the real world, I think longer stories should reflect at least some thematic density and diversity. The future should have a thick warp and woof, even though we act as if it doesn’t exist.

TFF: In Azanian Bridges, all the characters want to get hold of the incredible empathy box, for different reasons. Would you say that, in the end, no one gets what they were looking for?

NW: Like most ‘real’ life, yes! Even the empathy promised by the Empathy Enhancer ends up being a double-edged sword. As an old Stones song says, ‘you can’t always get what you want.’

TFF: As a psychotherapist, Martin (one of your two protagonists) often tries to use his professional knowledge and training to be in control of critical situations, and mostly fails. Being a psychologist yourself, does this reflect your personal experience at all?

NW: Yes, this reflects my experience as a human being in a world that seems to be unravelling fast. I have managed to get some positive movement in small scenarios, but ‘control’ has its’ downsides too and should not be over-egged, even though arguments have been made that an ‘internal locus of control’ is helpful. (That is, the sense that one is in charge of one’s own ongoing activities and fate.) I prefer control to be opened up and shared, however, to see where that goes, although this may be harder and more anxiety provoking initially. Many African definitions of identity have contextual or relational foci rather than seeing people as individual and controlling islands of identity.

TFF: Martin thinks that empathy has the power to defeat racism; that realising that other people feel exactly as we do would dissolve barriers. Do you think he is an idealist or naive?

NW: I think he is a naïve idealist – he would like us all just to appreciate our common humanity and ‘love one another’. But nothing is that simple, in a world still framed by the benefits and costs of colonisation. Further, in this overpopulated world of disappearing resources, fights between trapped rats on a sinking ship will increase. Unless the shock of rising water on our skins gets us to start co-operating, in order to protect a common but increasingly tenuous future. We humans are pretty good at denial and procrastination, despite our frontal lobes.

TFF: Do you think all white people are “a bit more racist than they think”?

NW: To some extent yes – for a start, most white people aren’t aware of their ‘whiteness’ and will insist on the need to be ‘colour blind’ to avoid racism. They can of course choose to do so – black people are unable to avoid racism and are aware that being ‘colour blind’ is a convenient avoidant excuse, for those privileged enough to be able to use it. So paler persons need to be aware ‘white is a colour too’ (to quote an academic paper by Dr. Nolte) and interrogate their own experience, as it’s so easy to suck in racist attitudes unwittingly from wider societal discourses. In the words of a group at the University of Cape Town, we need to find ways to ‘Disrupt Whiteness,’ in order to move towards real equity.

TFF: If you had the chance, would you actually try the empathy box yourself? And with whom?

NW: I would love to – and I’d do it with another animal, given we are all animals too. There is a dreadful ongoing destruction and killing of our conscious cousins the apes – as well as our other animal relatives, on the back of commodification of their lives. We don’t need to look for aliens elsewhere – they’re all around us, but they are fast being mercilessly exterminated.

TFF: Looking at the news of these past months, how “dystopian” do you think your story really is?

NW: It’s starting to look pretty tame by comparison. See question 10. I actually partly wrote the book to remind people of how close in history apartheid was – and something still so close, but supposedly consigned to ‘history,’ can easily re-emerge in ugly variations.

TFF: There are several foreign, untranslated words in Azanian Bridges. As a reader, I enjoyed them. I believe I even learnt a couple! Why did you decide to use them, and leave them untranslated? What do they add to the narration?

NW: The original attempt was to have the book published in South Africa, where there would have been no problem with the Afrikaans and isiZulu words. Given I ended up going with a UK publisher instead, I tried to ensure meaning was implied through context and these ‘foreign’ words were kept to a sprinkling, so as not to overwhelm the text or the reader. With hindsight, perhaps a glossary may have helped. However, I did write an essay, ‘One Language is Never Enough,’ on the importance of not anglicising everything, something the wonderful writer Rochita Roenen-Luis cued me in to. What other languages add are a crunchiness to the text, they make it harder to gloss over and make assumptions about what you are reading – they do what good SF does, i.e. they remind you this is not a white Anglophone world and that WME (White Minority Ethnic) is actually a more appropriate term in the context of the world than BME.

TFF: What was your reaction when they told you Ursula Le Guin was going to blurb your book? (I think I would have melted!)

NW: Thrilled to bits. She’s a long-standing favourite of mine, since I read her Earthsea books around 14 years of age and moved quickly onto her other ground-breaking works. Her Earthsea opener has a young wizard (Ged) at a school for wizards and written in 1964, long before Harry P. There are six books in the series, taking you through Ged’s lifespan and our relationship with dragons. Gorgeous stuff still.

TFF: You’ve been writing in the world of this novel for a while now. Are you planning a sequel or any other tie-ins, or will your next book be something completely new?

NW: I enjoy shorter fiction too so I’ve written a couple of shorts focusing on the unfolding ecological catastrophe as well as the financial divide between the one and ninety nine percent. I’m also writing a fantasy novella involving a family migrating along the south coast of Africa in post-catastrophic times. After BREXIT and Trump I’ve realised there is plenty of fuel for a British sequel to AZANIAN BRIDGES too – perhaps the break-up of the UK and Farage as English PM, the collapse of BRITANNIC BRIDGES? What a nightmare world we are descending into. Dave Hutchinson’s EUROPE trilogy (perhaps presciently) explores the fragmentation of the EU.

TFF: What is the most spooky or frightening thing that you ever experienced?

NW: Speaking with an archaeologist friend some years ago about an experience he’d had in a hut near a dig he was leading up the southern west coast of South Africa. Tim is a hard-nosed atheist scientist, with a materialist view of reality, but was obviously terrified out of his wits retelling his account of fleeing the hut at night, after an enduring visitation from a malevolent old lady ghost. He said it was either there - or he was losing his sanity. Seeing how grounded and level-headed he is, I was suddenly aware ANYTHING is actually possible. Tim’’s story seems to have been thinly fictionalised subsequently in Peter Merrington’s book Zebra Crossings.

TFF: Would you use a piece of art to tell someone that you love them?

NW: I have already done this on a number of occasions and will readily do so again. As an example, I drew and wrote a comic with a kick-ass heroine lead called ‘Brenda’ – and gave it to my partner ‘Glenda’.

TFF: I’ve seen an article few days ago, advocating the use of virtual reality to enhance empathy and, therefore, dissolve prejudice. You’re probably not surprised to hear that it reminded me of your novel. What do you think about it?

NW: An interesting development indeed and one I thought was probably not too far off when I wrote AZANIAN BRIDGES. I think it’s one way to go, but in and of itself it is unlikely to be enough to substantially change attitudes. As the article points out, you have to entice people into wanting to do engage with this in the first place – I made it into a competitive app game in AB.

Secondly, although the technology is immersive it is not fully immersive, in that you are not privy to their full experiential history, so identification will always remain partial. Thirdly, I’m sure there will be huge individual variation as to how much people identify with the experience of the other, partially based on pre-existing biases and prejudice. Finally, racism is more than a pejorative attitude to another – there is also comfort and privilege afforded to holding on to greater power and access to resources. So people may also actively discount their experiences of the other, in order to keep hold of what they may feel are fragile but ‘equitably earned’ entitlements.

Societal discourses within various institutions may further entrench this positioning. So, just for a start, we need to add another machine – an MM one – the Media Manipulator machine. Yes, I know one already exists in the form of RM, but like the EE machine, this needs to be appropriated by the 99%, to engender alternatives to the Daily Fail of the Sun.

TFF: What other developments would you like to promote?


NW: SIx Key Things (A-F Below):

A. African SFF – the newly launched African Speculative Fiction Society.
Voting is now open for the Nommos, the African SFF Awards. Geoff Ryman has a wonderful unfolding series of ‘100 African Writers of SFF’ at TOR

B. OMENANA – African SFF Magazine: http://omenana.org/

C. The work of Chinelo Onwualu – Chinelo not only edits Omenana but is also a wonderful writer. She is also co-editing ANATHEMA, a apeculative fiction magazine of work by queer POC, which has just met its Kickstarter goals. There is an extremely interesting podcast interview with her here.

D. ROSEWATER – Tade Thompson – A brilliant re-envisioning of an alien invasion narrative. A textured and gritty immersive world, with evocative words that puts VR technology to shame. This is set in Nigeria, like the Lagos-invasion of Nnedi Okorafor’s ‘LAGOON’, but ROSEWATER also shows how much difference two wonderful writers can bring, to what may look superficially like similar themes and setting.

E. Short African SFF, a selected some DOZEN significant anthologies/persons are:

1. Hartmann, Ivor (Ed.) ‘AfroSF’, V1 (Short SFF) and V2 (FIVE Novellas);
2. Arigbabu, Ayodele (Ed.) ‘Lagos 2060’

3. Dilman Dila ‘A Killing in the Sun’
4. Nnedi Okorafor: ‘Kabu Kabu’

5. Lauren Beukes: ‘Slipping’

6. Nerine Dorman (Ed) ‘Terra Incognita’ (Short Story Day Africa)

7. Jalada – Afrofuture(s): https://jalada.org/2015/01/14/jalada-02-afrofutures/
8. Nerine Dorman (Ed.): ‘Bloody Parchments’
9. Billy Kahora (Ed.) ‘Imagine Africa 500’
10. Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso: ‘Haunted Graves and Other Stories’
11. Shadreck Chikoti – writer and key driver for Malawian SFF

12. Wole Talabi - writer and also keeps a SFF short list at OMENANA. Here is also an overview of his favourite short African SF
13. For a baker’s dozen, I’m keenly waiting the first African SFF short collection by women writers – Chinelo Onwualu?

F. Comics

1. I have a round-up of South African comics here: 
SF in SA (28) ‘Is There Such a Thing as South African Comics?’
2. The Comic Republic: http://www.thecomicrepublic.com/
3. KWEZI is making giant waves in South Africa right now: http://kwezicomics.co.za
4. Chimurenga Chronic: The Corpse Exhibition and older graphic stories http://chimurengachronic.co.za/in-print/current-issue/

Nisi Shawl's Everfair

Tomorrow sees the US release of Nisi Shawl’s long-awaited African steampunk novel Everfair, a book that asks the question: what if the people of the Congo had access to steam power and technology in the nineteenth century, before they were colonized by Belgium? We invited Nisi to come say a few words about her book here.

I told Djibril I would write a paragraph about my novel Everfair. I’d rather offer you something different to read, though: thoughts on this novel’s growth medium. Everfair, I’d better first tell you, is a steampunk novel that’s primarily set in an imaginary Utopia in late 19th and early 20th century central Africa.

So where’d it come from? Yes, I’m the one who wrote my novel’s text. I had help, though. People gave me money, and ideas, and medicine, and food. Books. Flowers. Tea. Places to stay. They combed my hair, treated me with acupuncture, trimmed my toenails. That nurturing environment is what I’m calling Everfair’s growth medium. It holds my novel’s roots.

In my WisCon 35 Guest of Honor speech I proposed the idea that genius is not the manifestation of a single being but of a whole community. I said the same thing on Everfair’s acknowledgments page. I don’t know if what I’m manifesting is genius, but I’m very sure it’s an expression of my community and our concerns, from the pleasures of steeping ourselves in the sensory delights of technology to the ambiguities of fully nuanced interactions between a supposedly united mind’s conflicting yet simultaneously held beliefs.

My community is where Everfair is rooted, where it derives from.

And, in a truly fair turnabout, my community is also the atmosphere into which my novel unfurls itself and the light towards which it reaches.

When you read it, Everfair is fulfilled.

One early reviewer claims my novel is an “important entry in the movement for greater diversity in sf.” It only enters the movement through your eyes, though. It’s only important when it’s important to you.

Thank you for reading my book.

---

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said of Everfair, “A compelling debut novel … Shawl deftly wields a diverse cast of characters to impressive effect, taking readers from the Victorian era to WWI and its aftermath. This highly original story blends steampunk and political intrigue in a compelling new view of a dark piece of human history.”

Nisi Shawl has posted on her website various teasers and extras, including photos of objects that inspired the story, an essay on sexuality and morals in 19th century Congo, the outline of a play performed in the novel, and other materials. There is also an extract of Everfair at the Macmillan website, where you can buy or preorder the novel.

Interview: Jungle Jim magazine

1. What was the inspiration for setting up Jungle Jim and what is the ethos/agenda of the magazine?
   I think both of us (Hannes and Jenna) were at a stage when we were working on things that were dependent on outside factors – people, money, circumstance etc. It was becoming frustrating and we dreamt of having a creative project which we could run on our own terms – something we felt was important, but also not too serious (Little did we know…). One day it just reached a crisis point – we were sharing an office at the time – and we decided to start a magazine. Hannes has a background in independent publishing, but I had absolutely none – so we were guided by very little other than what we thought we could achieve, and for which we felt there was a need. Looking around, there were very few print magazines offering the magical combination of storytelling and images I remembered from childhood. We wanted the adult version – something different, shocking, ‘out there’ – and where I could sometimes get away with publishing my own writing! At the same time, I was becoming more and more interested in pulp writing, the ethos of that time – where writing was accessible, imaginative, visual, dramatic, narrative-driven and relatively ego-less (for better or worse). Of course, it’s easy to idealise that time, but we felt there was also a lot to learn – especially in a country where reading is not the entertainment of choice. We became fascinated with the idea of western pop-genre ‘clashing’ with Africa, of the new truths and exciting ideas this could reveal – and potentially the sacred cows we might upset. So we launched the magazine with this ethos: “Jungle Jim is a bi-monthly illustrated print publication, aiming to showcase narrative- and concept-driven African stories. Taking from the pulp tradition, we publish short and serialised fiction that entertains and engrosses in all dramatic genres, accessible to all, but with a high quality of writing. We seek to publish stories that explore the collision between the visceral daring of pulp and the reality of living in Africa.” And our motto is: “African tales of the uncanny and the unexpected.”