Creativity and Possession: Synopsis of a Nigerian Author
Tess Onwueme was raised by her grandparents in a small Nigerian village. A self proclaimed peasant girl, she never dreamed that she would become a writer, yet has achieved major recognition within the drama community, and has established a writing career that spans continents.
“Now, let me say that writing found me. It’s an odd statement, but that seems to capture the whole circumstance around what I call my epiphany in the whole business of writing.”
As a girl of modest means attending an exclusive all girls’ boarding school, where classmates were the children of wealthy and influential parents, Onwueme had to work hard. She found herself excelling at academics and athletics and surrounded by friends. However, when she was recognized as one of the top ten students in the entire state, jealousy and backbiting erupted. The once popular girl found herself pushed out of the circle of peers who had once embraced and celebrated her, crushed by her feelings of isolation.
One evening, as she was thinking about the situation, she began to writing about her feelings, eventually developing a poem called “The Stinging Tongue.”
“Once I wrote that it was like exhaling. It was so therapeutic. And I had found a certain power, a certain community within that circumscribed space that I had created. From then on, anything, be it joyful, be it sorrowful, be it whatever I felt, I wrote it down.”
By the time Onwueme finished high school she had completed five booklets of poetry. She became a continuous writer. She didn’t stop when she married – or had her five children – or when she worked on and completed her Masters and PhD – or taught in university classrooms. She did begin sensing distinct characters in her inspirations, however, and had to move beyond the expression of poetry to plays.
“There were other voices like a community just pushing to be heard. That’s how I wrote my first play. And I continued. It was like my private, secret encounters with the world and my own conversations with the world around me. When I wrote that first play, it lifted me into a new scope and gave me a new landscape to perform.”
The first play she submitted to a publisher, A Hen Too Soon, was rejected. But she persisted. She sent it to a small press, who published it in 1983. Onwueme immediately sent two more plays which were not only published, but were also adopted in high school curriculums. But the icing on the cake came when she won her first literary award, the 1985 Association of Nigerian Authors Award for Drama. Several other major awards and offers from large publishers followed.
By 1988 three of her works had been staged in the U.S. She was invited to attend a performance of her play The Broken Calabash in Detroit. As luck would have it, she was also invited to attend a conference on women playwrights in Buffalo at about the same time. But she knew it was meant to be when she learned that her expenses would be covered by various cultural embassies in addition to a stipend. The play went on to win the Martin Luther King Writer’s Award – which came with a one year fellowship at Wayne State University. So she moved with her five children to the U.S.
“It was extremely liberating. For once I had space of my own. But I had children ranging from 4 to 12. I came to this new world with a lot of challenges, but I was also quite invigorated.”
Onwueme has succeeded both as an educator, and as an author. Currently UW Eau Claire’s Distinguished Professor of Cultural Diversity and Professor of English, she has been awarded two Ford Foundation grants, published a total of 18 books, and received numerous literary awards. Her work has aired on the BBC, and is staged and studied in classrooms around the world. She recently completed a novel, What I Cannot Tell My Father, which she refers to as a fictional biography.
Many of her works deal with the lives of women in rural Africa, the good and the bad. Some of her plays discuss the effects of oil production on local economies and cultures. Others focus on family issues or social structures. But they are all written with passion.
“The words, the action, the narrative, the dialogue I want to engage society in lives in me as I work with people and the world around me. Each work has its own gestation period, and, when ripe, will burst open. When ideas are ready to be born and they burst open, like labor, you can’t hold them back.
“In the Igbo language of the Nigerian delta, the word agwu means creativity, but it also means madness or lunacy. You see, you cannot control lunacy or creativity. It can possess you; it can grip you, at any moment. And when it does, you must yield.”
Additional information about Onwueme can be found at http://www.writertess.com.
You can find Tess Onwueme’s books at many librarires, and through Michigan State University Press, Africa Heritage Press, or Amazon.com.
They include:
No Vacancy (a play), 2005
What Mama Said (an epic drama), 2003
The Missing Face, 2002
Then She Said It! (a play), 2002
Why the Elephant Has No Butt (a novel), 2000
Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen (a play), 2000
Tell It To Women (an epic drama), 1997
Riot in Heaven (a play) 1996
Three Plays: An Anthology of Three Plays, 1993
Parables for a Season (a play), 1991
Legacies (a play), 1989
The Reign of Wazobia and Other Plays (1988)
Mirror For Campus (a play), 1987
Ban Empty Barn and Other Plays (1986)
A Scent of Onions (a play), 1986
The Desert Encroaches (a play), 1985
The Broken Calabash (a play), 1984
A Hen Too Soon (a play), 1983
