'The Writing Itself Decides': An Interview with Vanessa Onwuemezi
by Ali Maeve Sargent
Your prose makes use of gaps and line breaks to punctuate, although they do not function equivalently to full stops or commas. What is your thinking about using the space of the page in this way?
The first time I used the gaps in the way they appear in the collection was in “At the Heart of Things”; they developed through reading the work aloud, and I wanted the opening of that story to have a particular pace that commas didn’t give. I didn’t find them satisfying. So it originated as a way to incorporate a pause. It’s a very intuitive thing — when I came to edit the collection there were occasions where there was a decision to keep a gap or not — especially with type setting - which meant I had to interrogate the location of the gaps more. But it’s still a process of reading aloud which helps me decide if the gap should be there or not. There is something about the line break in poetry, which is much more normal in the middle of a sentence of a poem, encourages a different attitude towards a word that I wanted to introduce into my prose.
Your story ‘At the Heart of Things’ explores the idea of a void; that where we may see nothingness there are many things, and depth. There’s a theme of materiality running through your stories, in the sense that our perception, and also narrative, are always partly excluding or not seeing some of the matter present at any given moment. How did this theme develop in your writing?
It’s interesting you pick up on the question of perception. I’m very interested, generally, in why as people we do what we do. I studied Biology originally, so part of my desire to understand the way in which the world operates, and what really makes us act the way we do, came through that lens. Writing for me is an expression of my interest in the world, but by no means are my interests exclusively literature. How we carve up the world to suit our preconceptions, both individually and collectively, has always really interested me. How the world responds to us in that way too - it often gives us back what we expect from it. A lot of my stories grapple with the individual struggle for self-realisation, to grapple with the unknowing. The void the character enters in ‘At the Heart of Things’ is an optimistic thing. I think with my story ‘Cuba’ I had been reading E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Of course it contains assumptions, but it’s a great insight into the human condition and workings generally. It’s not a great leap to see how most societies operate through irrationality that we take to be rational. It’s easier to see that in other cultures that are not familiar to you.
In ‘At the Heart of Things’ the protagonist has given up a baby and left it on the steps of a hospital. The story is about her running away from that, as a situation — but she’s also trying to control the situation, how she feels about it, by turning to her Cuban parents and ancestors’ religion, trying to revert to this old system of reality which brings her comfort. That doesn’t work for her, really. Her breasts and urinary tract are infected, so at the end she’s at the point where she can’t evade her body anymore. She’s also never been to Cuba so she has a nostalgia for somewhere she’s never been or known. For some reason, I always knew the story would end where it did, at a point where nothing that the protagonist is doing is working for her. I’m interested in the ways that we deceive ourselves, and the way we break out of it — usually through great suffering.
Often in the stories, for me, there’s a sense of the unknowability of the other, but also characters who are alienated from themselves.
Alienation isn’t something I set out to write about it, but it’s on my mind a lot. I was reading Wittengenstein at the time that I wrote ‘At the Heart of Things’; I wrote multiple works with that title. I think it sparked a lot of thinking for me. I was thinking more about language, and the meanings inherent in things, so that’s where the title sprang from. I wrote the first paragraph much later, after I’d written a lot of it. I don’t think it’s lost on many people that we live in quite an alienating society and I wonder what it means for us, how we got there and how we can move on from it. I think we can, and ‘At the Heart of Things’ is optimistic about it. The protagonist does begin to recognise herself at the end. She says the line ‘I didn’t have feet before they had something to stand on’; the writing is very embodied, but there’s also a sense of an inner world that she is recognising, so the story expresses all this in bodily terms. She realises her own shape.
Your writing is poetic in the sense of a search to make language strange again, transcending everyday meanings of words. Do you come from a background in poetry, and do you ever have a process of deciding if something you’re working on will be a poem or a short story?
When I first started getting interested in literature I didn’t really see them as different. I read Orlando by Virgina Woolf, and some Iris Murdoch and that was the beginning of me turning to literature, and recognising its possibilities. I wasn’t an avid reader, I was much more interested in science, which I studied at university. I remember being in the South London Gallery and I picked up some Allen Ginsberg, and that was my accidental way into poetry.
I do intend to ground myself in poetry; I feel poetry is integral to my writing and I don’t really see the forms as separate. In terms of deciding whether pieces are poems or short stories, I think the writing itself decides. I sort of just know.
What’s your editing process like?
I don’t do lots of drafts. On average, maybe a couple, depending on the story. I write a lot in my head, thinking about something for a long time. Things will spill out in notes, which I often keep on my phone. I often think of things when I’m out, on trains, that kind of thing. When I start feeling like something is taking shape I start actually writing it. It takes me a long time to get one draft. Then I get it to a point where it’s readable and I share it with friends who I met on the Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck, who are brilliant editors, I’m very trusting of showing relatively early work to them. But when I share work I want it to be at a point where I feel it’s useful, not when there are lots of things I already want to change. I share things when I can’t see the way forward. Then I do a couple more redrafts. Poetry is useful for this process because it involves lots of cutting out — getting used to throwing everything down, knowing that you can find the shape of it.
I find in first drafts things come out very unclear or cliched — there’s a lot of amateur things in the first draft and I have to raise the level of it. Poetry has taught me not to be afraid of that as a process.
What’s your experience of the publishing process been like?
It’s been good. I had a lot of good editorial support already from friends, so the publishing process has gone quite fast. It was sent to Fitzcarraldo who said a month later they wanted to publish it, with quite a fast turnaround for the editing process. I had always thought it would be slower. It was intense but not stressful; I was very up for having it published sooner than expected. I had left the manuscript for a few months after submitting to Fitzcarraldo, and when I came back to it there were lots of things I wanted to change. So I did make some quite substantial changes in that short time. We had a healthy back and forth about certain passages; there were a few where I had to insist on not clarifying things in certain passages.
On one level I think there’s a tendency to want to pin everything down and make everything causally neat, so that every sentence has a causal logic. I’m not really that kind of writer and poetry isn’t like that — I know these aren’t poems but I think sometimes the desire to straighten everything out can kill the mystery of the work, the part of the work which haunts you. You need to keep the void in it, where you don’t ‘get’ everything. You also never know how things will be received by readers, and if I’d have got rid of some of those passages I would never have known how they were read. I preferred not to be cautious, and I’m glad of that.
Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.