‘I was desperate. How much loneliness can one person take?’
Poet and writer Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi talks to Emily Hourican about moving from Lagos to Galway aged 10 — two years after her mother — trying to fit in, racism in Ireland, and finding light at the end of a tunnel
THE day we meet, writer and poet Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi has just found out that she has been long-listed for the Short Story of the Year award at the Irish Book Awards, for her contribution to The Art Of The Glimpse, a magnificent anthology of short stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson.
“I got a message from Sinéad to say ‘I need to give you a call right now, what’s your number?’,” Chiamaka says. “My heart skipped a beat. ‘Have I done something terrible? What could I have done?’”
It was of course good news — great news, frankly — but her first response was to think ‘what have I done?’ “I’m working to overcome that,” she laughs, “but yes, I did think I’d done something wrong, and I was nervous.”
Chiamaka writes poems, prose and short stories. Does she have a preference?
“My preference is poetry. That’s something I’ve been working on seriously since I was 12. I remember my first attempts. My sister, Ihunanya, is incredibly studious and incredibly academically talented. She is a year and seven months older than me but you’d think she was 10 years my elder. That’s tough sometimes,” she laughs, “but most times it’s a blessing, especially in this context.
“At the time, she was doing her Junior Cert, and she was learning poetry and she would come home and we would memorise it together. She would teach me about alliteration, about assonance, about rhythm, about rhyme” — Chiamaka speaks these words as if they’re holy — “and I would just soak it all up. She’d give me assignments. I would write a poem and try to incorporate all the things I’d learned, and she would score it for me.”
At the time, Chiamaka and her family were living in Galway, where Chiamaka arrived at the age of 10, from Lagos, Nigeria, where she was born.
“I remember it was freezing,” she says, “And I remember it being Technicolor. I think maybe it was over-stimulation in my senses. I felt extremely cold, it was extremely bright, extremely loud — and this isn’t reality. This is how my senses perceived it. Lagos must be louder than Galway, realistically — it’s a city of 21 million people — but my experience of it, the newness, was that everything was heightened.”
She talks beautifully, openly, candidly, about her experience of immigration, and the many layers of upheaval that come with it. Chiamaka is now 22, but her understanding far outstrips her age.
“We were economic migrants,” she says. “We’re lucky that we weren’t forced to leave our home, we chose to. It’s about better opportunities, the dream of a better life. My family are from very humble beginnings. There is no silver spoon, no ounce of riches. Pretty much poverty. My parents invested every penny they had in our education. Everything else was squalor, but we went to the best-standard school you can get with the money they had. We were the investment they made with the money they had.”
In Lagos, Chiamaka, her sister and older brother went to a primary school run by the military; it was “very strict, very focused on academic achievements; on building a future generation who would succeed”.
When Chiamaka was eight, her mother left Lagos for Ireland, because she was able to get a job here nursing. “She came here two years before we did,” Chiamaka says. “I think this is where my fascination with women comes from… you leave your babies — I was eight, my sister was 10, my brother was 13 — you leave your husband, you leave your family, friends. I don’t know if I could do it.”
The thing is, she says, “As an eightyear-old you don’t have that understanding. You don’t have all these — ‘oh wow, you’re so brave’… All you think is ‘my mother is leaving me’. Eight is an irrational age. I did feel a grudge.”
There were phone-calls, but it wasn’t enough. “We didn’t have Skype. We just had phone-calls that went from every day to a few times a week, to once a month. The connections were not great, so after a while I just thought ‘my mother is gone’.”
And, for two years, she didn’t come back. “The point of her going, of her sacrifice, was that any resources would be put towards creating a family base for when we joined her,” Chiamaka says. “I’m sure she wanted to, many times, but she couldn’t.”
The family were reunited at last, in Galway, when Chiamaka, her siblings and father arrived here in 2008. “I’d like to say that it was like the movies,” she says. “Like that amazing Christmas movie, Love Actually — the airport scene — but honestly, it was like meeting a stranger. We had this awkward hug. You’re just overwhelmed…”
She talks with heartbreaking candour about the gap that existed for a time between herself and her mother: “Mother-daughter relationships aren’t inherently positive. You have to get to know each other, spend time with each other, find common interests. For a while, I saw someone who didn’t know me, who had chosen to leave me.”
And she is just as frank about her own part in this.
“I was not very likeable,” she says. “There is a good part of being independently minded and trusting your own judgment, but the other part is that you’re stubborn, defiant, oppositional.” Invariably, there were clashes.
“My parents are immigrants, we children are dual citizens, so even within the family you have a whole different social dynamic. Me, as the youngest, I was concerned about being Irish. I was thinking, learning, absorbing — I was trying to assimilate, I wanted to fit in.
“My sister, she was very much ‘I want to preserve my Nigerian-ness, be authentic to my culture’. She’d be more aligned towards my parents. My brother, he’s just a very fun person, he slides happily into any social situation.
“I was the one rejecting food at home. I was trying to find my own ways of coping. I wanted to eat like the skinny girls I saw on the shows on television. Nigerian food is very rich — it’s amazing: high carbs, rich in protein, lots of meat. Eat that and you’ll be very healthy and strong. But you won’t be skinny and fragile on a
Nigerian diet. At that time, I wanted to be skinny and small. I guess in a way I wanted to disappear.
“I didn’t want anything my parents offered — my mother especially. She would have been very concerned about my weight, about making me into the kind of woman that she would value. My idea of a woman that was valuable was the opposite. That clash was massive. Food is such an expression of love. Now I recognise how that rejection must have looked. At the time, I wanted to take back control by not eating what she cooked.”
It’s an astonishing piece of analysis: sharp, astute, honest. No wonder she then says: “I’m obsessed with the mother-daughter relationship, in literature, sociology, psychology. I think I could write about this my entire life.”
Asked if she and her family found Ireland to be a welcoming country, Chiamaka says: “This is the part where we talk about Ireland as a systematically racist country. With really terrible policies around immigration, around work permits. The image of Ireland abroad is very welcoming. We were in for a shock. It was a step up — we came from poverty, and became a working-class family, but were still barely scraping by. My father couldn’t work for eight years. What does that do to a marriage? We were a single-income family with three kids in full-time education. A nursing salary supporting a family of five…”
The result? Even when reunited, Chiamaka still didn’t see nearly enough of her mother.
“She experienced lots of racism when she was working in Galway, so she found another job, in Tipperary. She would leave in the morning before I woke up, and she would be back when I was going to bed. There was a while when I wondered, ‘what’s the difference between us being in Nigeria, and us being here? I still don’t see you, except for Sundays.’”
When she was in her Junior Cert year, Chiamaka’s mother got a job in Shankill, and the family moved to Bray.
“Once again, I was leaving my school, the friends I’d managed to make. It became another grudge,” she says, adding with a laugh, “If one is in the mood to look for grudges, one will find a grudge! It’s unfair to be so young and have such big emotions. Someone should really ask the kids, are they OK? I’m 22 now, I’m just coming out of it, and I wouldn’t go back for anything.”
That school wasn’t a particularly happy place for Chiamaka. “I had a very singular goal,” she says. “UCD, that my sister coached me towards and coached me through. I’m only committed if I care. I cared about English. I liked biology and I liked PE. Everything else — oppositional defiance! My lack of caring can often present itself… I can be very scathing.
“I was incredibly lonely and kind of alienated. If you said the wrong word, during those three years, there was a very fragile dam and behind it was a flood of tears. My attitude was what was keeping the dam. It was either attitude or tears, and attitude — anger — is more socially acceptable than vulnerability. I preferred to be feared than pitied. There were days when I didn’t have the energy to be angry and I would spend my break times in the computer rooms upstairs, crying.”
She spent a lot of time in detention, she says wryly. “In my senior years at school, a teacher called me stupid in front of my father. The consensus was I wouldn’t go to college…”
Did she have friends? “There were people who were interested in me, but for me, friendship is something very intimate, which means I have to be able to cry in front of you — there were one or two people I felt that with. But I find it unbearable to be around people and be lonely. I’d rather be on my own than be with people and lonely.”
And yet, thankfully, there were people who got her. “There were people who saw me. My dream is that one day I’ll be successful and can invite all my mentors to a castle and have a party, because there are people who I owe everything to. My first teacher in Ireland, she saw me for what I was — a little homesick girl who loved reading and writing, not that sociable. She would let me sit in the classroom and read when the other children were in the yard. There was my English teacher in Bray. Other bright moments, bright people.”
Did these people balance out the general institutional indifference?
“No. Absolutely not,” she says, minded to be honest rather than play Pollyanna. “They were the light at the end of the tunnel, but it was a very long tunnel. One or two good Samaritans in a multitude: it’s not enough! At many moments in my life, I could have given up before I reached the light at the end of the tunnel. There have been dark times in my life. It’s just luck that these people were there at those times. There are other people who did not meet their lights at the end. The tunnel should not have been so dark and so cumbersome.”
And she’s absolutely right of course. For everyone who had the luck, the guts, the miracle of timing to meet mentors and helpers at the right time, there will be others who did not. And happiness and success in life should not be dependent on luck.
Chiamaka somehow made her way to the right places. “At 16 I started to go from Bray to Dublin city centre, to these different cultural institutions like the Irish Writers Centre. There was an ongoing event: Milk and Cookies — an open story-telling night. That was where I met people like Rob Doyle, author of Here Are The Young Men, and Michael Naghten Shanks — editor of The Bohemyth literary journal at the time.”
These people, along with others like Sinéad Gleeson, encouraged and supported her. Their intervention was vital.
“Coming from being in a very lonely place in school, and lonely at home too, coming into this small room with these bright shining stars, people with eclectic, eccentric minds, it was…”
She doesn’t finish the sentence. There’s too much in it.
Life is busy for Chiamaka, who graduated from UCD last year with a BA in English and Philosophy. She recently got engaged to Tad McAllister, a software architect. Next week, she will be participating in the Red Line Book Festival. She co-runs Black Girl At Ease (BGAE), a collaboration aimed at creating a new cultural renaissance of black girl wellness and self-care in Ireland, and she has contributed to the Irish University Review, out in November, edited by Emilie Pine.
Somehow, it seems, she has found herself, and her gang. She was, I say, very brave to seek out what she needed. “I was desperate,” is her answer. “How much loneliness can one person take? I had to find a way to leave my alienation behind.”
Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi is one of 100 contributors to The Art of the Glimpse, an anthology of stories edited by Sinéad Gleeson, and the official Red Line Book Festival Book (October 12 to 18; www. redlinebookfestival.ie) for 2020 and will be recommended to book clubs across South Dublin County
‘I wanted to eat like the skinny girls I saw on TV… I wanted to be skinny and small. I wanted to disappear’