Getting others to see themselves in your stories is another level of creativity – writer, Chiemeke

Jerry Chiemeke is a Nigerian-born writer, marketing communications specialist, film critic, journalist, and lawyer based in the United Kingdom. He obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Law from the University of Benin in 2012, and was called to the Nigerian Bar the following year. In 2022 he moved to the UK on the Global Talent Visa, following an endorsement by the Arts Council England.

Chiemeke is the author of the critically-acclaimed short story collection Dreaming of Ways to Understand You (2020) the poetry chapbook Notes For Nnedimma (2019) and the hybrid collection The Colours in These Leaves (2017). His work has won or been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ken Saro Wiwa Prize, Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Quramo Writers Prize.

Chiemeke’s writing has appeared in publications like Die Welt, The I Paper, The Africa Report, Berlinale Press, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Culture Custodian, Olongo Africa, and elsewhere. For his work as a writer and critic, he has been invited to the Sundance Film Festival, Berlinale, Blackstar Film Festival, Durban International Film Festival, Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) and Abuja International Poetry Festival.

Between 2017 and 2023, Chiemeke wrote columns on literature, music and film for magazines like Bellanaija, The Lagos Review and Netng. He has also been a consultant for features published in Aljazeera, The Republic, Afrocritik (where he was pioneering Editor-in-Chief in 2021) and New Lines Magazine.

Chiemeke in this interview talked about his creative trajectory, personal motivations, carving a niche, and paying it forward.

How did writing start for you and what pivotal moment made you take it up as a hobby, and ultimately, a career?

I got into writing via circumstances that can be likened to a “freak accident.”

The year was 1998 and seven-year-old me cared for nothing other than video games, wrestling with my peers during break time at school, and renting Jackie Chan movies from video clubs. In December of that year, however, my brother Stephen, 12 years old at the time, wrote a play for his class that was dramatised to rave reviews (in his school at least), while I was trolled for visiting Santa Claus and losing my voice on Delta TV. I felt sore and sour, and because I wanted my mother (God bless her soul) to “see” me, I started trying my hands at my idea of a “novel” in 1999.

I would write in a notebook, and just before I finished, said notebook would “mysteriously” get lost. I suppressed the desire in my teenage years as I navigated secondary school, but I later led the Press Club, and by the time I was pursuing my undergraduate degree at the University of Benin’s Faculty of Law, I had fallen in love with Facebook Notes (is that still a thing these days?). It was only a matter of time before I moved from helping my friends compose text messages to their lovers, and take things up a notch.

What was growing up like, and in what way did you think it influenced your writing?

Growing up in Warri in the early 1990s, my background could be categorised as (lower) middle-class; we didn’t have so much, but we were comfortable, and all needs (as well as some wants) were met. My father couldn’t take us on trips abroad every long holiday, but he invested heavily in literacy, and buying books was easy for him to do.

My early childhood had me reading books like H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and the crime novels authored by James Hadley Chase. I also got around to consuming some Nigerian literature by way of Cyprian Ekwensi’s Juju Rock and Burning Grass, Zulu Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods, Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine, and S. M. O. Aka’s Midday Darkness.

I peered into many books that lay around the house: a Brighter Grammar textbook here, a Jehovah’s Witnesses collection there. My father also had this corner in his storage room where he would stack copies of newspapers produced by Vanguard and The Sun. I found the stories in the Dear Serena column hilarious, my brother and I enjoyed playing “Spot the Difference”, and I lived for the Terror Muda as well as the Tunde Smatt comic strips. In many ways, interacting with these works heightened my sense of curiosity and imagination. It’s hard not to nurse the burning desire to create worlds and suck people in, just like the authors and creators I enjoyed reading.

Is it safe to say that writing was your first love and law was just a means of getting your meal ticket?

I enjoyed studying Law enough to graduate with honours; I would have just dropped out if I didn’t care for it.

In my case, law and writing existed side-by-side, which is not exactly a strange thing. I was nursing a breakup in law school when I launched my WordPress blog in 2013, and in 2014 I was writing blog posts bi-weekly while actively practising as a litigation lawyer. Between 2016 and 2018, I was getting published in literary journals, and at the same time working in financial institutions like UBA (United Bank for Africa) and Zenith Bank.

The full pivot to media, marketing and communications happened in 2019 after a string of events, but the point is that I loved being a lawyer just as much as I pursued writing as a hobby. It just happens that the latter has brought me more acclaim and opportunities, so I’m grateful for a gift that has allowed me to walk into hallowed rooms.

The reception to your short story collection, Dreaming of Ways To Understanding You, has been mostly positive since its release in 2020 – at least, judging from reviews we’ve seen online and on traditional media. One of the key comments was your use of language, blending English and pidgin across your stories. How did you pull that off?

The short answer is that I think in pidgin just as much as I think in English… hahaha.

To answer your question with the detail that it deserves – because I think it’s a really good question – I wanted to capture the pulse of the demographic I was writing about and writing for. It’s one thing for people to drop your book and exclaim “This person can write!”, but getting them to see themselves in your stories, to transport them to those hallways and junctions in the pages you have conjured, is a different kettle of fish.

You’ll probably make reference to how “Ugborikoko” was written in pidgin from start to finish, or how stories like “Memories Floating In A Glass Of Whiskey” and “What Am I Supposed To Say To You?” featured multiple colloquial slang across several paragraphs. There are certain lines of thought I wanted to express which would have lost their potency or simply wouldn’t have translated if I had written them in English. Maybe it helps that I spent the first ten years of my life in Warri, and then had my secondary school and university education in Edo State.

I had also fantasised about writing full-length stories in pidgin in 2015 when I read Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women and A Brief History of Seven Killings, both written in Jamaican patois. At the time, Nigerian literary magazines didn’t have that many stories completely marinated in pidgin flavour, and I wanted to challenge that. I feel like Nigerian pidgin is a language in itself, complete with contexts and conjugations, and when executed well, writing in said language makes for a beautiful reading experience. When “Ugborikoko” appeared in the Johannesburg Review of Books, people reached out via my DMs, and at least three people have referenced the story in their papers and academic theses which dwelt on African language, so maybe there’s something to be garnered from that.

Your creative work, particularly in recent years, primarily dwells on subjects like mental health, loss, impermanence, and unrequited love. What influences this direction, and how do you transform these pangs into Art?

I first stumbled on the concept of Suicide at the age of six when I read the portions of the Bible where Ahitophel and Judas Iscariot hanged themselves. By the age of seven, I had seen Obot Etuk’s character put a gun down her throat in the final scene of a Nollywood movie, so I found myself struggling to understand why anyone would choose to end their own life.

By my seventeenth birthday, I had read about the sad story of Ernest Hemingway, I had learned about Kurt Cobain, and I knew a cousin who was battling with a mental illness, so fascination was quickly replaced by empathy. By 2014 I could feel my blues on the horizon, and by 2016 I had been diagnosed with anxiety and acute depression; it was in that state of despondency and desolation that I wrote The Colours in These Leaves, and I insisted that the manuscript remain unedited so the raw emotions would stay “preserved.”

Volunteering for Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative (MANI), amidst interventions and long discussions with Nigerians on mental health, also gave me a deeper insight into human behaviour. I feel like it’s an important conversation to have, so I lay into it whenever I get the chance.

Per impermanence, there’s a lot of loving and losing that plays out in life, so someone has to do the chronicling: there has to be the uncle at the fireside with that wealth of experience, telling all the heart-wrenching stories and drawing out the gasps. I am a hopeless romantic at heart, and I am a yearner, so I write to remind myself of that fact. Sometimes, I scribble an essay to “bury” someone, to immortalise certain memories, or like days marked on the wall, to tell myself that at a certain time, such and such meant a whole lot to me. Plus, a little purgation every now and then doesn’t hurt anyone; it’s easier to deal with the situationship when you translate it into good prose.

Since 2017, you have distinguished yourself as one of Nigeria’s acclaimed culture journalists, writing columns for several leading publications in Africa, and getting invitations to film and literary festivals. What made you delve into criticism, and how did you navigate the terrain, given that engaging music or film in Nigeria is a thankless job?

I have always been the guy who asks the tough questions, the one who says the things that people are scared to point out. Back in primary school, I would get knocked on the head for (rightly) stating that the teacher was singing the wrong lyric to a worship song at the assembly ground.

I was exposed to a lot of art while growing up, so it was easy to develop a keen eye for distinguishing what was decent from what was objectively bad. Even at an impressionable age, I would have comments for films I didn’t enjoy.

My first memory of a detailed critique was in my penultimate year as an undergraduate: I had seen a play performed by the Catholic Students’ drama unit, and I didn’t think it was particularly good. I elaborated on my sentiments at a forum days later, and someone in the unit told me to “go write my own script”, but I was satisfied that I had made my feelings known.

Concerning my journey as a Nigerian critic, in December 2016 I saw a Nollywood film on Africa Magic Urban called A Soldier’s Story, starring Tope Tedela, Linda Ejiofor-Suleiman and Sambasa Nzeribe. It was a wartime drama, and I felt the action sequences left much to be desired. I wrote about the movie in a Facebook post, and inadvertently it gained traction, so I found myself discussing Nigerian feature films every other week. I gained some sort of following, and it just became a thing. I was in a book club where we discussed African literature, so I started reviewing books, too. Editors of culture platforms took notice, and the rest is history.

You are right when you say culture criticism in Nigeria is a thankless job. No creative is entirely indifferent to public perception of their craft, but Nigerian creatives (read: filmmakers and recording artists) can be quite sensitive. Culture writers engage with works of art because they care enough for the ecosystem and they want to see all-round growth, but it’s usually difficult to see things from this perspective, and I get it: no one wants to put effort into a body of work and feel like they are being flayed for it. That said, I need people to understand that critics are not just being cynical busybodies. In any case, a scathing review is probably better than sheer indifference towards your product.

From 2020 to date, you have been a faculty member and mentor at writing initiatives like the SprinNg Writers Fellowship and the IN Nollywood Film Journalism Fellowship. What spurred your decision to join these initiatives? Do you feel a sense of fulfillment that aspiring writers have learnt at your feet over the years?

When I immersed myself into Nigeria’s literary scene, I had no mentorship or guidance, and I had to find everything on my own. I would learn about writing competitions barely twenty-four hours to the deadline, I would submit to journals without any tips on how to get quicker feedback, and I had to be stubborn because in the absence of any information channels, isi aki was all I got. When Oyindamola Shoola (co-founder of SprinNg) emailed me in 2020 to join her faculty and mentor aspiring writers, I was happy to guide another generation of young creatives, and put them on to opportunities I didn’t have when I started out. The SprinNg community has blossomed into a fantastic pipeline for African writers; while others bicker over what constitutes for “real African storytelling” and whether “literature is in its death throes”, Oyindamola has built a strong network and the perfect springboard for those who seek to learn, build on and earn from their craft.

As for IN Nollywood, I have always believed that for an industry as large as Nollywood, there is a lack of sufficient documentation. The two most comprehensive books on Nollywood that exist today were published by Caucasians, and that’s not a good look. The trajectory of our local industry needs to be talked about, but the writing also has to be brilliant and accessible. It’s one thing to review a film, but who is writing about the pioneers, the people currently pushing the envelope, the process, and the inroads? One good journalist or critic can only do so much. IN Nollywood tries to strike the perfect balance between improving writing as well as perspective, and providing a strong network for opportunities. I had become friends with Anita Eboigbe (co-founder of the platform) in 2022 after I read a feature she wrote, following the Chief Daddy 2 debacle, so when she reached out to me in July of that year to ask if I could be a facilitator at the inaugural IN Nollywood Film Journlism fellowship, it was an easy decision; passion met structure. I can categorically say that since IN Nollywood kicked off, the quality of film journalism in Nigeria has improved.

A lot of people who have passed through both fellowships have become thriving writers and journalists in the spaces where they operate. More than a dozen SprinNg alumni have become published authors, with some branching out into content marketing, communications and digital content development. Winifred Odunoku, who passed through SprinNg in 2020, has been shortlisted for multiple writing prizes. Seyi Lasisi, Kikachi Memeh and Michael Aromolaran, three of Africa’s finest film critics, were IN Nollywood fellows.

What do you think about writing workshops generally?

As far as my creative writing goes, I’m an autodidact. I just kept scribbling cliché after cliché, jumbled paragraph after jumbled paragraph until my vocabulary and diction gained some muscle.

In the early and mid-2010s, I was avoiding workshops, partly due to the “mild arrogance” that comes with wanting to prove a point to yourself that you can learn on your own, and partly due to the fear that my prose would lose the purity it was imbued with if it became “too structured.” A few people have derisively asserted that my writing “lacks style” and that my sentences are not “proper”, but over the past nine years I have worked with over sixty editors who hold a significantly different opinion, so there’s that.

With what I’ve come to know, I will always recommend workshops. This doesn’t mean that you won’t grow or succeed if you don’t sign up for one, but it doesn’t hurt to be teachable, to be pruned, to have your tools sharpened and refined by those who came before you. The Farafina Workshop from back then and the masterclasses organised by the Lagos International Poetry Festival were helpful for many Nigerian writers trying to find their way around the maze that is language. In my case, my film journalism benefited greatly from Talents Durban and Berlinale Talents.

You have been out of the country for more than two years. How has this migration affected your craft and your personal life?

I’ve written about the loneliness in multiple essays – there’s one on the iPaper, one on NSUN and two on Medium – so I won’t dwell much on that here. But it’s true that nearly everything changes, and it feels like learning to walk. You have to find new communities, develop new habits, blend into strange cultures and hope that your mental health can go the distance, because it will be tested.

From a career standpoint, I have had to prove myself again. To be fair, my film journalism still got published by African magazines, but I had to break into the UK publishing space, and it took me about a year to get my first byline. These days I collaborate frequently with one of the country’s biggest black-focused media outfits, and I have scored a number of performances, but there’s still a fair bit of ground to cover. I didn’t arrive at London Heathrow on 14th October 2022 to be just a number.

What do you think writers or journalists looking to ply their trade in other climes should look out for?

They have to be ready for rejections, and they have to prepare to aggressively demand for seats at the table. The West is unkind to bashful people, and you have to learn to step outside and pitch yourself eloquently. There is a fierce jostle for the few spaces available, so it’s a double whammy for you because you are a person of colour and a migrant.

You also have to realise that even if you were published regularly by foreign journals while you were in Nigeria, it doesn’t mean that you will be automatically embraced when you cross the oceans. It’s a different state of affairs: when you migrate, you lose the garb of that “exotic voice from the Global South”, and now you will be treated like the rest of the “local” essayists or journos looking to get heard. Hahaha.

It gets better though, I promise you. It always does, so long as you don’t allow a glacier crash into you.

What’s next in your trajectory as a creative writer? Should we expect new work this year?

I’m not necessarily superstitious, but I prefer to be reticent when it comes to discussing future creative endeavours because I find that the more I talk about writing something, the farther I get from completing it.

However, I’ll make an exception this once. I have a manuscript of deeply personal essays which I thought was 85% complete, but which on further scrutiny is only 70% ready. I have been stalling for “life reasons”, but I’ll put my back into it this year and make it available to the world; five years is a long time to be without new work in an uber-competitive space where attention span fluctuates, and I’m scared of erasure, so I will be publishing by Q1 2026. There’s also a novel in the not-so-distant future, but let me clear out this queue first.

What advice do you have for young writers who want to navigate both creative and journalistic realms like you have been able to do successfully?

Read, and by that, I mean read everything, even the “boring” texts. Apply yourself because succeeding in this field, particularly in a country like Nigeria where there’s neither structure nor incentive, means that you have to care about the subjects you have decided to focus on writing about. Culture writing and creative writing require as much discipline as other professions; I’ve seen many talented journos and essayists who hung up their pens because they grew weary and moved on to other things because they couldn’t keep up the pace. Having the gift is cool, but grit is integral, too.

You can follow Jerry Chiemeke on X (formerly Twitter and Instagram at @J_Chiemeke. He goes by his given name on Facebook and LinkedIn.