Chika Unigwe's Blog

I was asked to guest author a bookstore's blog and write about the unusual job of my protagonist's mother:

Nani’s Mother in The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe
In FictionPublish Date30th March 2023 Guest Author
The mother of the protagonist in The Middle Daughter has an unusual job: she’s a trained midwife with a clinic that functions as a baby factory. The first time I heard of a baby factory, I imagined factories where babies were assembled and rolled out, and it didn’t make much sense to me. A baby factory is nothing of the sort but it doesn’t make it less worse. It’s a clinic or a home in which pregnant women are housed – with and sometimes without their consent- and their babies, when they are born are sold to new parents. In some of these ‘factories,’ young women are kept against their will to breed babies for a willing market of parents who want “their own children” without the inconvenience of the sort of paper trail that legal adoptions leave behind. Or the bureaucracy of it.


Although baby factories have only become well known in Nigeria in the past fifteen years or so, they have always been there except the one I knew wasn’t called that. When I was a child in Enugu, a woman with whose children I was friendly had a clinic that was very much like the one Nani’s mother owns. She also had the reputation , like Nani’s mother, of “helping pregnant, young women.” She was also known to be magnanimous, a Christian and an exemplary community leader. When I started writing Nani’s mother, I thought of this woman who must have thought of herself also as offering an indispensable service. In a country where sexual assaults happen, where single mothers are stigmatized, where sex education isn’t encouraged, a young woman who must carry a pregnancy she doesn’t want may not feel exploited if someone offered them room and board and some money to take the baby off their hands. And the “savior” may not feel that selling on the baby conflicts with any moral values they hold. Afterall, they did not force the women and it could be worse. As it was for a young woman I spoke to in researching this novel. And for the sister of another.

I hope that The Middle Daughter contributes to illuminating the existence of this industry and to conversations around stamping it out, among all the other conversations I hope this contemporary retelling of Hades and Persephone provokes.

https://blog.dubraybooks.ie/2023/03/3...

in a few days, and I cannot wait to share it with the world. I wrote a blog piece on my inspiration for it which I'll share later.

We've been soo fortunate with it: great reviews, a mention in Oprahdaily,and most recently: it's been picked by the UK's Booksellers Association as their Book of the Month. It's carrying that shiny seal that says so too. Validation from Booksellers, librarians, book clubs and teachers tickle a different way. I am super, super thrilled, honored etc.

I'd never planned my own gigs and thought that maybe I should. I reached out to bookstores here (ATL) to see if I could do readings. That was more difficult than I'd expected. Anyway throwing it out into the universe: if you run a bookstore in ATL , I'd love to pop in and do a reading before the traveling gets crazy...

Have a wonderful new week. And I really should get back to posting more consistently here

I have a new novel coming out In April (Canongate , UK and Dzanc US), and I am super excited. I spent years working on this book, and I am really thrilled to see it land good homes in both the UK and in the US. I feel so blessed. You can read more about The Middle Daughter here:

https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/...

I hadn’t wanted to write about this today but after reading that our Information Minister, Lai Mohammed went to Jigawa to inspect the tallest flag pole in Nigeria, I decided to practice self-care and not write about Naija this week. Haba! It’s not Naija that will kill me. I admit that It is pompous to think that anyone has it all so together that they could write a manual for life and social media. So, this is not a ‘how-to’ as much as it is a ‘what-I’ve-learned-so-far.’
Number one: Try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides. I’ve borrowed this from the very clever Anne Lamott. On social media, everyone’s life is like the cover of a glossy magazine. And their partners are the best and their holidays are the greatest. On Instagram and Facebook, we see carefully curated photos of people living their best lives. They save the brokenness and the sadness for when the camera is turned off. Do not compare your mottled, matte insides to their glossy outsides. Everyone is carrying a burden, some people are just better at making it seem as if life for them is a never ending party with confetti and glitter. There is no mess. No rowdy guests. No boring DJ. Years ago, a parent at my child’s school posted a really beautiful lovey-dovey photograph of herself and her husband just hours before they’d get into an argument and he’d stab her to death. Apparently, they’d been fighting a lot and the pictures she was posting on Facebook had little to do with the reality of her life. Which brings me to number two.
Number two: Do not be distracted by the slick veneers of your friends and family. Check on them , even those whose Instagram photos are the brightest and the prettiest, and whose Facebook status updates are the most inspirational. Call them. Visit them. DM them. Send a WhatsApp text. Touch base just to say hello. If you believe in God, pray for them. Mention them by name. If you don’t believe in God, send them positive vibes. Let them know you’re praying or thinking of them. People like to know that they are in your thoughts just because. It is the best compliment we can give and receive.
Number Three: Radical self-care is imperative. Look out for yourself. Protect your boundaries on social media and in life. Eat healthy. Take walks. Read. Watch movies. Sing. Play music. Mute conversations that are toxic. Forgive yourself. Be intentional about treating yourself with tenderness. Sometimes, folks are too busy saving the world or chasing money to take time to relax. Some treat their cars better than they treat themselves. Live intentionally both IRL and on social media. Treat your life as if it were a really expensive car that did not belong to you and if you crashed it, you would spend the rest of your natural life – no matter how long you lived- working 24/7 to replace it.
Number Four: Do not crash into other people’s dramas. Do not swerve into conversations that do not concern you especially on social media where it is easy to forget that not every post is an invitation to engage, and that not every poster is worth our time engaging. Consider why you want to engage and who you want to engage. Social media space is a market square: you’ll find all sorts in it. Folks who just like to be provocative and those who like to learn. Folks who are obnoxious and those who enjoy civil discourse. Folks who like jollof and those who like pasta (yuck!). The village drunk and the Head of the WHO. It’s a free world but unless you’re the sort to intervene in every conversation with every passerby and their dog on the streets of your town, there’s no need to do that on social media streets either. You’ll just elevate your blood pressure for nothing.
Number Five: You can’t be an expert in everything. No one knows so much that they could never learn anything. It’s okay to just listen and learn when you come across a conversation that you’re interested in but is above your station. Approach life and cyberspace with humility. Be open to having your mind blown and your mind changed. Do not clog your ears with the sound of your own voice.
Number Six: Remember that you will never be liked by everyone, you’re not money. People will disappoint you. They’ll say unkind things about you. C’est la vie. Be wary of those who slide into your ears or into your DMs to tell you every uncomplimentary thing others have been saying about you, especially if they ask you not to out them as the source. Good friends will tell off your slanderers without even letting you know. They have your back without trying to show you what a good friend they are unless they’re hoping to get something out of it, in which case they may not be as good a friend as they appear to be.
Number Seven: Realize that the road to self-delusion is littered with flatterers. Don’t fall for flattery and do not surround yourself with those who agree with you all the time. Chances are that if you have friends who are like you, that you agree on (almost) everything anyway. However, true friends are able to argue and remain friends.
Number Eight: Be intentional about speaking/writing. Think first. Do not be in a hurry to join the herd, you’re not a cow. Words, spoken or written, are like eggs. Once broken, they can’t be scooped up and put back in the shell. You can be sorry but the damage’s already been done. Handle your words with care.
Number Nine: Practice intentional compassion. IRL and on social media. Be kind to folks. Do not assume the worst of people just because you’ve met “others like them.” Remember, some folks are really just ignorant.
Number Ten: Always tell yourself the truth. Whatever your outside is , whatever pictures you share, to thine own self be true.
Inhale. Exhale. Live.

A Quick Note on Depression and Suicide


Last week, a young Nigerian man in Ibadan posted on Twitter that he was going to kill himself. He couldn’t see any other way out of the mess he felt his life was in. Thank God he eventually didn’t go through with it. Mentally Aware Nigeria and other private citizens apparently reached out to him and their support proved helpful. It possibly contributed to him not being swallowed by the darkness that was dragging him towards suicide. Unfortunately, there were others who mocked him, who encouraged him to go and kill himself , who treated his call for help like a big joke. It is appalling that anyone would sit behind their computer and treat someone else’s crisis like a joke. A line from one of my favorite songs from secondary school is “ if you can’t say something nice, don’t talk at all is my advice.” If your natural instinct is to mock someone else’s predicament, you should learn not to say anything at all. I get that many people don’t understand depression. They don’t understand the weight of an illness that shares a synonym with unhappiness. An illness that doesn’t manifest itself like any of the other illnesses they know. Most folks would say that that’s even a more compelling reason to keep quiet. You do not mock what you do not understand.

Major (or clinical) depression is one of the most common mental health disorders in the world. Per the ADAA ( Anxiety and Depression Association of America) , 264 million people worldwide suffer from depression. According to a 2017 report by Healththink.org, 7 million Nigerians suffer from clinical depression. And these sufferers don’t often get the help they need because of the stigma attached to mental health illnesses and the lack of knowledge of what depression really is. Per the same report by Healththink.Org, 78% of health practitioners at a medical center in Benin City had “difficulties working with depressed patients.” One of the most persistent misconceptions among our people is that (clinical) depression is the same as the regular sadness everyone feels at some point or the other. And they think that if they can get over their sadness, why can’t other people? They see it as some sort of attention-seeking behaviour. What manner of attention seeking keeps you in a place so dark that you’re unable to see any light? So dark that you think the only way out is death? While not everyone with a mental illness has suicidal thoughts, we know that depression, when not managed, can be life threatening and can lead to suicide. In 2020, The Daily Trust released a report on world Suicide Prevention Day that showed that between January 2017 and August, 2020, 264 Nigerians died by suicide. Officially. Thanks to social media, discussions about suicide are not as hidden as they might have once been.


And yet, certain fallacies about suicide and suicidal people endure. Some folks think that people who appear successful and happy cannot be suicidal. A friend killed himself despite being one of the happiest-looking people I’ve ever known. You could not be in his presence and not experience some level of joy. His laugh, as I remember it, was infectious. A 19 year old I’d known since he was a baby hanged himself after a night out with friends. He was – as far as I know- a happy teenager. He was a talented musician who played in a band with his brother with whom he had a close relationship. Yet , these two suffered from a depression that eventually took their lives.

Another thing one hears is that people who are serious about killing themselves do not talk about it. One of the responses to the Ibadan man’s tweet was that he wouldn’t do it because he was talking about it. “People who talk about it won’t do it,” someone wrote. Anyone who has contemplated suicide will tell you that talking about it isn’t an empty threat. And there have been cases where people have talked about it and gone on, sadly, to successfully kill themselves before any help could be given to them. In fact, according to NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) , an American organization, it is a harmful myth that most suicides happen suddenly and without any warning. Most suicides are preceded by warning signs which are only recognized in retrospect. When these signs are clear, like in last week’s case, it is imperative that whoever can, helps. That help shouldn’t include – as I saw last week- comparing your woes to theirs ( it’s not a contest and doesn’t help) or telling them gleefully that they would go to hell ( what sort of Christian or Muslim are you to rejoice in someone’s eternity in hell?). It shouldn’t include telling them that it is un-African ( which is ridiculous) or that they are selfish ( they are often not even thinking of themselves). Do not call them cowards ( anyone who’s attempted suicide or contemplated it would most likely tell you that it’s not “the easy way out.”) And whatever you do, do not minimize the pain of someone who’s already suffering.

So what is helpful? I asked a friend who’s considered suicide in the past ( and is, thankfully, in a much better place now) and I googled other survivors’ stories and the common denomination is this: compassion. When someone tells you they have suicidal thoughts, listen to them with compassion. That means without judgement. Listen in a way that shows that you do care for them. Acknowledge their struggle and encourage them to get professional help. You can’t fix their depression but you can make things worse by being an inconsiderate twat.

I wrote this personal essay for Babbel.com on failing to learn French (but also about cultural imperialism, power, internalized biases etc)
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/en...


I was already head over heels in love before I took my first French lesson. One of my older sisters had a t-shirt with Je t’aime boldly splashed across its chest. I knew the proper way to pronounce Paris. Paree. Like they did in the musical, Gigi, which was shown on TV at least once a month, and which I gorged on every time. All of the movies I had seen, Gigi included, presented Paris as the center of elegance and all things shiny and bright. The people were beautiful; the weather — even when it wasn’t good — was something magical. And everyone acknowledged that the accent was sexy. If there was ever anything I wanted so badly as a child, it was to be all grown up in Paree, perhaps under the Eiffel Tower, immersed in the glitz and glamour of the city, speaking to real French people in their language. I loved Paris first, but that love was so tied up with the language that they were one and the same. My elementary school did not offer French, as some of the fancier ones did. I could not wait to go off to secondary school and begin my lessons.

My first French teacher was a tall, striking woman who had studied French in the Republic of Benin (or was it Cameroon?). At my school, one of the top schools in Nigeria at the time, we did not have lessons in any Nigerian language for most of my six years there (and when we did, we were only taught numbers from 1 to 10 and a few stock phrases). But French — French was compulsory. I learned to count, learned the days of the week, learned to sing cocorico cocorico and to write short letters. Chère maman, tu me manques. I imitated the way my teacher enunciated each word when she spoke. I watched her intently as if I hoped to catch the words falling from her lips before they hit the ground and crashed. I envied her ease with it. Each French lesson brought me closer to this cosseted dream of one day being as fluent as she was and living a movie star life in Paris. I did not doubt once that it was a possibility.

In my second year of secondary school, I made a new best friend. She was a freshman whose father was a professor of French (and who had studied in Quebec, which was almost as good as the real thing as far as I was concerned). When he dropped her off at school on her first day, he had short conversations with as many of her prospective teachers as he could, including the French mistress. My friend reported to us that according to her father, our French mistress spoke the language with a “strange” accent. No French person would understand us if we spoke like her because it’d sound like we were hacking off dry yam rather than speaking their language. French was supposed to roll off the tongue smoothly, lightly. We were being taught to speak with an accent soaked in Nigerian undertones. I was devastated. I had invested so much emotionally and mentally, and for what?

Fortunately, midway through second year, we were assigned a different teacher. A slight, frail woman who had studied in France. Her lips barely moved when she spoke. It was as if she had trained as a ventriloquist. When my friend’s father spoke French to her on one of our visiting days, he approved of Mademoiselle Solomon.

My happiness at this new opportunity did not last long. Mademoiselle Solomon was a very strict and demanding teacher who completely put me — as well as a good number of my fellow classmates — off of learning French. She did not believe in making classes fun. Mais non ! French was serious business, not songs and games. In her hands, the joy was squeezed out of learning and classes became torturous. I entered each French class with trepidation. Mademoiselle Solomon was determined to sandpaper the roughness out of our accent. Each lesson was a reminder of what poor students we were and of everything we were doing wrong. I remember one day waiting for her to come to class and praying fervently that she would not turn up, that I would be spared 45 minutes of repeated Vous tous, répétez après moi. I hated that we were being forced to sit through the lessons, and I took my resentment out on French. I was not alone. Out of a class of almost 50 students, not a single one of us chose to take French after our third year, when it was no longer compulsory.

The thrill I got from correcting him resurrected my desire to learn this language so steeped in sophistication that one could be proud of being called Château.
I did not attempt to learn French again until the year before I went to university. I no longer recall why — perhaps there was a strike — but we had a long break between the end of secondary school and the start of university. One day during that break, I was introduced to a friend’s friend who had an unusual “Igbo” name: Chiatu. I asked him what it meant because I couldn’t figure it out, and he proudly told me his name was not Igbo, but French. He had been named by the French nuns at the hospital in southern Nigeria where he was born, “and it means mansion in French.” I knew enough French to know he was mispronouncing château. The thrill I got from correcting him resurrected my desire to learn this language so steeped in sophistication that one could be proud of being called Château.

The next day, I walked down to the French center near my house to ask if they gave lessons. They did. My teenage heart, so easily prone to crushes, sang to discover that Monsieur le professeur looked exactly like I expected a French man to. He had a Roger Moore-esque look to him. Moore was the sole reason I endured every James Bond movie my older brothers played when they monopolized the family VCR. Great chin. Piercing eyes, the blue of a doll’s. Hair that had a buoyancy to it, like a live, cuddly pet. My crush on the French teacher had me turning up for class on time and intensified the desirability of the language. It deserved its spot at the top of the hierarchy of languages, which relegated my native one to the bottom. By the time universities reopened and I had to quit, I had gone through two teachers (the second of whom was a Nigerian woman whose French flowed like water), my French had improved and my love for the language had been rekindled. When we read Madame Bovary in one of my undergraduate classes, I imagined being able to read it in French.

On my first visit to Paris, the city splintered my heart.
Living in Belgium years later, within a year of moving to Flanders, I had learned enough Dutch to follow conversations and make myself understood. I could have taken French, too, seeing that it was one of the national languages of my new home, but the language had lost its shine.

In the years since I had my last French class, I had become critical of my internalized partialities towards this language and the role of cultural imperialism in my bias. Why did I think it was sexy? The only reason I did was because Hollywood told me it was. The French aspirated their h’s and swallowed their r’s the same way the Yoruba did, but no one thought that the Yoruba accent was sexy. I did not. In fact, I remember kids at my boarding school making fun of a schoolmate who pronounced “rice” with the guttural “r.”

To exacerbate matters, on my first visit to Paris, the city splintered my heart. J, my husband, and I drove down on a Sunday morning. I expected to recognize the city I knew from movies, but I saw none of the glitter, the shine, the glistening, dazzling beauty I had spent a lifetime anticipating. The cafes were jam-packed and overpriced. Its streets were littered with dirt. Its traffic was unbearable. I saw the Arc de Triomphe from the windscreen of our van. The one redeeming feature of that first trip was the Louvre, which stopped me from completely collapsing in disappointment. The residue of enchantment that had survived my critical questioning of my French infatuation did not make it past that trip. In the years I lived in Belgium, I returned several times to Paris, often with my overseas guests who wanted to take pictures under the Eiffel Tower and buy key ring souvenirs from the many vendors around the site to testify to their having been. I never learned to love it.

When J and I started having children, I began to yearn for a common language we could use that the children did not understand. French seemed the most logical. I complained often of feeling like a tourist in Brussels. I had many frustrating incidents on buses trying to get the drivers to tell me whether or not I was on the right bus to my destination and where I needed to drop off. And as it turned out, being able to read Madame Bovary in its original language was one of the few enduring dreams that had survived my disenchantment from the cultural imperialism that made certain colonial languages desirable. This was mostly because I had people around me, J included, who spoke multiple languages, and swore that “reading books in their original language” was a different experience from doing so in translation.

I registered for French classes. I dragged myself to the school five nights a week at the end of long days spent taking care of my other businesses. I dreamed of when I’d pick up Madame Bovary —which I’d reread in English several times since university — in French. In under a year, I gave up on the lessons. It was no longer sustainable. I was traveling a lot for work. And when I was home, I did not want to spend my evenings away from my family learning to conjugate French verbs so that I could fulfill my fantasy of reading a classic in its original form. So what if I never read Flaubert in French? I had read Dostoyevsky in English and never felt the experience lacking for not having been in Russian. J spoke of Marquez’s brilliance with the same enthusiasm I did, even though he’d read him in Spanish and I in his English translation.

These days, I find myself wishing I had persevered with French in secondary school. Or had persevered with learning it as a young mother, but not for the reasons I had wanted to learn it initially. Of course I no longer think the accent is desirable — certainly no more desirable than my Igbo accent, or Yoruba or Hausa accents. I’m not compelled by the narratives pushed by global culture, or because I harbor dreams of reading entire novels in French, but because I am an advocate of learning new languages. I am glad that my children are multilingual. There is an enrichment in every additional language one learns, a new window into a different world.

As a writer who speaks multiple languages, I know from experience how rewarding it is to be able to borrow images and metaphors from the different languages in my arsenal. I wish my school had expended as much energy on making Nigerian languages available to us as they did French. I wish they had given us options. I might have left school proficient in another Nigerian language other than mine. More than that, I wish that I had wanted to learn French for all the right reasons. I might have been able to respond with a confident oui to the question, Parlez-vous Français?

This article is part of a series commissioned and paid for by Babbel, but it represents the journalist’s views. It was edited by Michelle No and Steph Koyfman.

I loved writing this story and the surprises it kept throwing my way. I had no idea what was wrong with Princess's mother until the story revealed it to me. I wrote this story in a day (which is the way I try to write a short story, get the draft out in one day and then whittle away at it for days and weeks and months) but this sone came fully formed, Princess stood over my shoulder and dictated the words and I just typed. The finished version is pretty much the only draft I have (has NEVER happened to me before) . It was published previously in Wasafiri but free to read here now:






https://iselemagazine.com/2020/07/28/...

For those who love to say , “It’s just a few bad apples , not all cops,” :

You do know the full sayng is that one bad apple spoils the whole bunch? Would you tolerate one bad apple (say a pedophile teacher) at your child's school, especially if that pedophile teacher targeted people who looked like your child? If the school kept that teacher on, covered up for that teacher, and people protested against the school and the teachers (because by covering up, they are all complicit), would you still be saying, "it's only a few bad apples" and keep sending your child to the school (hoping that the bad apple) would spare her?
And those who love to shout “ All lives matter," each time they hear #Black Lives Matter , should know that BLM has an implicit, too. It says black lives matter (too.) Lots of people have drawn really apt analogies to explain this, but let me add this : say that pedophile teacher from my previous analogy targeted only little blonde girls , all the other children at the school were safe from him, and the school did nothing and the parents of little blonde girls and their allies decide to fight back and protect / get justice for the victims , and they come up with the phrase, Protect Our Blonde Daughters, to draw attention to their cause ,wouldn’t it be ridiculous for people - parents of non-blonde daughters and maybe even some parents of blonde girls to start shouting them down with “All children must be protected ,” wouldnt it be silly for parents of non-blonde girls whose children are already safe to not understand that what these other parents are asking/ fighting for is their own children’s safety ( too) ; wouldn’t it be cruel to try to detract from the message , knowing the dangers these blonde girls face? #BLM is a movement and a hashtag that came out of a particular culture of violence / injustice against black bodies, a particular history of racial discrimination against black people.

#blacklivesmatter #racism #america

1.Understand that allyship is intentional. You are not an ally because your partner is black, your best friend is black, your dog is black; you like Mexican food, you watch foreign movies, you’ve been to South Africa; you adopted a black kid, you’re a liberal, your kid’s best friend is black. You’re an ally because you’ve chosen to take a side against injustice, and you make that choice every single day, in deed and in words.
2. Learn to listen with humility and compassion. Do not interrupt to say “I know how you feel,” or “I was once discriminated against” or “I was picked on at school for having red/thin/whatever hair.” Do not especially add, after you’ve said any of the above, “I got over it. We’ve got to move forward.”
3. Never ever say at any point, “Not all white people are racist.” We know that. If your child was being bullied at school, to the point where their life was miserable and they came to complain to you, would you tell them, “Not all children are bullies”? It wouldn’t matter to you or them that out of 2000 students, one was making your child’s life miserable. You’d use your voice. You’d go to the authorities and complain about it, and if your concerns were brushed aside, you’d complain that the school, as an institution, failed you and your child. You might even pull your child from the school.
4. Acknowledge your privilege (especially when you have the intersecting privileges of class and race), and use it for good. You can’t help the circumstances of your birth, but you can help what you do with the advantages you have. Speak up where you can/should, amplify the voices of the oppressed in the spaces where your privileges give you access
5. Read up more on the history of America, on racism, on police brutality. America was founded/ built on racism ( the original owners were decimated, Africans brought in as slaves), racism will never die out but institutionalized discrimination, violence on black bodies backed by authority, shouldn't be something Americans should still be confronted with in the 21st century. In the present circumstances and in similar ones, do not use the excuse of looters (both black and white) who often have little to nothing to do with the protests to discredit a righteous cause. Should the entire nation go up in flames, we all will suffer the consequences

Chika Unigwe

This much is certain: the world needs more, not less kindness. Not to be confused with empathy which is also great, the kindness I mean is the one that doesn’t have to have walked in your shoes to be compassionate to you.
In our contemporary ‘cancel’ culture, we must be willing – no matter how hard it is- to believe that other people (not just us) are capable of change, of growth.
In fighting the good fight – against racism, against injustice of any kind- when our allies mean well but get it wrong, let us correct them with kindness, let us point out to them how and where they have erred. True allies will listen and make the necessary adjustments. Fake allies will fall by the wayside ( we don’t need them anyway).
While the road to hell might be paved with good intentions, the road to growth also begins with good intentions. Good intentions can progress/transform to good works when we are willing to teach, to correct, to listen with #kindness.
No one has all the answers.
No one gets it right all the time.
Be kind.