Listed in 2010, among a very distinguished cast, as one of the most powerful Black Women in Europe, Chika Unigwe, is at the forefront of a new generation of African writers. Born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1974, she holds a Ph.D in Literature from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands and, currently, lives in Turnhout, Belgium, with her family. Her stellar oeuvre includes children’s books, poetry, essays, short-stories, and novels written in Dutch and English. Remarkably modest as she is gifted, Unigwe won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition for her story, “Borrowed Smile”, a Commonwealth Short Story Award for “Weathered Smiles”, in 2004, while another, “The Secret”, was nominated for the prestigious Caine Prize, in 2004, and “De Smaak van Sneeuw”, her first short story in Dutch, received a Flemish literary prize. Also a recipient of prestigious fellowships, including one from the Rockefeller Foundation, her stories have been broadcast on BBC World service, among other stations.
Her debut novel, “De feniks” (The Phoenix), written in Dutch, just like her second, “Fata Morgana” (On Black Sisters Street), and latest, “Nachtdanser” (Night Dancer), feature multidimensional female characters who challenge stifling, dominant, representations of African womanhood. Unigwe’s imagination, however, is no emotional dreamworld. Concerned with creating credible characters and unique angles for their expression, her African women are not ciphers; instead, they are inextricably linked to the shifting and overlapping contours of contemporary African social realities. She takes African womanhood out of pigeonholes and straitjackets, establishing networks of affiliation and resistance with which to engage matters in their complexities and raising, along the way, cogent questions of culture, identity and humanity.
Notably, “On Black Sisters Street”, a richly conceptualized narrative about the transnational economies of sex trade, now with Dutch, English, Italian, German, and Hungarian editions, won the recent NLNG Prize for Literature, Nigeria’s biggest prize for literature. Her recent work, “Night Dancer”, on (single) motherhood, loss, love, family, dissent, stigmatization, coming-to-terms, among other themes, includes Igbo words and idioms not as a self-serving ruse but to articulate dynamic social registers. Her next project, more ambitious, on Olaudah Equiano, an Igbo ex-slave, whose autobiography and work in the British abolitionist movement are legendary, continues her hardy engagement of complex issues and explorations of ordinary and extraordinary lives.
Chika Unigwe’s Africa and Africans are not framed in simplistic and specious pulls between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, often proffered in the West, nor are they governed by some kind of anthropological determinism. With spry strokes, bold but sensitive sketches of African womanhood, and assured control of challenging narrative strands, she weaves evocative worlds rich in insight and nuance. Inspired, profoundly, by the concept of ‘Negofeminism’ which proposes formulating approaches, adopting strategies and implementing initiatives rooted in cultural particularities for African women’s empowerment, she affirms faith in their resilience and capacities to transcend. Thus, like a thread through her works is the search for what measures of contributions the African writer can make, through creative resourcefulness, to illuminating certain material realities, paradoxes, dynamics and histories of the continent and its diaspora.
* Dr. Jude Akudinobi, an editorial board member, who teaches at UC Santa Barbara, contributed this piec
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