VANESSA ONWUEMEZI
Vanessa Onwuemezi is a London-based writer and poet. Her work has appeared in Granta, Prototype, frieze and Five Dials, while her short story “At the Heart of Things” won the White Review Short Story Prize in 2019. Her debut collection of short stories, Dark Neighbourhood, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021 and is characterised by Onwuemezi’s disruptive style and alienating settings, earning her comparisons to Kafka and Borges, as well as Clarice Lispector and Samanta Schweblin. Here, she discusses characters in crisis, dismantling linguistic structures and tightrope walking with Nietzsche.
Interview by Matthew JanneyPortrait by Daniela Ner
Matthew Janney There are lots of thematic rhymes between the stories in Dark Neighbourhood, particularly characters experiencing moments of crisis or transitioning through liminal spaces. How were they conceived?
Vanessa Onwuemezi It was quite sporadic; I just wrote them one by one. “Heartbreak at the Super 8” is an outlier because I wrote it much earlier, when I was on the MA at Birkbeck. That one is typographically different; it was at that point that I first started experimenting with the page layout. But a malaise or melancholy certainly runs through all of them.
MJ There’s a line in the story, “Bright Spaces”, where the narrator says: “You were never really born and won’t ever die.” All these characters seem to exist somewhere in this nightmarish, in-between place – they never find firm ground. In that sense, the stories feel quite existential.
VO I suppose they are existential. I never really set any intention to write about alienation or existentialism initially; I never have an aim in mind when I start a story. But this existential question, I suppose, is a preoccupation of mine. I spend a lot of time thinking about existence; I’m just quite philosophically minded. So it seems quite natural that that’s what came out when I started writing. It’s taken me a while to really look at these stories as a reader. I’m a little bit superstitious of thinking about the content too much, because then I find my mind starts to interfere; it starts to try to bend things to make them more conventional or make them more in line with my idea of what a pleasing story might be. Now I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on them, yes, all the characters are struggling with their identity. It’s interesting that you picked that line. In that space in between, there is a void, but also the real truth and mystery of our existence. It’s terrifying – because there’s no identity in that place – but it’s also kind of liberating as well. A lot of characters are at a point where they can no longer hold together the identity that they’ve built for themselves. Any identity is built on shaky ground because if you invest too much in a particular idea of yourself or a particular facet of yourself, then when that’s taken away from you it’s a real crisis, isn’t it? Eventually, life happens and you can no longer rest on that, and the real terror of that has always interested me because it seems to be at the root of a lot of the worst things that we as human beings do to each other. It can feel like life or death when an identity is taken away, so you can see why someone might go to extreme lengths to maintain it. A lot of the characters are at a point or at least reach a point eventually, where they have nowhere to go, there are so many cracks. A lot of the stories end at that point; I don’t really deal with what happens after that.
MJ Flimsiness of identity also connects to setting. The stories in Dark Neighbourhood typically take place in settings through which people pass quite anonymously, settings where they can reinvent themselves or play with identity. At what point in a story’s conception does setting feature?
VO It depends on where the inspiration for the story comes from. If I get stuck on a place, I can’t really imagine a story anywhere else. The idea of playing with identity and passing through is definitely a potent one, especially in the story “Cuba”. When I started thinking about that story I had watched the Madeleine McCann documentary, which is set in Portugal. There was this very ominous opening to it; somebody who owns a bar in the town where it all happened had said, “Oh, lots of people come here to lie about who they are and reinvent themselves.” So it’s funny that you said exactly that. That really set the tone for that piece, especially in the beginning. None of the stories are set in a very definite place, apart from “Cuba”, perhaps, but I haven’t defined the place. I don’t have any issue with doing so, but for some reason I quite like to blur the edges.
MJ One striking aspect of Dark Neighbourhood, which you touched upon earlier, is your experimentation with how your writing is laid out on the page. There are gaps, sudden line breaks, punctuation written out as words, disruptive features that nod to something more poetic. It seems you’re trying to go beyond the traditional structures that narrative storytelling affords.
VO I haven’t always written in this exact style, but I have always felt a move towards trying out different kinds of expressions, I suppose. And I always tended towards the surreal – or the unreal; that may be a better way to describe it. As a reader, I’m a big fan of Cortázar and Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Nabokov. I wanted to find some way of expressing things that felt fresh and embodied so that it involved all the senses as a means of having an experience rather than something that’s simply descriptive, something that kind of bypasses our intellectual faculty. I suppose this is more common in poetry, but I did want something that gets into you before you really understand it in your mind, before you have a chance to categorise it. It’s not always completely successful. Sometimes certain word combinations can maybe make sense only to me, but I felt mixing up language a little bit to try and find some new freshness of expression was worth the risk. With the punctuation, that was definitely something that kind of just happened. I just started doing that. It’s funny because in a lot of reviews, the word “precision” came up a lot, and I was like, “Wow, if they only knew, if only they saw me just throwing this stuff down.” The precision comes later in the edit, I hope. I spent a little bit of time in France and in learning a new language, I dismantled my adherence to the grammatical structures of English a little. French isn’t too dissimilar, but there is still a different way of constructing a sentence. I didn’t necessarily realise this straightaway, intellectually, but it made me realise you can reconstruct a sentence and still find expression in it, you can still give an essence of something, even with a sentence that doesn’t make grammatical sense in English. It’s like those word games where as long as you keep the first and last letter the same, you can scramble the middle letters and most people can read it because they read words as pictures. There is a similar thing going on with a sentence. There is a kind of sensibility of a sentence when it’s within the context of a whole story. Most people can understand what you’re saying, but then it also embeds it in something a bit mysterious; it gives it a strangeness.
MJ It feels as if all these stories are picking away at the assumption that knowledge is truth. Truth can indeed be strangeness, as well as sound, rhythm, texture, feeling.
VO There is a kind of salient truth among it all, which you can find in a lot of Virginia Woolf’s writings. She talks about this. I’m reading Mrs Dalloway at the moment and I can see there are so many passages where she describes something vanishing. I wish I could remember a line now. There is something always disappearing behind a cloud or behind the corner as you approach it. It’s impossible to capture that, but that is what I was trying to capture.
MJ Aside from Woolf, what else are you reading or has influenced you?
VO I really, really enjoyed Lote by Shola von Reinhold. I tend to read a lot of non-fiction. I’m still making my way through Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from which I took my epigraph. I think I’ll be reading it for months to come; it’s interesting, elements of it keep reappearing in my life, like the bit about a tightrope walker. I was listening to a podcast the other day and they weren’t talking about Zarathustra, but they used the archetype of the tightrope walker to talk about Philip K. Dick and this set of writers who went quite deep into mind-transformative experiences and psychedelics; they described that endeavour as a kind of tightrope walk. That, I think, is the way in which Nietzsche meant it. He speaks of man, by which he means a human being, as a transitional entity, our goal being to walk this tightrope. It’s really interesting, but it’s also very long and dense – he does go on a bit! I’ve also been reading a book called The Right to Speak, a book about the voice. Doing a lot of readings – I also just recorded the audiobook for Dark Neighbourhood last week – has made me think a lot about the relationship between text and voice. I’m definitely paying a different kind of attention to how I read and think. Being able to read the work and do this audiobook and engage with people by reading it has been really important; it’s a really essential dimension. I just started thinking about the possibilities of the voice and performance and what I suppose can be done to really show that. At a lot of readings you’re expected to read from the book and that’s it. But if you can just shift gears very slightly and make it a performance, everyone has a completely different experience. ◉