Kasimma is from Igboland. Her works are published on The Puritan, Kikwetu Journal, Native Skin, Jellyfish Review, Afreecan Read, Orbis Journal, Cacti fur, The Bombay Review, Trampset, Sledgehammer, and elsewhere.
Kasimma’s collection of short stories, All Shades of Iberibe, is set for release in November 2021 by Sandorf Passage Publishers.
She has been awarded residencies across Africa, Asia, and Europe. She is an alumna of Masterclass with Chigozie Obioma, Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, IWP lines and spaces tour Workshop, and SSDA Flow workshop.
1. Kasimma, congratulations on your epic and alluring short story collection, All Shades of Iberibe! How are you feeling about this first step to being an author?
Thank you very much. I am excited about all of this. It is so surreal because writing is a labor of love and I have poured in everything I have into this craft, everything. And now it’s paying off, it makes me happy to finally see the result of my hard work. My sleepless night, reading, and tons of rejection; then finally I have a book and people are getting excited about it. I see comments about my stories on the internet and people talking of Kasimma; there’s a lot to be grateful for. I thank God for all these.
2. I was first intrigued by the title when I first saw its announcement on Twitter. It filled me with humor and the curiosity of wanting to know what All Shades of Iberibe means. Let’s start with how you arrived at the title of your collection?
Okay, thank you. (Laughs). A lot of people have asked me this question. “All shades of Iberibe” is particularly my editor’s idea. Iberibe is an Igbo word that means—to put it mildly, “messed up”. The collection is about stories on how things have gone wrong from the conceptualization of colonialism in Nigeria. How we no longer know who we are; especially in Igbo land, we don’t know our tradition anymore. We call the religion and the ontology of our ancestors bad, we destroy our shrines and sell our valuable artworks because we are Christians and feel they are fetish. And so it’s all messed up; All Shades of Iberibe is a call to enlightenment. It’s almost a desperate attempt by me to preserve what we still have to make Igbo people and the rest of the world see that what our fore-fathers involved in were valid, what they ate, their god, their living conditions, the games they played, the stories they told, their language and everything about them is very valid. So my editor – God bless him – a very lovely human being. After he read the manuscript, he said the work seeped into Igbo culture and he felt we should add an Igbo word to the title and so we decided to go with All Shades of Iberibe, which I ended up loving because it is such a brilliant idea to have an Igbo word in my title.
3. This is interesting to know, and the cohesion with your editor came out remarkable. How much was involved in putting the collection together? Also, did you weave the stories toward a particular subject or you wrote them freely, as ideas came?
I don’t know how much that got involved in the publishing because my publishers took care of that. Also, did I weave the stories towards a particular subject? No. I wrote the stories as freely as they came. It was after writing that I realized most of my stories were in the theme of Igbo cosmology and ontology. I think it happened this way because I love my culture and I like to put and my language in my writing. So after we collected the stories it happened that the themes were basically the same, then we started marketing it as those themes.
4. When I asked, “How much was involved in putting the collection together?” I meant: the time it took, the process, and the impediments that may have occurred while you wrote and picked the stories for the collection?
Ooh, it took almost 6 months plus and we did a lot of back and forth editing. Sometimes we disagreed on a single word, sometimes a phrase we had to rewrite an entire story and restructure it, and some stories got taken off the collection and new ones added. It took a lot of time, a lot of reading the manuscript. I read the manuscript so much that I became white and scrapped out from reading the manuscript. But, I mean, it’s something you must-do if you want to give the world the best. It took a lot of time and effort, and my editor was very supportive and patient through it all. He had keen eyes that pointed it out easily.
5. What themes were explored in the collection?
The themes are Igbo ontology, Igbo cosmology, tradition, domestic violence, and rape.
6. Such incredible writings. It’s exciting to have a feel of all these diverse and innovative stories you’ve put together. Your collection is fascinating and haunting. How did the stories come to you? And what did you plan to achieve with this collection?
Thank you very much for the compliment. I planned to tell stories that’s all; stories that came to me. So I am hoping because of the central theme of the collection: we all want that in the end we all believe in the same thing—live let’s live. I am hoping that people who don’t believe in Igbo culture would get to understand us and, in general, everybody would get to make space for their fellow human beings. It’s very important to let everybody and live their lives without having any restrictions on their color, what they believe in, and the god they serve. How the stories came to me is a bit of a difficult question because I can’t directly say how. Every story came to me differently, but I remember the story titled This Man, the one the narrator was a ghost at a burial talking about life after death and all that. It was at midnight when I sat down to work as usual; earlier that day I had seen and discussed a video on the Biafran war. So while I was on my laptop to do some work the story hit my mind with a thrall so strong that I felt the urgency to write about these people who got missing during the Biafran war; people like Kainene of Half of a Yellow Sun—people who varnished with the war and nothing about them was found. Some of them are dead, some came back after some years. I began to wonder if it was possible for the ones that weren’t found to come back after all these years that have gone by.
How old were they during the war and how old would they have been now if they were still alive and are there chances of them coming back to their families? I thought about all these and I thought about how some of them must have been dead by now because many died during the war and maybe their families are still keeping the doors open and hoping that one day they would walk in. And I felt the need to write about these people who had died, who were never buried–whose bodies were fed to stray dogs—the spirits of those bodies who decayed into the earth instead of being buried properly. I immediately started writing and couldn’t stop until I was done with 3,000 words. Days later, I took my time to work and edit the story. The funny thing is after a year I wrote This Man, I learned that there are spirits called Umunnadi and Umunanze in Igbo land. These are spirits of people who have died and have not been properly buried. So the spirits are nimble, they cannot cross over either, so they hang around the earth causing trouble since they are unable to join the spirit world.
I also learned that these spirits are responsible for a lot of bad things that happen to people. I was shocked and scared after I knew this information then I became disturbed with the thought that it could be these spirits that came to me to tell their stories on the night I crafted the short story. The story was written around 2 am/3 am with an aura that held me down until I got to the last sentence. Its been over a year I wrote the story and since then I have come to believe truly that these hovering spirits are the ones responsible for what’s holding this country of ours from not moving forward. In the last part of the story where the other hovering spirits were saying, “we are the ones responsible for the way this country is, this country will never move forward until they bury us………” I believe this part so much, I have posted it on Twitter and Instagram so many times; I have been actively conscious of it, especially during Biafra Remembrance Day. This is not the first time I have experienced something like this. I have another short story (not in this collection). Such kind of inspiration came to me, and I wrote, and after I had written it I learned later that it had happened to someone’s relative who is already dead. (Laughs) Occurrences like these really scare me.
7. It’s fascinating how a story transforms itself from a minute´s image into a stand-alone world that mirrors society. Yes! Let’s talk about This Man, a story from the collection. As simple as the title is, the body of the story reflects a delicate part of history and Igbo tradition. Igbo people in general believe in honoring the dead properly to ensure the deceased attains eternal rest. And it’s heartbreaking that some of our ancestors who were victims of the war were denied this ceremonial farewell from the earth. How were you able to see beyond the physical world and convey the possible grief of our ancestors with the Nigerian government?
I’m glad you crafted this question this way. It’s scary to me even. Just as I said, I got the inspiration during the wee hours. It was so strong, as though people were drumming in my ears and heart, insisting that I started writing: start writing, NOW! And I obeyed. I could not stop until I had penned down every word they said. That was when the research started and then corrections were made. While making corrections, I realized that what I had written was not far from the truth. The scariest of the experience is when I learned of recent that such malignant spirits exist: spirits of relatives not properly buried that now hover between this sphere of consciousness and the next. The ndi Umunadi na Umunanze: These spirits are known to wreak havoc, cause illnesses, misfortunes, anything evil until they are properly buried. I deeply believe that these spirits want their stories told. Why they chose me, I have no idea. Am I frightened, oh yes I am. Dealing with humans is a lot; I cannot add spirits to it.
8. I feel you sis, you have reasons to be scared. The ending of This Man stays with me. In many ways, it’s so gripping with resonances of bravery that I encouraged my friends to read it. Did you already have an idea of how you wanted the story to end or it was something you arrived at while creating? I don’t know, you tell us?
I had no idea of how it would end. As I said, they dictated as I wrote. Exactly like how our teachers used to dictate notes to us those days in school. Sometimes even in writing, most of the time, I let the characters speak. I listen to them. It’s their stories, not mine. So I let them tell me how they feel then I write. I can tell you this for free, I believe in those last paragraphs of the story, one hundred percent! Yes. The Nigerian government should do the right thing by appeasing those spirits. “No Victor, no vanquished” will not work. The joke of it! (Laugh) if we do not appease them, we are only running around in circles.
9. This is huge and should be looked into by the government. Would you say that Igbo writers should be obligated to tell stories of this kind?
No. Writers, be it Igbo or Kikuyu or Luo, should tell the stories that come to them. Those stories chose them for a reason. Nobody is under any obligation to write any story. I started out hoping to write romance, yet here I am sliding into speculative fiction and fantasy. I cannot even categorize my writing yet because I write as they come. So I do not believe we should sideline ourselves as writers. No.
10. Can you share what authors may have influenced your writing, in terms of style and the traditional genre of your fiction?
In terms of style? I can’t say. I know I read a lot of writers so I can’t say that this particular writer influenced my style or traditional ontology. I am trying to think at the top of my head which writer made me want to write on Igbo ontology and I can’t find anyone. I just know those ideas came to me and I wrote them down as stories. I didn’t have to wait for anybody to give me permission or something.
11. How would you describe your writing process? Also, how do you nurture your inspiration and get yourself to write when the motivation isn’t there?
When the inspiration to write is not there, I don’t write or try to force it; evidently, there’s no point. You won’t really do anything you will only spend minutes looking at your computer. You might be able to write few sentences that would summarize nothing meaningful in the end. So when the motivation is not there I do nothing. But even if the motivation and words are there but I am tired I just let it go. Because I know that I will basically rush what I am writing to get some rest immediately. I only write when I am settled, when I am not too tired, and when the words are there. Also when I have the strength and the words aren’t there I close anything writing and look for a book to read. I read loads of poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction. I don’t know if I have a writing process, what I do know is that I do most of my work at night. I also wake up at night to read and sometimes when I have time in the day I write too. I don’t have a particular clear cut process where one wakes up at a specific time to write. Also, before I forget, when I have ideas but no words, I solve maths or statistics. I studied statistics/economics and I love solving sums.
12. Can you share something you know now that you wish you had known before your book got published?
Okay, I have just been published, my book is not even out yet. So I don’t know if I can claim the word ‘published’. But something I know now and wish I knew earlier, is more knowledge in Igbo culture. I wish I had more knowledge of Igbo culture before writing those stories and I wish I read much more than I did and gathered much more knowledge than I did when I wrote those stories. Because I know a lot now and as I look at these stories I feel maybe I should have added more considering the little I had. But my consolation is that learning is a continuous process that never stops.
You can read more works from Kasimma on her website. You can connect with her on Twitter: @kasimmam and Instagram: @iamkasimma.
This conversation took place over the internet between a sunlit bedroom in the bustling city of Lagos-Nigeria, and a dim-spaced sitting room in the cozy weather of Abuja, Nigeria—where Kasimma writes from. Both states are under a distilled atmosphere of Salah celebration.
Chinasa Afigbo is Afreecan Read´s deputy editor in the prose genre.
#igbotradition #Kasimma #Allshadesofiberibe #publication #ChinasaAfigbo
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