For award-winning author francesca ekwuyasi, writing began with a locked diary and a problem: she didn’t think she had anything interesting to write about.
So, she invented some things.
As a child in Lagos, Nigeria, ekwuyasi filled her diary with fictional entries about a girl like herself experiencing things she did not. Inspired by The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, she went on to invent fantastical worlds of her own.
One early story, No One Ever Really Dies, Not Here Anyways, imagined a planet where everyone lives forever.
“I don’t know,” she said, laughing at the memory. “I was just making things up.”
Storytelling was also woven into ekwuyasi’s family life. During frequent power outages in Lagos, she and her siblings would sit outside with their grandfather as he told them fables about Tortoise, the sly character always trying to outsmart others. Her older brother Namdi, meanwhile, entertained them with elaborate stories about his boarding school.
“Storytelling, oral tradition is a big part of many people’s lives. It certainly is for my family,” she said.
As she grew older, her writing moved from the fantastical to the familiar. Her family, Nigerian upbringing, relationships, migration and experiences in the diaspora increasingly became sources for her fiction.
ekwuyasi remembers vividly when she first read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, when she was about 14. The novel’s young Nigerian protagonist and depiction of family and tradition felt familiar.
“That’s when it blossomed in my mind that stories could be about contemporary girls like me,” she said.
That new focus would eventually lead to Butter Honey Pig Bread, her 2020 debut novel about Nigerian twin sisters that explores food, family, grief and sexuality. The novel was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, Amazon Canada First Novel Award and Lambda Literary Award, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers.
ekwuyasi now divides her time between Montreal and Halifax. She came to Canada in 2013 at 23 to study at Saint Mary’s University and says Halifax became a place where she learned about African Nova Scotian history, the Mi’kmaq and Canada’s colonial history.
“I feel like I grew up there,” she said. “Halifax is my base.”
Learning to trust the story
The path to Butter Honey Pig Bread was anything but straightforward. After completing her undergraduate degree at SUNY Albany in 2011, ekwuyasi returned to Nigeria and revisited books from her childhood library. She started writing the novel on a laptop, developing its themes as she went.
“I don’t know what I was doing,” she said. “It took a very long time, and I was learning along the way.”
The novel’s success was initially difficult for her to believe. She worried it might have been a fluke but now describes its reception as “a huge blessing.”
ekwuyasi is also grateful she wrote it before she knew too much about the conventions of publishing.
“If I knew then what I know now about the publishing industry, I don’t think I would have had the courage to write and submit this work,” she said.
She now uses that experience when mentoring MFA students at the University of King’s College, where she encourages writers to follow their curiosity and immerse themselves in their first novels.
A queer history in many stories
She’ll bring that same curiosity to McGill on Oct. 15, when she delivers the University’s Queer History Month keynote “Knowing – mapping a personal queer and creative history through the lens of Audre Lorde’s essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”
The idea emerged partly from research for another novel, whose protagonist is a PhD student teaching Lorde at a university in Berlin. As ekwuyasi studied Lorde’s work, she found herself inspired by Uses of the Erotic.
“Both of my copies of Lorde’s essays, I’ve marked up so much,” she said. “As I’m reading it as research for this character, I’ve been so moved.”
Rather than attempting to define a single Canadian or Nigerian queer history, ekwuyasi wants to explore the complexity of individual experience, drawing on her own life across Nigeria and Canada and the influence of writers and thinkers, many of whom are Black American feminists and womanists.
“We need simple categories to feel safe. But, unfortunately, that’s just not reality,” she said. “I want to leave things complicated.”
“I want to focus on the mess of my own personal queer history in hopes that the specificity my experience connects with someone else. Making that human connection is everything.”
francesca ekwuyasi’s keynote will be followed by a dialogue with Amber Rose Johnson, Assistant Professor in McGill’s Department of English. The event takes place at Tanna Schulich Hall in the Elizabeth Wirth Music Building. A catered reception begins at 4:30 p.m., followed by the keynote and dialogue from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Learn more and register.