Poetry and Business is a new journal created with the goal of incorporating the world of work into the world of letters. It is currently accepting submissions for its inaugural issue, which will be released in print on Groundhog’s Day, 2016.
The journal seeks poems and essays that have not been previously published. Material that is available online is considered to be previously published.
The subject matter of Poetry and Business is specific. We are looking for work that describes the meeting of verse and commerce. Poems should address some aspect of business – money, consumer experience, or professional life, for example. Essays should speak to some aspect of the interaction of business and poetry, from the perspective of either field of work. It is not necessary for contributors to be employed in the world of business.
Simultaneous submissions are fine, so long as prospective contributors communicate in a timely manner about works that have been accepted elsewhere. Up to three poems or two essays may be submitted at one time.
Poetry and Business will accept electronic submissions only, by email to submissions@poetryandbusiness.com.
To have your work considered in the 2016 issue, please submit by the end of 2015. Poetry and Business will be an annual publication, and so some gap between receipt of submissions and reply from the Journal – something in the area of one month – is to be expected.
All rights revert to the authors upon publication. Poetry and Business will claim First Serial Rights, and the right to keep material available online in electronic form.
Payment for each poem or essay accepted is $20.16, plus one copy of the issue in which the item is included.
How does science inspire the literary imagination? Can science writing be a literary art? The Kenyon Review is looking for poetry, fiction, essays, and drama that respond to issues in science, ecology, and the environment for a special issue to be published in Sept/Oct 2016.
Good science writing isn’t only about science: it is also about the way we think, and the ways in which that process of thought is shaped by history, culture, ideology, even the language in which we express those ideas. Only fifty years after Galileo published Sidereus Nuncius, or the “Starry Messenger,” which gave the first account of his telescopic observations of the Moon and four satellites around Jupiter, his discoveries became a crucial metaphor in Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Cutting-edge science quickly becomes the inspiration for–and subject of–poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.
In conjunction with that special issue, KR will host an online discussion of writers, editors, and scientists on the question of what makes science writing literary. Questions we hope to consider include: What makes good science writing effective? Should science writing make use of narrative conventions inherited from the novel? What is the role of metaphor in science writing? How do these literary conceits shape readers’ understanding of scientific issues? Does the dramatization of scientific discovery shift attention from science to character, or does it humanize the scientific process for readers?
[Rudolph Lewis, publisher of Chicken Bones, interviews Kalamu ya Salaam circa 2003. The entire interview plus most of Kalamu’s writings referenced in the interview are available on Chicken Bones > http://www.nathanielturner.com/kalamuinterview.htm]
4
Langston as Literary Influence
Rudy: You have attended a few writing workshops or retreats. How has those events influenced your writing in any significant way?
Kalamu: I have not attended any workshops or retreats as a student in over twenty years. Attending as a teacher or presenter is just an extension of what I do with NOMMO. I like to get around to hear and see what other writers are doing, both my peers and younger writers. I very much want to know what is going on. In that regard, the greatest influence is that being aware of what is happening helps me keep my work fresh.
Rudy: By retreat, I mean do you ever go to a “writer’s colony,” a place you can get away from the usual hustle bustle, to think, to meditate, to write, to be among other writers, your peers? I thought the last time I saw you, you said you had won some fellowship award that allowed you to do just this? I must have misunderstood what you meant.
Kalamu: Oh, yeah, I won a senior fellowship from the Arts Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I spent three weeks there with nothing to do but read, write and think. But that was the only time in my life and although it was productive, that’s not something I want to do again. I thrive on what some people call hustle and bustle. I have a short attention span. Plus, I write very quickly. And I love the work I do, so I’m not trying to get away to anywhere.
Rudy: I understand that Langston Hughes is your major poetic influence? Is your appeal similar to his? Do you believe his audience was liberal whites and the black intellegentsia? Langston was a professional writer; that is, he made his living off his work. Can that still be done? What do you think was Langston’s vision of America?
Kalamu: In poetry, Langston was my first and most lasting influence, but my major influence has been the music and culture of black folk. Techniques I have developed, approaches I have decided to explore, all come out of contact with black folk and the cultural expressions we have developed. This necessarily means that I am drawn to and most responsive to working class black folk, those who labor (whether “legally or illegally”) to earn a living. [See poetic autobiography section “two: what Langston did.”]
Hughes’ prime audience was working class black folk, but that was not his sole audience. Indeed, Hughes wrote for different audiences although the bulk of his work seems to me to be addressed to working class black folk and those who understand or empathize with that orientation. Hughes’ appeal to the intellegentsia was, and remains, limited to those intellegentsia who are appreciative of black culture and its working class roots.
Today, it is much more possible to make a living as a black writer than during Hughes’ time.
Hughes was a clear advocate of diversity. Respect for different peoples, different ways of doing things and at the same time he had profound faith in political democracy. So I guess you could say: cultural diversity and political democracy. His views on economic matters seems to have shifted over the years and I am not sure what economic views he held in his latter years.
Rudy: I don’t want to really press the point. But do you really think that most of Hughes’ work was working-class directed? Were members of the working class buying his books or attending his readings? Were they the ones who were even reading Crisis and Opportunity where some of his poems could be found? I would probably agree theSimple tales had a working class orientation. Though possessing an element of folk humor, don’t you think they had an air of minstrelsy about them? Don’t you think that given a blues poem by Hughes and a blues lyric by Muddy Waters, that Hughes wouldn’t have had a chance among Mississippi cotton pickers?
Kalamu: There is a misunderstanding about both Hughes and Muddy. It’s interesting that you mention Muddy. Muddy Waters didn’t become big until he hit Chicago and hooked up with Chess Records. Hughes was already big when he hooked up with the Chicago Defender and did the Simple series. Simple was published in a Black newspaper at a time when Black folk read the paper. Crisis and Opportunity was stuff of the 20s, by the 30s through the 50s Hughes was in another space.
Certainly he had more Black readers than any other writer until Richard Wright’s Black Boyand Native Son. Furthermore, the big three of Black poets who were taught in the segregated public schools of the South were Paul Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones and Langston Hughes. Hughes was available in the schools, Hughes was in the newspaper and Hughes had books. No other writer came close to that reach into the hearts and minds of the Black community at the working class level.
Rudy: I have heard you read, perform your poems and I have heard about Baraka’s performances. Both of you use humor. I heard Sonia Sanchez speak of Malcolm’s humor and how he used it as a technique to draw people in. Could you speak further how you make use of humor in your poems?
Kalamu: Well, I’m not as funny as Baraka. But you know, humor is only an exaggeration of a commonly recognized reality, and exaggeration as an aesthetic is at the core of African-heritage expressiveness. I mean if you look at the statues of traditional Africa, if you look at our dance movements, if you listen to how we worry notes. All of that is expressive exaggeration. Humor is just putting a little ironic twist on it.
Rudy: You have written and spoken about the importance of the Black Arts Movement. Is there a philosophical or ideological relationship between BAM and the “neo-griot” movement? Is it just a matter of a technological updating?
Kalamu: Well, I would not equate neo-griot with BAM. BAM was a nationwide movement that involved literally thousands of people. Neo-griot is my particular approach. Certainly my approach grows directly out of my involvement in BAM, but unlike BAM, and this is a major distinction, neo-griot is not associated with a particular political movement.
The creative use of communications technology in cultural work is constant in black culture in America. It is just that many of us are not aware of how closely aligned the use of technology and the expressions of our culture are. Perhaps because we seldom do anything just for the sake of technology, and thus technology is always used to facilitate our expression rather than to be the focus or subject of our expression.
As a people we focus on human relationships even as we use various technical developments to effectuate our cultural expressions. A prime example of this would be Stevie Wonder’s InnerVisions, which is widely praised but seldom looked at primarily as a technological marvel, even though it broke new ground for the use of electronics in popular music. I think the ability to humanize the use of technology has always been a hallmark of black culture, and in that regard, hopefully, neo-griot is a continuation of that trend.
5
Malcolm, My Son
Rudy: I have just finished reading Malcolm My Son. At first, my impression was that it was a parody. And then after the first two or three exchanges of dialogue I thought it was Shakespearean. How did you come to write such a play? You completed it sometime in the early 1990s?
Kalamu: Oh, I really don’t remember exactly when I wrote it. It’s just some outside jazz kind of stuff. Take the form and stretch. I have always experimented with theatre. I wrote straight stuff, but I also always wrote some out shit. We performed that play once. The brother who played Malcolm literally could not stop crying backstage after the performance. He had that much of himself invested in that piece.
I’m not sure what you mean by Shakespearean. I was just enjoying language with that one. That’s why it’s written in verse. I think that was the second or third verse play that I have written. I know the language has some of that Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, two tenors, wild-ass soloing in it. The play is full, not just of musical references, but also structured using musical motifs. But, I think my playwrighting days are over. I’m much more interested in dealing with video. It’s going to take me another three or four years to really develop my chops in that arena. We’ll see. I’m good now, but I’ve got a lot to learn in terms of producing video.
Rudy: I have read a few of your poems in which you deal with the question of gender oppression, the repression of women in a male-dominated society. My immediate impression was that you were a bit soft and sentimental when it came to women and women issues. That there was not enough of a critical edge.Malcolm My Son, in a manner, demolished that illusion. I see now that part of your approach as a writer is to get inside your subject, like an actor. Is that the case? That is, part of your poetic aesthetic, if we can call it that, is to show the complexity of life?
Kalamu: Well, you know, there are a couple of issues. First of all, few people have seen the range of what I do. In terms of women-oriented work, you have not seen or read the script “Memories.” I don’t know if you are aware of my book, Our Women Keep Our Skies From Falling, the collection of essays I did in the early-eighties whose subtitle was “Six Essays in Support of the Struggle to Smash Sexism.” Then there is a bunch of fiction, much of which has yet to be published. Also, by the time people see some of this stuff, I have already moved on to other stuff. So there is just the situation that much of what I have to say is not widely published.
But, the other, and more important problem is that I am not proposing a specific political line, so therefore there is no preordained point of view or conclusion I have to suggest overtly or covertly. Sometimes I am interested in what some people call deviant shit. sometimes I want to explore the typical, the normal. Who knows. as one of my characters says: what day is this? what am I feeling? To answer specifically about the complexity issue. My goal is to reveal and critique the lives we live, have lived and aspire to live. Some of our stuff is complex and some of it is straightforward and simple. Ditto, my creative work.
Rudy: In Malcolm My Son, how did you come up with the technique of cuts? What’s the idea behind that. It is as if the play never gets started, or as if it is continually restarting itself. Is that symbolic of something, something you’re saying about the world we live in?
Kalamu: Symbolic? No, it’s quite literal. We’ll just keep doing this shit, over and over, until we get it right.
Rudy: Do you view poetry as a weapon for social change? Would you agree with Karenga’s view that art that does not contribute to revolutionary change is invalid? Do you consider your writings “inherently or overtly political?”
Kalamu: I consider all writing “inherently” political, although not all writing is overtly political. As for my own writing, much of it is overtly political but not all of it. By overtly political I mean consciously advocating social change or offering social critique.
One important point of clarification: Karenga did not say “art” as a general category was invalid if it wasn’t political. In that particular essay Karenga was specifically talking about the category of revolutionary art. He understood that not all art aspired to be revolutionary, just as not all politically active people aspire to revolutionary change. I believe that over the years there has been a major misconception that we in BAM were trying to say that all art had to be a certain way. When actually we (or at least in this particular case, Karenga and those who shared Karenga’s outlook, which I did and do), we were clear in that we were addressing the question: what is the nature of revolutionary art.
Today we live in an era when nearly all art has taken or been forced to take a commercial direction. This direction means that we start from the premise that everything is, or ought to be, for sale. Thus, folk have a hard time conceiving of work that does not have a commercial purpose or is not of commercial use. But, I believe, the revolutionary artist has other ideas and approaches.
My commitment to revolutionary work is no less today than it was during the seventies. But my focus today is not solely on political specifics. Today I also focus on creating alternatives to economic capitalism, alternatives to commercial use value. And I usually don’t argue this point intellectually, rather I exemplify an alternative through the work I do and through how I use my artwork and offer my artwork to our community.
This question of the nature of revolutionary art is a very, very important question and also a very multifaceted question. Additionally, as I have learned from Black women writers, the nature and quality of interpersonal relationships should be a profound and critical part of our creative work as writers.
Not only does much of my post-BAM work investigate interpersonal relationships, but because I investigate the interpersonal, diversity is inevitable. I came to my positions on gender and sexuality through political struggle, but now dealing with and exploring the nature of gender and sexuality within our community informs and shapes my politics. This struggle, like all struggles, is dialectical.
When I first started delving into issues of gender and sexuality I, like many people, was clueless and ill-informed, my consciousness had been shaped by being an American, by spending my early years in the Baptist church, by public school, and by the norms of the status quo. I was fortunate to be born during interesting times, so that as I hit my high school years, the civil rights movement jumped off in full force.
I graduated from high school in 1964, a major year for civil rights activity. I spent beaucoup (that means plenty in New Orleans vernacular) days and months involved in picketing, sitting-in, voter registration canvassing, etc. I received the active support of my parents. As a young adult I was active in the Black Power movement. As a result of my Civil Rights work, I read James Baldwin.
In fact, I got kicked off the high school paper for writing a very enthusiastic review of Baldwin’s play “Blues For Mr. Charlie.” I had a lot of respect for Baldwin as a writer, and for Baldwin as a crusader for and witness on behalf of Black people. I could not and would not dismiss Baldwin because he was a homosexual.
Rather than simply ignore that or reluctantly tolerate the fact that he was homosexual, I ended up investigating the whole issue and over a period of years and after much struggle and study around those issues, I arrived at what I would consider a reasonably progressive, although others might call it “radical,” position on the question of homosexuality.
You know, the more you open your eyes, the more you see. So once I dug Baldwin and tried to understand where he was coming from, then I began to see homosexuality throughout our community. Also, by then I was into the blues aesthetic (see my essay on that in What Is Life?), and homosexuality was generally accepted as part of life in those circles.
Moreover, I had personal and close friends and comrades who were gay or who were bisexual. I remember a brother who was editing our movement newspaper during my year of student rebellion at Southern University in New Orleans. He was in the movement heart and soul. He was a comrade. I had to stand by him, with him, defend him from homophobia and heterosexism whether that homophobia and heterosexism came from others or whether it came from my own pre-revolutionary consciousness.
I was committed to struggle, and that commitment necessarily included struggle with my own biases, prejudices and weaknesses. I did not just wake up one morning and write Malcolm My Son because I didn’t have anything else to do. I wrote it because it reflected my own attempts to understand the breadth, depth and nature of Black humanity. And ditto for my participation in the struggle to smash sexism and develop women.
6
Christianity & Other Religions
Rudy: If you can say all writing is “inherently” political, couldn’t you say with equal thrust that all writing is “inherently” religious? Let me return again to Malcolm My Son. It is the best piece of dramatic writing that I have read in some time.
In that play you speak of the supernatural. Are you religious? Do you have faith in the Judeo-Christian God? Clearly, you are a very spiritual person. For you seem to have some “insight into the unseen.”
Kalamu: I am a non-theocentric spiritualist. I do not believe in a god or gods, as “god” is commonly conceived. I have no faith in organized religion of any sort, denomination or nomenclature. I will quote
haiku #45black people believein god, and i believe in
black people, amen
In a piece of science fiction I wrote, one of the characters addresses that question. God is “I don’t know.” The human identification of “God” is another way of saying I don’t know albeit putting some certainty and substance to one’s ignorance. As brother Curtis Mayfield said, everybody needs something to believe in. Most of us can not imagine facing the void without a faith in something beyond what we know.
Personally, I don’t feel a need to understand everything. I can accept that there are mysteries, that there are aspects of life that are not only unknown, but are indeed unknowable. In fact, you want to know the truth, most Christians have the same belief system I do, it’s just that they put “God” between themselves and the mystery. They make god knowable and then turn around and tell you that we humans are not able to understand god.
So, when they say “God knows,” that’s just another way of saying, I don’t know. I don’t feel a need to have god as a middleperson between me and my ignorance. There are things I don’t know—god or no god. And no amount of my belief in a “god” is going to enlighten me or make me any less ignorant on issues beyond the scope of human understanding.
Rudy: I quite sympathize with your position on our religious situation. I too was baptized at twelve at my family church, which has been the same foundation for 132 years–a foundation laid by freedmen For me also, it was prophesied by my great grandfather that I’d become a preacher– which has given me much pause. I too left the church when I was in high school and have not been much of a churchgoer since.
I have also flirted with a Marxian perspective and other religions. I have, however, never been able entirely to reject the faith of my Virginia ancestors. Among whom I would include Nathaniel Turner of Southampton. Thus it is unclear to me whether you are rejecting fully the religious faith of our Christian slave ancestors or whether you are rejecting the church as presently constituted. If the former, does not that constitute a kind of disrespect of these ancestors?
Kalamu: Was it “disrespect” of their non-Christian ancestors for those of our people who were first enslaved to convert to Christianity? When Kunta became Toby, when they turned Shango into Jesus, was that disrespect of the ancestors? Don’t ever forget we did not start out as Christians. I accept that Christianity is a legitimate religion and a legitimate choice for some of us to make. But I don’t respect any kind of Christian chauvinism that attempts to browbeat people into accepting the inevitability of the whole world converting to Christianity.
Moreover, Nat Turner was not the only person to actively fight for freedom. The fact that Turner was a Christian in no way legitimizes Christianity for me. Why is it so hard for Christians to accept non-Christians without trying to convert them, without trying to make it seem like anyone who chooses not to become a Christian after receiving the “word of God” is a heathen? The truth is, I am honoring all of my ancestors who refused to embrace the White man’s god. Period.
Rudy: Your interview with Edward Kamau Brathwaite and your response to him on the question of religion is extremely interesting and provocative. Brathwaite concerned himself with Carribbean culture and its religious connection. He concluded: “With the African person the religion is the center of the culture; therefore, every artist, at some stage, must become rootedly involved in a religious complexity.” He goes on further to make a distinction in how European theologians have dealt with God and how our ancestors have dealt with divinity in our everyday lives.
In your response, you seemed troubled by Brathwaite’s position on the role and importance of church religion in our cultural life. You seem to believe our African gods and the Christian God failed us. Maybe our African gods failed us. Neither Turner nor King nor my 91-year-old grandmother would agree with you on the failings of Christ in the lives of African-Americans. They and many like them would say that our Lord has brought us a mighty long way.
Kalamu: I am not going to argue with anyone’s beliefs. I have stated my position. I am not troubled by anyone believing something different from what I believe. I questioned, in the larger philosophical sense, how Christianity in general and how Black Christians specifically deal with the question of what did we do to deserve enslavement. If the Christian God is a just God, what wrong were we guilty of to deserve the holocaust of chattel slavery? If we did no wrong, that is, if we were not collectively guilty then why were we punished? If the answer is that it is a mystery and is something beyond the ability of humans to understand, I can live with that. However, that answer implies that we can not use the principle of God being just to explain our situation.
Rudy: It seems as if you have set up a type of duality or conflict between the blues/jazz world and the church/religious world. I know that sort of thing is out there. But in practice they seem to inform the other. Wouldn’t it be better to view the two worlds tied at the waist, so to speak?
Kalamu: Tied at the waist may be true in a meta-philosophical sense, i.e. taking a cultural look at the ways of Black folk, but on a day to day basis, a blues lifestyle is not the same as a Christian lifestyle nor is a blues lifestyle generally acceptable to Christians. You know that and I know that. In fact, the Baptist church is known for its vigorous damning of blues music. Moreover, this is not something I set up, rather the differences between the camps is something I recognize, not something I created. This difference does not mean that some overlap does not exist or that there is no one in either camp that understands and embraces the other.
Obviously there are numerous examples of blues singers who also sang gospel, and vice versa in the case of Rev. Gary Davis. And of course you had jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington and especially John Coltrane who recorded religious music. Plus, there are people such as the theologian Rev. Cone [Dialogue on Black Theology] who wrote a book on the subject of the blues and religion. But the example of those folk is an abnormality, a deviation form the norm.
In general, blues/jazz and the traditional Christian church are separate, and too often, conflicting camps. I might also add: contradictions and controversy do not bother me. I don’t feel a need for everyone to agree in order for us to live and work together, or in order for us to love one another.
A deeply rooted tradition in the African American community, wearing flamboyant hats to church has both spiritual and cultural significance. The centuries-old custom continues to flourish throughout the Southern U.S. and in strong black Northern communities, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Harlem. The dress hats, which are beautifully fabricated and extravagantly decorated, have evolved into an art form and an important cultural symbol.
Catching God’s Eye
Prior to the 20th century, most American Christian women commonly followed Corinthians 1:11 and covered their heads in worship. For early African Americans, God’s house was not only a sanctuary of hope and salvation in a brutal world, but it was also one of the few places where they were allowed to hold important positions of leadership. Sunday was thus a day of worship and celebration. African American women traded in their drab aprons and knotted head wraps for brightly colored dresses and straw hats gaily decorated with fresh flowers, ribbons and feathers. These heaven-reaching hats were designed to “catch God’s eye” in hopes He would hear their prayers.
The African American Crown
Elaborately adorned headdresses hold enormous significance in African rituals. American slaves continued the custom of weaving geometric designs, attaching feathers and adding beaded jewelry to straw and fiber hats before attending church. In addition to instilling pride and confidence, the hats remind the wearers to carry themselves like queens. Culturally, church hats became a strong symbol of the ability to triumph over hardships. Worn with the head held high, African American women strut with “hattitude” while sporting these crowns.
A Symbol of Success
As African Americans gained greater freedoms, the crown evolved into an important status symbol. During the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the growing middle class celebrated their economic successes by purchasing flashy hats and wearing them everywhere, from the office to the speakeasy. Black women appeared in church flaunting colorful, wide-brimmed hats lined in silk, sparkling with rhinestones and trimmed with flower garlands, sassy feathers and delicate lace. Noted African American milliners, which include Grace Bustill Douglass, Mildred Blount and Mae Reeves, achieved fame for their designs as early as the 1800s.
Fluctuating Popularity
Young girls who dreamed of wearing beautiful hats like their mothers and grandmothers rebelliously rejected the crown as a symbol of oppression and the black bourgeoisie in the 1960s. Still, ridiculed elders kept the tradition alive. In the 1990s, these young women vigorously reembraced the custom as they became the church elders. Although most prominent milliners are now well past retirement age, custom-made designs fetch between $100 to $1,000. While many church-going African American women own at least one formal hat, it is not uncommon for devout crown wearers to have one that flawlessly matches each carefully tailored church dress. Shopping for the perfect hat to wear on Easter, Mother’s Day and Christmas can take hours.
Hattiquette
In writing and photographing their book, “Crowns,” Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry discovered that numerous unwritten rules for wearing church hats have developed in the African American community. This hat etiquette includes not wearing anything that is wider than the shoulders or darker than the color of the shoes and never borrowing or touching someone else’s hat, although treasured pieces are often passed on to daughters and granddaughters. While the hat should be the focal point, it must not compete with the matching outfit, jewelry or accessories, such as pocketbooks and gloves.
She won an Oscar for her first film,
12 Years a Slave. Now Lupita Nyong’o
is back, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
She talks aliens, sudden fame and family
Lupita Nyong’o. Photograph: Erik Madigan Heck for the Guardian. Styling: Priscilla Kwateng. Clothes by Miu Miu
Every night of the week, and four times at the weekend, Lupita Nyong’o has been going on stage at New York’s Public Theater as the Girl, an escapee from a village in war-torn Liberia who finds shelter among the concubines of a warlord. In a relatively youthful career, it is the kind of role that Nyong’o is proving very good at – light-footed in the face of traumatic material – and the play, Eclipsed, by Danai Gurira, will move to Broadway in the spring. There are no men in Eclipsed and, Nyong’o says, “It’s rare that we have an all-female cast. And all-female African voices speaking for themselves on the stage. I don’t know any other play that does that. I felt it was something I needed to do.”
Nearly two years after winning an Oscar for her role as Patsey in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, the 32-year-old says she had a lot of other options on the table; the decision to do a long run at a small New York theatre, rather than throw herself into a beckoning Hollywood career, is a sign of her priorities – and confidence. A few hours after we meet, in a photographer’s studio in Manhattan, Nyong’o is due at the theatre, and in these preparatory hours is quiet, composed – a leaver of pauses. She moves across the studio floor as if on coasters, and if she wasn’t made up fresh from the shoot, has the tiny proportions, cat-like eyes and perfect symmetry that don’t need much help to look magazine-ready. Since her Oscar win, Nyong’o has become a model for Lancôme, among others, something she regards with satisfaction. One of the best things about her recent success, she says, has been the extent to which, in her native Kenya, she is “a source of inspiration” for girls who might otherwise have thought acting and modelling weren’t options for them.
Nyong’o is still adjusting to her radical change in fortune, something vividly described by the chasm between the only two films she has so far appeared in. After making 12 Years a Slave, but before it was released, Nyong’o continued her apprenticeship with a tiny role as an air hostess in Non-Stop, one of those Liam Neeson vehicles in which he is either gurning and crunching his knuckles or flying through the air waving a gun, and in which Nyong’o had precisely one and a half lines. Her third film role, still heavily under wraps, will be as Maz Kanata, an alien character in the forthcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens. (Journalists will not be allowed to see the film until next week. Recently, it was rumoured that her role had been cut in the edit, but the director, JJ Abrams, has strongly rejected this, saying, “The only rumour more ridiculous than Jar Jar Binks being a Sith Lord is that I cut Lupita Nyong’o’s performance because it wasn’t satisfactory. In truth, her performance wasn’t satisfactory. It was spectacular.”)
Lupita Nyong’o covered in CGI tracking dots while filming Star Wars: The Force Awakens
The question is how she managed to pivot the role of Patsey into a huge career launch and withstand the kind of pressure under which lesser novice actors might have buckled. It comes down to good sense and imagination, says Nyong’o, who, after growing up in the Nairobi suburbs, went to college in America. The trajectory of a girl from an elite Kenyan family to Brooklyn, where she now lives, via Mexico, Yale and Hollywood, is one that gave Nyong’o a certain amount of flexibility and willingness to suspend judgment. It also conferred what reads as a certain distaste for saying anything that might be construed as controversial; she is even reluctant to offer an assessment of the Kenyan national character – “oh no, I wouldn’t want to be the one to do that” – a diplomacy one imagines she learned from her politician father. She is one of six children, and her father, Peter Nyong’o, is a prominent politician who teaches political science at universities around the world; her mother, Dorothy, is managing director of the Africa Cancer Foundation. Both, Nyong’o says, encouraged their children to “find out what we were passionate about and try to make a living out of doing that.”
Still, the family’s inclination was towards rigorous academic pursuit rather than the arts, and it took Nyong’o a long time to figure out she wanted to go in a different direction. She attended a series of international schools in Nairobi, and when she was 16, her parents allowed her to move to Mexico to live with an elder sister for seven months and perfect her Spanish. Afterwards, she studied for a degree in film and theatre at Hampshire College, Massachusetts.
At no point during those years, Nyong’o says, did she have any real sense what she was doing with her life. But the American system gave her what she needed to find out: freedom. At Hampshire, she says, “there are no exams, no grades. It was a culture shock. I was used to a very structured school. I did the international GCSE and the international baccalaureate, and it took a while to adjust and appreciate [the American system]. And I did appreciate it, because I was very indecisive about what I wanted to do. I knew that if I was in a more structured environment, I would end up not taking the risks I was raised to take.”
Photograph: Erik Madigan Heck. Styling: Priscilla Kwateng. Clothes by JW Anderson
Those risks have led her to the Star Wars movie, for which she was covered in CGI tracking dots for most of her scenes. It seems a long way from the classical training she underwent during graduate school at Yale; how do you build character and motivation when you’re playing an alien?
“These worlds are created by human beings,” she says, “and at the end of the day they are created to illuminate something about us. So, under all the makeup, it’s just human relationships and wants and desires.” She laughs. “All we know is how to be human. And the way we take in the world that isn’thuman is also human.”
Nyong’o’s move from Kenya to the US gave her some insight into being a fish out of water, albeit one confined to this planet. Being in the US also made her appreciate what she had left behind; she realised how focused on western culture her education had been. “America has infiltrated all of us with its swag,” she says, laughing. “It took coming to America to make me realise the ways in which I was not American. It made me realise how much of myself and where I’m from I had neglected. That’s one of the reasons I took African studies while I was an undergraduate, because I realised I wanted to know a little more about who I was, aside from all that other stuff I had absorbed – not only from America, but from Britain. I grew up in a former British colony. So, coming to America, I realised it was the African influence I needed to familiarise myself with.”
Winning her Oscar for 12 Years a Slave. Photograph: FilmMagic
At college, she began to think of herself as a film-maker, and for her final thesis flew back to Kenya to make a documentary called In My Genes, partially funded by her parents and focusing on the fascinating and often very difficult lives of black Kenyans suffering from albinism. It is a terrific film, a study in race and identity and the arbitrary nature of pigmentation. Nyong’o says it was a subject she identified with because she, too, had once been told she was the wrong colour – in her case, a casting agent who said, “I was too dark to be on TV.” She says, “to think that I was on the other end of the colour spectrum, when it comes to my complexion, yet we were experiencing similar discrimination. I think that’s what drew me to that subject.”
The casting agent was auditioning Nyong’o for a local commercial in Nairobi and the actor was horrified by what she said. “That was not fun to hear. But I just didn’t accept it. It hurt, you know. And I cowered. But I didn’t accept it, actually. That’s the truth.” The fact that she could, with some effort, shrug it off, is in no small part down to her mother, who “said you can do anything you put your mind to. It didn’t occur to me that I should change what I wanted to do. I needed to change how I was going to do it.”
Still, she looked around for role models. Oprah was one; the whole family would watch her talkshow while Nyong’o was growing up. “The overarching theme of her show is finding your purpose. That was huge.” What else? “The Color Purple was a huge influence on me. The closer I got to saying I wanted to be an actor, the more I started to look at which actors were doing things I was interested in and I admired. Charlize Theron and Cate Blanchett and Taraji P Henson. Elizabeth Taylor.” There is a long pause. “Oh, my goodness, whatsisface. Sidney Poitier was a very big influence on me.”
By the time Nyong’o graduated, she had started to lean away from documentary film-making and towards acting. While still a student, she had won a role in a Kenyan miniseries called Shuga and was convinced that, if she wanted to pursue an acting career, she should have some formal training. Rather than go to drama school, Nyong’o went to Yale to study acting as part of an MFA programme, a course most famously pursued by Meryl Streep; in the US, it is the acting course that comes nearest to the pedigree of RADA. During the vacations, she headed into a second season of Shuga, found a manager and, while still at college, was put up for the 12 Years a Slave audition.
In 12 Years a Slave with Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Photograph: AP
Nyong’o was at an important junction when the role of Patsey came along; young enough to be bullish in the face of considerable pressure, old enough to have a firm sense of herself. “I felt comfortable in my own skin. Had I felt any other way, it might have been discombobulating.”
She had Yale to thank for this, she says, and also, one suspects, a certain level disposition evident in her long, thoughtful pauses and quiet demeanour – although it took her a while to get there. In 2005, when Nyong’o was an unpaid production assistant on the set of The Constant Gardner, which was filming in Kenya, she bugged Ralph Fiennes with questions to such a degree that, she has said, although polite, he eventually asked her to give him some “space”.
After Yale, however, Nyong’o had calmed down considerably. “I felt that I had just come out of a very rigorous training. I felt prepared. I also felt, psychologically, that one of the merits of going through an acting programme was that you work with your demons. You work through your self-doubt and learn how to make friends with it. And so when [a big break] comes along, it’s so easy to self-sabotage and say, I’m not ready. I felt like that a lot, but I would know that the next sentence is, ‘Breathe, it’ll be fine.’”
The other helpful element in her background was the fact that Nyong’o is not fazed by celebrity: in Kenya, her father is extremely well known, “a big public figure. And so I knew that the man sitting across the table from me was not necessarily the man on the cover of the newspaper. I grew up exposed to public persona versus private. I had no expectation that Brad Pitt would be anything other than a man. So of course there’s the nervousness, and the, oh my God! But there’s also a very healthy reminder in my system that these people are just people. I know the folly of not recognising that. I’ve seen people approaching my father with preconceived notions of who he is.” (Pitt is producing Americanah, the forthcoming adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel and Nyong’o’s first starring role.)
Photograph: Erik Madigan Heck for the Guardian. Styling: Priscilla Kwateng. Top by Issey Miyake
Filming 12 Years a Slave wasn’t easy. It’s a hard film, and the hardest scenes involve Nyong’o’s character, who is raped, beaten and abused by the plantation owner, played by Michael Fassbender, and his evil wife, played by Sarah Paulson. Nyong’o has talked about the discomfort, physical and emotional, of sleeping overnight in the complicated prosthetic back piece that depicted Patsey’s wounds after the whipping scene, but one wonders how she and Fassbender got through the filming of those moments together. “We spent a long time hugging. And we did a lot of dancing. We partied hard. It was really great. We both had a good in-and-out-of-character work sensibility. When we were in it, we were in it, and between takes would leave each other alone. It was like going into a boxing ring. We come, knock each other down, regroup, and at the end we hold hands.”
Her parents were disturbed when they first saw the film. Nyong’o says that her mother “didn’t talk about it with me for a while. And when she did, she was very mousy. She just said, ‘You did really well.’ But she was heartbroken. She was very quietened by it. Very moved.”
And her father? “My father, he’s a different kind of person. He said something…” There is a long pause. “He was at the premiere in London, and he said something funny to the effect of, ‘Why did you let them beat you like that?’” She laughs. “He also said that someone had asked him whether he could relate to the story, given his political past.” Nyong’o’s father once served as a minister and was harassed along with other family members for his opposition to Daniel arap Moi, the country’s president for over 20 years. Nonetheless, says Nyong’o, “he said that his life is like a dinner party compared with [12 Years]. There’s recognising that we are very privileged.”
One imagines that, to play the most brutal scenes, Nyong’o had to disconnect, but she says that isn’t a word that makes sense in the context. “Disconnection suggests that I can shut down and be someone else. I can’t do that. I feel like I use my personhood to do what I do. But it is understanding that it’s make-believe, and recognising that I have the privilege of doing this in a make-believe world, rather than having this be the truth of my life. And remembering that allows me to go for it with an open heart, because I get to walk away. Patsey didn’t get to walk away.”
With her mother, Dorothy. Photograph: Getty Images
The role Nyong’o is playing nightly on stage in Eclipsed touches on similar topics of trauma, enslavement and sexual violence. When she gets home to Brooklyn at 11pm, she watches mindless TV (the comedy Jane The Virgin is her current favourite) to relax. She hasn’t been back to Kenya for a while, but since winning the Oscar has been raised to the level of a national hero at home in a way that, she says laughing, is “quite spellbinding”.
What does she love about Nairobi? She thinks for a long time. “There’s a certain jive,” she says. “There’s a vibration when you spend time in a place. You absorb it and I know my Nairobi vibration. I love things like stopping by the side of the road at around four or five in the afternoon, when the roasted maize comes out. There are certain corners where you can find it, and there’s always discussions about where’s the good maize. The cassava chips. Things like that. I love the red soil.”
The fact that Nyong’o, in playing Patsey, was depicting a singularly American crime against humanity might perhaps have given her some distance on the role; some ability to regard it as a cultural outsider. Did she make a distinction in her own mind that, in this dreadful story she was telling, she was not animating her own nation’s history? “No, because at the end of the day, when I’m taking on a role, I’m taking that history personally. It’s got to be my history. And if I’d lived in Patsey’s time, I would have been in the deepest, darkest part of the cotton field. I would not have been spared. It may be distant, but it’s this close. It’s a history that affects America for sure, but we are not untouched.”
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is released on 17 December.
Hair: Lacy Redway at the Wall Group. Makeup: Nick Barose at Exclusive Artists Management. Nails: Casey Herman at Kate Ryan Inc.
What do you do after an Oscar nomination
and a raft of Hollywood offers? You go home
to star in a 500-year-old play about death, of
course. Chiwetel Ejiofor talks fame, race and
childhood trauma
Chiwetel Ejiofor: ‘When you’re young and encounter death, you are stalked by it. Boom! Deal with it.’ Photograph: Frederike Helwig for the Guardian
Punctual to the minute, Chiwetel Ejiofor walks towards the pub where we’ve arranged to meet, wearing a long, wind-ballooned overcoat, his takeaway coffee thrust out like a compass. The actor ploughs right by – gets a couple of crossings down the road before I can catch him and lead him back. He got confused, Ejiofor explains, because he knew this pub when it had a different name. It’s one of those places that’s always being emptied out and painted differently, given a new identity on a proprietor’s whim, subject to the kind of perpetual reinvention that an actor, more than most, might appreciate. Ejiofor is between characters this week, and a bit stressed about it.
Only days ago he was on a film set in Hollywood, bearded and sharp-suited as an FBI agent in a movie called The Secret in Their Eyes. He kissed Nicole Kidman beside a car that had exploded and then he got on a flight to London, shaved, put on his overcoat, and checked in at the National to begin intensive rehearsal on a production called Everyman. It will open this month, a reimagining of a 500-year-old morality play, directed by Rufus Norris (his inaugural play as the National’s artistic director). “We go up in a few weeks,” says Ejiofor, frowning, “and I want the show to be special, obviously.”
In the original, Everyman reads as a thorny, preachy little work about squaring up to death. We meet a character called Everyman, who meets Death, and after some handwringing (lots of thous and thys and thines) it’s all over in 30 pages. The new version, to be staged in the National’s giant Olivier theatre, has been scripted by Carol Ann Duffy and sounds spunkier, more substantial. There are songs, dance numbers, what the show’s director of movement, Javier De Frutos, promises will be “perilous” stage design. Ejiofor has spent significant time already, he tells me, 50ft above the theatre floor, suspended upside down. “And being at the very top of the Olivier,” he says, “feels like being in outer space.”
We settle in a corner of the pub, next to a shelf of boxed board games. Under his coat, Ejiofor has on a thin, grey jumper, the sleeves rolled up and brilliant sweat circles showing under his arms whenever he unfolds and refolds them. He has the settled good looks of somebody who’s comfortable in their skin, a severity of expression softened when you glimpse the childishly wonky tooth in his lower rack. He has a deep and profound voice – ideal, I imagine, for making himself heard by an audience, even from 50ft up, but kind of intense.
Ejiofor has a reputation for this: intensity. A year ago, he was nominated at the Oscars and won a Bafta, after playing the lead in Steve McQueen’s landmark movie about 19th-century slavery, 12 Years A Slave, and at the time Ejiofor found the jumbling of serious subject matter with awards-season silliness quite tricky. He was, by his own account, worried about being “the guy at the party who was constantly talking about man’s inhumanity to man”. In the pub, we cut straight to the heavy stuff, tearing through karma (he doesn’t believe in it) and God (he’s not sure), touching on capitalism, nuclear weapons, environmental damage, even poor animal husbandry (“That’s not the right size for a chicken! We know that, we’ve seen chickens, and still we eat it!”).
Conversation with Ejiofor is like this, interesting and rapid and ardent and almost entirely impersonal, everything related outward to the world where it can be. Why does he think Norris cast him as an everyman? “It almost doesn’t matter who you cast, in a sense, because he’s just a representation of humanity.”
Ejiofor’s castmates at the National tell me that, during breaks in rehearsals, surprisingly heavyweight chats have been taking place. In the show, Ejiofor portrays a complacent high-flier, feeling good about life until he’s confronted by Death, and told: time’s up, prepare to be judged. A journey ensues in which he must find someone who’ll advocate for him before God and plead the case for his existence. The actors I speak with say they’ve been considering who they’d get to argue for them in such a situation. A partner? A parent? I ask Ejiofor who he’d choose.
“Well,” he says, laughing nervously, “obviously I’ve been thinking about this a lot.”
Chiwetel Ejiofor: ‘I was glad to get a kind of closure,’ he says of the brouhaha surrounding his Oscar nomination. ‘The Academy Awards mark a full stop on an experience.’ Photograph: Frederike Helwig for the Guardian
I know he lost his father when he was young, and that he used his time on the winners’ podium at the Baftas, last February, to tell his mother he loved her. Ejiofor appeared on red carpets, at the time, arm-in-arm with a Canadian model called Sari Mercer. Which of them knows Chiwetel Ejiofor best?
He purses his lips. “I feel like… y’know… I think I would advocate for myself. That if I was taking Everyman’s journey, I probably wouldn’t bring anybody with me.”
***
Before meeting Ejiofor I was contacted by the press office at the National. “We can get you God on the phone. No, wait, Death, we can get you Death. We keep getting the two mixed up!” So I spoke to Death, better known as the actor Dermot Crowley, who described Ejiofor as “very intense” and “immensely likable… My gut feeling is that you would find it hard to find anyone who’d have a bad word to say about him.” Death was correct. The other cast and crew, on short but comprehensive acquaintance, say they’ve come to adore Ejiofor. “Lovely, encompassing, gorgeous,” says Sharon D Clarke, a co-star. “If he has any ego of great size he keeps it at home,” says Norris. De Frutos tells me that “with real stage actors the sense of ensemble is important. You cannot lead the ensemble and be a wanker.”
They all sound pleasantly surprised that, following the bluster around 12 Years A Slave, Ejiofor has signed on for this at all. The years after a career-boosting Oscar nomination are not, by Hollywood tradition, the years to step away from the machine and pull on a tracksuit for warm-ups in rehearsal room number one. “To my huge good fortune,” Norris says, “he was up for it.” Crowley guesses that, in the aftermath of a massive Oscar nomination, “Chiwetel would have been inundated with scripts, with offers of money, and to call a halt to that headlong rush seems very mature to me”. Crowley adds, loyally, “Of course he should’ve won the Oscar.”
In the pub, I ask Ejiofor what it was like being in contention for Best Actor. “It’s a thrilling time. It’s an experience that I of course will treasure.” He recalls how quickly the whole circus wound down at the end. “There’s this moment afterwards. You’ve had a crazy buildup to the Academy Awards, which happens on a Sunday night, then on Monday morning you’re like: ‘Where did everybody go?’ And you’ve got five emails. Instead of 500.”
With Audrey Tatou in Dirty Pretty Things (2002) Photograph: Allstar/BBC
So Ejiofor wasn’t named Best Actor on the night (Matthew McConaughey was, for Dallas Buyers Club), but Steve McQueen was nominated for Best Director and 12 Years A Slave won Best Film. A kiss from co-star Brad Pitt still wet on Ejiofor’s cheek, he went out to party. “I was glad to get a kind of closure,” he says. “The Academy Awards mark a full stop on an experience. They say: ‘This is [12 Years A Slave] and we’re gonna go absolutely bat-shit crazy for it.’ Then on Monday morning we’re done. I like that – it reminds me of the Olympic Games or the World Cup. You win and it’s great. But then it’s time for the next one, and nobody cares if you won before.”
As a teenaged member of the National Youth Theatre, Ejiofor tells me, “I was a kid with this funny name. And people were like, ‘It’s going to be quite difficult for you to make any money as an actor.’” Later, at drama school, the name-change discussions came up again. If he stuck with Chiwetel, he was warned, he would play Africans for much of his career. He replied, “OK!” and went on to play Africans for much of his career, first a bit part in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), later a meaty screen lead as a Nigerian immigrant in Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things(2002). He played South African statesmen in Red Dust (2004) and Endgame (2009), and then, in 12 Years A Slave, Solomon Northup, an African American whose trials on a Louisiana plantation Ejiofor communicated unforgettably.
In the stage world he has vacuumed up awards since his early 20s; his Olivier-winning Othello, at the Donmar in 2007, is still thought by many critics to be the best of the decade. Such was the hype at the time that tickets did super-inflated trade on eBay. Screen appreciation took longer. The year he played Othello, Denzel Washingtonteasingly marked Ejiofor out for assassination, worried that this young actor would rise up Hollywood’s ranks to topple him. Frears, who had worked with both men, said of Washington, “Chiwe is the one he’s threatened by.” A year later, Ejiofor was slogging through David Mamet’s karate movie Redbelt (“a film with a black belt in pomposity,” wrote the Guardian) and after that Roland Emmerich’s puddle-deep disaster flick 2012. Finally, thanks to 12 Years A Slave, elevation.
12 Years A Slave trailer
“Wow, wow, wow, wow,” Ejiofor said at the Baftas, clutching his statue while Tom Hanks wolf-whistled from the stalls and Leonardo DiCaprio stood for a one-man ovation. Uma Thurman, presenting, bowed to him and Pitt was there with another kiss. All this, did it feel like a moment of acceptance, of promotion? “It’s interesting, it’s complicated,” he says. “I don’t know what all of these things mean yet. In terms of stratification, fame, renown, all these things, it’s like an ongoing process of trying to work out what it means.
“Obviously, I’m aware that people react slightly differently to me. It’s not like people were rude before, and suddenly they’re polite. But yeah, you notice a slight shift, that people are slightly more aware of you – in the street, or whatever.” He’s not comfortable, he says, with “this abstract idea of a weird power that has to do with being not anonymous… I put my pants on one leg at a time, just like I did before I was nominated for an Oscar. You know what I mean?”
Way back, when he was told that his too-black name would be a barrier to proper income, Ejiofor replied: “I don’t give a shit.” He tells me he has never cared about pay. And he feels much the same way about his industry’s racial politics. Campaigners who seek greater parity for black performers often invoke Ejiofor as an example of a black British actor who has thrived, just as others might if given the breaks. Lenny Henry mentioned Ejiofor several times while speaking to a parliamentary committee about equality issues last year. But the actor himself – and I’m paraphrasing – doesn’t give a shit.
Ejiofor won an Olivier for his performance as Othello in 2007. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
“I don’t spend that much time thinking about race in the context of the industry,” says Ejiofor. “I just don’t. I can’t speak on those things, because I haven’t thought about it that much.”
Sharon D Clarke, Ejiofor’s co-star in Everyman, and an established black actor, tells me: “As actors we’re trying to get work. We’re not writers, we’re not directors, we’re not producers – we need people to give us gigs, and there’s not so much that we can change from where we stand. Like Chiwetel, I’m not really a political animal. I love to perform and that’s where my energy goes.”
I ask Ejiofor if his reluctance to speak on the matter is down to the constraints of the actor’s place in the trade – whether he feels he has a position to protect. He leans forward in his seat. “I think I can say whatever I feel. I’m not tempered by the idea of, like, ‘Well, this would be hard for me, because of the career thing.’ This is what I was born to do and it’s what I’ve given my life to, and it’s not a question of looking at the opportunities. I don’t give a fuck about any of that! I’m not positioning myself,” he explains. “I’m not running for office. I’m an actor.”
***
Ejiofor is the child of Nigerian immigrants, refugees who moved to London to escape civil war in the 1960s. He was born in Forest Gate in the east and now lives in Islington in the north. He has a brother who works in fashion and two sisters, in medicine and journalism. He was privately educated and his first proper acting role, at secondary school, was either as Algernon in The Importance Of Being Earnest (the way his mother remembers it) or as Angelo in Measure For Measure (the way Ejiofor does). He likes to sail, reads books about sailing, and owns a boat that has an on-board shower.
Chiwetel Ejiofor: ‘I was a kid with this funny name. And people were like, “It’s going to be quite difficult for you to make any money as an actor.”’ Photograph: Frederike Helwig for the Guardian
Beyond this, there is remarkably little that is public knowledge about Ejiofor’s life. He goes to awkward lengths to keep it that way. When he was invited on to David Letterman’s US chat show, a couple of years ago, discussion about the boat, even, was strained. Beside me in the pub he goes through a whole routine when I ask a question that is too personal. (It’s about whether he expects to have children.) Ejiofor announces he needs a new coffee; moves off to order it; and when he returns and I remind him what we were discussing he grins and says, “I was avoiding your question. You didn’t spot that?”
He says, “I just want people to see the work that I do. I don’t think they should be concerned about whom I’m sleeping with or what all the rest of the aspects of my life are. I don’t want to be a celebrity. I don’t have any interest in that. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of what I want.” He sits back and sips his coffee, one he never really wanted in the first place, considering what he’s just said. “Is that true?” Ejiofor asks himself. “Let me think.”
Put it this way, he decides, “I don’t want to be known as Chiwetel, I want to be known as the actor-who-is-Chiwetel, if you follow my distinction there. Doesn’t everybody want that, to be known by reputation, rather than the fact of X, Y or Z?”
There’s one deeply personal thing about Ejiofor’s life that is known. His father died when the actor was 11, an accident that sounds only more terrible on the occasions that Ejiofor, over the years, has agreed to discuss it. There was a car accident on a motorway in Lagos while the family were on holiday. Ejiofor, a passenger in the vehicle, was thrown clear, suffering serious head injuries and broken wrists. His mother, in England and pregnant at the time, was only told about the death of her husband once she’d flown out to be at the hospital. So we know almost nothing that’s personal about Ejiofor, except something enormous. With his sleeves rolled up today I can see the scars on his wrists. “At a certain point I just let go of trying to not talk about it,” he says.
Ejiofor in rehearsal for Everyman: ‘If he has any ego of great size, he keeps it at home,’ says artistic director Rufus Norris of his star attraction. Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith
In Everyman he plays a character who is scared of dying; who embarks on a journey to thwart death. I ask Ejiofor if, after his experiences as a young man, death has lost its power to frighten him. He says, “When you’re young and you encounter the reality of death – especially if it’s not something you’ve been prepared for, because there’s not been an illness – it’s just something that arrives out of the blue, Boom!, this person is gone, deal with it. As you process that, when you’re 11 or 12, yeah, over time it loses its scare value, yeah. But you are stalked by it. It’s in your cortex – the knowledge that this thing is waiting at any moment to completely revolutionise your universe by taking away the people that you care most about. For no reason, randomly.”
He nods several times and says: “Fuck yeah, if you go through that as a child, you start to contextualise your experience on earth.”
Years before she was widowed, he says, his mother experienced trauma at a similar age. She was a teenager when the Biafran war forced her family out of their home in northern Nigeria. After a succession of bereavements she had to take charge of their sudden relocation, aged 14. “My mother and I, we had experiences in our very formative years of randomness and chaos. And that meant we took a viewpoint on the way that the world is. As I get older, and she gets older, it put us in similar places in our psychology, I think. I’m always very interested in her point of view, because often it echoes mine. Not because ‘the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree’, but because of that echo in our experiences.”
When earlier I asked who he’d approach to speak on his behalf, should there ever be an Everyman-style reckoning, I expected Ejiofor to say his mother. They obviously share an unusual bond. But he insisted he’d advocate for himself.
With girlfriend Sari Mercer, and his 2014 Bafta Photograph: Danny Martindale/Wire Image
Is he a loner? “Yeah, I think so. I love the company of people. But ultimately I feel like I’m self-reliant, yeah.” Has that feeling deepened as he’s got older? “I think I’ve always been that way. I don’t think I’ve ever required the company of people, in order to feel good or to feel access to the world. It’s something that to me, when it’s good, it’s a bonus. Like great art or great music – it’s nice that it’s there. But if it’s not there, y’know, it’s not like everything falls away. I can completely exist without it, be satisfied and happy.”
None of this, he adds, “is to say that I don’t know what other people are for. I understand. It’s just…” He tries to think of a way to express what he wants to say, and mentions a book about sailing he’s been reading, The Long Way, by a French writer called Bernard Moitessier. Moitessier’s reasons for sailing, says Ejiofor, resonate with his own. “He talks about the idea of sitting on your boat and knowing the thousand secrets that only you and it share. I think that’s like our experience of life. People can come on to your boat and hang out. Cook a meal or whatever. Have a great time. And then when they leave, that’s it – it’s just you and the boat.” •
In a revealing interview with Salon, Donna Tartt once said, “I had a fairly well-known editor tell me that The Secret History would never be published because no successful book by a woman had ever been written from the point of view of a man, and that I would have to change it to a female narrator.”
Although it’s tricky for both male and female writers to write from the point of view of the opposite gender, there have always been a number of tremendously talented and successful female authors who have not only risen to the challenge but, in doing so, have completely demolished deeply-embedded social codes that should not have existed in the first place.
British-Nigerian novelist and poet, Bernardine Evaristo is not only a master of literary gender-bending but she’s also adroit at subverting well-worn tropes from slavery to stifled sexuality in a way that feels new, visceral, vital. Although Evaristo has always been an innovative stylist, her latest novel, the critically acclaimed, award-winning smash, Mr. Loverman, is her chef d’oeuvre; a masterful dissection of the life of a 74 year-old, British-Caribbean gay man. It is a book about secrecy and self-protection, freedom and fear, history and the future, family and faith, repression and renewal.
For Evaristo, this extraordinary act of ventriloquism was necessary. “I knew this was an explosive mix for fiction”, she says. “Not only is black homosexuality all but invisible in British fiction, but the idea that a septuagenarian is actively gay is potentially very controversial.”
“I like the challenge of writing beyond my own culture (I’m not Caribbean), gender, age, sexuality and so forth, but it does mean that I have to work hard to create authenticity with my characters. To make them totally believable and convincing.”
Evaristo, who originally trained as a stage actress, nurtured her writing talent by penning roles for black actresses “because few parts existed for us in the early 80s.” She dropped acting but fuelled the fire to keep writing. “The magic of writing,” she says, “the emotional, intellectual and imaginative connection I feel to it, is addictive. My influences are wide and varied, and certainly many writers inspired me to tell my own stories when I was very young – Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, Keri Hulme, Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker.”
With the recent anti-gay legislation in Nigeria and throughout a depressingly large part of Africa, does she feel there’s been enough of a response from African writers in terms of exploring the issue of homosexuality in fiction or non-fiction?
“I’d say not,” she says. “It’s still quite a taboo subject in many communities and certainly not enough people speak out. You’re probably one of the very few writers writing black African stories with gay characters. When I chaired the Caine Prize for African Fiction a couple of years ago we shortlisted a gay story by Malawian writer Stanley Kenani. Lola Shoneyin’s super novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wivestouches on lesbianism, as did Monica Arac De Nyeko’s Caine Prize winning “Jambula Tree”, which won the Caine in 2007. But essentially, when you can list such stories on one hand, there is a problem. I wrote a piece for The Guardian about the long history of pre-colonial homosexuality in Africa when the recent anti-gay legislation was passed in Nigeria, my father’s homeland. We need more voices out there, gay or straight, writing stories that include homosexual characters.”
Aside from her work as a novelist and poet, Evaristo teaches creative writing at London’s Brunel University, where she spearheaded the creation of the prestigious African Poetry Prize, which offers a powerful platform for gifted poets on the rise.
Part of what makes Bernardine Evaristo such an important cultural figure is that she’s an intellectual who’s unafraid to take creative risks. Every book that she has written doesn’t feel so much a progression as a complete re-invention of style, subject matter and genre. Once you add a hearty dose of compassion and energetic forward-thinking to the mix, what you get is not only an artist who repeatedly resists status quos and shoots straight for the jugular but a bonafide literary rebel with a cause. This in itself is worthy of celebration.
Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman (Akashic Books) is out now as is Diriye Osman’s Fairytales For Lost Children (Team Angelica Press).
The week before my TEDx talk was a series of terrible jokes. To be clear, I mean terrible jokes made by me. The first was an answer to the question: “What did you think when you received your invitation to give a TEDx talk in Amsterdam?”
My response—to a table of accomplished adults made up of TEDx volunteers and speakers —was: “Well, I thought I was being tricked into becoming a sex slave.”
Let me explain. The bustling cities of third-world countries are filled with posters promising young girls the glamor and thrill of life in Europe. But only If. If they sign up with a “model agency” that has no height requirements. If they sign up for “teaching agencies” that require no degrees. If.
I was certain that even though the email that invited me was sent from a legitimate tedxamsterdam.com account, that this was all an elaborate rouse. A rouse specifically designed to get me excited about a week in Europe, only to have that dream snatched from me along with my passport and my freedom.
As you can see, I have a pretty dark sense of humor. I also apparently have an inability to “read the room.”
In hindsight, I was scared. I was the girl who had spent much of her teenage life trying to have drunken conversation about economics TED Talks in Gaborone night-clubs and now I was suddenly tasked with giving one. And instead of saying, “I’m nervous!” I insisted on subjecting people to terrible jokes.
The week flew by as I unleashed more and more poorly thought-out jokes to unsuspecting adults. My own laughter reverberated through old buildings and abandoned dance-clubs and I remained blind to the room.
I deal with stress and fear by ignoring it, by pretending it is not there and then by waking up at 2AM in a cold-sweat with my heart beating like death is sitting on it.
Siyanda Mohutsiwa at TEDxAmsterdam. Image by Bas Uterwijk.
My talk was about a concept I like to call Social Pan-Africanism. I purport that it is for the “ordinary African.” I spent every night that week convinced I was a fool. What did I know of the “ordinary African?” Indeed, what is an ordinary African?
I tried to push it all to one side by reminding myself that the speech coach, a wonderful Tara Philips, and my slide-technician (yes, there is such a thing) had already received my speech and it was all out of my hands now!
That didn’t work. So I drank and walked and danced and ate! I didn’t do the museum route simply because it was far too expensive. And how could I face real art with my flimsy excuse of an “Idea Worth Sharing?”
This determined second-guessing went on until the very moment I delivered my speech. The girl who had written it, wide-eyed and determined, excited and hopeful, utopian and passionate showed up on that stage that day. The self-judging kind-of-woman who had been carrying her speech in her backpack all week, avoiding eye-contact with strangers and laughing too-loud at dinner parties was gone for fifteen glorious minutes, and a girl who loved and believed in Africa so much it moved her to tears delivered a speech that changed both their lives.
Afterwards, there was a standing ovation. The crowd erupted between and around audience members who had been moved to tears.
I didn’t know what a standing ovation was, so I marched off stage, determined to fight the emotions that had overcome me in the last of my speech. I walked back, the girl who believed in Africa walked back and the woman who she’d become followed her there. I, we, they, stood on that stage and soaked in the joy of an audience that had been moved to believe in hope.
My TEDx speech was about hope. I didn’t mean it to be. The organizers certainly didn’t mean it to be. They’d invited me to give a speech about a hashtag (#ifafricawasabar) and possibly add a bit of color to a line-up of otherwise European intellectuals.
After my speech, I went backstage and something truly moving happened. I was met by every African person who had attended the TEDx conference that day. They hugged me tightly and told me how proud of me they were. And then one of them, a middle-aged man who I would later find out was once a refugee from Congo, told me that my speech had melted his heart and in-so-doing had lifted the anger and disbelief he had nursed about leaders like Kabila and Mobutu his whole life. Out of all the people who spoke to me that night—excited Dutch people, many of whom had spent some amount of time in Africa—this man’s words brought me to tears.
Siyanda Mohutsiwa is a 22-year-old writer who is obsessed with Africa and the internet. In her spare time, she studies mathematics at the University of Botswana. Follow her ungovernable tweets @siyandawrites.
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