Greg McCartney: Hi Melatu, Thanks for being in the HU. Can you tell us a bit about your background?

Melatu Uchenna Okorie: I was born Melatu Uchenna Okorie. I was born in Enugu, the eastern part of Nigeria and I did most of my education there. I come from a polygamous home, which means that my father has other wives apart from my mother. There were seven of us children from my mother, well, up until quite recently when I lost two of my sisters. And, I am a mum of one, myself!

GMCC: Did you come from a literary family?

MUO: No, not at all! My mother was quite a story teller though. She would have been greatly influenced by her father, who had a bit of education, and played the Ukelele. He died when I was quite young, but I have a strong image of him still because my mother loved him very dearly. They had shared a special bond. I suspect she was his favourite child and he had twelve children! Some of my stories that were set in colonial Nigeria would have been fragments of stories by my mother from her father of his work as a court messenger.

GMCC: Who were the writers you grew up with and influenced you?

MUO: That is a really good question! I remember reading Nawal El Sadaawi in secondary school – Woman at Point Zero – the story was about this woman that went through horrendous domestic violence in her marriage. I loved that story! It was dark and heavy, and I carried the weight of it around me for years. Later at University, I took a course for a semester in African Women Writers and was introduced to the works of Mariama Ba, Flora Nwapa etc. All their stories had one thing in common, the injustices of being a woman. And even at that young age, it was reflective of my life already; so you can easily guess why I am very passionate about issues that have to do with women.

I also got the wonderful opportunity to study other African Literature. I think reading Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe and most especially, Ken Saro Wiwa’s book, Sozaboy, made me realise how powerful the use of colloquial English is for writing. It brings out a story in ways that I don’t think standard-English does because if you actually listen to the way we speak in our daily lives, you would notice that we often hop to and fro with our tenses, especially when we come to the good parts or dramatic bits, we usually end up using the present tense: ‘I’m like….what do you mean?’ ‘The next thing I know, this man comes running down the street…’ and so on. I think the convention of the past tense can act as an inhibitor in writing great dialogues. It was fantastic reading pieces of work where the author really conveys the ways and manners of the characters through speech. That really influenced me.

GMCC: It’s ironic that Ireland, a country whose mythos and tourist economy is built on the romanticism and hardship of the Irish emigrant throughout the centuries can be so unwelcoming and belittling of those who wish to settle here in contemporary times. You were in ‘Direct Provision’ for over 8 years. How dehumanizing was the ‘Direct Provision’ experience?

MUO: There is a stigma to DP that I think should not be ignored. I have heard that a lot of work is being carried out in some DP accommodation centres to make it more accessible, but the truth of the matter is that people are still regarded as ‘living in that place!’ There are still limitations to what one can and cannot do. I don’t know how much things have changed now, in terms of choices or freedom that people in DP have, but if there are any kind of rules, then one cannot claim to be free!

Having said all these about DP, I find that the lrish community are still unwelcoming outside of the DP, but that is a matter for a whole other discussion.

GMCC: They say for people in prison the worst thing is the boredom. Also very difficult is the lack of being able to make decisions for yourself. It sounds like Direct Provision is similar. Did you find that writing helped to counter this?

MUO: At the time, I didn’t realise that was what I was doing. I thought I was just writing because I felt a compulsion to write. That it was just another way to vent, and it still is! It is in looking back at a lot of my writings - most of them unfinished - that I realised that I was using my writing to express different emotions – nostalgia, sadness, loss, anger, love etc…

GMCC: How did you come to publish the This Hostel Life collection?

MUO: As you know, This Hostel Life was published by Skein Press, a publication set up by two awesome women who felt that there is a gap in the market for underrepresented voices and wanted to do something about that. However, I’ve known Grainne, one member of the team for many years. We met through her work with women in DP and we found that we shared a love of writing and kept in touch throughout the years. So when they thought of setting up Skein Press, they asked me if I would mind being published by them, and I said, of course not! The rest, as they say, is history.

GMCC: One of the interesting things about the story ‘This Hostel Life’ is that it portrays the different cultures and attitudes of the people in the Hostel portraying them as individuals. Was it important for you to perhaps counter the media and political narrative that sees immigrants as spongers or threats? A narrative that eliminates them as individuals from various cultures and portrays them as a ‘flood’ for example.

MUO: The intention behind This Hostel Life was never to make any sort of political statement, not at all! I wouldn’t waste my time that way at all. You have to understand that certain kind of people are prone to think in particular kind of way, regardless! There would always be people who would begrudge you anything, and even if you give them the sandals off your feet, they would still complain that your barefoot is soaking up the moisture from the soil! So I don’t bother with trying to counter opinions or add to the political narrative, as you call it.

The reason behind seeing immigrants as spongers or threats is pure racism, and that is not a word that I drop lightly. I take it as racism because those individuals who see immigrants as ‘flood’ say that only about certain cultures and races; there are other cultures and races in Ireland that they do not see as immigrants but as welcomed visitors or residents or whatever they choose to call them. With This Hostel Life I simply wanted to capture a moment, a piece of time in the life of someone who is an asylum seeker and living in DP.

GMCC: How hard was it to write about your experiences? Not everyone can successfully.

MUO: It was hard, I must say - initially I had thought of doing a memoir, but I kept finding it very difficult. I am a Nuala O’Faolian fan, so it’s either one is brutally honest or you don’t do a memoir at all. There’s no playing it safe. So writing This Hostel Life in a fictional satirical form was the option I felt would be suitable to say what I wanted to say while still maintaining that step back that I needed in order to write about something that was that emotionally fraught for me.

GMCC: You mentioned I think in an interview that there was a kind of pigeon English spoken in the hostel. Did you feel it necessary to try and recreate this for the ‘This Hostel Life’ story?

MUO: It felt right, is what I would say. You see, an accommodation centre has a mix of different calibre of people. You have the highly educated former government officials or even bank directors, and you have people with no education at all. Somehow, broken English language became the Ligua Franca of this cauldron of people. It was something everyone unconsciously resorted to – from the educated African to the non-Africans. So to capture a moment of time such as people waiting to collect provision as we have in This Hostel Life, I felt that staying true to the language that is spoken, in this case, an adulterated pidgin English would serve that purpose best.

GMCC: I really love the ‘Under the Awning’ story. How did you find your first experiences of Irish creative writing sessions? Personally they’ve always horrified me!

MUO: I quite enjoyed them, until I presented Under the Awning at a workshop!

GMCC: I love the way in ‘Under the Awning’ that there is a story within and without the actual story if that makes sense. Do you think perhaps the other participants reaction is based on a refusal to acknowledge the everyday racism that occurs here?

MUO: I think people were not ready to receive such criticism and perhaps rightly so – no one likes to be criticised! But the story wasn’t about pointing fingers at anyone; it was more about painting a picture of what it feels like not to belong, which lots of people feel in different ways, and I suppose that the participant in the workshop who said that the character may be feeling paranoia might have a point. Who knows?!

GMCC: Another Irish myth is that it is one of the most welcoming places and some people perhaps refuse to believe anything that challenges that. There seems also to be an insistence on a pervasive positivity in some creative writing circles that refuses to acknowledge the validity of other darker experiences and perspectives or wants to cut the edges of them. The Abridged still gets accused of being ‘negative’. Did you find it a challenge to get your experience across?

MUO: I find it challenging to get my experience across all the time. Not just in creative writing classes. I find it ‘trying’ to express to my male friends how difficult life is for as a woman. It find it challenging to explain to my married friends that being a single mother is tougher. Therefore, I was not, and still am not surprised to find that the people in the writing group thought that the story was too negative in its portrayal of racism. It angers me, but it doesn’t surprise me.

GMCC: The third story in the collection ‘The Egg Broke’ is pretty horrific. Was it based on old myths and superstitions you were previously familiar with?

MUO: I think every culture have old myths and superstitions. The killing of twins was an old practice that existed in my culture long before I came along, and I think like all superstitions, it was borne out of ignorance. I am a Christian so I don’t really believe in superstitions or think about them.

GMCC: Myths of all sorts old and new often serve the function as agents of control, particularly of women. Was perhaps this a reason that you made Ogechi try and resist?

MUO: You’re quite right in saying that. Every myth I can think of in some way controls women. However, Ogechi’s resistance was an expected course of action for the character to take for me as the writer. I am a mother myself, so for Ogechi to do otherwise would have been unnatural.

GMCC: Who are you reading at the moment?

MUO: Michael Rosen, Sybil Marshall, Barry Maybury…Do you know what these authors have in common? They are all writers of books on children’s writing! That’s where my head has been buried all summer, my PhD work. But I managed to read Michael Harding’s On Tuesdays I’m a Buddhist, and I’m about to tuck into Wendy Erskine’s Sweet Home.

GMCC: And the inevitable final question: what are your future plans?

MUO: I know I’m expected to say something about writing, but right now at this moment, it’s simply to exist peaceably.

GMCC: Thanks for being in the HU!

MUO: Thank YOU!