This story is part of a series about arts and culture in Washtenaw County. It is made possible by the Ann Arbor Art Center, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, Destination Ann Arbor, Larry and Lucie Nisson, and the University Musical Society.
In her debut story collection, "Ghostroots," Nigerian-born writer ‘Pemi Aguda blends elements of the uncanny with the gritty mundanities of everyday life in Lagos, Nigeria.
Aguda, who earned her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Michigan, will return to Ann Arbor on Sept. 20 at 6:30 p.m. for a reading at
Literati Bookstore, where she’ll be joined by writer and U-M Professor Peter Ho Davies.
In a recent phone call with Concentrate, Aguda said the stories that make up "Ghostroots" took shape over the course of seven or eight years.
In one story, a mysterious fever claims the lives of the youngest sons from each family on a given street. In another, a house contorts itself to swallow whole each successive generation of men who are given to mistreating women.
Aguda says it was only about five years into her writing process that she realized she "clearly had a preoccupation" with family dynamics — especially the relationships between mothers and daughters, and mothers and sons. She says she was also fascinated by embodiment – the "ways people live inside their bodies, [how they] live in their bodies in the context of the society they're in, [or how] people want to shed those bodies or feel weighed down by them."
Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: It seems like a lot of the stories in this collection focus on the experiences of women — relationships between women, and especially those familial relationships you mentioned earlier. I wondered if you could tell me about why that subject draws your eye.
A: I think in my early 20s, I was very concerned about being an individual in a very particular way and was realizing that I couldn't separate that sense of self from the people around me. I would see my mother interacting with my grandmother and see the ways that I was replicating some of their ideas and their patterns without necessarily thinking about it.
I'm also somebody who didn't grow up going back to our family village. So there are all these people who came before my grandmother who I have no idea about, but then my mother might say something in passing about one of them that I realize is something that I currently do. A friend of mine described it as being epigenetically haunted. There's a way all these people who I've never even seen are still existing in my body, in my life.
So I'm just very interested in the question of how much of me is me versus just a consequence of the place I come from, the people who I’ve come from, and how that connection can either feel grounding, like I have support, or it can feel like a trap, like how much of my own destiny can I create? I don't think there are any straight answers, obviously, but this is something that I think about — what we inherit and how we pass that on and what we owe ourselves.
Q: You mentioned that these were issues you thought a lot about in your 20s. Do you find that you're less preoccupied with that question these days?
A: I think the question has evolved. The novel I’m working on [now] is also [about] a specific mother-daughter relationship. The daughter leaves her mother and is trying to start her own life in the city. So in some ways I'm still thinking about these things, but the way I'm thinking about them has changed. It no longer feels like such a binary between individual and community the way it [used to]. I think a part of me has accepted that these things can be separated, and the question might have evolved to see what happens after that. What happens after that acceptance?
Q: There’s a blurb from Kelly Link that I thought really nicely describes the atmosphere of the book, where she says "the everyday strangeness of life and the uncanny rub up against each other." I wondered if you could tell me about your interest in those two forces and how that interest has been playing out in your writing.
A: So I grew up in Lagos, right? And I think that Nigerians talk about the supernatural in a very mundane manner. There are people I know personally who’ll tell you how, ‘Oh, when I was 13 and I was walking home from school, somebody said something to me, and then I lost myself, and then I recovered myself like two hours later, and I'd given them all my family's property,’ or something. Or someone told me about somebody who went to visit her fiance's family and realized that they were trying to kill her — to eat her. These stories are told in this very straightforward way, and the truth is that there's a part of this definition that seems to come from outside of our culture.
Sometimes when people describe the work as otherworldly, it becomes a question of what your baseline of reality is. Because if we have different ideas of what reality is, then [our] ideas of [the] supernatural are very different. I think a lot of my stories interact with the strange in a way that the tone isn't necessarily, ‘Oh, this is a strange thing.’ It's more matter of fact. I think there's an interesting tension between the tone of a story being matter of fact, and then things happening at this higher register. When you take things down to just, like, ‘Oh, this is mundane. This is natural,’ I think there's more space for people to enter strangeness without their hackles being risen.
More information on Aguda's reading is available here.
Natalia Holtzman is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions, and others.
'Pemi Aguda photo courtesy of W.W. Norton and Company.
Enjoy this story?
Sign up for free solutions-based reporting in your inbox each week.