Chapbook Chats: Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto Interviews Voyaging Author Nome Emeka Patrick
To celebrate KUMI New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto is talking to poets whose chapbooks are included in the KUMI edition of the wonderful ongoing series. Enjoy this conversation between Chinua and poet Nome Emeka Patrick.
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto: Congratulations on the release of your chapbook, Voyaging, featured in the 2024 New-Generation African Poets series! Could you share your experience of seeing your work published in this acclaimed series, and what it means to you personally and professionally to be part of this important moment for African poetry?
Nome Emeka Patrick: It means a lot to me as a poet. Mainly because my words, and my voice, are now amongst all the other voices and words of poets whom I respect —who in the past or recently have been a part of this. It feels a lot like an invitation into a tradition I have loved, admired, and dreamt of being a part of. In addition, I’d say I am most excited about the archival aspect of it. But yes, I am on the queue of voices who are writing at this moment, at this time, and in this space, and that in itself comes with a subtle, even if fleeting, feeling of excitement.
C. E-O: How did you arrive at the title for your chapbook?
N.E.P: The chapbook is a kind of reaching, a moving into, toward, around… Even at the end of the chapbook, there seems to not be a pause, but a gentle sigh. The breath doesn’t drop, which is in itself a resistance against stoppage, against the end that last pages illustrate. I want everything about the chapbook to resist endings. The poems are open in their attention to and exploration of grief—grief that roams about age, family, self, boyhood, etc. That roaming, that act of resisting staticity, of the body always constructing its way about and around grief while being simultaneously constructed by it, is a continuum. Hence, the title “Voyaging.” Voyaging with the ‘ing” signals the present continuous while paying homage to the past as they appear in the poems. It wasn’t very hard to come up with that title. However, I had a bit of struggle with the historical associations with that term “Voyage” and “Voyaging,” but I trusted that the poems in the book would wrap their meanings around, and point the readers back to, the title.
C.E-O: Can you talk about the organization and how you chose the poems to be included in Voyaging?
N.E.P: I am a bad organizer. I didn’t consciously think about organization. I knew I was writing towards an idea of openness so I didn’t bother to organize. It’s like attempting to organize an open field…There are already multiple entry points, and multiple exit points. The poems in the middle could have come at the beginning or ending, whichever, and it still wouldn’t change anything. For this particular project, I was thinking about the fragmentary nature of grief. Now that I speak of it, I think of smithereens. There’s no need assembling what’s already in pieces. The best one could do is trash or admire the beauty of broken things. This is not to say to have grief is to be broken. I’m just saying, I don’t think organization mattered to me.
C.E-O: “Good Dreams” explores a journey of self-discovery and the interplay between joy and sorrow. Can you elaborate on the significance of dreams in your journey of self-discovery? What role does nature play in your understanding of identity and personal growth?
N.E.P: I have always been fascinated by dreams. I think my dreams are a part of the story I’m actively constructing about myself as a writer, and as a Christian. Moreso, the construction of the self or the selves happen on that bridge where the waking world and the dream world attempt proximity, attempt to collapse the distance. I think the self exists in that distance, straddles it. To understand the positionality of the self in relation to the world, I believe we have to explore its relation to the dream world. Nature is important because it’s a route I can always trace back to my childhood, but also a route that confirms the inevitability of time’s constant mobility, and the self edging itself along that mobility, even if not simultaneously. Nature appears everywhere in my poems not just to acknowledge geography and season, but also to serve as a marker for my existence in place and space. Again, nature, its presence, confirms my aliveness.
C.E-O: In the poem “A Midnight Storm, Outside the Wild” you balance intimate personal struggles with broader societal themes like loss and violence. How do you navigate this balance in your writing, and what message do you hope to convey through this duality?
N.E.P: I think the personal exists in the public, as does the public, which inadvertently permeates the personal. I am not sure I consciously establish a balance. Any balance that exists, or is called forth by the poem is the doing of the poem (not necessarily of mine). The message speaks itself in, through the poem. There are times when I consciously try to write about “broader societal themes” but writing about those themes are simply writing about how the self is positioned in relation to them —and so, the line between the personal and the societal blurs into an invisible smudge.
C.E-O: Spirituality plays a crucial role in your exploration of grief and identity. Did you integrate your spiritual beliefs into your poetry, and what impact does this have on the healing process?
N.E.P: In the poems in this chapbook, spirituality rings through mainly in the speaker’s prayer to, interrogation of, evocation of, and sometimes dismissal of the divine. I integrate spirituality into my poems not necessarily to move towards healing, but mainly to place grief side by side the divine. Job interrogated God, at his lowest, but he never dismissed God. I think the speaker in my poem is possessed by doubt, and at the same time, is convinced his existence is tied to the divine, to something that transcends his doubt. So there’s the constant loss, not just of words to articulate this psychological dilemma, but loss of certainty, loss of stability, loss of a true anchor. It’s the result of the wavering, the manifestation of what it means to be on a voyage, the unpredictability of ever reaching. In this chapbook, (I think) spirituality exists not within, but side by side to identity, grief, and maybe healing. I am resisting enclosure, as the speaker in the poems do.
C.E-O: The poem “Aquagenic Pruritus” opens with a sense of vulnerability and a direct question about fear. What motivated you to start with this inquiry, and how does it set the tone for the exploration of struggles throughout the poem?
N.E.P: That’s one of the poems that speaks mainly to the speaker’s struggle with his body, and also explores briefly how this body is questioned when it is in proximity to water. Aquagenic pruritus is a skin condition that causes your skin to itch when it comes in contact with water. It’s a tortuous body itch. The poem wants to understand how the body that holds desire, love, grief, could also be troubled by water, a thing so universally eulogized and essential to our collective humanity. I think to do that means to be open to the world, to be vulnerable to a great certain degree, to basically stand naked in a crowd. The poem, its tone and vulnerability mirrors or is mirrored by other poems in the chapbook—vulnerability, alongside other feelings, poses as the foreground for which most of the poems exist.
C.E-O: The use of Nigerian Pidgin adds a unique voice to some of your poems. The pioneer poets who have used Nigerian pidgin in their writings include Dennis Osadebay, Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Mamman Vasta, and Tanure Ojaide. They used it as a medium of sharing and passing messages. How does Nigerian Pidgin influence your expression of emotions, and what role does it play in your connection to cultural identity?
N.E.P: The simple answer: the use of pidgin in my work has been a great way to show that pidgin itself, at its most natural, is a very poetic language. It’s a language that, of course, bears a deep history, and it is also the language that I am most comfortable in. I like to think every appearance of pidgin in my poems are moments when the speaker feels the most of themselves, through its music and moments. Relevant to this question is the fact that using pidgin in my work locates not just the poet in relation to the language of the empire, in addition, it also places Nigerian Pidgin in relation to English. It is a mode of deconstruction. And I won’t go into details about what I mean by that.
C.E-O: You mention searching for a “black flower” in a landscape of nothingness in “Un/Still Life with a Flower & Nothingness.” What does this flower symbolize for you, and how does it reflect the concept of inner journey throughout the poem?
N.E.P: I’m not one to assign symbols to my images—especially because what the “black flower” meant when I was writing the poem has changed now that I am reading the poem. Certainly, the use of the image of “black flower” exists, in the poem, in the dream world. When I wrote it, the image signals or references a puzzle. Now that I read it, I am not so sure I’d consider it a puzzle. But the concept of puzzle(s) has always been fascinating to my personal understanding of the self. The cliche life is a puzzle shadows the concept of inner journey in the chapbook. What it does for me as a poet is offer a way forward: “healing” isn’t linear, isn’t a stack of perfect acts—there’s the possibility, tiny or large, that one spends their lifetimes trudging toward healing. Most of the poems in this chapbook create space for the exploration of that puzzle, and for the poems that don’t, they have a certain nostalgia or desire for it.
C.E-O: “The Alternate Life” vividly contrasts a current life with an imagined alternate life. What prompted you to explore this theme, and does this duality reflect any of your personal experiences?
N.E.P: This poem was me thinking out aloud. I wrote the poem exploring my current life and balancing it alongside a life that was, at the time, not yet experienced. So yes, that duality reflects my personal experiences.
C.E-O: The search for purpose is a recurring motif in your work. What processes or rituals do you engage to find meaning amidst chaos, and how do they manifest in your poetry?
N.E.P: My rituals are simple: taking long walks, reflecting by a body of water, listening to classical music. Most, if not all, of the poems in themselves were written with classic music in the background. But also, my poems are reflections, deep sighs—ones that might outlive me.
Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto is an Igbo and Nigerian poet, fiction and nonfiction writer, and essayist, exploring the themes of culture, religion, lineage, ancestry, divination (dibia afa), post-colonialism, migration and the complexities of existence. His full- length poetry collection, The Naming, will be out on December 1, 2025 with African Poetry Book Fund via Nebraska press. The Naming explores the movements, excesses, and extremes of existing as a postmodern individual, connecting these experiences to familial ancestry and lineage.