Chapbook Chats: Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto Interviews Home Is a Heart That Flees Author Nurain Ọládèjì
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 Nurain Ọládèjì.
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto: Congratulations on the release of your chapbook, Home Is a Heart That Flees, 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?
Nurain Ọládèjì: I feel humbled. This chapbook series has been one of the most revered initiatives that support African poets and I am honored to have been selected for Kumi. I was going through a major transition, so to speak, when I was invited to submit my manuscript and I thought it would be a perfect exercise in perseverance and focus. I was not confident with where I was as a writer and was content with simply being able to complete a manuscript that did not completely lack coherence. So, I was pleasantly shocked when I was notified that my manuscript had been selected. Now, whenever I think of how I became a writer, I will always think of Home Is a Heart That Flees and the APBF.
C. E-O: The chapbook’s title has the word “Home” in it, a word that is incorporated into most of the poems in the chapbook. What does home mean to you? And how did you arrive at the title for your chapbook?
N.O: The manuscript had a different title. Home Is a Heart That Flees was suggested by Kwame Dawes, a kind and thoughtful editor, during the editorial process. I had not given much thought to the prevalence of home, to internal and external displacement, throughout the manuscript. I am from a generation of Nigerians many of whom I think have never felt at home in a country where to dream is to be invested in fruitless indulgence and who will likely live their entire lives in some form of alienation. I prepared this manuscript in 2022, a few months before the last general election that was held in early 2023, and I was thinking constantly about the lifelong displacement I had felt all my life, which should not be so for someone who has never left his home country. I have since resolved that home is whichever space I occupy where I do not feel the impulse to seek other spaces. Home is something I must not be afraid to lose but must always be willing to rebuild, and, like joy, is inherently fleeting. Home, to me, is an unattainable permanence.
C.E-O: Can you talk about the organisation and how you chose the poems included in Home Is a Heart That Flees?
N.O: The selection and organization of those poems were almost entirely intuitive. I remember wanting to open with “Facing East” and close with “Crawling West” because the former represented the chaos of the internal displacement I was trying to capture while the latter culminated in a kind of submissiveness to an endless pursuit of something essential yet ungraspable. The manuscript ended up reading wrong this way. So, I read to myself and listened to each poem to determine which poem feels most right to be preceded or succeeded by which poem. It felt right to close on a more defiant note, hence the selection of “Home Is a Heart That Flees” as the closing poem.
C.E-O: In the poem “Home is a Heart that Flees,” you write that “passion can never fill in for peace.” Can you explain what peace means to you and how it contrasts with the idea of passion in the context of this poem?
N.O: As a not-very-young person, you start to feel tired of all the franticness of ambition and desire. I mean, according to the average life expectancy of a Nigerian resident, however flawed the statistics are, I have advanced some good years beyond the median age. At such age, the irredeemable displacement one feels in one’s own country has grown into a full-blown existential dread. I was trying to make sense of all this in the poem “Home Is a Heart That Flees” in the context of a chronic political apathy I have found in many others in my age group. Can one who is not passionate be considered to be truly alive? What preconditions compel people to choose basic self-preservation over the grander ideas of purpose and ambition? What are the consequences of this choice? What is patriotism? Can it be commanded of people? What are the preconditions that would justify demanding patriotism of people? These are questions I was and still am trying to navigate in that poem.
C.E-O: In the “Preface,” Tyree Daye writes that “[t]he speaker of Nurain Ọládèjì’s Home Is a Heart That Flees seems to have a familiar dilemma; they live in a country that needs them but does not want them.” I see this idea or relationship reflected in “Puppy in Love,” the interaction between the speaker and the puppy evolves from indifference to a complex reflection on love. What inspired this progression, and what does the puppy symbolize in the broader context of the poem?
N.O: The poem is an adaptation of my experience when someone in a building where I lived got a puppy and I felt irritated by its absurd indiscriminate giddiness. I thought a lot about this puppy, why I was so unreceptive to its affection and why it keeps returning despite the many ways I repel it. Even when it stopped coming to me, it would simply sit and watch me from a distance like a forlorn lover. The thought kept leading to this line I’d read in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, “The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free,” and the poem came through that. I think now of the late John Burnside, in his poem “Neoclassical,” where he wrote, “We have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why they fail to love us.” I am also thinking of something from Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savanna: “When a rich man is sick a beggar goes to visit him and say sorry. When the beggar is sick, he waits to recover and then goes to tell the rich man that he has been sick. It is the place of the poor man to make a visit to the rich man who holds the yam and the knife.” I think all the writers have articulated so expertly what I am trying to say here about love between entities of greatly disparate power positions.
C.E-O: The poem “Facing East” presents a journey towards truth and self-discovery. Can you elaborate on the significance of ‘facing east’ and how it represents the speaker’s quest for meaning? And how does this directionality tie into broader themes of identity and belonging?
N.O: “Facing East” was one of the first poems I wrote that was intended for this manuscript. I wish I had more time to work on newer drafts of it. The closest thing I had to a concrete theme for the manuscript started with this poem. It started as an attempt at a prayer that ended up as rambling about the chaos of the capitalist world many of us did not consent to create but in which we are all compelled to participate on so many levels, a game designed to produce no winners. All the poems that follow it should try to untangle a bit of this rambling, to offer coherence to my attempt at articulating the quest for meaning and identity and, ultimately, home. I don’t know if I achieved any kind of success with this, but this was what I wanted to do, and “Facing East” is the poem from which it all springs.
C.E-O: You mentioned the speaker being an “erratic anthology” and an “audience of Earth’s narrative.” Can you explain what inspired this metaphor and how it encapsulates the human experience as portrayed in the poem “An Audience Learns the Plot”?
N.O: I think we all bear witness to the world by compulsion but choose how we remember. And how we move in the world is a function of we remember it. So big choices on matters of sociopolitical significance are often based on misplaced sentiments. Yet, the sociopolitics governing most of the world present themselves as purely logical. I was pondering the unresolvable conflict between what we are thinking and what we convince ourselves we are thinking and this poem started as an attempt to demystify it for myself. I was thinking about the value of willful skepticism.
C.E-O: “Collateral Damage” uses powerful imagery to depict both physical and emotional devastation. What inspired you to use the flood and body metaphors to convey these themes? Are there specific experiences or observations that influenced these choices?
N.O: The flood and body metaphors were likely influenced by images from the massacre of EndSars protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos in 2020. “Collateral Damage” is a poem I did not struggle too much to write. I wrote it almost two years after the tragedy and never once tried to figure out why I wrote it. I think it was an outlet for memories of collective trauma even beyond the 2020 massacre I had refused to consciously revisit. For someone who considers himself relatively apathetic towards politics, it finds its way into many of my poems. Perhaps writing poems like this is an unconscious strategy to not forget the many human and material costs of local and global politics, to not indulge what is becoming passively normalized, that society is a natural phenomenon and such tragedies are akin to natural disasters.
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.