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The Social Literary Critic, Embracing the African Perspective
By Linda A. Annan
In 1983, shortly after giving birth to her twins, she attended a convention hosted by the Association of Nigerian Authors. Two years later, she decided to join this group of highly established writers at the 1985 conference held on a grand scale, at the federal capital in Nigeria to learn more about the organization. This time she was able to stay for the entire five-day event because her children were now much older. She sat amongst the large audience, anxiously waiting and itching to see who won a literary award, ready to join in the crowd's cheer for their victory. Nominees were awarded and the crowd applauded in wait for the true winner. And then the microphone announced, “The Drama Prize for the 1985 honor award goes to Osonye Tess Onwueme.” She thought for a moment how familiar that name sounded to her. She waited to see who it was but no one rose. The rest of the audience waited in silence. Then someone nudged her saying, “Go!, go, it is you,” and she asked, “Are you serious?” The response was, “Yeah, it's you!” So she stood up, took a few steps forward, and then turned back toward her seat in disbelief. Everyone in the room burst into laughter. That was when it occurred to Onwueme that she was really the one—an about face in her writing career, the beginning of a dream yet to unfurl.
The recount of her story was interrupted with bursts of laughter, but her voice steadily softens as she says, “It was so shocking, pleasantly shocking, and I started walking. I was trembling and then tears started rolling down my eyes.” Onwueme's achievement began to take over headlines in Nigeria . “That was when I began to realize that whatever I write is no longer for me alone and that people do take me seriously. Since then, it's never been the same.” Since then, she has had 18 creative works published and received 11 honors and literary awards.
Today she is a professor at the University of Wisconsin where she has been teaching Africana and Cultural studies in the form of dramatic literature since 1994. Onwueme is currently finishing up her upcoming novel, “ What I Cannot Tell My Father ,” a biographical fiction containing semi-autobiographical information about her. This intriguing story about a young protagonist who through determination perseveres through hardships to become somebody truly resonates the life of Onwueme, considering her own journey.
Onwueme began writing plays in 1978 when she was a junior in college and refers to life as the raw material that sparked her writing interest. “I'm very passionate about things that concern black people, especially, it doesn't matter where they're from, knowing the kinds of struggles we've been through and continue to go through,” she shares. And that fervor extends most particularly to the concerns and experiences of women, especially poor, nameless and underclass women who are often times ignored by society until they engage in horrific behaviors. Most of her literary works are testimony to this ardor as she tries to stage a bearing for these women that she believes have never had opportunities like others and therefore marginalized and sometimes even oppressed. “They suffer from economic handicaps, just multi-dimensional, and the levels of pain that they go through. It's these ordinary women who do the impossible, day in and day out, to pull their families to live to go through life and have some degree of sanity. These are the women I find to be the true heroes,” she says.
Prior to writing plays, she had been experimenting with poetry, a medium with which her writing commenced, since high school.
"I wanted to write a poem, but somehow the way it was coming out of me, the voices within were such that I couldn't control and contain them. And it turned out to be the voices that emerged in the first play that I wrote “A Hen Too Soon,” the same one that received a glare of publicity at the awards ceremony. Once I found those voices, I became so delighted to have that conversation,” she refers to the dialogue that took place in her plays, ones that took a pinch at societal issues. “That became the channel for me and drama took over poetry,” she adds.
By the time she graduated from college, she had written three plays. These works which began as personal journals were eventually made public when she mustered up the courage to get it published. Though major press had rejected it, she was lucky to catch the eye of a rather smaller agency and her first play “The Desert Encroaches” was published in 1985. It was the same company that entered “A Hen Too Soon” for the literary award and it won. “I was stunned because I didn't know that my play was entered for the award,” she laughs and explains, still with a tinge of surprise in her voice. By this time, Onwueme had completed a master's degree and was pursing a Ph.D. and teaching at a university in Nigeria.
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