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In 1989 her play “The Broken Calabash” won the Martin Luther King Distinguished Writer's Award, which brought her to live in the United States with her five children. This meant she had to start over, to find a place and voice in a society she was hardly recognized as the writer she was. “The journey has not been fruitless, and I've just been working and working,” she says of the 18 years of being in America , “I'm grateful to God and my children, who sustain me. I'm particularly grateful to God for the blessing and the grace and strength.”
The challenges Onwueme faced while developing into the artist she is now are nothing unfamiliar to someone who grew up in an environment, as a child, that taught her that hard work was practically all she could hinge on to survive from the time she was six years old. “I had nobody to rely on but my God and sheer hard work,” she poignantly shares.
“From the time that I came into the limelight as a writer, I came from nowhere,” her voice drops to a whisper, “so maybe when I write, when I say that I'm passionate about the people who are nameless, those who are voiceless, those who are at the margin, maybe I am able to connect because I've been there.” But Onwueme has been blessed to be pulled out of the dread, like she put it, and is focused and determined to continue to strive for the best with faith and hard work alongside her; she believes that she will continue to go far with her craft.
“I don't know where the mark is, I don't have any specific goal to say ‘oh yeah, this is really what I'm now aiming for: I want to win this prize because it's never really been that. I just write and do what I have to do and hope that somebody hears somewhere, that I connect with that world community that I'm trying to reach out to,” she says, though she concedes it is not easy in a country with so many well-established writers from all over the world.
Onwueme's interest in drama, like she previously described, is a form of thirst or hunger in her to connect with people through verbal communication and the works, she says, are “supposed to be my own ways of engaging, it's not enough to write [a] play.”
Onwueme humorously talks about another interest of hers: “I love to dance,” she laughs. By the time she was eight years old, in spite of the lack of family support, she had formed a dance troupe with other children in her village and they would rehearse and improvise with bamboo sticks as instruments and performed during major festival periods or talent shows. “I would say that was the beginning of my journey in drama. I got exposed to traditional performances early and that seemed to have seeped into my blood and I have extended it in different forms,” she says. This is a reason why her works are set in rural communities.
The dynamic 51year-old woman also shares about her experiences during the 1967 Nigeria-Biafra war that took the lives of many in her time. “It was horrifying, it was terrifying,” she reminisces. Part of her experience as a 12 year old who suffered abandonment during that period is re-lived by the protagonist in her upcoming novel “ What I Cannot Tell My Father .” While young girls her age fell in the trend of sleeping around with soldiers, she was concerned about going back to school. “That was the most fervent hunger that I had, because knowing that things had not been easy for me…I saw education to be the only avenue for me to become somebody and I longed to go back to school.”
This is why she says: “It is very important for women all over, no matter where they're coming from, to always remember to have a sense of dignity, even in the worst kind of situations. I think an integrity, a certain resolve within you, that no matter what [the] situation, you're going to pull through, and not despair [or] succumb to victimization because that kills the spirit.”
Though she advocates connecting with the rest of the world at various levels to grow and survive, she adds, “There is the need for one to know oneself and have a certain degree of pride in one's African-ness, living it and embodying and affirming it in what we do. It's not enough for me to say I'm African. I wear it, I live it, I breathe Africa , in me. I don't have any confusion or whatsoever about who I am or what I am. I have no desire whatsoever to be anything else.”
Onwueme's passion to continuously succeed in life is evident in her advice to today's African, and she incessantly communicates that in her work –giving hope to others.
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