The first time I read Iheoma Nwachukwu’s story collection Japa & Other Stories (168 pages; University of Georgia Press), I was staying in a small Airbnb near the Mexico border while my wife volunteered as an interpreter for human rights lawyers interviewing detainees at two nearby detention centers. Each night when she returned, she talked for hours about the people they had interviewed and how odd it was to see these centers filled with people from around the world, who had all somehow made their way through Mexico. So, of course, it seemed like a strange serendipity that of the thirty-three story collections I had queued up to read over the next month in my role as the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the one that I found myself reading on that particular day was Japa: linked stories about Nigerians in the diaspora, often caught in the liminal space between leaving (in search of education or stability or something less definable) and arrival, not yet sure where they would find themselves or when or how they would get there. Nigerians in Moscow trying to get to Finland; in Utah as students; in Zanzibar working in hotels; and, in another serendipitous twist, in Melaka, Malaysia, where my wife and I had lived for a couple of years. These bits of serendipity aside, nothing about Iheoma’s collection seemed familiar, expected, predictable. 

The Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction began in 1983, a prize that comes with a cash award and publication by the University of Georgia Press. Of the approximately 375 collections submitted each year, a panel of short story writers reads and passes on their top seven or eight choices to me, all submissions read “blind” at every step of the process. As I read, I generally follow a system: when I feel quite sure that a collection is a strong contender, I move it to the YES pile, the plan being that I will finish it later, once I have winnowed the pile down. But that day in the desert, I simply kept reading, drawn to the author’s humor and lyricism and his themes, ranging from emigration and brotherhood to humanity and inhumanity (often side by side) as well as the situational ethics of survival.

After I had chosen Japa as the 2023 winner and received Iheoma’s name and contact information, I told Nwachukwu during a Zoom call that one of the things I loved about the collection was the way that it de-centered the United States, that this perspective felt to me like an essential part of the American literary canon that was often overlooked. He noted that this aspect of his writing was one of the very reasons he feared he would have trouble finding publication in the U.S., so when it came time to think about who I might ask to interview him about his book, Hugh Sheehy came immediately to mind. Sheehy’s first story collection, The Invisibles, won the 2012 Flannery O’Connor Award. In 2022, his collection Design Flaw came out, a beautiful collection that, as the title slyly suggests, examines what it means to be human; like Iheoma, he is clear-eyed about the world we live in. Both are masters of the male perspective. Moreover, Sheehy’s intellectual lens is defined by the geopolitical. In short, Hugh Sheehy conversing with Iheoma Nwachukwu about Japa & Other Stories was an interview I wanted to read. — Lori Ostlund

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Hugh Sheehy: My impression is that “japa” is Yoruba slang for something like “to run hard” or “to break free” and has been around long enough to take on multiple meanings. Maybe it’s better to say it means many things at once: wanting to leave Nigeria for opportunities abroad, doing just that, or being someone who is doing that or has done that; Nigerian diaspora culture, and a state of mind. I imagine it also carries various connotations and that those are complex, too, as well as in flux. Please feel free to correct anything I’m getting wrong here, by the way; I don’t mean to be presumptuous. In your stories, the term seems also to refer an existential or spiritual condition of having one’s sense of self irreversibly and even unknowably altered by the experience of living in a new place. Is that a fair interpretation?

Iheoma Nwachukwu: Your understanding of “japa” is correct. More broadly, japa’s transliteration is “rip an arm off.” To break free so brutally the arm pops out. And emigration can be a violent act. A vicious act of freedom. The uprooting of the self from the familiar into a cavern. When I was a kid, and even up to my first year of undergrad in Nigeria, we used a shortened form of japa—ja. You said “ja” when a person was moving abroad. Ja, when you were unhappy at a party and wanted to scat. Ja when the ram you bought to celebrate Ramadan hoofs it over a fence. So the word has been in flux, as well as—as you pointed out—its meaning. As a matter of fact, a new variant has entered the Nigerian lingo: japada—the immigrant who hurls themselves home. Returning, too, is coercive.

I agree that my japa characters feel tipped into some kind of existential vacuum—with spiritual parallels—which complicates the meaning of japa to the reader. Though this feels like an unconscious decision on my part, but definitely a consequence of the pureness of their yearning. Landscape and the people who live in it are one gigantic creature. It’s impossible not to be affected by it, changed by it.

HS: There are specific ways in which your stories speak to all of these ideas around japa. I’m thinking of the graduate student Electric Oku-Oyibo in “Japa Boys.” Having lived in Salt Lake City a while, he’s metabolized Emerson’s thinking in “Self-Reliance” and talks about wanting to help Amemafula, the displaced teen who’s new town: “All—inside all of us—is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.” I’m thinking also of Ray-Ray in “Japa Beach Hotel,” a pool boy in Zanzibar who grew up bouncing around Lagos but identifies Utah with “the halcyon days” of his early childhood. Unable to decide whether supernatural forces are punishing him or if it’s just international capitalism, he, too, takes an Emersonian turn, though it’s the Emerson of “Nature” and his “transparent eye-ball” that echo in Ray-Ray’s statement:  “I’ve found myself staring into the ocean more and more, the uneven line where the water meets the sky, because if there’s a way to do this, to become a person suffused with so much light he sees contentment in the mere movement of a starfish, I need the universe to show me…” Could you speak to the theme of troubled identities in this collection?

IN: Immigrants carry ambivalence like an electric charge when they move. You find resonance with your new landscape, and sometimes dissonance. This idea that an immigrant finds self-defining frequencies in a foreign city illustrates the thought that yearning is universal—in its purest form—not because the character chooses a foreign city over their home city, but because they’re attempting to construct home out of a foreign city. It’s not an often told story, so in a way it’s counter-cultural. In Japa the characters struggle not as much with troubled identities as with “excited” identities. It’s like in physics when an electron within an atom absorbs so much energy it jumps to a higher energy level. The characters in this book are yearning at that higher energy level, consequently their identities are very complicated.

HS: I found the stories “Hosanna Japa Town” and “Spain’s Last Colonial Outposts” particularly devastating. While I’m hesitant to say much about the plots, I wonder if you would be willing to talk a little about the ways you come by storytelling material. It seems to me there must be many lived experiences much like the stories you include in this collection; there must be countless others that one might deem worthy of framing as fiction or nonfiction. What made you want to write these stories?

IN: If I didn’t have a job teaching, you’d find me marooned all day on several Nigerian internet forums. My stories come from the quotidian worries of Nigerians on these sites. Their heroic pursuits. Their vicious and witty comments. When I find a subject matter (an individual or social concern) that moves me, or speaks to that unique interplay of morals and economic opportunity, the deep yearning of a society or people trying to say, I’m alive! I save it in a folder on my computer. I might return to it in a year or two. I wrote “Hosanna Japa Town” because that sense-numbing, aleatory journey through the Sahara Desert epitomizes the harsh circumscribing that drives many people to emigrate. It is Japa at its most acute. My elder brother had tried entering Europe through this trap-route, too (and returned home). Writing this story was also an attempt at exhuming this painful family history. To try to understand my brother’s anguish on the trip.

In “Spain’s Last Colonial Outposts,” I was interested in how colonial legacies in Africa can affect identity, the sometimes ambiguous nature of Chinese investment in Africa, and how a character’s deepest desires can be complicated by disability. Disabled people in Nigeria hardly find employment and are often treated as though they weren’t full humans. I wanted to write a story that gave agency to a disabled person, a story I hope might spark a change in one or two people in the world. Because unkindness is universal.

HS: Kurt Vonnegut famously advised students to write for one specific person, which I take to be his way of saying a writer should commit to an ethos. Of course, there are writers who see writing fiction differently. In 2014, Cormac McCarthy told a couple of high school students who’d managed to get his attention, “I’m not writing for a particular audience. The reader in mind is me.” And if we can make room for TV writers here, David Chase says he made The Sopranos for himself and his friends, which I suppose puts him somewhere in the middle. Do you see yourself on this spectrum? How do you think about your readers?

IN: When I was in secondary school in Nigeria, we used to do this thing where one person jumped in front of the class and made up a story on the spot, tweaking the plot to match the energy of classroom spectators. So I’ve always been aware of the importance and the sensibility of an audience. More than a decade ago I used to send my stories to Binyavanga Wainaina, the brilliant Kenyan writer. In many ways, that’s who I still write for. In addition to myself. So that’s two. I write for two people.

HS: Who are some of your other influences?

IN: Robert Olen Butler, Elizabeth McCracken, Jim Crace, Kola Onadipe, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, Alice Munro, Nadine Gordimer, William Faulkner, James Clavell.

HS: That’s a fascinating list, both intuitive and not. It seems to me that influence works in a variety of ways, at least in so far as authors are willing to talk about it. In some cases, it’s obviously imitative, like John Irving’s connection with his old teacher Kurt Vonnegut, for instance. Other writers imagine themselves in conversation with dead authors; similarly, some writers write to correct or complement the works of the past. Some writers simply take inspiration, often from writers whose work bears little resemblance to their own. Still others adopt the techniques of gathering material. I wonder if you would be willing to elaborate a little on your sense of the way or ways influence works for you.  

IN: A writer’s a kind of director, arranging himself into the shape that best defines his private vision of who an artist is. My influences impact me in different ways. Perhaps in all the ways you mentioned. My work is in conversation with that of a few writers from the Global South whose works are read in the West. Maybe even all of them. One writer influenced my tendency to write long, paragraph-length sentences. Another writer, dramatic dialogue. When, very early on, I learned that Thomas Harris used to be a crime reporter, and kept files from murder cases and other crimes he investigated or heard of, and that his understanding of the psychology of a criminal was drawn from those cases, I began to keep files of stories in the media I found interesting, stored away as potential sources of fiction in the future.

HS: Your collection includes a few recurring characters, though they recur on a rotating basis, such that one who narrates or anchors one story might play a smaller role in another. Do you often use recurring characters in your fiction? How do you see this feature of your work? Are recurring characters and overlapping stories the building blocks of a novel?

IN: Fantastic question! My first recurring character was probably in 2015. I had published a story in Eclectica, and then decided, spontaneously, that I wanted to startle the character with the gift of happiness, however brief, in another story. That story, “Train Juju,” appeared in the Iowa Review. It’s not something I enjoy doing because it feels like cheating the reader—I want to give them the experience of a new character, though I understand the thrill of re-encountering a familiar face in a different setting. In many ways the first story in a collection is like the thesis statement of the book and lucky for me the glut of characters introduced in “Japa Boys” pack such a rich inner life I could unspool them across many pages. At the end of the day, it’s really serendipity. I’ve always thought of a novel as a fattened short story. And you’re right to think of it, at the very least, as a repetition of characters and overlapping stories. I guess this makes the case for short story collections to be sold as novels in the marketplace.