Onyinye Ihezukwu
Onyinye Ihezukwu was born in Nigeria where she worked as a broadcaster and journalist. Before broadcasting, she worked with an independent theater enterprise, The Tapshak Company, as an actress, project director, and playwright. Her fiction largely explores changing socio-spiritual themes in the urban Nigerian setting. Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Scholar, the St. Petersburg Review, among others. She received her MFA in 2014 from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where she was awarded the Poe/Faulkner Fellowship, as well as the 2014 Henfield Prize for fiction. She held a 2015-2017 Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and is currently earning a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She's at work on a novel.
Excerpt from "Now, Let’s Consider This Case," published in the Virginia Quarterly Review:
And so they meet for drinks at the open court in the shopping plaza, something that happens quite often as they are wives with no jobs (depending on how you look at it) or wives with jobs (also depending on how you look at it), in the sense that the usual definition of “job” is work that a) comes with a dress code, b) is defined by a time range, and c) is rewarded with a specified amount of money, which you must consider carefully now, for though these women’s duties did not come with any, not dress code, not time range, nor salaries, they were always busy, the explanation being that to them, husband and children were more than all of the above, and chores like washing up after meals, helping out with homework, presenting chests to receive vomit and sick heads and so on, were the ultimate fulfillment of their presence here on Earth, because Almighty God said through Apostle Paul who was under the influence of the Holy Spirit, that the woman is the weaker vessel, to be under her husband, to call him “Lord,” and this because he is an earthly representative for Jesus the ascended Lord of Lords, so said Apostle Paul, so said the law of the Almighty, which made all things okay, so okay in fact, that when their earthly Lords decreed that the women leave the work of family provision to them alone, these women were exceedingly glad, for how else could a man show he loved his family except by taking command, showing the way, and even devising spousal duties, yes, these Lords devised some statutory job functions for their wives, or maybe the functions were an outgrowth of sheer necessity,
And so they meet for drinks at the open court in the shopping plaza, something that happens quite often as they are wives with no jobs (depending on how you look at it) or wives with jobs (also depending on how you look at it), in the sense that the usual definition of “job” is work that a) comes with a dress code, b) is defined by a time range, and c) is rewarded with a specified amount of money, which you must consider carefully now, for though these women’s duties did not come with any, not dress code, not time range, nor salaries, they were always busy, the explanation being that to them, husband and children were more than all of the above, and chores like washing up after meals, helping out with homework, presenting chests to receive vomit and sick heads and so on, were the ultimate fulfillment of their presence here on Earth, because Almighty God said through Apostle Paul who was under the influence of the Holy Spirit, that the woman is the weaker vessel, to be under her husband, to call him “Lord,” and this because he is an earthly representative for Jesus the ascended Lord of Lords, so said Apostle Paul, so said the law of the Almighty, which made all things okay, so okay in fact, that when their earthly Lords decreed that the women leave the work of family provision to them alone, these women were exceedingly glad, for how else could a man show he loved his family except by taking command, showing the way, and even devising spousal duties, yes, these Lords devised some statutory job functions for their wives, or maybe the functions were an outgrowth of sheer necessity,
Recommended Books for Aspiring Writers
- Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway
- Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
- The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
Teaching Philosophy
My main aim is to help my students find their voice. I wish for them to recognize that their agency as writers is unique to them alone, as no one can quite tell a story the way you can. Therefore, every act of confident writing begins by applying this knowledge to ourselves.
My main aim is to help my students find their voice. I wish for them to recognize that their agency as writers is unique to them alone, as no one can quite tell a story the way you can. Therefore, every act of confident writing begins by applying this knowledge to ourselves.