In “Better Never Than Late” Chika Unigwe’s Nigerian Immigrants in Belgium Journey Not Into Europe But Into Selves

Chika Unigwe, 51 in weeks, moved to Belgium in 1995, the year she finished her BA in Literature at University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and married a Belgian engineer. She went on to get an MA and a PhD in Belgium and raise a family of her own. She would live in Belgium until, in 2013, she moved with her family to the US, where she has since lived. Belgium, however, fed her earliest fictional outputs. Her first novel The Phoenix (2007) revolves around Oge, a Nigerian woman living in Northern Belgium who has been diagnosed with breast cancer. Her second, On Black Sisters, with which she won the $100,000 Nigerian Prize for Literature in 2012, tells the story of four Nigerian and Sudanese sex workers – Ama, Sisi, Efe, Joyce – based in Antwerp. 

Although her later novels – three in all – explore topics other than the lives of Nigerians in Belgium, this is the material Unigwe draws on in her 2019 story collection Better Never Than Late. All ten interlinked stories in this small book of fiction are kinly-knitted portraits of Nigerian immigrants in Belgium: humane, intimate, intense. Yet individual joys and miseries are always happening within the context of families: marriages are breaking or are beginning to run low on love, fake paper weddings are being arranged, people are seeking a marriage or are seeking love in a marriage. There is indeed a bigger collective dimension than the family unit: everybody seems to know everybody or has heard of everybody or has crossed paths with everybody. A couple’s living room, Prosperous and Agu’s, where lavish meals are shared with friends and community, mostly provides a physical centerpiece, in fact – a Nigerian country the size of a living room buried in the cold of Europe. The couple themselves are the most central characters to the book, playing major roles in some stories, appearing as cameos in some others. Oftentimes their living room is where we get to witness the hardships this small group of Africans face for leaving for Europe but also the pains they are capable of inflicting: on themselves, their spouses, their hosts. For the latter, it is mostly the heartbreaks they serve the fake white wives married for a while for the sake of residency papers.

But the journey for them isn’t as much into Europe as into selves. “Do not be sad...” goes the concierge in Louise Glück’s poem “The Denial of Death.” “You have begun your own journey,” he continues. “Not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself and your memories.” This quote states explicitly the intrinsic logic upon which Unigwe’s fiction operates. Her Nigerian immigrants in Belgium are constantly in a search to find chipped and lost parts or, at least, to realize the loss. They are constantly in a search to uncover new or long-buried selves or, at least, the need to. At the heart of most stories is a sense of becoming or unbecoming, a sense of waiting upon a change, a sense of seeking, finding.

This is obvious even in their titles. In “Becoming Prosperous,” Agu and Prosperous leave Nigeria for Belgium in search of a better life when Agu’s supermarket is destroyed in a riot in Jos. But they soon discover in their misery in Europe that they have in fact gone there to watch themselves become “bags of rattling bones unable to become whole.” At least not yet. In “Finding Faith,” though, Oge has to come back to Nigeria to find something she loses when she loses her five-year-old son, which is masterfully symbolized by a teddy bear. She empties her deflated self, hoping to be refilled with life.

Time becomes a metaphor for this. It becomes the conceit most useful to all the pieces. You sense a clock ticking at the back of your mind as you read the stories: a change is always in motion. Take the highlight of the book: “Finding Faith.” Oge is a young mother grieving the death of her five-year-old son. The warped sense of time is smoothened into the skin of the plot. Flashback frequently cuts through to give us a piece of the horrible past, which feels all too present, which is, in fact, in the present. It’s a sad story of a most accurate emotional intensity. It represents the story all of the book aspires to tell. 

But the story elements in some pieces are not optimally arranged, their timing dulled, lagged. Critical details or crucial chinks of the past or vital characters sometimes pop out of no where to rescue the plot, like cats out of a hat. In “For the Love of a Fat Woman,” Godwin’s grandma is picked from the village and dropped suddenly into the story. A lack of earlier mention or placement makes her an emotional deus ex machina. She pops out from the back of beyond, dragging along a sack of sand-encrusted mangoes and oranges: a most remote superhuman. In “Everyone Deserves Grace,” it is delayed introduction of a detail from Agu’s school days in Nigeria. Meanwhile, this detail is the catalyst for the character change that the story seems to be about. In “How to Survive a Heat Wave,” it is yet again the delay of a germane, university-days backstory that gives Añuli her emotional complexity.

Stringing stories into one big, selfsame story made up of small, standalone stories is a paradox of will: the weaving, which must be deliberate, should feel like an accident, a coincidence. Unigwe does this well most of the time, if not all. Expectedly, major characters in some stories should appear as minor in others. But the delight is that she does this whimsically. In “Becoming Prosperous,” a Gholahan, who’s mentioned in passing, works at an abattoir. In “Cleared for Takeoff,” a Gbolahan is a central character, a single father of one who works as a carpenter after an injury halts his football career and, subsequently, his marriage. We are not even sure if the Gbolahans are one same person.

She also performs a double function with her weaving. She sneaks prospective subject matters into a current story, the topics waiting to be explored in full in later stories. In “Becoming Prosperous,” Prosperous – who, in reality, has long stopped being prosperous – briefly, self-righteously, mulls over how she did not, back home in Nigeria, maltreat her two teenage househelps as her neighbors and acquaintances did. Like fate, this subject bubbles up in the story after the next, which is the collection’s title story: “Better Never Than Late.” In its witchcraft accusation, physical abuse, pentecostal demon exorcism, it becomes utterly specific as well. Kambi is cousin to Agu, one half of the childless couple most central to the collection. Together with another cousin Ada, she accuses her 15-year-old help, Ijeoma, of tying up her luck with marriage. Ada, less educated but more spiritually mature, suggests Ijeoma has also tied Agu and Prosperous’ luck with children.

However, the sarcastic tone of this story (the church is called, in italics, The Holiest of Holies Jehovah Jireh Jehovah El Shaddai Evangelical Church of God and its pastor, Pastor Moses Elijah Samuel Okeke) makes the story almost unfit in a collection that is anything but sardonic. With its “Rabbi shaddai gram gram” spiritual language, the story feels like a hoax rather than a work of fiction; it feels like a piece of entertainment. Nonetheless, Pastor Moses is an entry into a Nigerian literary lineage that most memorably goes back to Wole Soyinka’s Pastor Jeroboam of The Jero Plays.

Perhaps this otherwise purposeful glueing falters in “The Transfiguration of Rapu.” A story about a Nigerian woman waiting for her husband to divorce the white woman he has deceptively married for passport, it is a story with explosive material. Perhaps if told from inside Rapu’s head, the story might have been a more emotionally-fraught portrait of a wife-in-the-wait. One feels Unigwe might have simply stuck to Prosperous’ point of view as a linking device.

The fiction is sad. The characters are always waiting for a change that might not come or that might turn out negative. Even when the change is positive, the realization that it has taken this long and cost this much gives off a sad undertone. Unigwe balances this out with humor. It is one way she textures her character, moulding them like dough until they spill into the reader’s consciousness. She deepens their interior lives by transcribing their funny, little thoughts, her sentences not strings of words but breaths of humorous but “true” worldviews. In “How to Survive a Heat Wave,” Añuli fumbles with the difference between atheists and unbelievers. “Here,” Unigwe writes, “she has met humanists and atheists (who she has been told are different from unbelievers, but she cannot remember how).”

The humor serves its most useful purpose in this same story. Añuli has been assaulted by a group of boys on the train. She cannot speak of the incident to her husband; the words are blocked off by fear, shame, humiliation. She sends for her two best friends Oge and Prosperous to tell them. But when they arrive, she brings out a bowl of unshelled melon seeds sent to her from Nigeria, declaring, “Ngwa, we have an egusi peeling party here!” Through the peeling party, she cases her trauma with backhanded jokes, the heater going on blast an xray of her internal weather. The story is a tipsy dance between a funny exterior self and a deflated interior self, a dance that tips into its fated climax by the end of the story.

Better Never Than Late is above all a clean picture of how quickly a Nigerian dream can fester on foreign soil. It is an exploration of what can happen to a Nigerian self becoming or unbecoming in the snows of Europe. The book starts with an arrival and ends with a homecoming. But we know not to read more meaning into that. We know someone somewhere tomorrow will set out to Europe, in search of a dream, of a future, of a self. We can only wish that person reads Chika Unigwe’s book before setting out. Of course the book will not tell if to go or not to go. But it comes with a caveat: that when what is lost is found, something happens. The concierge in Glück's poem, says, laterly, “Also everything returns, but what returns is not / What went away—” What returns is not what went away. No, not exactly. Returns come with lessons, and lessons change people. Here, always, is a vital book for anyone who cares. A sad, slim read that will have a crackling effect on its target readers. 𖦹