Wahala is a darkly comic and bitingly subversive take on love, race and family, through the experiences of three mixed-race friends living in London. In this Q&A, author Nikki May chats about expectations on today’s women, embracing her culture as an Anglo-Nigerian, and Ife heads.
Which scene was hardest to write, and which part was easiest?
The food scenes wrote themselves. In fact, many of them had to be cut – at times it felt more like a cookbook than a contemporary novel! The conflict scenes were the hardest, I’d fallen in love with my characters so it was really hard to make bad things happen to them. Chapter twenty-nine, when Boo comes home to find her laptop open was the hardest. My heart was thumping as hard as Boo’s, I had to stop writing to have a good cry.
You have an eye for fabulous clothes, and it gives the book a wonderful flair. Where does this come from? Or did you have to do a lot of research?
I love fashion, I always have. Dressing up is the thing I miss most since I moved out of London. Nowadays, I live in mud-splattered dog-walking clothes and rainboots. It was a joy to spend hours and hours reading fashion magazines and creating imaginary shopping baskets at online designer shops for Simi, who luckily has the bank of Martin, to pay for it all.
Your characters feel lucky to belong to two cultures, this is a powerful message which gives your book great positivity and warmth. Was that a deliberate choice and is it how you feel yourself? If so, do you always feel it or only sometimes?
It was very deliberate and something I knew I could write authentically about – this is my lived experience. I love my two cultures and I’m a champion code switcher. I love the Super Eagles and The Three Lions, speak pidgin and Queens English, listen to Fela Kuti and Ed Sheeran.
I think the concept of identity and belonging is so interesting and I wanted to explore how three Anglo-Nigerian women could feel so differently about their heritage and what constitutes home.
But being mixed-race is a mixed bag. I’m used to people telling me what they think I am. I’m either ‘not black enough’ or ‘not white enough’. Unless, of course, I’m being ‘too black’ or ‘too white’. Sometimes my sense of belonging is concrete, other times it’s elusive. But all in all, I got the long straw – two homes is twice the joy.
Wahala is filled with delicious scenes of Nigerian cooking and characters bonding over brunch. In what ways has food played a role in your family?
Food is central to Nigerian culture and when it comes to food, I’m one hundred percent Nigerian. We have a Yoruba saying, ‘e wa jeun’ – it means, ‘come and eat’. If anyone sees you eating, even a stranger, it’s what you say. Food is our way of caring.
Mama, my paternal grandmother taught me to love pepper. She made the best stew in the world – red, oily and spicy, all it needed was bread to dip in. Mama thought pepper made you strong – maybe she was right, she lived to 102 and the average life expectancy in Nigeria is fifty-four.
My Dad lives in a tiny village near Sagamu, he’s never approved of ‘street food’ but he makes an exception when I visit. We go to Mama Ofada, who cooks the most wonderful green pepper stew over firewood in a rickety shack. We take it home and eat it under the canopy in his garden. He always says the same thing, ‘Watch out for the stones in the rice. This food is cheap, but good dentistry isn’t.’
“Being a woman is a complicated thing – the world we live in pulls, pushes, and tugs us with expectations of our bodies, hair, careers, relationship status and reproductive organs.”
In what ways do Ronke, Simi and Boo’s distinct stories reflect the challenges facing British women, Nigerian women, biracial women, and women everywhere?
The challenges my characters face are universal. I think any thirty-something year old woman, anywhere, will find something they can relate to. Being a woman is a complicated thing – the world we live in pulls, pushes, and tugs us with expectations of our bodies, hair, careers, relationship status and reproductive organs.
But my story is refracted through a biracial lens, and that makes being a woman even more complicated:
In Nigeria, (yes, even in 2022) being single and over thirty can’t possibly be a choice – it’s a failure. This might be why Ronke is so desperate to be married.
In the West, society still baulks when women, say they don’t want children. In Nigeria, society is outraged. You must be barren, mad, or cursed (possibly all three). You cannot possibly just not want children. Simi was brought up knowing this.
Boo’s sense of not belonging (something that is all too common in mixed-race children) has plagued her life. It’s left her with a deep-seated loneliness; she’s adapted so much that she no longer feels connected to herself.
Why did you choose the epigraph, “The axe forgets, but the tree remembers,” and how does it relate to the story?
At its simplest, my epigraph says: bullies forget, but victims remember. But like all good proverbs, the meaning is so much deeper. For me, it’s about having your heart broken by someone who doesn’t seem to care, who’s oblivious to (or worse, gladdened by) your pain and distress. How life carries on for the axe whilst the tree carries the scars and has to find a way to survive without a much-loved limb.
Like many Nigerians, my paternal grandfather had a proverb for every occasion. I grew up listening to them and I love the way just a few words create a sudden sense of enlightenment. Potted wisdom and poetry – maybe proverbs are Africa’s answer to haiku. Chinua Achebe put it beautifully in Things Fall Apart: “Proverbs are the palm oil with which food is eaten.”
Lastly – do you own an Ife head? What inspired you to use this startling object as the murder weapon?
No, I don’t own an Ife head – but I really want one!
I learned about the Ife head from a wonderful BBC Radio 4 series: A History of the World in 100 Objects. And the more I found out, the more intrigued I was.
When Leo Frobenus, a German explorer discovered the Benin Bronzes in 1910, he refused to believe they could have been made in Africa – they were way too sophisticated and ornately carved to be the work of “savages”. He was sure he’d found the remains of the mythical lost city of Atlantis. He was wrong though, the Benin Bronzes are the ‘Donatello’s of medieval Africa’, made by Africans in the fourteenth century and the equal of anything that came out of Europe.
How could I not have an Ife head in my book? The British Museum in London sells a beautiful replica of the Ife head and, like Ronke, I’ve been tempted to get one. Maybe one day.
Wahala is out now. Read an extract.
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