Six Questions for Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike
- Apr 16
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 17
Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is an assistant professor in the Department of English and the 2025-2026 Wayne O. McCready Emerging Fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, University of Calgary, Canada. His teaching and research interests include African and African Diaspora literatures, postcolonial literatures, gender and sexuality, cultural studies, and creative writing. He is the author of Masculinity in Nigerian Fiction: Receptivity and Gender (2025), and his other critical works have been published in journals such as Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Journal of African Literature Association, Metacritic, Men and Masculinities, Journal of African Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Text, amongst others. Umezurike is the author of literary works such as We Survived Until We Could Live (2026), there’s more (2023), Double Wahala, Double Trouble (2021), Wish Maker (2021), and a co-editor of Please Don’t Interrupt (2025) and Wreaths for a Wayfarer (2020).
INTERVIEW
MG: You recently released We Survived Until We Could Live (University of Calgary Press, 2026), a bold and compelling poetry collection about a family navigating the memories of war. What more can you tell us about the book?
UPU: Thanks for your compliments, Brandon. I wanted to explore what it means to survive a war and how families cope with post-war memories and trauma. For years, I have wrestled with questions about war and survivors, such as what moving on means for an ex-soldier or a survivor in a country that re-traumatizes them. I also wanted to understand how the impact of war, particularly the Biafra-Nigeria war, which caused about 3 million deaths, endures and haunts survivors and the children of survivors. My book, We Survived Until We Could Live, is an attempt to use the family as a lens to reflect on the perverse desire of warmongers who ignore the horrific effects of war and instead revel in the mass destruction of human and non-human lives.
MG: How do your poems develop? Can you describe your creative process?
UPU: I’m always amazed at how poems come to be, how they sometimes start so delicately, like shimmers in the dark, and then become luminous, almost tangible. Yet there’s no single way a poem develops for me. Sometimes it’s an image, an idea, a concept, a thought, or a feeling; other times, it’s an incident, an event, a tragic happening, or an interesting piece of news. I also get inspired by reading another poet’s poem, which is a delightful thing. Usually, when I’m working on a book, I need to be more deliberate in creating space for ideas and images to cohere in ways that illuminate what I see as the thematic and social vision.
MG: You also write fiction. What can you tell us about your short story collection, Double Wahala, Double Trouble (Griots Lounge, 2021)?
UPU: Wahala means trouble in Nigerian lingo. Thanks to Bibi Ukonu, who believed in the book, which was fun for me to write because it depicted everyday troubles faced by the average Nigerian. Writing this book gave me a way to look beyond stereotypes of Nigerian life and to narrate the fragile, precarious lives of ordinary people struggling to get by. It was exciting to present a montage of diverse, complex, even eccentric characters who find ways to love, explore desire and intimacy, and navigate infidelity, marital tensions, gender-based violence, disability, mortality, and environmental degradation, all set against a backdrop of postcolonial gloom and disillusionment.
MG: Who are your favourite writers/poets and why?
UPU: My friend Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba, a fellow writer and professor at the University of Winnipeg, and I once joked about my inability to answer this question. Anyway, I love reading poetry and fiction, so it’s hard for me to list my favourite writers or poets. I am looking forward to some fantastic poetry collections by fellow Canadians coming out soon, including Richard Harrison’s My Mother Joins the Resistance, Anna Veprinska’s Wound Archives, David Martin’s nightstead, Kathryn MacDonald’s The Blue Gate, and Peter Midgley’s Eaten by White Ants. Jide Salawu’s Contraband Bodies, Paul Akpomuje’s Black Passport, and Echezonachukwu Nduka’s Jazz Negotiations are three remarkable new books by Nigerian poets in North America that I have enjoyed reading.
MG: What is the best writing advice you've ever been given?
UPU: I’ve received a great deal of generous advice from established writers, including a friend, Juleus Ghunta, who is working on his poignant and heart-stirring debut poetry collection, so it’s difficult to single out just one. If I had to choose, I’d say: keep writing, trusting your voice, and valuing your stories. Now, of course, there will be moments of frustration, times when you want to gnash your teeth or slam your fist on the desk, but even then, writing remains one of life’s tax-free joys, something no one, even authoritarians, can fully censor or regulate.
MG: Are you currently writing anything new?
UPU: Oh no. I’m just looking forward to enjoying the summer with family and friends, now that my latest book is out in the world.
Who survives war? What does survival mean? And at what cost? Yes, the sirens and bombs have ceased. Yes, peace has settled over the rubble. But even in moments of laughter, ghosts chafe. Blood still smells in the air. The present is as fraught as the past, filled with shadows and fumes. Old wounds sting the body and the mind, rekindling nightmares and memory.
In poetry by turns lyrical and intense, elegiac and intimate, We Survived Until We Could Live plumbs the contours of vulnerability, inviting readers to reflect on loss and the broken flesh. Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike skillfully uses multiple narrative voices and personas —a father, a mother, a son—to show how postwar trauma and memory warp family relationships, how violence persists long after a war has ended.
Umezurike doesn’t turn away from contemplating the psychic and physical scars that war leaves on people, whether on the old or young, parents or children. These are poems of taut breath, silence, and echoes. These are also poems of love and its redemptive power. Poems of the courage to continue. Tender yet enduring snapshots of kindness, grace, hope, and resilience, reminding us of our capacity to emerge from the crushing shrouds of darkness and tragedy into the light.
