At the edge of language

Vanessa Onwuemezi: That’s interesting; I like the word “confluence” because it definitely describes my thinking. While writing Dark Neighbourhood, it wasn’t a conscious choice, but now that I’m working on my second book, the confluence of cultures is at the forefront of my mind. The form in Dark Neighbourhood emerged through practice, there was no deliberate decision to do it this way or that way. What I was pushing towards was a more truthful, immediate means of expression, something that could break through the barrier of language. When you write, the words are your medium, but they also form a barrier – like the skin that forms over milk. You can’t let them settle for too long, otherwise the reader doesn’t really feel them. The meaning doesn’t penetrate. It stays on the surface as description, power dynamics, all the things we associate with prose. Underneath, the story holds a meaning that can only be communicated by the whole.

When I started to like poetry, it helped me to understand what a word is in isolation, the power it holds and how it can pivot a rhythm. Essentially, how a word is relational. This is where “confluence” comes in. Poetry gave me an intuitive sense that a word has a vertical depth. Every day, words move horizontally: they point, they’re instrumental. But in poetry, a word extends vertically; it becomes more than the sum of its parts, and a single word can expand a sentence in that way. So the moments in Dark Neighborhood where the poetic breaks through are the moments where expression is the hardest, and only the poem could express what I needed. 

VO: You’ve homed in on what I was obsessed with at the time of writing those stories. I had read some of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, thinking about how we affect anything that we put our eyes on. His critique of Kant’s proposition that there is such a thing as a “thing-in-itself”, untouched by our consciousness, got me thinking about the nature of experience. That philosophy isn’t directly in the stories, but it formed a backdrop for my thinking. Later on, I discovered Wittgenstein and read the Tractatus. His line “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” was really striking because it suggested that beyond what we can say, there is still meaning, but it’s inexpressible. Poets and poetic prose writers still reach toward that, even if we’ll never fully capture it. That was on my mind constantly. 

The story At the heart of things begins with the line: “At the heart of things there is no meaning”. That came specifically from Wittgenstein – not that things are meaningless, but that there’s a depth that can’t be expressed, and we have to accept that mystery. It deepens life. So the lines you quoted, the “nonsense” from Dark Neighbourhood, express how inadequate words can be, how easy it is to misunderstand each other. And the line from Bright Spaces, though less deliberate, also deals with how naming things expands our world, but only up to a limit. 

My more recent thinking is that, with poetry, words can surpass their own limit. Because words relate to each other, recombining them can unleash new energy. I think that’s why a lot of writers are led to experimentation. I didn’t consciously decide to experiment: I only wanted to tell the story truthfully, and that pushed me there. When we’re saturated with words, you have to shock people, bypass their intellect. Especially with readers trained in close analysis, the intellect becomes a barrier. Poetry accepts the inexpressible part of the world, and silence becomes the only real expression of that part. I suppose that’s why the gaps are quite important, because they are long pauses. They incorporate the ineffable part as well as the word. And after a silence the word has more power.

VO: The gaps in a sentence and these other spaces you mention: between people, within the psyche etc. could be considered as liminal spaces, zones that we pass through when in transition, zones between one and the other state. But these silent zones are not empty, they are full of potential and are the backdrop, the ground of existence and everything that exists emerges out of it. When I began to view life in this way, everything in life from birth and death, down to the spoken word, began to mirror this fact. It is a kind of eternal movement from being to non-being, creation, de-creation, emergence of something from nothing. This isn’t a religious belief but a natural fact, from my perspective. 

The gap also gives the word a new emphasis. In At the Heart of Things, the line: “for old times’ sake then”, with that pause, reads completely differently. I think of it musically. In music, silence has obvious narrative meaning: it creates contrast between quiet and loud, between fullness and minimalism. My first love was music, so that sense of silence seeped into my writing. The punctuation available (full stops, commas) didn’t seem adequate for the rhythm I wanted, so I used blank space. At first, I didn’t even know if I’d keep it. You’re writing for no one, so why not try? Later it accumulates meaning – once it’s published, it means something.

VO: I now think of writing as an embodied process. Writing has taught me a lot about my body, about trusting its inner movement. When I write, I rely on my inner sense to tell me where the story wants to go: whether a sentence is complete, whether something is missing, or whether the syntax isn’t quite right. The mind comes later, to handle technical adjustments. What comes first is the feeling, an intuition of “not this, but this”. When I teach workshops, I emphasise that writers must trust what they like and dislike. None of it is wrong: a sentence that pleases me is the right sentence for the work. I think that a large part of learning to write is learning that relationship between my body and the work: it shows me when to push on and when to take a break, when to take feedback on board or when it misses the mark. It makes the difference between work that’s alive on the page or work that’s so overworked that you kill it. 

Performing is similar. I was nervous at first, but seeing how the stories gained a new dimension when spoken encouraged me. I’ve become really interested in the power of the bare voice, with minimal technology. Silence in performance is more powerful than on the page. I’m not afraid of it, and if you aren’t afraid of silence, the audience feels that too.

Non-verbal elements also interest me. Drawing from Wittgenstein: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. But there’s also non-speak, like pauses, laughs, cries, or the ums and ahs. We cut these out of prose, but they express meaning. I experimented with this in Bright Spaces, where the repeated “A” was meant as sound, like a name echoing against walls. Working in this way reminds me that a word is, first, a sound. English often disguises this. One and won, for example, sound identical but look different. This brings back the idea of confluence, how sounds and script merge, but they’re not quite the same. You don’t necessarily know where one ends and one begins, which is exciting because it’s always changing. 

VO: Learning French definitely helped. As you said, when you don’t speak a language you hear everything lost to native speakers: the blurring of words, the non-words, the filler sounds. In every language there are these superfluous elements: English’s “like,” French’s “quoi”, Nigerian Pidgin’s “o”, Patois’ “so”.

When I started to speak French more fluently, I realised the meaning wasn’t in the words themselves. It was embodied. The intention sat in my body, and the words carried that intention. When you’re monolingual – especially in English, which is so ubiquitous – you’re rarely exposed to other languages  in any meaningful way. That can make you mistake words for the things they stand for. Learning French meant letting go of English, and when I returned to English, it felt new again. French grammar introduced another way of meaning: you realise that you can have a new construction of words, and that it still carries meaning once you learn how to use it. English is especially malleable: simpler verb conjugations, no gender, you can chop and change things more freely. In my writing, a lot of French grammar influenced word ordering. At the moment I’m looking at Creole languages and seeing how embodied meaning can be. In many contexts, you don’t need adjectives or long descriptions; meaning is inferred through presence, gesture, time of day, shared knowledge. 

Translation was a way to recapture the energy of learning French: I missed the feeling of being challenged by a language. At the American Library in Paris, I began translating a couple of poems as an exercise. I am in no way a translator – my written French isn’t good enough for that – but I wanted to see what would happen. One of the poems I translated was Aimé Césaire’s Ferrements. Even translating the title, one word, brought up a whole constellation of associated meanings. You can’t necessarily extract a word from all its relations. I had to read the poem over and over again to absorb its meaning, in order to understand what each word meant within the network of the poem. My translation was terrible, but it gave me a sense of having absorbed something, even if I couldn’t carry that meaning into English. It also gave me a huge respect for the work of a translator – you have to take the whole thing in and reform it creatively so that it means the same. That’s a really incredible thing to do. 

VO: Absolutely, that sense of closeness and distance is fascinating. You become slightly different in the new language. One identity exists in one set of expressions, and you let go of it when you switch. It’s not Jekyll and Hyde, but certain experiences exist only within that system. Even though I only lived in France for about a year and a half, there are things I only ever knew in French (street names, for example) that I can’t make English. I can’t pronounce them in an English accent; it feels wrong. So some words exist only in French in my mind.

VO:  Yes! Exactly.

VO: Martin is a good friend of mine, so I felt comfortable saying, “I really want to do something with Many Men by 50 Cent”. I’d been listening to it – it was nostalgic; I must have been 11 or 12 when that album came out. I’ve always found it quite beautiful. I like the repetition of “many men”, the “mɛ” sound. I am very sensitive to sounds, so I found it quite pleasurable and beautiful. Martin suggested the Dickinson poem, I don’t remember why. We decided to mash them together. We started with extra-long silences, and just said: “let’s hold the pause until it becomes too painful, then speak the next line”. It’s great because those collaborations within poetry festivals are fleeting and you don’t have this same pressure to publish. We put that together quickly and we read it out. There was no deliberate intention beyond wanting to work with those lines.

In my own work, I don’t usually like cut-ups or direct borrowings, except for one instance: the final two words of Dark Neighbourhood, “only ahead”, come from Cortázar’s The Southern Thruway. I had earlier drafts with different endings, but when I read Cortázar’s story, I realised that was exactly the feeling I wanted. I couldn’t think of a better word, so I kept it. A kind of homage, even though it’s not based on the story.

Mostly, I use other writers’ work energetically. I read a lot while writing. I find that the things I love re-inspire me to keep working. Christopher Okigbo, for example – the first poem in Dark Neighbourhood was influenced by one of his poems, because it had the right rhythm and feeling that I wanted for those lines. Reading that was the thing that pushed me to write the lines as poetry, rather than keep trying to force them to be prose. Playwrights like Arthur Miller have given me rhythm, scaffolding for my own writing, as has Gertrude Stein – Tender Buttons helped shape the first paragraph of At the Heart of Things. It’s usually like that: energy, rhythm, the odd word or nod. Nothing more direct.