In 'The Liquid Eye of a Moon,' Nigerian Author Uchenna Awoke Brings up a Difficult Conversation

“I was motivated to start work on the Liquid Eye of a Moon, by acts of discrimination and othering that I found around me,” Awoke tells OkayAfrica on the eve of his book release. In addition to that, however, Awoke says he has always been fascinated with bringing stories from small, unknown places to more people. “I always wanted to talk about small places and hidden things in a story, bring them to a wider audience and hopefully open conversations about them. So The Liquid Eye of a Moon is breaking the silence surrounding a dangerous contemporary system of human taboo.”

This sentiment easily makes the novel a modern classic, sure to thrill fans of Chinua Achebe and Chigozie Obioma (both of whom Awoke was inspired by while working on the story) with its slightly didactic touch but ultimately timeless subject matter, that reveals new angles to a supposedly well-known topic.

Writing through it

For this story to work, Awoke initially toyed with a few POVs before settling with the first person. “I settled for the first person because it brought me close to experiencing the world I created through Dimpka’s perspective,” he says.

Dimkpa’s world, although small and rural, is filled with dynamic, complex characters. The book explores a people’s religious uncertainty, with churchgoers publicly denouncing the traditional religious practices, while secretly participating in its rites. This element, like much of the book, offers an illustration of a much larger, Nigerian problem; a country driven by Western religious practices and in ardent denouncement of its traditional ways of life. Awoke has seen the caste system affect families and cause disarray amongst friends even in modern times.

On his part, Awoke’s journey into writing has been riddled with many difficulties. He read a lot of James Hadley Chase and Chinua Achebe growing up. After his uncle lost his job in Lagos, effectively cutting short Awoke’s secondary school education, he picked up writing while working a range of menial jobs, including as an undertaker, a farmhand, a commercial bus conductor and more. At 20, he began writing, putting his experience in shorthand and typing to great use, with his realities centered around poverty and human tabooing.

“I have always been fascinated by the power of words. I always wanted to write a compelling story that will captivate readers. Becoming an author for me was a natural progression, despite all odds.”

On loss and caste

While Nigeria’s prevailing, but unspoken caste system is a major theme in this work, loss and grief are also powerful machinery. Sharing a strong, spiritual bond with his late aunt, Okike, who passed before he was old enough to even remember her, Dimkpa finds himself mourning a person whom he now only knows through stories. For Awoke, the powerful and tender exploration of loss wasn’t premeditated at all.

“I wrote it the way it came to me at that time, so the effect on the reader is what I do not know. You are the one who is telling me the way you felt and what you saw after reading the book,” he says.

The theme of loss is also present in the short story, Shallow Grave, which birthed this novel. In Shallow Grave, a widow is ostracized by her community for killing a god incarnated in a tortoise, and in the wake of her passing, her church community hired foreigners to bury her, as doing it themselves would have had them ostracized as well.

“As I continued to develop the story, I wrote the different arcs in short stories and weaved it all together in the end into what we have as The Liquid Eye of a Moon,” Awoke says.

With clashing ideologies and unending struggles between insufficient Western norms and sometimes stifling traditional dictates, The Liquid Eye of a Moon is set to topple over what we tell ourselves about forgotten practices and their existing impact on modern life.