Jerry Chiemeke

Jerry Chiemeke (born 1 May 1991) is a Nigerian writer, lawyer, journalist, and film critic. Chiemeke won the 2017 Ken Saro-Wiwa Prize for Criticism. Quotes I always knew I was going to write a short story collection when I stumbled on Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck in 2012; say what you will about that book, but I think it ages well. However, it was when I read Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky that I told myself, “Ah, I want one of those!” I had written a few stories in the past, but that collection (which I think everyone should read, by the way) gave me the impetus to work towards sending out this one to the world. I was also looking to create a body of work that captured lived experiences in urban contemporary Nigeria, something with grit, garbed with the flavour of pop culture. You are right when I say I touch on several social issues, but I’d tell you for free that I wasn’t necessarily looking to be socially conscious; I just wanted to mirror life in these parts with its attendant complexity. I have seen certain theories about the intent of this story spring up on Rihanna’s internet, but let me make it clear that in writing “Not For Long,” I wasn’t necessarily setting out to teach any “morals.” I am no Sunday school teacher, and I have never tried to churn out “didactic literature.” I work with a feeling or an idea, and if, by chance, there are “life lessons” to be gleaned from what I write, it’s coincidental. I wrote the first draft of this story in 2015, and at the time, all I was trying to do was capture a dark story from the perspective of a mindless killer; I was part of a writing community on Facebook in the early 2010s, and I had a knack for writing romantic shorts, but someone challenged me to conjure something different. It just happened that the story involved a dating app, and to be fair, online romance had gained a lot of momentum in those years. By the time I revisited the draft in 2019, I felt that the story was flat and wanted to give it a little more form, so I tweaked a few things, and maybe that’s why it reads as quite…”vivid.” I wasn’t trying to pass any “message,” and in retrospect it’s probably too graphic, but all I was aiming for was a dive into the mind of a demented, sadistic individual. You are correct when you allude to my mental health advocacy. I have watched the ones I love suffer from mental illnesses, and I am quite vocal about my struggles with anxiety and acute depression. It was not for nothing that I joined MANI (Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative) in 2016, and even recently, I contributed a column for Cambridge’s BJ Psych Journal. I feel these conversations are necessary because there are people who simply don’t get it, especially in a society like Nigeria, where vulnerability is sneered at, and being expressive about mental health struggles is seen as “weakness.”