Idza Luhumyo
Idza Luhumyo (born 1993) is a Kenyan short story writer, whose work explores Kenyan coastal identities. In July 2020, Luhumyo was announced as the inaugural recipient of the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award. She was the winner of the 2021 Short Story Day Africa Prize with her story "Five Years Next Sunday", which also won the 2022 Caine Prize
Quotes
[edit]- Thank you. It is thrilling. I’m glad that the story continues to resonate with people, but I certainly did not see it coming. So it’s a wonderful surprise!
- I mostly just follow what I’m curious about and then just take it from there. Writing then becomes this process of discovery. Something else: most – if not all – of the stories I have written so far have featured the Kenyan coast, so I guess that answers the question of what informs my stories.
- Dabbling in screenwriting helped me think a little differently about stories, especially with respect to how one goes about externalizing the internal.
- Writing stories is not easy, but there are times when I have found out that this discovery process can be enjoyable. I once read somewhere that writing can also be thinking, which might explain why you might start out with one thing and end up with something completely different. Maybe because along the way you might stumble onto something you did not even know you knew.
- Yes The characters, for example. The only one I had at the outset was Pili. But the rest came about as she went about her world, so to speak.
- Exploring that aspect bogged down the story. I wanted it to be about Pili, but introducing the aunt made it about the aunt and Pili. I also wanted to start the story as close to the end as possible, so as not to lose the momentum.
- We certainly can extrapolate and have it speak to bigger themes about Western validation, as you said, but it is also a commentary on human nature. We tend to become (more) interested in things/people once we have seen that we can benefit in some form.
- Yes, I see how it is possible for the story to have multiple interpretations. I have heard it called ‘layered’ on numerous occasions and I suppose that’s part of what allows this multiplicity of interpretations.
- Yeah, that was a coincidence. What I mean to say is that it is not what I had in mind from the outset.
- Dabbling in screenwriting helped me think a little differently about stories, especially with respect to how one goes about externalizing the internal.
- Yes, that’s what I mean. How I like to think about it is that it’s helped me write for the eye, and not just for the ear.
- I’m working on a longer project at the moment. We will see how that goes. Thank you for having me.
- It’s something that the story demanded. Once I had the main character – knew what she wanted, and knew exactly where she was located – then the story opened up and had to speak to bigger questions, even as it remained welded and attached to these few characters.
- It started with the hair. I had been thinking about the practice of witch hunts along the Kenyan coast for a little while. People – usually elderly folk – whose hair starts to grey are said to be practicing witchcraft, and are banished to these remote outposts and, technically, left to die. With Pili, I wanted to create a character who has the ability to make rain but is shunned by her community for that very ability. It was an irresistible contradiction I simply had to pursue
- It’s the form I started out with – that is, without counting the awful poetry that I did in high school. I think the short story form is good practice for a writer just starting out. But even more than that: I think there’s something poetic about the form; it demands you to distil what you want to say/question/explore to the bare fundamentals; it’s a form that doesn’t reward lingering, and so you have to work hard to make it tight.
- I wanted to think a little differently about how race works, especially when we’re talking about a place such as the Kenyan coast, where there has long been a white presence because of tourism. Even though we have two women with diminished power – but who are in no way powerless – we find that the expectations are flipped: because of her hair, Pili is actually the one who has more power. I thought it’d be interesting to see how their relationship played out with this reversal as a framework.
- I was – and, truthfully, I want to keep exploring it in my future work. What does agency mean when you have to coexist with others? And what’s the best way to move through the world with agency while also being aware of, and attendant to, other people’s needs and expectations? I don’t think these are easy – or even answerable – questions, but I believe they still need to be posed so that we can sit with them.
- I think it depends on what you want to get out of them. Writing has no roadmap and MFAs certainly won’t work for everyone, but they offer an unrivalled opportunity to centre writing in your life, at least for a couple of years. What’s more: if you’re lucky, you leave with a couple of lifelong readers.
- They motivate me to keep the faith, to keep pursuing the ideas that interest me and, more importantly, to get my work out there.
- A simple (and maybe a tad unromantic) answer: rewriting and rewriting. But there’s also the fact that the stories that I like reading tend also to be layered and I guess that was my model as I worked on this story. The other thing is that that’s just how life is. Things are almost never about one thing, and I guess achieving the sort of verisimilitude that works requires bringing that life-like quality to storytelling.
- I would say it’s about power. Everyone has it, and some have more of it than others for sure, but everyone’s always using however much of it they have or can access to various ends