In 2025, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo published The Tiny Things Are Heavier. The novel which she started working on after the #EndSars Protest carries ‘specific emotional truths’ she wanted to confront. The novel’s plot is entirely invented but its themes of identity formation, privilege, un-belonging and familial responsibility are drawn from Esther’s lived experiences. At age twenty-four, similar to the novel’s protagonist, Sommy, Esther migrated to the United States for graduate school. That migration, as the writer told Diaspora Africa, was a necessary step toward her dreams of becoming a writer. As she grew older, and began witnessing family and friends struggle under the weight of Nigeria’s collapsed systems, her focus broadened. As she fittingly described it, her life “became mostly about putting off one fire or the other.” Thus, on one hand, she holds onto that small dream of reading and writing, on the other she holds a sense of responsibility towards others.
The traumatic #EndSars Protest that saw Nigerians protesting against police brutality and extra judicial killings happened amidst Esther’s mental and emotional shift. Nationally, the aftermath of this protest triggered a national disillusionment in the nation; young Nigerians were pressured to leave the country en masse, recalling Somali-British poet Warsan Shire’s line from Home : “No one leaves home except home is the mouth of a shark/home is the barrel of the gun.” What motivated Esther to write Tiny Things was her intimate knowledge of what a failed state does to people’s relationship with themselves and with other people, especially those they love. She wanted to explore the emotional consequences of this condition. This question : “How can you love, truly love yourself, in a country that debases you at every turn?” sits at the core of her exploration.
In writing this novel and creating Sommy, Esther’s concerns were monopolised by narrative and structural concerns like “action”, “inconsistent consistency”, “believability” and “change.” As she told Diaspora Africa, it wasn’t enough to have the intention of writing about a lonely, young who’s been socialized to stand behind a man, she also had to think about the character in relation to plot and language. Thus, even when Sommy’s feeling of in-betweenness and displacement is explored, the rendering of her displacement comes from questioning and trying to articulate what makes her come alive on the page as a character. Esther described this as a “matter of deft craft work.” This craftsmanship guided and influenced the writing of Sommy as a flawed woman. “What I’ll say I continue to find victory in is in the fact of my creation of this specific, unheroic woman, who grew up in a place I rarely see in fiction, and who is both victim and victimizer, loving and selfish.”
Writing Sommy as a flawed, selfish, loving woman was important to Esther because over the years mainstream global media i.e. books, films, music and creative productions have often presented African women as victims of an isolating system that need only to be pitied. “I think we forget that African women and girls have long been written as caricaturized victims onto which everyone else can project their pity. It was important to me that I wrote a character who makes it hard for you to simply pity her.”
At the center of The Tiny Things is Sommy, a Nigerian graduate student who has just arrived in Iowa carrying the guilt of leaving her brother Mezie behind in the aftermath of his suicide attempt. Disoriented and straddling two geographies, her sense of dislocation launches her relationships with Bayo, a Nigerian, and Bryan, a biracial American man, both of whom become willing frameworks through which Esther explores race, grief, and the fragility of family and intimacy.
In this way, The Tiny Things is primarily a character study. In an interview with Nelson C.J for OkayAfrica, the writer mentioned that she “didn’t want this to be a migrant novel only”. She wanted it primarily to be a novel about a “person trying to move from young adulthood to maturity.” It was important that readers don’t just see the novel as another migration-themed novel even if it has migration elements. Migration is just one aspect of Sommy’s journey.
African migrants are often romanticized as hardworking people trying to break their back to achieve the American dream. Esther wanted to confront this narrative by purposefully writing Sommy as a reluctant and “loser” migrant. Sommy just wants to chill and live a small and lovely life. She isn’t pressured about being the first nor best. She is moved by the need to matter to someone or something, and at the end of the book, she realizes that she can matter to someone and something that doesn’t require her powerlessness. Esther’s feminist background was instrumental in this. “What do we do with the desire to matter that has been manipulated by the patriarchy to convince women that unacknowledged and unseen servitude is a legitimate life, and also manipulated by capitalism (the girl boss propaganda) that self-optimization and making as much money as possible is the way to matter? I’m glad Sommy gets it in the end. She gets that responsibility to others who have less than she does, and in a way that is wholly giving, is the answer.”
Personal and national memory and its preservation is a significant cultural work and duty. When quizzed if she feels compelled to keep the memories of Nigeria alive in her writing and personal life, she responded assertively. In her response, she articulated how important it is to give language to quotidian experiences and how memory is how our experiences are preserved. “It’s important and loving to see ourselves reflected in art,” she said. It’s akin to a painter setting their eyes on an object. For Esther, Nigeria is her ultimate subject matter. “I have not loved and hated a thing with such equal intensity. I do feel a sense of duty to write about Nigeria, to be part of the discourse. Some of it is being trained in the Achebean tradition of art as a vehicle for change, and some of it is being a victim of Stockholm syndrome.”
To soften the blow of the emotional and communal isolation that African migrants feel, they rely on community. A Nigerian writer frames club rooms as “fugitive spaces” and havens. In their description, it’s an unconventional meeting room for finding important and needed rest and community. Esther agrees that these spaces are an important part of most people’s communities but adds that as her socio-economic status changes, she feels less inclined to align herself with words like “fugitive.” She has more power than that. She says this because it allows her to see what she’s capable of giving. Responsibility is a huge part of her identity, and this keeps her aware of the privileges she does and doesn’t have. “It’s easy to stay trapped in one side of the power spectrum, the victim side, and not see how much power we have to enact change.”
This power spectrum and the economic and capitalist idea that instills a sense of competitiveness into migrant communities has been an ongoing discussion. Capitalist structures present limited opportunities and scarce resources (jobs, housing, social services) for migrants. This perceived and touted scarcity forces individuals and families into direct competition with one another for essential stability. In some contexts, the capitalist pressure and structure emphasize individual achievement for social mobility and financial success. This atmosphere often pits members of the same community against each other as they strive to meet these high expectations and demonstrate individual exceptionalism. Esther admits that capitalist ideas and economic insecurity impose a sense of competition in every community, but her experience has been the opposite (which is not to say that there aren’t contrasting experiences).
She has felt supported by Nigerian writers in her own migrant community. She believes that there’s a general and increasing awareness that their fates, as migrants, are linked together and that the vision they have of their country can only be realized if they work together, especially as the Western world continues to bar many Africans from entering Western countries. “We know that there’s no use in being crowned a king in a place that can just as swiftly label you an “illegal”. I get the sense that we are working towards goals bigger than our personal desires for success. It’s invigorating.”
Audre Lorde once wrote, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies and eaten alive.” There is that human eagerness to define others, assign them into boxes and see them play minor and utilitarian roles in the story of their lives. This is the foundation of colonialism, patriarchy and other oppressive ideas and practices. Oppression occurs when the oppressor defines the oppressed in unflattering ways that are useful for their oppressive interest. As a human, it really starts, Esther opined, with defining oneself as utterly and completely worthy and not having that definition come from work or labor. This is why she chases pleasure and transcendental experiences. She loves looking at art and just enjoying how the colors play on her senses. She leisurely listens to music and watches birds and trees. Also, she is resisting the need to be constantly “productive” by learning to spend whole days doing nothing. “I’m learning to look at the world like a promise made to me, not to extract, which is a colonial mentality, but to witness, to be one with it.”
As humans, we often forget that we have one chance at life and that we are always living it. This principle – to remember to live, is what she’s on. And she isn’t in the business of explaining her humanity to oppressive systems by providing definitions of myself. “That work has already been done by selfless visionaries in the 60s and 70s and so on. What I do is live and write as fearlessly and beautifully as I can, in public and in private, and have that just be okay.”
The EndSars protest is the most recent time in Nigerian history that Nigerians, mostly youths, came out collectively to demand respect and the right to live freely and loudly. It was a nationwide protest against Nigeria’s SARS police unit that demanded accountability for profiling, police brutality and killings. The movement was suppressed by a violent government crackdown and over the years there have been state-sponsored attempts to erase memory of the event and its aftermaths. Esther was one of the active online protesters. And, five years later, she defines the protest as being fundamental to her political awakening. It was a powerful movement ;the passion and hunger for change she saw expressed on the streets of Lagos, Sokoto, Enugu and others still inspire her. Although the movement might be dormant, it’s not dead and the day of political reawakening is coming soon.
The Nigerian political landscape is akin to staring into an abyss. The constantly rising corruption, the disregard for Nigerian lives, and economic uncertainties Nigerians are exposed to, thanks to supposedly working politicians, inspire desperate feelings of hopelessness. Tribalism and ethical segregation amongst Nigerian youth is on the rise. The last Nigerian Presidential election presented monumental tribal occurrences. After the election, there has been an almost weekly ethnic-inclibed diatribe on social media. This is a disturbing reality and it might signal our doom if it’s not squarely addressed.
The Nigerian political and ruling class have no problem exploiting sensitive tribal wounds to create distrust and end movements that will bring about their destruction. They actively promote these destructive tribal conversations and movements. But, as Esther articulated, Nigerians must organize around class. “I want us to stay awake to that. Be vigilant. The enemy is never the poor neighbor. The poor neighbor doesn’t have the power to destabilize your life, your children’s lives, your grandchildren’s lives, but the Nigerian elite class have, for long decades, created policies that have left Nigerians in the pit of hell. Things have to change.”
As a Nigerian writer and thinker in the diaspora, she feels a responsibility towards committing and engaging with Nigerian political and social discourse. The anti-immigrant sentiment raging across the Western world is a constant reminder that the Japa phenomenon is a scam which only works temporarily. Thus, Nigerians in the diaspora are realizing that they have no choice but to be part of the discourse. Nigerian and African migrants cannot completely sever themselves from a country where they have family, friends, a whole village. What affects them inadvertently affects you. It pulls you back because you are stuck anxiously saving family members and friends from the jaws of poverty and insecurity. “In that way, you never get out of precarity yourself; it’s only a matter of time before the poverty and insecurity come for you. To my mind, there’s no other option than to be part of the discourse.”
Writer: Seyi Lasisi
Design: Emmanuel Ogunleye
Editors: Beatrice Nwoko, Amaka Obioji, Nafisa Mohammed, Chimee Adịọha
Interviewee Headshot: Lechoyce Photography
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