Inua Ellams — from show-off to troublemaker

Inua Ellams’ one-man autobiographical play, the 14th Tale, begins with an anxious scene – the writer, wearing a blood-stained T-shirt, is waiting at a hospital to hear news of his father’s health. From this inauspicious beginning, the play traces Ellams’ family heritage as a group of ‘troublemakers’, going on to his experiences at boarding school, to his perceptions of London and Dublin (where he shifted with his family in his early teens) and his evolution as a performance poet. “I became a poet because we were too poor to buy paint, and so I couldn’t become an artist like I had planned,” he grins. “So I thought, okay, I guess writing is kind of like painting with your fingers.”

Ellams’ play was staged at the NCPA’s Experimental Theatre as part of the Tata LitLive Festival. A couple of hours before it began, Ellams sat down to speak about his artistic influences, the role of his family, and how he came to realise that telling a personal story might be a more effective way to ‘change the world’.

Born to a middle-class Nigerian family in 1984, Ellams was 12 years old when he moved with his family from Nigeria to London, and then to Dublin a few years later. “When I was younger, around 19, I wrote ambitious poems about the state of the world and the problems we all face and create,” Ellams remembers. “It seemed that all I had to do was throw a pen and it would hit something that was wrong with the world.”

It was an English teacher in Dublin who initially gave Ellams the push to take poetry seriously. “I started writing as a way to show-off and impress my teacher and classmates.” But when a friend, a person whom Ellams “wrote for and with”, committed suicide, he started writing seriously. “This friend and I were very similar – we were argumentative, loved words and hip hop, and both wore glasses. He always said I would be a writer. After his suicide, I began to write with much more intent.”

Ellams remembers the culture shock of arriving in London from Nigeria with no understanding of the word or concept of racism. “I remember the first time someone was outwardly racist towards me. I had never come across such a thing before, so I didn’t know this term. People said, ‘You shouldn’t take that,’ and I said: ‘Take what? What’s happened?’”

Through the 14th Tale, Ellams reveals that in his ancestral village, his father and grandfather were infamous for their pranks and troublemaking. Ellams is intent on carrying on this family tradition and causes trouble wherever he goes. “I think making art can be considered a kind of troublemaking and mischief... The best art usually angers some people.”

Ellams’ play, however, has struck a more pleasing chord with audiences throughout the world. One of the childhood experiences he evokes in the play is straight out of boarding school, when a friend and him were made to fight for the entertainment of their older classmates. “So many people come up to me and say, I was just like that! Or, my child did something like that yesterday! I’ve realised that pointing out our similarities as human beings is so much more powerful than pointing out what we’re doing wrong.”