Chinaza is as deep as she is bubbly, a loud laugh at her lips in every picture, even as she seemingly casts the weight of the world where it belongs. And I don’t really know where that is—do tell me when you find it. This same one, Za, a quiet wonder who writes some of the most profound things you’ll find anywhere. We’ve challenged ourselves with many writing prompts, tried to keep in touch, and somehow, she always wins at being ahead—meeting every commitment—while I, somehow, lag behind until our agreements fail to materialise.

In thinking about all of this, I found myself reading her Love, Death, and Dominoes (LDD, as I’ll call it moving forward, which you can read HERE), after getting the privilege of enjoying it before LOLWE officially put it out. It wasn’t the obligated read of the last time, but a composed, measured reading this time, as I nursed a bad flu and struggled to get my brain to stay in one place, rather than follow the million fleeting thoughts and sensations it was driving me to. I should have been in church, but here I was, sick-bound and reading—perhaps fittingly—this work.
I WILL SAY THIS EASILY over here: Chinaza James-Ibe is one of the younger Nigerian writers whose writing pulls strings in my heart. While I may not have read all her work, I certainly love what I have read—for its depth, beauty, and honesty. In my opinion, Love, Death, and Dominoes is one of the finest things I have read all year.

But we did not outgrow hope; to outgrow hope is to wither beneath sunlight and rain. To die alive. … it has become a joke how the things that mattered so much to us are now the things we walk past without noticing. [Love, Life and Dominoes]

Chinaza’s LDD is a deep and sobering creative non-fiction piece that interrogates a writer’s obsession with darkness in her work, her life, love and everything else that comes with that. It is structured into ten interconnected sections that are richly philosophical, linguistically clean, and full of questions that call to mind a lot of what we as humans carry with us. It questions faith, morality, life and so much more. Considering only last week, we had a close call with death [but God’s mercy said NO!] and I have lost count of how many times I have been forced to quit trying to call a certain loved one on their birthday or anniversary due to death, I can relate with a lot of what she says. I have loved, and I still love, deeply, sometimes too deeply, and I want that love to be for everything, and almost everyone. So, I relate on that count too. As a writer who once wrote dark before deciding to let light shine since there is too much in the world, I also relate to much of the darkness in too many ways… And yes, humour is a thing that calls my name. So, maybe I love LDD because it tells me of a me that once was and perhaps still lives somewhere deep within, despite all that I have become. Age becomes us and time changes yesterday, making us wonder about so many things but, let’s talk about the work.

Every so often, a piece of writing lands in your lap and reminds you of why you read. Chinaza James-Ibe’s Love, Death, and Dominoes is one of those rare gems—raw, elegiac, and achingly honest. It’s the sort of work that you don’t simply read. You feel your way through it. And when you finish, you realise something in you has shifted.

Let’s start with the language because that’s the first thing that grips you. Chinaza writes with a bold lyricism, a voice that feels simultaneously lived-in and still forming, like fresh clay that knows it’s destined for fire. The prose is lush and alive, often poetic but never showy. There’s clarity here, but it’s laced with just enough opacity to give the work texture. She uses repetition in this piece, especially with the echoing of “death”, like a constant footfall to mimic the recursive nature of grief. She turns ordinary observations into something delicate and devastating.

The tone is light and devastating in turns, often within the same breath. It shifts from humour to horror, from anger to gentle introspection, without ever feeling scattered. There’s a youthful confidence to it, perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Chinaza is in her twenties and a recent graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. One can’t help but feel that the intellectual and artistic ferment of Nsukka has seeped into her sensibilities, or maybe we shouldn’t give the school that one, since as we note from her essay, LDD, she was already reading by six and writing in primary school! And there was deep thinking that went into her writing even at that age. Gosh! New generation people sha. I remember drawing comics when I was that age, but thinking of writing something complicated. Hmmm.

LDD reads like a mosaic, structured in ten parts with no clear linear narrative. Yet somehow, it holds together like an intricate patchwork quilt, with grief and love as its binding threads. The recurring imagery, dominoes, whiteness, silence, death as ceremony, is deeply evocative. At times, you’re not sure if you’re reading memoir or theology, eulogy or essay. And this adds to the beauty of the work, the confession, telling, and general showing.

"Sometimes, death goes hand in hand with hope. The same way a year dies and we make wishes and manifestations on its corpse. It is like forcing a corpse to decompose and rise with the sun as a dandy sunflower. There are a plethora of things it can become: thorns, spirogyra. Why do we expect nature to obey us when we are still? [...] This was before I realised that the sunset was enough transformation for God, that we could be waiting for him all our lives while he flipped the switch over and over again, content in the incarnation of nature. Our lives were given to us so we could live them; why do we wait for God to live our lives for us? Why do we lie still in the mud? Why do we embark on this endless wait? As I watched death around me, I realised that everything else was so minuscule compared to it – the final truth. The world was not going to pause simply because I paused; it was going to move, and no matter what I or anyone else did, death would come." [Love, Death, and Dominoes]

There’s also something distinctly Nigerian about the spirit of the work, and not just in the references to fufu, knockouts, and Betnaija. It’s in the communal nature of grief, the religion-haunted worldview, the peculiar mix of faith and cynicism that pervades everyday life. The anecdote about the politician, the borehole, and the enraged deity could easily feel like satire but Chinaza allows it to sit beside personal mourning and existential musings without a trace of jarring. There is that Naija flavour that we use to make life easier, humour. Don’t we always find a way to bury our deepest wahala in some joke, comedy or the other? In saying this, I remember that shortly after we buried my foster father in 2011 after his assassination, we drove back to Makurdi in silence, and somehow, found ourselves laughing in the evening. Not because we weren’t pained, but because, somehow it is what we do. We have learnt to laugh as some form of escapism. It does not matter that in the coming months, it was too dark and I nearly lost me, we would find ways to laugh every time we got. It is this same humour that Chinaza sprinkles into her work in many places, dry and biting. As the author herself notes in the piece, “For the average Nigerian, humour is a basic social amenity. If anything, we know how to laugh until tears stream down our eyes and then keep laughing.”

One of the most impressive feats of this piece is how deftly it explores power. As she states in the piece, “Humans are born with full power over themselves, and they give it all away to people, things, and beliefs until they have no power left.” The author takes us through the act of writing itself as an assertion of control, killing characters to reclaim agency, rebuilding worlds as a form of resistance, and how she works generally to use her ‘stronger right hand’ to reclaim power in every way she can to hold as hers for good. It’s an idea that feels profound without ever descending into pretension.
That said, there are moments where the introspection threatens to loop in on itself a little too tightly. The philosophical ruminations on God and grief, while deeply moving, sometimes tread familiar terrain. But even in those instances, the emotional truth of her writing pulls you back in. It feels lived, not theorised.
There is also some treatise on love and Kintsugi, that beautiful Japanese act which I have written about myself in a previous post.
I could go on and on but that would probably just be a spoiler, so I guess it is best to have you do your own reading, in your own time, and at your pace, perhaps like I did to experience Chinaza’s writing which comes forth like someone writing to wrestle, to remember, and live. Perhaps you would also notice after your reading something that she gives us in this piece, permission to hold grief and love in the same trembling hands. This too, is something I can relate to, as I am sure a lot of my loved ones can too.
In this period where we commemorate Easter again, may we find peace and hope even as we grapple with all the things that this life brings our way…
And on Chinaza’s piece, you can be sure I’ll be returning to this piece, whenever the world grows quiet again.

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S. Su’eddie Vershima Agema is a multiple-award-winning writer, editor, cultural advocate, and development practitioner. Among other books, he is the author of Memory and the Call of Water (Winner, Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize 2022 and Runner Up, [NLNG] Nigeria Prize for Literature 2022] and winner, Mandela Day Short Story Prize 2016. He heads SEVHAGE Publishing and its sister charity, SEVHAGE Literary and Development Initiative, as well as African and Black Creatives 4 Development, while convening the annual Benue Book and Arts [International] Festival. He is the Managing Editor of the notable poetry collective, Konya Shamsrumi, and sits on the editorial team of Cons-cio Magazine. He also convenes and administers the SEVHAGE Literary Prizes, a collection of different prizes across the various genres. Su’eddie is a 2018 Chevening Scholar and a 2022 David C. Pollock Scholar.