Where Chekov’s Gun Does Not Shoot, Okigbo’s Gun Will – Nkiacha Atemnkeng

Narrative structures, when overused, can become redundant. I had a lightning bolt moment in that regard the day my Nigerian American MFA classmate’s story was workshopped by an older, white, male American novelist. In my classmate’s short story, there is a one-page folk tale right at the end. Her workshop was going well in my opinion, until I heard the white American novelist advising my classmate to split her folktale into bits and splice it into different sections of her story. That is when I went berserk. After the workshop, I picked up the phone and called her, disagreeing with the white American workshop facilitator. I reasoned that she should leave her folktale in one piece. Yet, I tried to imagine why he may have given her such feedback and remembered something from one of my past fiction seminar classes.

A white female instructor taught the craft elements of a short story using a short story written by the acclaimed novelist who had workshopped my classmate during a seminar class. His short story examined the trauma experienced by his soldier characters during the Vietnam War from different angles and in a non-linear manner. I recalled my white female instructor’s words about the acclaimed novelist’s short story. She observed that when authors write about trauma, they generally write about it in an elliptical manner because it is so hard to write about trauma linearly. One often sees it done this way in many stories about trauma, in part because it can mirror the fragmentation that some trauma survivors experience as dissociation. 

But terms such as “dissociation” are Western concepts, and Adam Johnson calls this sort of fragmentation “Trauma Narrative.” And so, I figured out why perhaps the acclaimed novelist gave my classmate that splitting-your-folktale-advice. What my white, female instructor said made sense to that acclaimed novelist’s short story about war, but not really to my classmate’s short story. My classmate’s folktale is really short (one page), and her short story itself, at just ten pages, is relatively short too. Also, the way my classmate wrote her folktale at the end worked for me because it is an older female character who is telling the folktale to young children at the end of the short story to teach them a lesson about life, which is the essence of almost every folktale in my narrative tradition.

In West and Central African storytelling traditions, folktales are mostly told by older characters to younger characters to teach the characters in the folktales lessons and therefore teach their audience (the younger generation), those important lessons in the folktale as well. Sometimes, the folktales do not take this format and can be cautionary tales. Generally, though, the characters in these folktales are stand-ins for virtues such as perseverance, kindness, smartness, industriousness, etc. Hence, folktales are usually sophisticated metaphors, witty anecdotes and expounded proverbs, without any explanations whatsoever, which are specifically woven to be didactic. They are meant to trigger the intellect of the younger generation, or anyone really, who listens to them, to be able to make sense of the witty anecdotes, without really consulting elders to interpret those folktales for them. It is a cultural expectation that the younger generation who listen to the folktales from the older generation will have their own personal illumination from the listening experience and learn valuable life lessons at their own discretion.

Because brevity is always at a premium with these folktales, they are usually delivered whole; from the griots, the bards and praise singers of Africa, which were passed on to the works by the African literary pioneers of print like FA Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe, to modern-day novelists like Ayobami Adebayo. Now, for a ten-page short story, which even has its folktale at the end, what the older white American novelist advised my classmate to do did not make much sense to me, especially as my classmate was not even writing about trauma. 

I relayed my thoughts to her and even joked. “If you do not want Chinua Achebe to flinch in his grave and come to Texas and flog you with a koboko for splitting a folktale, abeg, do not listen to him. However, it is your story, so do what you want.”

Something similar has also happened to me during one of my workshops, with a middle-aged, white, American novelist as my workshop instructor. I submitted a short story titled “Zip Code. The story is about a young Cameroonian girl, BB, who is dating a white male college student in San Marcos, Texas, a college town with the zip code 78666. After a series of events, BB meets her cousin at a bar in San Marcos called Zelicks, with its conspicuous 78666 neon lights, on Halloween, while they are having drinks. BB’s cousin recognises her and calls her name in shock. Instead of going to greet her cousin, BB hurries through a bunch of people ordering drinks at the bar and disappears on that Halloween day. Forever. Such that her boyfriend, who goes looking for her at Zelicks and beyond, never sees her again. When he calls her sister in Cameroon, he learns that BB had died two years prior to her disappearance in San Marcos and is even shown a video of her grave in Mamfe, the small Cameroonian town where she was raised. This was a girl the white male student had dated, slept with, eaten with, and drunk with for the past two months, so how come? 

At the time, I only knew about the fly-on-the-wall concept for the workshopee, the writer being workshopped. So, I just sat there, listening to mostly white American peers analyse my short story, Zip Code, along the lines of “She’s a ghost… she’s not a ghost, she can drink and have sex… It’s a ghost story, she’s dead… it’s not a ghost story… I think Nkiacha is trying to subvert a ghost story, but he didn’t quite achieve that… Nkiacha employs Chekov’s gun to give us a hint that BB was dead and only returned to life in San Marcos, etc.” 

Chekov’s gun, which is a literary technique whereby an unimportant element introduced early in a story becomes significant later in the same story, is an important trope in Western storytelling traditions. As one critic put it beautifully, “If it is not going to be fired, then it shouldn’t be hanging there.” 

My peers and I admit that they were not malicious but were trying to critique in the spirit of the workshop, had still veered off track for almost the entirety of my workshop. I only came in at the end, to say that my character was not a ghost (which is a formless entity), but what is called the undead or reanimated dead; people who resurrect after dying young to live with their exact same body, just like any human and will vanish after their time stamp is up. Worthy of note, the undead are not zombies, who come back to life with real but putrefying, decaying bodies. The Ejagham people in Cameroon call the undead, Benem, the Yoruba in Nigeria call it Akudaaya, the Sotho people in Southern African countries call it Sethlotwane. 

I am not even the first writer from Central Africa to write such a story with the reanimated dead premise. It has even become a trope by several West and Central African writers; Ope Adedeji and Pemi Aguda have all published short stories in Western literary magazines with that premise in recent years. The only thing new in my story is my own creative spin, the juxtaposition of that undead idea with San Marcos’ parallels of the 666 mark of the beast-like numbers in its zip code (hence its title) and my San Marcan Halloween setting – a town with vulture-laden skies, which is near one of the biggest body farms in the US. 

My peers apologised, and I could see how slightly uncomfortable everyone looked on Zoom – the workshop had been held during the pandemic. It was still painful because I experienced a wasted workshop, which I could have salvaged by chiming in early. However, the lesson I learnt from that workshop is that I could have spoken up earlier, and explained the reanimated dead concept/premise only, and let them continue talking, just when my peers and my workshop instructor, who were not ill-intentioned, veered off track. I think it would have been a better workshop. Of course, being citizens from a Western country, they probably did not know all that from my narrative tradition, but I thought about and wondered about the importance of diverse reading. What if any of them had read an undead or reanimated dead story? I expected them to at least do some basic research to ensure that I had a productive workshop. They went with the closest thing to the undead, which they knew: ghosts. 

Also, I felt like the workshopee-is-a-fly-on-the-wall idea employed in many MFAs in America is dated and is not entirely correct. Workshopees can always hop in if the conversation veers off the story’s intentions. But I also think the workshopee should not just come in, talk and dominate everyone; only to redirect the workshop analysis. We had a conversation about all this in my next workshop with the instructor who taught the war story, and she implemented many of our concerns. She called on all of us to chime in if anyone was misinterpreting our work, but said we should not chime in just to dominate the conversation. 

She said we can all enjoy and relate to good art which can from any country, yes, but there’ll always be a few cultural aesthetics which we’ll miss through our blind spots if we’re not from that writer’s country. She encouraged us to Google things in our peers’ stories which we did not know, before coming to the workshop, to ensure that the conversations were productive for the workshopee. I tried my best with the stories which my American classmates submitted, but I confessed a few times in different workshops with stories which were so steeped in American cultural aesthetics which eluded me, that I was not really qualified to comment on certain aspects of those stories, so I would let other American students do it instead, lest I deliver unproductive feedback.

Personally, too, I thought that it would be productive for me to carefully select which kind of stories to submit to a fiction workshop in a Western classroom. In addition, my last MFA workshop instructor, who was born outside the US, called Chekov’s gun “a Western concept” and said that ghosts are an anomaly in American culture. Whereas the reanimated dead, ghosts, revenants and all other beliefs about the dead are an integral part of people’s culture in many African countries and even many other regions around the world, like her country. The first draft of my story “Zip Code” had weaknesses which could be improved upon no doubt, but I thought the story is a good representation of how Chekov’s gun would not work in a story at all; the thrill of such a story would always be finding out that BB is dead towards the end and grappling deeply with that wild idea, no matter how uncomfortable or ridiculous the idea may sound to any reader who does not believe in the undead. 

We can always give some sort of hints in stories, but revealing the death of BB at the beginning of such a story, through Chekov’s gun, will spoil not just the suspense, but also the fascinating premise of such stories about the reanimated dead. It is on the same tangent as Paul Ugbede’s brilliant flash fiction, “My Maths Teacher Hates Me.” Revealing what “y” is to any prospective reader in that story, using Chekov’s gun, and poof, the magic of that story’s conundrum is all gone.

That brings me to the playfulness of my title. “Where Chekov’s gun does not shoot, Okigbo’s gun will shoot”. It stems from the fact that Christopher Okigbo, arguably Nigeria’s greatest poet, drew from his traditions and customs and forged a unique poetic form with complex personal themes. In rhythmic musical poems, Okigbo imaginatively blends African culture and ritual with such influences as Christianity and Western poetics in a way which is subversive. Furthermore, I am drawing parallels with Okigbo’s work, by saying that just like he takes poetic inspiration from his tradition and culture and blends it with Western poetics, many fiction writers and poets from West and Central Africa also take inspiration from their traditions, cultures and environment as well. Sometimes they blend it with Western poetic and narrative forms. Sometimes they do not – which I must specify, lest I create a monolith about these writers. The Nigerian poet, Adedayo Agaurau, once said about MFA programs, “If you admit a poet from my country, then you also have to accept his/her/their traditions and culture as well.”

Lastly, my main premise is figuratively bringing up the fact that Christopher Okigbo was a soldier in real life, who was martyred for what he stood for in 1967, while fighting for the Eastern Region, during the Nigerian Civil War. I am saying that Okigbo is the poet with a real gun that can guide me to shoot my own bullet from my own Central African perspective, unlike Anton Chekov, who was a Russian medical doctor who had no business with a real gun – only his syringe and surgical knives. Perhaps a better name for his literary technique would have been Chekov’s syringe or Chekov’s surgical knife? Okay, I’m just kidding. But my serious question is, why must I use Chekov’s gun in my own stories? I can use it sometimes, but not all the time. Perhaps not at all. Sometimes I prefer to use Okigbo’s gun, which is a real gun by a soldier who was also a great poet. 

Disclaimer: I am only speaking about shooting a gun with respect to Chekov’s gun in Literature. I will never shoot anyone in real life. Abeg, do not take me literally.

Nkiacha Atemnkeng is a writer from Cameroon. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University in San Marcos, where he taught College writing courses as a faculty member after he graduated. He is currently enrolled in the PhD in Rhetoric, Writing and Professional Communication at East Carolina Universityin North Carolina. Nkiacha has published fiction and creative non-fiction in various anthologies in print, such as The Lost Manuscript and Other Meditations by Bakwa Books in 2025, the Caine Prize for African writing anthology, Lusaka Punk and Other Stories, the 2019 Short Story Day Africa (SSDA) Hotel Africa fiction anthology, Of Passion and Ink: New Voices from Cameroon fiction anthology by BakwaBooks, Limbe to Lagos: Nonfiction from Cameroon and Nigeria by Bakwa and Saraba magazines, and Taxi Drivers Who Drive Us Nowhere nonfiction anthology. Nkiacha’s work has been published in The Guardian UK, The Africa Report, This is Africa, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Porter House Review, Longreads, among others. He is a winner of the Goethe Institut/Sylt Foundation African Writer’s Residency Prize on Sylt island, Germany, as well as a 2021 Art Omi Writer’s residency fellow in Ghent, New York. Nkiacha was runner-up in the Bakwa Magazine Short Story contest. He attended the 2018 Miles Morland Foundation writer’s workshop on Bulago island, Uganda and the 2015 Caine Prize writers’ workshop in Elmina, Ghana.

*Image by Philip Myrtorp on Unsplash