I should’ve played basketball when I was ten.
Not attempting to do so is one of my lingering regrets, even though I
realize that holding on to this sentiment thirty years later makes little
sense. It’s just that I can’t count the number of times I was asked back then
if I played basketball for my secondary school, with everyone that asked just
assuming that I did.
I was tall and lanky and looked like I played a sport. I also had a
history of being a die-hard tomboy who played soccer with my brothers and their
friends just as roughly as they did. When it came to baseball, I was a ‘feared’
pitcher as the only girl on our informal basketball teams. My brother had
groomed me well, teaching me how to pitch a deadly curveball, corkscrew, and
fastball.
Then I spent my tenth year of life at a girls-only, Catholic secondary
school and moved on to a mixed boarding school the year after that. Both
schooling experiences cured me of my tomboyishness. I learned what it meant to
be ‘a girl’ at one, and these lessons were reinforced at the other where girls
and boys largely lived in two separate worlds within the same school compound.
With the realization that I was ‘a girl’ and an enhanced understanding
of what this meant, my natural shyness grew exponentially and, for the first
time, I became shy about participating in sports. Painfully shy. And not just about sports, but about pretty much
everything else, too. This is not a complaint about the schools I went to,
though (I look back and I’m convinced they were both great schools at that
time). It’s merely an observation.
I still wish I had played basketball, though, because I really did want
to at the time, and I believe I would’ve been good at it. Plus, playing a sport
comes with many benefits that I would’ve been happy to carry into my old age.
One of the reasons why I hold on to the memory of this regret is
because it reminds me to push myself. I have this fear of not living up to my
potential, of not making a difference. Of ending up like the proverbial wicked servant
who, instead of putting the ‘little’ he had to use, buried it out of fear and
low self-esteem.
Over the years, God has REALLY helped me with my crippling shyness. I’ve
come a long, long way, but I have by no means overcome it. I have done many
things afraid, with my stomach churning, trembling on the inside, doubting myself,
unsure and far too worried about how I would be received.
My work has been an excellent training ground for managing this
annoying trait of mine. Its very nature demands that I stretch and step into
the unfamiliar all the time, that I multi-task and juggle far more than I think
is humanly possible. It has created a situation where I have so little time to
focus on the fact that I’m terribly shy. I’m forever meeting deadlines by the
skin of my teeth, and once I’m done with one task, it’s time to get up there
and speak (for instance), and as the waves of shyness hit me and try to bowl me
over, it’s too late. I’m up there already and I have to say what I came to say
within a limited amount of time and move on to the next thing.
I consider it as one of my greatest achievements that few people I meet
today believe me when I say I really struggle with this. They’re shocked to
learn this and I’m shocked that they’re shocked. It proves to me just how much
I’ve worked on ignoring it and just how much I’ve been helped.
When I finally decided to take the plunge and contact a publisher, I
did it afraid.
For my 40th birthday, among the presents I got were two
copies of the same book (from different people) – a book by a Nigerian author
based in the UK who published her novel (which was shortlisted for the
Commonwealth Writers Prize) in East Africa. When I started examining different
books to figure out which publishers would be best for my sort of writing, my
eyes were drawn to these two birthday presents. I looked at the back of the
books and wondered: Why would a Nigerian
woman based in the UK choose to publish her book all the way out here?
I looked up the address of the publisher online and found out they were
practically in my neighborhood. This was really strange. I could literally get
in my car and be there in 10 minutes or less. Not wanting to deal with a
possible rejection letter, I called instead. The people I needed to speak to
were out of the office, so I was asked to send an email. I sent a link to the
blog on October 4th and waited. And waited. I waited impatiently for
a couple of weeks before finally getting a nice (if non-commital) response,
asking that we set up a time to meet. That meant more waiting because of our
busy schedules and because I suddenly had all these trips to make. And then I didn’t
hear from them for a while. We had agreed to set up a meeting, but hadn’t actually
selected any dates.
Should I wait for them to follow
up on this? I wondered.
I swallowed my fear of putting myself out there and of ‘bothering’
people and contacted them again, letting them know my availability. We set a
date, but then there was some hitch that required our postponing the meeting. Needless
to say, I was on edge the whole time.
I finally met with the publisher on November 20th. We had an
amazing, hour-long conversation which
easily could’ve gone on longer if not that we both had to get back to work. He
was fine with my using a pseudonym and asked me what name I had in mind, with
his pen ready to write it down.
‘Nnenna Ndioma,’ I said.
‘Nena Ndioma,’ he said, trying it out for himself. And he proceeded to
write it down (as ‘Nena,’ I later discovered). I explained the meaning of each name to him. ‘Ndi oma’ means 'good people.' ‘Nnenna,’ on the other hand, literally
means ‘father’s mother.’ It’s a common name among the Igbo, who traditionally
believe in reincarnation, and who often feel honored that their mother, for
instance, has come back into the world as their child. My father firmly
believed that I was his mother and I always came up with counter arguments
demonstrating why I couldn’t possibly be. He chose not to give me a name
reflecting his belief, but when a reader on the blog referred to me as ‘Nne
Nna,’ it occurred to me that this was actually the perfect pen name.
‘That’s the perfect name, actually,’ the publisher said pensively,
after I told him what it meant.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, Nena [he said,
mispronouncing it again] in Kiswahili means Talk
or Speak it out. And from your blog, I
can see that this is essentially what you’re trying to do. And Ndioma [mispronounced, too] could easily
be a name anywhere in East and Southern Africa.’
He pronounced ‘Nnenna Ndioma’ as one would pronounce it if speaking
Kiswahili (a language widely spoken in East Africa). Delicately. It gave the name a nice ring, but totally messed up the
meaning. In Igbo, it is pronounced with much more emphasis on the syllables and
with a certain kind of deep tonality that’s hard to describe – you just have to
hear it.
But I was extremely pleased with the name, however it was pronounced. I
was even more convinced that this was the perfect
pseudonym for me. I was totally enamoured with the idea that this Nigerian name
could pass for an East African one and I saw it as a way of paying tribute to
my father, but at the same time, of paying tribute to a region that has been so
good to me professionally. I packed up and moved to East Africa 8 years ago and
it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my entire life.
This region has given me an extremely rewarding career, and now it has given me
another great opportunity.
I am grateful for it all – even for the shyness. Yes, it makes me ‘over-think’
things unnecessarily (really exhausting, trust me), and although I don’t
recommend analyzing things to death the way I tend to, it does seem to leave someone
like me better prepared to confront whatever I need to.
