Staff reader Zara Karschay speaks with NER 47.2 writer Olaniyi Omiwale about the social currency of writers, creating characters with consciousness, and finding the “unguarded truth” within the parenthetical.
Zara Karschay: Let’s start with place. You set “Parenthesis” in Lagos, and it opens with your narrator saying the Nigerian city is “by temperament and statute a city without maps.” Is this absence of structure a deliberate act for Lagos to liberate or conceal itself, or does its resistance to mapping represent something else entirely?
Olaniyi Omiwale: The unmapped city is not simply a liberation Lagos has performed on its own behalf, nor is it simply a wound that statute failed to dress. It is both, often operating simultaneously. The danfos, Lagos’s famous yellow-and-black buses, sometimes run routes that exist nowhere on paper because the city has organically organized around the state’s absence. Elsewhere, plots of land remain undocumented not from neglect but because someone in power made sure they would stay that way; the same gap on the map, but not the same gap.
I’d say “Parenthesis” dissolves the distinction between concealment and liberation rather than choosing between them. The unmapped city doesn’t liberate the protagonist Akin from his obligations; it just lets him call them something softer than what they are. Another character, Ifunanya, names the real structure underneath all that softening when she talks about the accounts everyone keeps: not the clean kind with numbers, but an internal registration of debt nobody files. Lagos’s cartography isn’t absent, then, but private; more personal conscience than professional ledger. It’s what happens when a place chooses, generation after generation, party after party, to oblige the debt over the deed.
ZK: Your story takes particular aim at the social currency of writers. Akin attends a party, and its guests seem unsettled by him, even if they are eager to be seen around a writer. One guest makes a joke at the expense of his work, which Akin feels compelled to take on the chin. What is it about writers and thinkers that threaten the status quo?
OO: What unsettles the other guests about him, before anyone’s said a word, is the feeling that a writer in the room is a person who may decide that everything happening that night could be potential material for his next work. By entrusting his experiences to print, he’s the only person who might “outlast” the party. That’s an enormous, almost rude privilege to hold quietly while eating someone else’s party jollof. The guests aren’t wrong to feel unsettled by it.
The joke at the party may be the most honest moment in the story because it shows the threat and its defusal happening in the same breath. Akin has written a book about margins, and someone asks, “Has it marginalized the margins yet?” The room laughs without malice. They can’t stop Akin from mapping the margins in his book, but they can insist his book is marginalia to the evening; good for a laugh but ultimately contained within the party rather than outside of or above it. They make the threat sociable, let him take it on the chin with the correct, practiced smile, and the evening proceeds.
ZK: Akin is studied in the way he comports himself. What is your process when shaping character?
OO: I think a character should convey consciousness and not just information. I try to shape a man rather than a mouthpiece. Rather than starting from the man I want him to be, I try to write the detail before I know what it means—the curtainless window, the gait. Only afterwards do I ask what kind of man would be behind them.
A mouthpiece already knows what he means. A man finds out badly, at a party, in the one moment his neighbors are watching closely enough to make sure he never forgets it.
ZK: Your title is significant. A parenthesis can be a grammatical note, an aside, and something categorized as unimportant, and you toy with this multiplicity of meaning throughout the piece. Just one of the story’s passages is in parentheses, and your title invites us to pay special attention to it. The paragraph concerns fitting in: In Lagos, an element of performance is an expectation. What made you choose this technique to convey the message of performance?
OO: The things we consider parenthetical are very often exactly where the unguarded truth surfaces, precisely because grammatical convention asks us not to consider them the main event. But my title asks the reader to notice this has been happening the whole time, at every scale. The story itself is a kind of parenthesis (fiction is often treated as an aside to real life).
I liked the idea that the most authorial intrusion in the piece was within the least authoritative typographical marker. It felt true to how performance works in Lagos, and perhaps everywhere: The official text gets the most attention, but the truth runs in the margins, in brackets, in the things you were told don’t matter.
ZK: Ifunanya, another character at the party, believes that “A book is a thing you carry like a child. You bear it and then you hope it will not hurt other people.” Akin thinks having that kind of hope is arrogant. As a writer, where do you stand on the question of “taking responsibility” for your fiction?
OO: Where I stand is closer to what the story does than to what either character says: I try to write my sentences as honestly as I can, try not to use real people as furniture for fictional arguments, and then accept the story will go where I cannot follow it and mean things I didn’t intend and find readers I didn’t imagine, one of whom will be a friend, who will look at a character constructed from seven different people and see only the one I was trying hardest not to include.
ZK: What are you working on now?
OO: I’m currently at work on my first novel, an alternate history of Nigeria. Its protagonist is a poet who gets caught up in a coup d’état.
Olaniyi Omiwale was born in Lagos, Nigeria. His short stories and essays have appeared in several publications. He currently lives in the country’s capital, Abuja.
Zara Karschay’s fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Baffler, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. She received the Harper-Wood Award for English Poetry and Literature from the University of Cambridge in 2017–18, and was awarded second prize in Zoetrope: All Story’s Short Fiction Competition in 2025. She reads fiction submissions for NER.