My mother was almost nine months pregnant with me when she slipped and fell on the ice at a bus stop in Mainz. There were people standing there, waiting for the bus to arrive, and not one of them moved. She got up by herself and walked all the way back to the flat.
She told me this one night in November 2022, as I interviewed her in her room in Nigeria. I had come home with a plan to ask her about her time in Germany, 1993 to 1994, because she had told us many tales about those years. She was telling it the way it came to her mind, which may not have been the order in which each event occurred. She smiled as she recounted, and I stopped her many times to ask for more details about some of the events as I scribbled fast. Of course I had to write fast, because making someone speak at the pace of writing can kill the steam. When I say I have heard scraps and bits of my mother’s stay in Germany, it is because things happen around her that remind her of certain events, then she would laugh and recount them to us.
I was born in Mainz in January 1994. My father, Ezenwa-Ohaeto, the poet and scholar, had gone there in 1992 on a DAAD fellowship at the Johannes Gutenberg University, and his visa allowed his family to come along. So my mother, Ngozi, came in 1993, pregnant with me and with my toddler brother, to a city on the Rhine where she did not speak the language and did not know any person apart from her husband. About a year after I was born, she took both of us home to Nigeria. My father stayed on and kept going back to Germany for the rest of his life, as a Humboldt fellow and later as a visiting professor in Berlin. He died in 2005, when I was eleven.
I have no memory of Germany at all. What I have is a birth certificate written entirely in German. I have looked at it many times, and the only words on it I can read are my name, my mother’s name, my father’s name, and the word Mainz. There are photographs too, but photographs only show a moment fixed in time.
Why did I decide, in 2022, to go and collect the pieces properly? I would like to say it was a noble reason, but the honest answer is that I had always found the bits of story my mother told interesting, and I had this nag in me to do something with them. One day I finally listened to the small voice that had been telling me for years that this was a book. My father was a writer. I grew up watching him read every single evening, and I suppose a child who grows up like that will eventually try to write something. I had been writing stories since I was little. Now I wanted to make a novel out of a particular story.
A faithful account of my mother’s year in Germany would have been a short book, in which she managed her baby, her toddler, and her home, with a little hiatus here and there. There is nothing wrong with that, but nothing much in it would have stirred anybody’s thoughts, and a novel needs something to explode. I decided from the start that I would make it a novel so that I could add conflict, and I decided to include things that really happened but to change them, so that nothing would happen exactly the way it happened in life.
The woman in the book is Ifeoma. She is twenty-seven, from Awka, six months pregnant on a Lufthansa flight out of Lagos on the twenty-ninth of September 1993. Her husband Ugochukwu is a Humboldt fellow who teaches African literature at the University of Mainz. Her son is Ikenna. The baby she has in January is a girl, and the girl is inspired by me. I confess she was born in the novel on the same day I was born, and I gave her a photograph in the hospital reception with the caption Das erste schwarze Baby, the first Black baby, because I was actually the first Black baby to be born in that hospital in 1994.
The kind German woman with the winter coats, Zelda Wolf, is a professor at the university who has not spoken to her own daughter in two years because the daughter married a Black man, and who is now assigned, against her wishes, to help a Black family settle in Mainz. The real woman (God rest her soul), as far as my mother could tell, was simply very kind. I made her kindness cost her something, and I made her change. I said in the author’s note that Zelda bears no resemblance to the woman who inspired her.
I did enjoy myself while working on Torn Between Homes. I gave Ifeoma a day in the supermarket, Rosemart, where the shoppers stare so much that she decides to buy bananas on purpose, to give them something to think about. She imagines doing King Kong stunts in the aisle and waves at them cheerfully from outside. I gave her the New Year’s Eve when strangers kept wishing her “einen guten Silvester” and she wondered who the Silvester was that everybody was greeting. I gave her an ambulance she did not understand when she was in labour, because where we come from an ambulance carries the dead mostly, and she tells her husband, “I am still alive!” I gave her a nurse in the delivery room who says, in German, that today she will see how these people give birth. Ifeoma who does not speak German but understands expressions, grabs the nurse by her hair as the baby comes and does not let go, although it was a reflex and the nurse was simply the closest person to her. I gave her a landlady with an old German shepherd, a neighbour who slides complaints under the door, and in the end a fight in a restaurant by the Rhine that keeps her awake for a month waiting for the police. Agbacha egwu, ola na ukwu, as we say: after the dance, the waist bears the brunt of it.
My mother read the manuscript before it was published, and when she finished, she called me. “Nene,” she said, “there are too many things you said I did which I didn’t do.” I laughed and reminded her that it is fiction. That Ifeoma is Ifeoma and she is herself.
There was one thing she would not accept, though. In the book, Zelda visits the flat while Ifeoma is cooking with ogiri. Ogiri is a seasoning we make from fermented castor seeds; it is strong, and that is the whole point of it. Zelda smells it and insists that the baby must have soiled himself. My mother did not like this at all. “Germans have a spice that smells worse,” she told me, and she was right. They do, but I still left the scene in.
The book has been out for nearly a year now, and it has started to travel to places I never thought about while working on it. It is in libraries in Berlin, Vienna and New York, and in the city library of Mainz, three decades after my mother pushed a pram through that city’s snow. Last month a scholar in Vienna wrote to tell me she had known my father, and had met my mother some years after Germany, and could she have the book? A Black American professor in Illinois wrote to say she had been born in Germany too and had spent part of her childhood in Mainz, and that she liked to imagine our two families passing each other on the platform at Frankfurt station in those years, each one a little steadier for seeing the other. I liked that very much. I have no memory of that city, and a stranger has given me one.
I think what the book is really about is the first year. We talk a lot about migration, about leaving and about arriving, but we do not talk much about the year in between, when you have left one home and have not yet made another, when the person you used to be does not work in the new place and the person you are going to become has not been built. My mother spent a whole year inside that gap. Then she came home, and who in Nigeria wanted to hear about the loneliness of a flat in Mainz? She had come back with a professor for a husband and two healthy children. As far as everybody was concerned, Germany was the good part.
About the Book
Inspired by the author’s own family history, Torn Between Homes is a tender and sharply observed novel about migration, marriage, and motherhood far from home. It is a japa story from before the word existed, and a rich choice for book clubs.
“A poignant and deeply human novel… a hauntingly beautiful story of migration and one woman’s search for home.” NewInBooks
Torn Between Homes has been read and reviewed in six countries. It can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1069931713
About the Author
Nnedimma Okoli is a Nigerian writer and lawyer. She was born in Mainz, Germany, in 1994, the daughter of the poet and scholar Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Chinua Achebe’s biographer, and now lives in Calgary, Canada. She was a finalist for the 2024 Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. Torn Between Homes, her first novel, was published in December 2025 and is available on Amazon and through bookshops.