Inua Ellams

Ellams was born in the city of Jos in the north Nigerian highlands[7][8] to the nation tribe of the nomadic Hausa people[1][9] in a family with a "long line of troublemakers"[10] with his grandfather and father being infamous in their ancestral village for their troublesome pranks.[11][12]

Ellams' father, Inua Ellams I,[13][4][5] was born Muslim in the early 1950s[14] in Bendel State (what is now Edo State)[15] to a Hausa-Fulani mother,[16][17][18] and, while in secondary school, survived through the Midwest Invasion of August 1967 in the Nigerian Civil War,[14] which leveled his town and pitted him against his uncle.[14] After educating at Nautica University,[4] his career led him to becoming the managing director of a Coca-Cola bottling plant[19] and also to owning and operating a successful business in the import and export trading[6][13] of Nigerian food.[20] His work mostly saw him outside of Nigeria travelling extensively around the world.[4][19] Ellams' father met Ellams' Christian mother;[7][21][20][19] together, they had 4 children, including Ellams, all out-of-wedlock. They eventually married in 1995[22] in a mixed-faith marriage rejected by some wider family members.[23]

Ellams' family lived a wealthy and privileged upper-middle-class with family servants, several houses, and security guards.[10][24][19] Ellams attended boarding-school at the Plateau Private School in Jos.[1][24] Growing up, Ellams wanted to be, variously, an architect,[25] painter (he eventually became disillusioned with due to its perceived pretentiousness),[9] town planner,[4] businessman like his father, comic book writer, graphic designer, and athlete.[26] He followed both faiths in his household, Islam and Christianity, with "similar enthusiasm".[22] He played with his sisters' Barbie dolls while composing stories about comic strip superheroes.[13]

In 1993 or 1994,[19] his father went on a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia – a tenet of the Islamic faith – but he saw some things there which he did not agree with.[21][20] Upon returning to Nigeria,[21] his father began to openly doubt his faith and was considering to leave Islam[21] and decided to convert to Christianity.[6][13][25] Members of the local Muslim community were not happy with his father, and further resenting the wealth of the family, they made life difficult for them.[19] Islamic extremists threatened the family and tried to kill his father.[21][20] This region in Northern Nigeria is now overrun by Islamic terrorist organization Boko Haram.[19][4][27] In 1996, in the dead of night at gunpoint,[28] the family escaped to Lagos, but the extremists followed them there and the threats and violence still continued.[19][20] They mistakenly burned down the house of the family's neighbour, confusing it for the Ellams family's.[19] His father was chased by a car full of men shooting AK47s at him,[29] they killed one of the Ellams family's security guards[29][19] and one of Ellams' uncles also disappeared and is still missing in suspicious circumstances.[29][10][30] Amongst this situation, one of Ellams' uncles, who owned Nigeria's first independent television station and wanted to build bridges with the British BBC, tapped Ellams' father due to his extensive world experience and investments in telecommunications, for a job opening in London.[31][19] His father moved to London first,[19] then a few months later, in the autumn of 1996, when Ellams was aged 12, the rest of the family migrated from Nigeria to London, UK[32] under political exile.[13]

The family settled in Holland Park, a "very multicultural" neighborhood of London.[1][33] British culture was not foreign to Ellams as he had visited London before at age 8 or 9[34] and loved British television in Nigeria.[25] Unlike in Nigeria, money was tight for his family in Britain, and Ellams even resorted to cutting his own hair[35] being unable to afford to go to the barbershop.[36] He attended Holland Park School[1] in Holland Park, London, where he experienced racism for the first time when, confusingly, a schoolboy called him a "nig nog", which had to be explained to him by his white best friend Jack Prideaux.[25]

In 1997, Ellams' family applied for an extension to his father's work visa and his mother's spousal visa,[19] but the Royal Mail had ostensibly "lost" the family's immigration papers and application in the post, including their passports, birth certificates, and father's qualifications,[29] leaving the family without any official identification .[10][6][13][37][19] The family tried to restart their case with the Home Office, but the Home Office ordered the family to return to Nigeria, which they were unable to do since their home there was burned down.[19] Ellams' father was too proud to inform the Home Office that they were actually refugees, instead informing them that they were workers, which stalled their British immigration case.[19][6] Advised by the London law firm which they engaged to work on their immigration case, the family chose to move to Dublin, Ireland while the firm carried on defending their case on the merits of their refugee status.[19][6]

In July 1999,[1] at the age of 14, his family was forced to move to Firhouse[38] – at the time a poor suburb – near Tallaght in the outskirts of Dublin, Ireland.[33] They lived there for three years,[20] and Ellams worked jobs in general office administration for a local architectural firm and a sports retailer in his secondary school years.[1]

He attended Firhouse Community College in Firhouse,[1][38] as the only Black boy at the school in his years.[27][10] Racism towards him was prevalent[22] (although it was out of ignorance),[38] but he learned to laugh and not give in to self-pity,[22] and eventually found a tightknit group of friends.[38] It is at this school that, at age 17, Ellams worked on his first play: a poor adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, with Dublin slang and a cast of his friends and the school basketball team.[25] He also organized the school's first arts festival and also served as vice-president of the student council.[1][33] Ellams' interest for poetry and basketball was kindled and supported at this school by Mr. Senan Nolan,[38] a poetry teacher and a basketball coach who saw Ellams through the confusion of the racism he was experiencing.[6] He learned about John Keats and Eminem,[22] simultaneously,[22] and discovered hip hop at the same time as he discovered poetry and basketball.

In Firhouse, Ellams befriended another nerdy classmate Stephen Devine, with whom he would argue with on the most mundane things, and they bonded over Shakespeare and being top of their class in English.[31] He took poetry more seriously[11] after Stephen committed suicide due to depression[35] in 2001 over the summer holidays[31] when Ellams was 16. Ellams returned to school from the holidays to discover that the classroom was rearranged by his teacher so he did not have to sit next to an empty seat.

By 2000,[19] the Ellams family's London immigration lawyers stopped communicating with them about their British immigration case, so the family applied to live in Ireland as refugees.[19] Halfway through the application process, Ellams' father received text messages from Sinn Féin with death threats and messages to leave Ireland, but his father ignored the messages, until late 2002, when the threats intensified with descriptions of the family, threats of beatings, and threats of rape towards Ellams' sisters.[19][29] Ellams was in the middle of applying for university in Dublin in the field of graphic design,[9] when his family fled Dublin,[9] leaving behind all their possessions and friends.[19]

Despite moving from Ireland, Ellams retains aspects of his Irish identity.[38]

In late 2002,[33] at age 18, Ellams and his family settled back in London, UK.[36] They tried to reach out to their London immigration law firm again, but they discovered that the firm had disappeared after being raided and shut down by the Home Office for fraud for selling fake identities and identities of their clients on the black market and exploiting immigrants for money.[29][19][6] He applied for college and art school in Britain, but having unresolved British citizenship status, Ellams qualified as an overseas student, which came with higher tuition fees.[20] Money being "painfully tight", he could not afford to go, so he did not pursue further post-secondary education.[20][24] Dejected, he tried visual art, but because he could not afford paint or other art materials and because he did not know how to use Photoshop, he turned to poetry,[33][9] thinking of it as "painting pictures with words".[9] Now an adult, Ellams started working as a self-employed freelance graphic designer for poets,[25] and rekindled relationships with his previous London childhood friends, like Jack Prideaux.[33]

Ellams was transfixed by a CD of the first album Amethyst Rockstar of stage poet Saul Williams which was recommended by his friend Jack,[31] followed closely by a BBC television airing of a performative poetry piece by poet Jessica Holter of the Punany Poets.[31] In the following weekend at a bar near the London National Portrait Gallery, Ellams performed his first poetry session, and thereafter within two months, based on his flourishing performance, was given a headline slot.[31]

Ellams began to frequent bookshops, in particular Borders bookshop on Charing Cross Road,[34] every Friday night to write poetry and read and discuss extensively about X-Men comics with a community of Black poets, including Roger Robinson, Nii Ayikwei Parkes and Jacob Sam-La Rose, who would later become his mentors.[34][6] These experiences contributed to his lifelong interest and "encyclopaedic knowledge"[20] of Marvel comics, and they were formative in his poetry as Ellams relates that "part of my poetry education was through comics and fandom."[6]

In March 2007,[39] when Ellams was aged 22, his father suffered a hemorrhagic stroke which left him unable to work.[39][6] Ellams moved into cash-in-hand poetry performance and selling his books as a way to make a living and help his mother to educate his sisters through university while his father was unable to work.[6][39]

In 2005 and 2007, Ellams performed a spoken word poetry piece in a tent at Glastonbury Festival,[37] but the audience was heckling, drunk, noisy, uninterested, and even contemptuous of his performance, and due to poor rainy weather, the venue was muddy and battered by heavy winds. Due to this poor experience, Ellams was thereafter spurred to move into theatre, where the staging could be better controlled and where the audience is more receptive, and also due to theatre being a "natural progression" of poetry.

Ellams attended a Royal garden party at the Buckingham Palace at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth II,[10][30] with Goldie and Andrew Marr,[37] while under threat of deportation by the Home Office.[37] Despite this, the Home Office refuses to recognize Ellams, or the rest of his family, as British citizens.[10][30]

In London in June 2005,[1] Ellams founded The Midnight Run, an undirected and politically unaffiliated urban social excursion project where strangers gather to explore a city's streets from 6pm to midnight or 6am.[33][9][34] The project originated when Ellams and a close friend were waiting one night for a bus after seeing a play at Battersea Arts Centre.[33][34] The bus did not show up, so they walked the bus route aimlessly for hours discovering London.[33][34] Further influenced by the 1950s French artistic movement The Situationists and the nomadic traditions of Ellams' Nigerian Hausa tribe, Ellams began inviting members of his poetry newsletter mailing list.[33][9] Over the years, the sessions expanded from poetry excursions initially, to other arts and activities ranging from "Tai Chi instructors to basketball coaches, to guerrilla gardeners and Greek wrestling enthusiasts, to puppetry, poetry and political speech writing, as well as cookery classes".[9][33] The project is currently international, with sessions in countries such as Australia and Italy.[34][9]

Ellams first chance at theatre came when he was commissioned by the organization Apples and Snakes (where he worked as a poet) to write a 15-minute poem with theatrical elements in a competition against three other poets. Although he half-bakedly adapted his first book Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales as his competition entry, Ellams ended up winning the prize of making a longer play, which became The 14th Tale. Close to calling it quits six drafts in, Ellams chose to extend a previously written poem about his father called Ash Skinned after being advised by his mentor Roger Robinson to write about what Ellams was most afraid to write about – himself. Ellams performed three informal scratch showings of his preliminary play script, including to Kate McGrath co-founder of the theatre production company Fuel Theatre, which was invited to the showings at the behest of Apples and Snakes. After a few months, McGrath contacted Ellams to further develop the play, and took a chance on Ellams despite him not having a work permit in the UK.[6] With additional funding from the London Arts Council, Ellams scratched and showcased his finished play The 14th Tale, with freelancer Thierry Lawson as theatre director and Michael Nabarro for lighting, to a full sold-out audience at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston, which was well received. This got the attention of the British Arts Council, who booked the play for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it opened to critical acclaim and was awarded the Fringe First as the festival's best production. The play returned to London for a National Tour in September, where it was seen and further considered for a run by the National Theatre. Two years after being first written, The 14th Tale was shown at the National Theatre as one of the first plays there featuring a Black man in a solo production.

Ellams has a twin sister[25] as well as one younger and older sister,[13] to whom he attributes his sense of femininity. His twin sister, Mariam Ellams Oreva Asuquo,[40][41] owns a cake bakery business Mimi To You Cakes[41] in South East London,[41] and wrestled him in childhood.[25] His younger sister, who is around five years younger than him,[25] also owns a bakery business[25] and, unlike Ellams, was granted British citizenship in October 2018.[21] His older sister, who is around two years older than him,[25] works as a PA for the Transport of London as of July 2019.[25]

Ellams' family restarted their British immigration case in 2005, and in 2011,[19] they received "Discretionary Leave to Remain" under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights[29][28] and had to apply to renew and extend their stay in the UK by formal request to the Home Office every three years at a cost of £900 per person.[10] In 2018,[21][19] 22 years after first immigrating from Nigeria, Ellams' family was given "Indefinite Leave to Remain" in the UK,[28][21][24] which also has to be re-verified every three years,[28] but means he can finally apply for British naturalization and afterwards British citizenship.[19] Except for his younger sister, Ellams and his family have not yet been granted British citizenship as of September 2020,[21] and Ellams' application for citizenship was refused in December 2019.[37]

Ellams disdains Donald Trump, who figures in some of his poems,[13] though he would like to move to New York City, US.[25] Ellams is gluten-intolerant.[25]

Ellams is fascinated with hip hop culture[9] and basketball, which figures occasionally in his work like The Half God of Rainfall.[20] He started playing basketball at age 12 to get the attention of a girl obsessed with African-American culture during his time in Holland Park School.[20] He still plays basketball pick-up games two times a week as point guard.[20]

Ellams describes his spirituality as a cross between Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Zen, Neo-spiritualism and poetry, which he believes to be related to religion.[23]

Ellams partner is Vietnamese-Chinese, born in Vietnam, and works in virtual reality film.[23]

Ellams has written for the Royal Shakespeare Company,[42] Royal National Theatre and the BBC. In June 2018, Ellams was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as part of its 40 Under 40 initiative.[3][43]

Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales (flipped eye, 2005)

Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars (flipped eye, 2011)

The Wire-Headed Heathen (Akashic Books, 2016)

The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011)[44]

Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014)[44]

Ellams's one-man show The 14th Tale was awarded an Edinburgh Fringe First at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2009 and later transferred to the Royal National Theatre, London.[8]

A one-man show staged at the Soho Theatre in 2010,[45] telling the story of twins born on Nigeria's independence day.[46]

Barber Shop Chronicles is a play set in black barber shops in six cities on one day, against the backdrop of a football match between Chelsea and Barcelona. The play explores the African diaspora in the UK,[47] masculinity, homosexuality and religion. The play was produced by the National Theatre, Fuel Theatre and Leeds Playhouse and was shortlisted for the Alfred Fagon Award in 2017.[48] Following a period of touring, the play was also performed at the Roundhouse in 2019,[49] and a recording of the National Theatre production was streamed in May 2020 as part of the National Theatre at Home season.[50] For the production, Ellams recorded 60 hours of "male banter"[25] in barbershops all over Africa and in London at his barber Peter's shop Emmanuel's in Clapham Junction.[25] This project originally did not secure funding.[9]

In April 2019 his new play, The Half God of Rainfall, was presented at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre,[51] in advance of its run at London's Kiln Theatre, as well as its publication as a book.[6]

In December 2019–February 2020 Ellams's reworking of Chekhov's play Three Sisters was performed at the Royal National Theatre, London.[52] The play restaged the story in the 1960s in the midst of the Biafran war in Nigeria.[24]

In 2020 Ellams has been performing a live stage programme with anecdotes of his childhood and his experiences as a refugee and will continue to update it to reflect his current experiences. An excerpt was shown at the Hay Festival on 24 May 2020.[8]