Chidinma Eze‑Marlow

Chidinma Eze‑Marlow had shopped at the same market in Enugu all her life without ever hearing the traders tell their own stories. She had a hunch that the market held a book, and no idea how to ask for it.

She started by buying lunch from the same six stalls every day for a week, until the traders asked what she was up to. Once she explained, the first one to talk was a woman who sold smoked fish and had been at the same table since 1989. The others followed over the next two weeks, mostly because they did not want to be left out.

She recorded forty conversations, transcribed them herself and cut each to two pages. Her mentor, an editor, told her to leave in the interruptions, and she did. A customer asking the price of onions, a radio turned up, a child sent for change: all of it stayed. Some of the traders were unhappy at first to see their pauses on paper, and she read the pages aloud to them before anything was printed.

The hardest cuts were the long ones. A tailor spoke for nearly an hour about his father’s sewing machine, and she kept six minutes of it. She sent each trader their own two pages to check, and three asked for a line to be changed.

A Short Book of Market Voices was printed locally in an edition of 300 and sold from the stalls it came from. It can be read on the fellows page, and she still gives a copy to any trader who asks.