Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

Chris Abani

Categorized in : Fiction Book Narrative

When I was growing up in Nigeria - and I shouldn't say Nigeria, because that's too general, but in Afikpo, the Igbo part of the country where I'm from - there were always rites of passage for young men. Men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women; that's essentially what it is.

women growing-up men country

African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.

find always care humanity

I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate... by Chris Abani

I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.

best always love way

It takes me forever to actually finish something like a ten-page essay. But, when I do, I usually love what they are. It's a complicated relationship.

me complicated love relationship

Like most writers, I find the Web is a wonderful distraction. Who doesn't need that last minute research before writing?

find need research writing

My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the '50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English.

english she parents mother

We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not - I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value.

value think language world

My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the... by Chris Abani

My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the '50s.

cork university educated father

I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years. And I was growing up in school, and the federal government didn't want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels.

government war history school

My grand uncle was a traditional priest, and he would always say to me as a kid, 'We stand in our own light,' which essentially for him meant we were entirely responsible for a lot of what happens to us and for the ways in which our lives play out.

uncle stand me light

I have to have three or four books going simultaneously. If I'm not impressed in the first 20 pages, I don't bother reading the rest, especially with novels. I'm not a book-club style reader. I'm not looking for life lessons or wanting people to think I'm smart because I'm reading a certain book.

smart style life people

I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

you style literature darkness

I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too.

me time war peace