Chris Abani Quotes

If you want to know about Africa, read our literature – and not just ‘Things Fall Apart,’ because that would be like saying, ‘I’ve read ‘Gone with the Wind’ and so I know everything about America.’

Literature is an aspect of story and story is all that exists to make sense of reality. War is a story. Now you begin to see how powerful story is because it informs our worldview and our every action, our every justification is a story. So how can story not be truly transformative? I’ve seen it happen in real ways, not in sentimental ways or in the jargon of New Age liberal ideology.

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

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.

Here’s the thing: You rescue us every day in small, quiet ways, so why not in this way? Let us into your mystery, tell us how you would like to be loved, show us how to see you, really see you.

Before you speak, my friend, remember, a spiritual man contain his anger. Angry words are like slap in de face.

Sometimes we say we want an end to hate or racism or sexism. But we all participate in keeping these structures alive. If everyone decided to relinquish the past what would happen to people who feel that there hasn’t been proper atonement made to them? And what happens to the person who feels that the constant atonement is their identity?

My friend Ronald Gottesman says…that the cause of all our trouble is the belief in an essential, pure identity: religious, ethnic, historical, ideological.

I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified.

In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.

If there was no risk, it wouldn’t be art. It wouldn’t be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

I didn’t leave Africa, I left Nigeria, and for political reasons. But … I’ve never, never left Africa, and I certainly never left what it means to be Ibo. That is something you carry with you.