Novelists From Nigeria

"Power is not the answer. It will only intensify the fight."

"Love is too strong, too intense, for what I feel. For what I am allowed to feel."

"You have your duty and your heart. To chose one means the other must suffer."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) Acts of love. Be it familial, friendly or romantic. A beautifully described, tender act of love destroys me…I’ve always loved sweeping romances and magical fantasies. I’ve loved headstrong, determined female protagonists and epic battles. I still like to read the same things. I think the difference now is that I get to read all the things I like with characters who look like me. My childhood stories didn’t give me that. Even in the stories I wrote myself, I was only writing white characters and biracial characters. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that erasure was painful and damaging to my sense of self. So getting to create and read stories that fight that erasure and build on my sense of self is the only significant change in my reading tastes."

"(What makes for a good fantasy novel?) I think the most magical fantasies will always be the ones with a world you want to live in forever…I think great worlds are important because they allow readers to play in that world with their imagination long after the book is done, but a great world isn’t complete without a great protagonist."

"When I read, I like to go somewhere else in my mind with stories that touch our real world without taking place in it."

"(Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?) For novelists, I’m a forever-fan of Sabaa Tahir. Her debut fantasy — “An Ember in the Ashes” — was the epic tale that inspired me to write “Children of Blood and Bone.” It moved me in ways a story hadn’t moved me before and gave me a chance to imagine a fantasy world with characters I’d never gotten to see before. For journalists, Shaun King. The work Shaun does for the black community is incredible. I respect his strength, tenacity and passion, and I admire him deeply for the commitment to getting our stories out."

"…I had a lot of different reasons for writing the book but at its core was the desire to write for black teenage girls growing up reading books they were absent from. That was my experience as a child. Children of Blood and Bone is a chance to address that. To say you are seen."

"I saw the opportunity to show the beauty in the culture and show that these words sound magical. We’re so used to using Latin, but if J.K. Rowling saw magic in that, you can see magic in your own culture. And if you can see it, you can help other people to see it."

"The thing is that underneath we are all humans…Everyone has people they love and people they want to protect, everyone has things they are afraid of or that cause them pain."

"People say you’ve got to write honestly and that sounds great but also, what does that mean? I think part of that is knowing there are some things black people go through that are universal and those things are how the world shapes you…if you’re in a racist encounter, they’re not going to say, “Oh, you’re Jamaican, oh, you’re Nigerian; oh, you’re full African American; your ancestors were brought here on slave ships.” That’s not what other people see. In the outside world, we have a kind of universal experience but it also changes depending on whether you’ve grown up in predominantly white spaces or predominantly black spaces…"

"You’re a beautiful man."

"in Umuahia, a town in the land of the great fathers..."

"Loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief."

"All the peace that had returned after his father finished mourning his wife for many years vanished at once. Grief returned like an army of old ants crawling into familiar holes in the soft earth of his father’s life....."

"Guardian spirits of mankind, have we thought about the powers that passion creates in human beings? Have we considered why a man could run through a field of fire to get to a woman he loves? Have we thought about the impact of love on the body of lovers? Have we considered the symmetry of its power? Have we considered what poetry incites in their souls, and the impress of endearments on a softened heart?”"

"For the truth remains that more can also be more, and that less is often inevitably less."

"The true being of a man is hidden behind the wall of flesh and blood from the eyes of everyone else, including his own."

"Time is not a living creature that can listen to pleas, nor is it a man who can delay."

"They were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join this universal orchestra in which all there was to do was cry and wail."

"Even in his most extroverted moment, a man is concealed from others. For he cannot be fully known."

"We did it. We avenged them"

"M.K.O., you are beautiful beyond description,"

"I must have my pound of flesh and you must all join me in this because you caused it."

"I'd heard someone say that the end of most things often bears a resemblance - even if faint - to their beginnings"

"That story, as all good stories, planted a seed in my soul and never left me."

"Listen, days decay, like food, like fish, like dead bodies. This night will decay, too and you will forget. Listen, we will forget."

"Do you not know that there is nothing the eye can see that can make it shed the tears of blood? Do you not know that there is no loss we cannot overcome"

"I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what become permanent can be indestructible. The things my brother read shaped him; they became his visions. He believed in them. I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what becomes permanent can be indestructible. This was the case with my brother."

"Mother was a falconer. The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children. She owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind and so could easily sniff troubles early in their forming, the same way sailors discern the forming foetus of a coming storm."

"Hatred is a leech: The thing that sticks to a person's skin; that feeds off them and drains the sap out of one's spirit. It changes a person, and does not leave until it has sucked the last drop of peace from them."

"People always ask me, why do your stories end this way? And honestly…I want to write a feelgood story. But I think that because I’m fascinated with the metaphysics of existence, I keep thinking why, of all the people who came to Cyprus, was it Jay who died? Or, I read not too long ago of a nine-year-old doing her homework and there’s a drive-by shooting and a bullet comes in through the roof and kills her. She didn’t do anything to deserve that fate. When you think about these things, and you want to write fiction around that, the path it takes you to can feel inevitable and tragic."

"There are some rhetorical moves that I wouldn’t be able to make if I didn’t know these languages. In terms of writing figurative language, I probably pull a lot from Yoruba imagery…"

"I believe that some of the strongest stories we can have begin with very simple archetypes…The great mother, or the great father, for example. And you work your way from that, slowly, to more complexity. The idea of this guy who wants to be with the woman he loves – you can say the same of the movie Gladiator, for instance. If you strip everything down to the basics, it’s just about Maximus wanting to go back to his wife and every other thing stopping him. Even Homer’s Odyssey; he just wants to go back and the entire universe is conspiring against that ambition."

"I've always wanted to write something that will show the world that prior to the coming of the British to Nigeria, we had some kind of complex systems. I feel like there hasn't been an African version of, say, Milton's "Paradise Lost" which actually explored the very foundational principle of Western civilization, which would be the free will. Or even Dante Alighieri's "Inferno." So I wanted to write something cosmological, and the chi has been very fascinating to me. It was very difficult, it entailed a lot of research, even down to actually going to shrines and interviewing the last adherents of Odinani, the Igbo religion, now that most Africans are converts to either Christianity or Islam…"

"(Chapter 8, Page 19)"

"Ayoola is draped across my bed in her pink lace bra and black lace thong. She is incapable of practical underwear. Her leg is dangling off one end, her arm dangling off the other. Hers is the body of a music video vixen, a scarlet woman, a succubus. It belies her angelic face.”"

"(Chapter 5, Pages 7-9)"

"“For the average male, this wouldn’t be all that peculiar—but this man was meticulous. His bookshelf was arranged alphabetically by author. His bathroom was stocked with the full range of cleaning supplies; he even bought the same brand of disinfectant as I did. And his kitchen shone. Ayoola seemed out of place here—a blight in an otherwise pure existence.”"

"Love is not a weed, It cannot grow where it please…"

"There is music blasting from Ayoola's room, she's listening to Whitney Housten's I Wanna Dance With Somebody. It would be more appropriate to play Brymo or Lorde, something solemn or yearning, rather than the musical equivalent of a pack of M&Ms."

"We are nothing if not thorough in our deception of others."

"That’s how it has always been. Ayoola would break a glass, and I would receive the blame for giving her the drink. Ayoola would fail a class, and I would be blamed for not coaching her. Ayoola would take an apple and leave the store without paying for it, and I would be blamed for letting her get hungry."

"Is there anything more beautiful than a man with a voice like an ocean?"

"She does not cry for me,” he says, his voice hardening. “She cries for her lost youth, her missed opportunities and her limited options. She does not cry for me, she cries for herself."

"It takes a whole lot longer to dispose of a body than to dispose of a soul, especially if you don’t want to leave any evidence of foul play."

"I know better than to take life directions from someone without a moral compass."

"It’s because she is beautiful, you know. That’s all it is. They don’t really care about the rest of it. She gets a pass at life."

"Here in Nigeria, being the first born is a huge, huge role. It's a huge responsibility. It's a big deal. You're treated - from the get-go, you're treated differently. You know, there's a kind of proverb here. I'm not sure what language it's in, but where they say, the eldest child is the one that opened the womb."

"We have a wide divide between classes and we have a wide divide between cultures because we’re from different tribes, we have different religions. You don’t have to walk very far to see someone who has a really different life from you...I wouldn’t want to write a novel and people feel that I’m speaking to a Nigerian experience – I’m speaking to my experience, to the things I’m interested in, and that’s all I can do."