Novelists From Nigeria

"ZURRJIR’ which means a son who would change himself into another thing very soon."

"Old people were saying that the whole people who had died in this world, did not go to heaven directly, but they were living in one place somewhere in this world. So that I said I would find out where my palm-wine tapster who had died was."

"When I completed three and a half years in that town, I noticed that the left hand thumb of my wife was swelling out as if it was a buoy, but it did not pain her. One day, she followed me to the farm in which I was tapping the palm-wine, and to my surprise when the thumb that swelled out touched a palm-tree throne, the thumb bust out suddenly and there we saw a male child came out of it and at the same time that the child came out from the thumb, he began to talk to us as if he was ten years of age.”"

"As we sat down under this tree and were thinking about that night’s danger, there we saw a ‘Spirit of Prey’, he was big as a hippopotamus, but he was walking upright as a human-being; his both legs had two feet and tripled his body, his head was just like a lion’s head and every part of his body was covered with hard scales, each of these scales was the same in size as a shovel or hoe, and all curved towards his body.”"

"The expression of the life-force which forms one’s personality, and which remains even in the deads after they have become non-living."

"This old man was not really a man, he was a god and he was eating with his wife when I reached there . . . I myself was a god and juju-man."

"When there was no palm-wine for me to drink I started to drink ordinary water which I was unable to taste before, but I did not satisfy with it as palm-wine."

"By and by, this lady followed the Skull to his house, and the house was a hole in the ground."

"Because everything that they were doing there was incorrect to alives and everything that all alives were doing was incorrect to deads too” (Palm-Wine Drinkard."

"The brave new world that they had fought for had very easily faded into a rotten world of unemployment and frustration."

"I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life."

"So, I saved the lady from the complete gentleman in the market who afterwards reduced to a "Skull" and the lady became my wife since that day. This is how I got a wife."

"Alo is a lie!"

"I was seven years old before I understood the meaning of ‘bad’ and ‘good,’ because it was at that time I noticed carefully that my father married three wives as they were doing in those days, if it is not common nowadays."

"Are not thousands of these heroes still roaming about Lagos and the Provinces in search of the wherewithals of life?"

"But I did not know that all that I was thinking in mind was going to the hearing of the inhabitants of these three rooms, so at the same moment that I wanted to move my body to go the room from which the smell of the African’s food was rushing to me […] there I saw that these three rooms which had no doors and windows opened unexpectedly and three kinds of ghosts peeped at me, every one of them pointed his finger to me to come to him."

"Performed a juju which changed me to a horse unexpectedly, then he put reins into my mouth and tied me on a stump with a thick rope."

"Make u no worry. That be how life be. Sometimes it go up, up, up, and sometimes it come down, down, down. When it go up, you get many friends. But when it come down, your friends run away."

"It is clear that she (Ulasi) has produced five mysteries. The novels are indeed mysteries ... set in what Hortense Spillers, in another context, refers to as the "terrain of witchcraft" (1987, 189). In Ulasi, seeing is not always believing or deceptive. Her intriguing genre, the juju novel, appears to be Nigeria's answer to the gothic and magic realism ... Ulasi's terrain covers the occult, dark, impenetrable tropical forests; in short, vestiges of the supernatural world, which proliferate the Nigerian imagination."

"Decades ago I read Adaora Lily Ulasi's Many Thing You No Understand. When I read the work, who would have thought about the strange happenings in my nation, Nigeria?Adaora, who passed on in 2016, also wrote Many Thing Begin for Change, and The Man from Sagamu Let me say that as we keep mute or play mute, as we pay lip service things are changing, and the resultant effect is one that we may not be able to cope with...."

"I don’t have a formula, or a place I can go to get ideas from, for a new book. Usually, ideas come when I least expect them. I could be doing something so boring, like washing up, and bingo, a voice pops up in my head."

"The soul (spirit) finds respite in books."

"I visit Africa as much as I can and all my books have an African setting. I get my ideas from reading, listening to people and observing people too."

"Travelling has taught me that people are the same all over the world – some irritating, some helpful."

"My religion has a great influence on my lifestyle and definitely my work. Coming from a very Islamic background, I see and take the Islamic point of view all the time. I let the Qur’an and Sunnah guide my actions and decisions always."

"daughter wants to marry at a young age, I would first have the necessary conversations with her and if i know this is what she needs, i will allow her. I won’t allow premarital sex in my house."

"I think they must tackle three important sectors: power, refineries and diversify our economy. Then, a systematic eradication of corruption must kick start these three."

"You can read a lot of books and the main characters are white people - especially in the classics - and after a while you forget that you're not white, almost, because it's this big pervasive culture. And then you find books like Yoruba Girl Dancing [by Simi Bedford] and you think: it's just as interesting to be Nigerian in England as it is to be white in England."

"Through Yoruba Girl Dancing, Simi Bedford ingeniously, entertainingly, eloquently, and intelligently examines the complicated issues of home and identity, language and diaspora, in multiple contexts."

"In my pre-teen years, I read books such as Yoruba Girl Dancing by Simi Bedford, Beka Lamb by Zee Edgell and books by Rosa Guy. I also read a lot of Enid Blyton and Betsy Byars."

"People’s experiences define how they view life. A man who has been through it all, he might want to resort to the village, it’s not so much of a bad idea to catch them young. When you pick a poor girl,a girl from her back ground knowing that her expectations fall in line with what you want.Men who successfully marry from the village, know all she wants and her definition of success will be to give birth and take care of their children"

"I went to school in England and I was taught about slavery, but I was taught about it from a very European point of view - that this was a horrible episode, but actually, Europeans then realised that it was a terrible thing they were doing and so very kindly, as a gift, gave freedom to the slaves."

"How we danced. The music poured through our veins and we flowed with the beat. The wheel had come full circle. We wound and unwound our bodies seamlessly as if we had no bones. Is there a sight more beautiful, the older women said, than a Yoruba girl dancing?"

"If you get all your schoolwork for the day done in, say, three hours, you can spend the rest of the time reading or making up stories or whatever else."

"what would be considered a middle-class setting, where women seem to have power, but they are living in a particular context that requires them to contort themselves into different things. And so they make choices that are not necessarily the kindest choices for others or choices that we would consider to be good."

"When we bury ourselves in a story that is well told, we can’t help but go away with an understanding that we may not have had before. We go away with being able to see things perhaps a little more clearly, a little more humanely."

"Unconditional family support may be the way in Nigeria, but when Kingsley turns to his Uncle Boniface for help, he learns that charity may come with strings attached."

"At age seven, when it was confirmed that her right hand could reach across her head and touch her left ear, Augustina moved back to her father’s house and started attending primary school. Being long and skinny had worked to her advantage."

"Make una come see o, Graveyard don begin dey use perfume."

"Boniface — aka Cash Daddy — is an exuberant character who suffers from elephantiasis of the pocket. He's also rumored to run a successful empire of email scams. But he can help. With Cash Daddy's intervention, Kingsley and his family can be as safe as a tortoise in its shell."

"My father was a walking encyclopedia, and he flipped his pages with the zeal and precision of a magician."

"I spit out everything onto the page, from beginning to end, and then go back and edit. I’m one of those people who like to tick off things on my to-do list; so, it helps me psychologically to get to the end first, and then settle down to revise."

"Cash Daddy’s cheeks were puffy, his neck was chunky, his five limbs were thick and long."

"For much of his young life, Kingsley believed that education was everything, that through wisdom, all things were possible. Now he worries that without a 'long-leg' — someone who knows someone who can help him — his degrees will do nothing but adorn the walls of his parents' low-rent house."

"It would have to be one of those dangerous pieces of advice that people dish out all over the place. A particularly popular one is: Follow your heart. What if the person’s heart is leading them into a dungeon of doom? What if the person’s heart is filled with foolishness? ‘Follow your heart’ is not just unwise counsel; it is a recipe for anarchy. Imagine a world where each of us followed our heart to wherever it led us, without caring for the people around us or the laws of the land."

"My novel came before the story: I decided to write a novel before I knew what to write about. The story wasn’t burning in my heart or bursting to be let loose on the page. It didn’t feel like there was this one story that I had to tell. But I have always been fascinated by why people do the things they do. While trying to come up with ideas for my novel, I decided on a story that explored that."

"Being the opara of the family, Kingsley Ibe is entitled to certain privileges — a piece of meat in his egusi soup, a party to celebrate his graduation from university. As first son, he has responsibilities, too. But times are bad in Nigeria, and life is hard."

"Everyone can tell a story, but the skillful use of words is what I usually find captivating when reading a piece. The imagery. The alliteration. The emotion. The quotable quotes. Think Shakespeare. Think the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The skillful placing of word against word is what builds the masterpiece and turns a story into a memorable work of art. I often tell people how fascinated I was with Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. But while I have absolutely no recollection of the plot, I still remember how struck I was by her use of words. Her writing was pure art."

"When a tragedy befalls his family, Kingsley learns the hardest lesson of all: education may be the language of success in Nigeria, but it's money that does the talking."

"If it was authoritarian for the Nigerian government to ban the use of Twitter, it was even more problematic for an American swivelling in a chair in Silicon Valley to poke their finger into the internal affairs of a sovereign African state."