Women Authors From Nigeria

"Feminism was a politics of empowerment that assumed that a woman was a victim. I saw feminism as a politics that had to first position women as victims so that it can then empower them."

"Women have always been powerful and striven to achieve financial independence. I wanted a politics that fought for expanding and nurturing the power that women already had. It is not that I believed that there was no such thing as gender inequality. I just did not want to see a woman as a victim but as someone who was always enterprising and looking for ways to undermine the systems of power that tried to put her down."

"I don’t even accept that I’m a feminist. I accept that I’m an ordinary woman who is writing about what she knows. I try to project the image of women positively."

"I don’t think that I’m a radical feminist,”"

"They did not see the reason why Adizua should not marry another woman since according to them two men do not live together. To them Efuru was a man, since she could not reproduce."

"I am sure you will like this gin. Nwabuzo had it buried in the ground last year when there was rumour that policemen were sent to search her house. When the policemen left, finding nothing, Nwabuzo was still afraid and left it in the ground. A week later, she fell ill and was rushed to the hospital where she remained for six months. She came back only a week ago. So the gin is a very good one."

"Efuru told him that she would drown herself in the lake if he did not marry her. Adizua told her he loved her very much and that even the dust she trod on meant something to him."

"We are well, Efuru replied. It is only hunger. It is good that it is only hunger. Good health is what we pray for."

"There was nothing in me when I was in school that made me feel I was going to be a writer. It was one of those things that just happened. I didn’t have the ambition to say, “Oh, Flora, you are going to be a writer, so work towards it"

"There is no problem in this world that cannot be solved."

"What can a woman do? You say everyday. In the end, a woman does something, and even then still you look down on women."

"Not even crocodiles eat their young...papa takes care of his children."

"Life is like a set of false teeth. The world sees what you show it: Clean teeth wey white like Colgate. But you know for inside dat your real teet' don rot finish!"

"Never give up if your heart and your head tell you are right. People can disappoint you, but your heart and your head will never. Make them your best friends."

"Determination makes one impervious to pain."

"It is not the thing that we fear the most that crushes us but that which we have failed to fear."

"No matter the size of your husband's penis, no other woman should know it."

"You children, you forget that no matter how high the okra tree grows, it's never mightier than the hand that planted it."

"Sometimes in life, we have to take a stand. It does not help to sit on the fence, even if we have to hurt the people we love-love. That is what I want you to remember. If I have taught you anything, I want it to be that."

"A parent never apologises, even if he regrets his actions. It is the child who should apologise."

"S is for sir. It's what you called your father if you'd never lived with him. If you did not know where his medication box was. If you did not even know what he was taking medication for. No, sir. Yes, sir. S is for strangers multiplied by five. Ten eyes watching her, sizing her up, maybe wondering what she was doing there. What was she doing here? And all this talk of tradition, which had pushed her mother away in the first place. Roll. Dip. Swallow. She had met her father."

"S is for sins. What is a sin? At Catechism, she was taught to repeat, 'Sin is an offence against reason, truth and right conscience.' But she could not tell what sins she was supposed to be atoning for. What were her mother's sins? Mma swallowed all the words she wanted to say and started eating the food she no longer tasted."

"Blood is thicker than water, you hear. Ha! Let me tell you, some blood flows thinner. And some water is as thick as sludge."

"People who are quick to pay compliments, baby-baby, are also quick to withdraw them."

"There is no Muslim Nigeria and no Christian Nigeria. There is only one indivisible Nigeria. Kaduna belongs to all Nigerians. No religion endorses violence or gratuitous cruelty. Regrettably, some undesirable elements have incited these ugly clashes and those elements will be fished out and properly punished."

"Be courageous, not brave. Bravery was to dash out of the bomb shelter and grab the child left crying on the veranda. Courage was to go to the stream the day after a bomb had scattered your friend on that path because water must be fetched to sustain the life that was left"

"If you prefer sitting in traffic to sitting at your desk, if you pass office hours waiting for closing time, if you spend more time on Facebook than you do attending to important emails then perhaps it's time for you to consider quitting your job."

"No. I’ve never even read a Le Carré novel, but I slept with a few in a bookcase behind my headboard. My mother was a Le Carré fan. I studied Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory when I was at school in England, which turned me into a fan of his prose. I realise my novel ventures into white male territory by playing with the idea of espionage and satirising high society. When you do that as an African woman writer, someone is bound to ask, “Why are you here? Have you lost your way? Do you know where you are going?” But I was raised by a woman whose experiences were not limited by her gender or nationality."

"Lastly, as you know, we have a few critics in the Nigerian literary community who are caught up in the old Igbo-Yoruba rivalry, which doesn’t interest me, but their reviews reflect that. I’m used to having different responses to my work. I don’t expect everyone to appreciate what I write and I’m thankful to readers who do."

"I’m never afraid when I write. I’m sometimes nervous after my books are published, by which time it’s too late to censor myself. When you write boldly, you get mixed reactions and I assume it will be the same with this novel. Not just because of its content, but because of the way I’ve written it. Much of what we’ve talked about may be overlooked by readers who want more to happen in an African novel, but I don’t write to accommodate their needs. Also, whenever you write about privileged Africans, someone somewhere will be upset with you."

"It doesn’t matter whether Frances Cooke – the bead collector – was spying or not. It was enough to show there were allegations in those days, which may have been partly due to xenophobia. Ikoyi, however, was where business and political leaders lived, and the United States did have an interest in spreading neo-liberal ideas to developing countries like Nigeria."

"We’d never seen the woman before, but she came to our house in south-west Ikoyi for a few nights and talked to my mother about the coup. On her first night she had dinner with us – osso buco. I remember this because it was a rare treat I looked forward to eating. We had no electricity at night, so my mother reheated it on a kerosene stove and we boiled rice and fried plantains. We ate dinner at the table with a battery lantern. I don’t recall details of what the woman said, but she soon stopped coming over and my mother said she had to be a spy. Of course I made fun of my mother."

"I’ll tell you a couple of family stories. The first is that my mother met Graham Greene in a shop on Bond Street. Neither of us can remember the exact year it happened and she says the shop has since closed down. The funny part is that she’d never heard of him. After he left, the shop assistant mentioned his name and said he was a famous author. To this day I wish I’d been with her, just to confirm it was him. The second story is that during the coup that brought General Muhammed to power in 1975, an expatriate woman befriended my mother."

"I break that down in the novel, and in that sense it’s no different from novels I’ve read about suburban life in the United States, England and elsewhere, except it has moments of political intrigue and turmoil. I juxtapose these extraordinary national moments and ordinary domestic moments to give a realistic portrayal of how we lived. Perhaps my real motive is to depict Nigeria as one big dysfunctional family."

"You know, I’ve also been called a Lagos writer and a feminist writer, but I just tell stories that interest me in ways that interest me. Growing up in Ikoyi, I had friends who used drugs. Friends who discovered their fathers had girlfriends, second wives and other children. Friends whose mothers were victims of physical and emotional abuse. Friends whose parents got divorced. I never thought any of those families were dysfunctional. To me, such things were just part of family life. But I always heard about them from third parties because appearance was everything in Ikoyi, most especially the appearance of respectability."

"The people who gave Ikoyi a bad name were the ones who rarely allowed other Nigerians into their social circles, except to serve and look up to them. Occasionally they were open to outsiders who had as much money and were equally materialistic. They were self-conscious but not particularly self-examining, and they were afraid to admit their vulnerability. As my protagonist Remi Lawal notes at the Dadas’ cocktail party in the novel, their lives are full of frivolous contradictions and, ultimately, they are replaced from one generation to the next. She is right about that. Ikoyi of 1976 is not the same as it is today. That society is gone now. The band and the song have changed."

"I suppose the reason I write about the Lagos elite at all is that they don’t become writers. Ikoyi people in particular are underrepresented in Nigerian literature. Ikoyi itself is often described as a place where rich, powerful people live. But when I was growing up there, the people I knew were not unlike those who lived on Victoria Island, and districts on the mainland such as Apapa and Ikeja, and estates such as Alaka and Palmgrove."

"In my short story “Unsuitable Ties”, I have a snobbish character called Biola whom I refer to as an authority on class since her early schooling in Switzerland. Characters like these provide comic relief for me. Blame the British as well. They left us with a social construct called class distinction, which makes no sense except to justify the oppression of the majority of Nigerians."

"When I was a child, I was called oniranu a lot at home because I poked fun at people I ought to respect. I was about six years old when I made up a song about a certain Lagos society woman. One line, I remember, said she had rashes, even though she didn’t. I’m still an oniranu at heart. I never grew out of it. In my play Lengths to Which We Go, which you’ve read, I have an aspiring character called Mrs. Babalola who calls herself upper “clarse”."

"If anyone says they fit in nicely with the Nigerian upper class, I would have to come to the conclusion that they are thoughtless. No one is responsible for their upbringing and no one deserves to be defined by any social class. My late father was the son and great-grandson of traditional rulers and he attended Oxford University. I often joke that the women in my mother’s family carry themselves as if they are royalty. They are proud of their parents, who worked hard to educate them."

"In this particular novel, the Fanon quotation identifies the process we’re going through and explains our failures so far. What I then do is show we are products of complex pre- and postcolonial systems that determine our orientations. The heart of the story, though, is Remi Lawal’s difficult relationship with Nigeria."

"Even activism is for personal gain in Nigeria, so it’s no surprise that nothing improves. Should that happen, activists would be out of business. I am part of the world I complain about, but writing is not business as usual for me. It is an expression of hope that I might, in my small way, play a part in bringing about change. Now, you can’t kill the beast by feeding it, but you can slip poison into its food, which is what I attempt to do by writing honestly."

"Yet it benefits only a minority of us and fails the rest of the country. In fact, it is the underlying cause of our moral failings, and whether or not you care about the welfare of your fellow citizens, being a member of the elite can no longer save you. There is nowhere to hide from the dysfunction, which is why Nigerians who can afford to, escape abroad as often as they can."

"Perhaps living in other countries has given me a different perspective, but for me these are not signs of a country’s progress, by which I mean its advancement towards freedom, justice and equality. The way we are going, I don’t think we’re prepared for the political impacts, social shifts and economic disparities that will come, and we still have no common ideology that unites us more than capitalism does."

"We call that development, but at every traffic light along the way are beggars, most of whom are children and disabled adults. Some are amputees and presumably they are often victims of sharia law punishments. We look away only to see billboards advertising business conferences at mega churches."

"Nigeria isn’t exactly a newly industrialised country either, but we have engaged in trading activities for centuries, and have a history of selling people for mere beads. Fast forward to what we have witnessed of late, with our governments selling us down the river by privatising public utilities, and contracting out public services, such as waste management, to foreign companies. Yet we still don’t have regular electricity supply or a clean environment."

"The quotation is for those whom it may concern. Our country doesn’t work. We know that. We also know why. What we may not be ready to accept is that progress will continue to elude us so long as we follow trajectories that are alien to us, the most damaging of which are driven by unbridled capitalism. This is not to suggest that a return to our traditional systems is the way forward; I don’t idealise them in the novel."

"History is very important to my work in that regard and thank you for noticing. I’m no expert on Fanon, but I used the quotation as an epigraph because I found it amusing and apt. The bourgeois phase in the history of a country like Nigeria is indeed completely useless, which is why the novel ends as it begins, with middle-class preoccupations, despite the political changeover that occurs in the story."

"It occurred to me that there was nothing more precious than satisfaction. That it was possible to end up committing a crime just because you were contaminated by a little discontent. You could convince yourself that you were satisfied, then someone could come along and say, 'But I can offer you more', and then you could begin to think, My life is not worth much after all. In fact, you could tell yourself, My life was completely worthless from the start."

"Cooking was a skill, I thought; an art form. In our country, we appreciated the end result, but not the craft, perhaps because we didn’t have fancy names. Paring was “cut it.” Julienne was “cut it well.” Chopping was “cut it well well,” and so on till you had puree, which would probably be “mash it.” And, if anyone was measuring any ingredient in a kitchen, it meant that they really didn’t know what they were doing."