Literary Critics

"When was the last time you failed or faced rejection as a writer and how did you cope with it and what did you learn from the experience?"

"I love the innovative nature of Olumide Popoola’s writings across literary genres and so I’m very much looking forward to her forthcoming novel, Like Water Like Sea. I am also looking forward to Hala Alyan’s new poetry collection: The Moon That Turns You Back."

"I’ve been surprised by how many young people as well as people who are not from the African Diaspora have found this book an inspiration and a comfort."

"Resist the temptation to write stories you’re expected to write and take inspiration from a wide array of art forms. Use all the tools available to improve your craft. Be innovative, be new! And when a door opens for you, hold it open for others. We all stand on the shoulders of giants and we’re stronger together than on our own."

"And recently, because London has been on my mind, I’ve found myself placing Zadie Smith’s NW next to Brian Chikwava’s Harare North, Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye and Ben Judah’s This is London. I, like Morayo, am interested in books expanding and enriching the literary landscape. As for my two novels, they currently still sit alphabetically on my shelves, happily wedged in between Jhumpa Lahiri, Amara Lakhous, Javier Marias, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"I don’t have a single best book, but I enjoyed and learned a lot from the following: actor David Harewood’s memoir: Maybe I Don’t Belong Her: A Memoir of Race, Identity, Breakdown and Recovery; poet Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest; and travel writer, Noo Sara-Wiwa’s Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China. I also enjoyed re-reading Hugh Masekela and Michael Cheer’s fabulous Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela. I also read a number of great manuscripts including two brilliant chapters from my brother’s work in progress: Common Property: An Intimate History of the 20th Century."

"In the realm of a TV series, I think of Wole Soyinka’s political satire Chronicles From The Land of the Happiest People On Earth and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, which might also lend itself to an animated film. There are so many exciting prospects within the genre of documentary films too. Take Hugh Masekela’s Still Grazing—how visually and sonically fabulous such a film could be. I’d also love to see my novels adapted for the screen. In Dependence as a feature film, and Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun, as a TV series. Film broadens and expands our access to stories and opens many new possibilities for creative work."

"Oh, there are so many! When I think of feature films, I imagine the intense drama of Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero; the quiet grief, as well as the eroticism of Yewande Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief; the forbidden wartime love story of Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees. Short stories such as Segun Afolabi’s ‘Monday Morning’ would also make for powerful and timely feature length films."

"The 1960s struck me as such an exciting decade in which to start the novel—it was the time of independence movements across Africa, the Civil Rights movement in the US, and various countercultural movements across Europe. Artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Fela Kuti and the Beatles were amongst many to herald this change. But because I hadn’t lived through this decade myself, I had to do a lot of research for In Dependence for it to feel as historically authentic as possible. I loved the research which included reading back issues of local magazines and newspapers and interviewing people who’d lived through the period."

"Thanks to my mum, I read many Puffin classics. I loved the miniature Beatrix Potter books, Richard Adam’s Watership Down, and tales of Brer Rabbit. As a child, I was a voracious reader, of books and of people, and still am an inveterate eavesdropper and people-watcher. Snippets of overheard conversations and the faces of people not usually noticed often inspire the stories I write. Wondering about other people’s life stories is what I do."

"I tend to disagree with most end-of-year ‘best of’ arts lists, not so much for what’s on the lists but for what gets overlooked. In the realm of recent films for example, I would have loved more attention to Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, especially his sonic and visual gem, Lovers Rock and the same for Jeymes Samuel’s directorial debut, The Harder They Fall, a casting tour-de-force. On the writing front, Yewande Omotoso’s novel, An Unusual Grief—a book about friendship, sex, grieving, domesticity, and depression is one that deserves more attention."

"Whenever I can’t find stories that I want to read, I try writing them for myself. In this case, I’d met many older women who’d lived colorful lives and yet when it came to fiction, I didn’t find stories that mirrored these lives, especially so when it came to the lives of Black women."

"How could I explain that the way he craved my body made me angry"

"I wonder if I should explain that it’s not that I don’t want to make love, only that after a long day of attending to others I’m craving space."

"Is every, every?’ ‘Everything’s fine,’ I say, sensing her struggle with the words."

"For my second novel, I did almost no historical research. With Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun I played much more with form and with voice than I’d done in the past. As such, it was particularly gratifying to have the novel shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, a prize that rewards innovative approaches to fiction."

"It’s tough out here, and sometimes when I read about Africa, I don’t see America being any better. It’s really a crying shame."

"I dream of being held. Of being touched. Of being desired again. Of being recognized. Of not having to worry about what other people might one day think of this, might already be thinking."

"What is done is done and I’ll wait until I get home to see how bad things really are. Consider the birds in the sky, I remind myself. Consider the birds in the sky."

"Madness. Old age is a massacre. No place for sissies. No place for love songs. No place for dreaming. No place for dreaming erotic dreams"

"How often I have felt lonely even when with someone. Lonelier sometimes than when I’m on my own."

"always remember that you are an Ajayi man. Don’t forget the Ajayi motto – In all things moderation, with exception of study."

"I may be old, but farting and burping in public is not something I intend to succumb to. If I can help it."

"The architects must only have thought of women when they designed retirement homes, and assumed they liked to sit and stare solemnly at gardens all day."

"I keep remembering the man who repeatedly lifted an empty fork from his plate to his toothless mouth."

"A book reads us as much as we read a book."

"This book came out of a personal search for greater perspective, inspiration and hope in the context of the current turbulence of our world. I’ve had the great privilege of getting to know the twelve people featured in this book, which allowed me to go beyond their public profiles to the more intimate conversations. They’ve all been an inspiration to me and as such I wanted to share their stories more widely."

"At the time that I began to write the novel I was simply looking for a really good love story set in my parent’s generation with at least one character from West Africa, and because I couldn’t find such a story, I tried writing it myself. As Toni Morrison says, if there’s a book you want to read but can’t find, then try writing it."

"Negritude is an ideology of the elite, completely devoid of meaning for the masses ... Negritude is an ideology suggesting that Africans are blessed with a soul and not reason. They would have us believe that Africans can sing, dance and feel, but not think."

"" The future of Nigeria is no longer in it's army as some of us used to think, but in the oil business."

"Now the books are arranged according to which characters I believe ought to be talking to each other."

"The academic life has become far more bureaucratic, and is increasingly dominated by people with the habits of bureaucrats. You have to either do the bureaucratic stuff on autopilot, and try to keep some section of your brain free for thinking, or find a place where there are friendly bureaucrats to shield you. I'd say this. Managerial programs work best where there is a clear and quantifiable outcome and an easy way of checking what the work-force is doing. Neither of these apply to teaching, or research. Really productive researchers are often staring at the wall, or going for walks -- and their product tends to turn up ten years later. Good teaching is not measured by the number of degrees you turn out, or even how highly the students rate you at the time. But unsophisticated management systems (and those are the ones we have) insist on counting something"

"Malaysians write in an English which is quite distinctive. We can recognise Malaysian English both in its standard and non-standard forms. We can see the influences of the local languages on Malaysian English and it certainly enriches the language, but we need to bear in mind that it should have intelligibility for both local and international readers."

"I certainly do not subscribe to any form of kiss and tell in my writing. Those who write such real-life confessional books are certainly not doing it for any kind of literary reasons. Sadly, that seems to be what some publishers want, and they know these books have readers and they will sell copies."

"One needs to be careful with what one decides to publish. There are things I write and don’t publish. But I certainly needed to write them for myself. My editor is my barometer who cautions me, and I rarely disagree with him. Some of my readers say I’m brave to publish what they read in my books. So maybe, now I can go a little further. Malay­­sians self-censor for many reasons. There is the fear that our work might be banned or at worse the writer gets arrested. One has to be careful with matters of race and religion. My writings do deal with race and aspects of religion, but I am very careful not to offend though I might touch on these issues."

"The primary, fundamental event is war; politics is simply the legitimation and consolidation of the hierarchy imposed in war."

"Thales was the father of ancient philosophy. His consternation, and the firm beliefs to which this gave rise, were transmitted to his pupils and to their pupils again. The law of heredity exercises as despotic and unlimited a sway in philosophy as in all other fields of organic existence. Let any one who doubts this cast a glance at any text-book. Since Hegel no one has dared imagine that the philosopher is able to think and inquire “freely”. The philosopher grows out of the past, like a plant out of the earth. Foreword xxxi"

"Spinoza’s formula, “Deus=natura=substantia”, like all conclusions drawn from it in his Ethics and his earlier works, simply means that there is no God. This discovery of Spinoza’s became the starting point for modern philosophical thought. Foreword p. xxxix"

"One of the outstanding examples of the unfree character of modern philosophical thought is perhaps the famous dispute between Hume and Kant. Kant often declared that Hume had awakened him out of “dogmatic slumber.” And in fact, when we read Hume and those passages of Kant in which he appeals to Hume, we might think that this could not be otherwise, and that what Hume saw and what was visible to Kant also, after Hume, must have awakened not only a sleeper, but even a dead man. Foreword p. xlv"

"What can be more terrible than not to know whether one is alive or dead? “Justice” should insist that this knowledge or this ignorance should be the prerogative of every human being. p. 3"

"Directly Kant hears the word “law” pronounced he takes his hat off; he neither wishes nor dares to dispute. He who says “law” says “power”; he who says “power” says “submission” – for man’s supreme virtue is to submit himself. P. 23"

"Suppose Euripides is right, and that indeed no one can be sure whether life is not death and death life; can this truth ever become certain? If all men daily repeated Euripides’ words when they got up and when they went to bed, they would remain as strange and as problematic as on the day when the poet first heard them in the depths of his soul. P. 6"

"Dostoievsky was not the first to live though this unimaginably terrible passage from one world to another and to find himself obliged to abandon the stability which “principles’ give. Fifteen hundred years earlier Plotinus, who had also tried to transcend our experience, tells that at the first moment one has an impression that everything is disappearing, and has an overwhelming fear that only pure nothingness is left. P. 28"

"Science is objective, indifferent; it does not consider whether a thing matters or not. It coldly casts its eye over the innocent and the guilty alike, knowing neither pity nor anger. But where there is no pity or indignation, where the innocent and the guilty are alike regarded with indifference, where all “phenomena” are merely classified and not qualified, there can be distinctions between the important and the insignificant. Science pretends to the certainty, the universality, and the necessity of its statements. P. 32"

"There are no ideals exalting the soul, but only chains, invisible indeed, but binding man more securely than iron. And no act of heroism, no “good work” can open the doors to man’s “perpetual confinement”. Dostoievsky’s barrack vows of “improvement” now appeared to him as a sacrilege. He experience which he underwent was much the same as Luther’s when he remembered with such unfeigned horror and disgust the vows which he had pronounced on entering the convent. P. 10"

"Plato, too, knew the “underground”, but her called it a “cave” and created his splendid world-famous myth in which men were likened to prisoners in a cave. But he did it in such a way that no one thought of calling Plato’s cave “underground” nor calling Plato himself a sickly, abnormal being, one of those for whom normal men have to invent theories, treatments, etc. p. 13"

"What happens to the mind of the underground man has no resemblance at all to thinking, nor even to seeking. He does not think, he excites himself desperately, throws himself about, knocks his head against the wall. He inflames himself the whole time, dashing up to unknown heights of fury, to fling himself into God knows what abysses of despair. He has no control of himself; a force far greater than himself has him completely under its sway. P. 42"

"The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman are distinguished from Eliot's earlier plays by their author's obvious desire to accomodate himself to the conventions of the stage at their most conventional level. In the earlier plays, Sweeney Agonistes, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Family Reunion, Eliot was working in the experimental theatre of the 'thirties, using such devices as the chorus, the direct appeal to the audience, soliloquy, lyrical solos and duets, and ritual and symbolic acts. In these last plays he deliberately wrote within the limits of what has been contemptuously called the "West End Play", or what Mr. Terence Rattigan called "Plays for Aunt Edna"."

"What was the modern movement in English and American literature has now passed into history. We have to call it the 'modernist movement'. Its great figures—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Wallace Stevens—are now well entrenched in academic syllabuses. The vultures and the crows have moved in over the old battlefields. Writers who once aroused a passionate enthusiasm and as passionate a disapproval are now the prey of bibliographers and textual critics, biographers and editors of letters, and students seeking doctorates."

"Plotinus's assertion that the soul, in so far as it is in the body, rests in deep sleep, now acquires a new meaning for us; Plotinus, like his great predecessors Epictetus, Plato, and Socrates, felt that we must awake out of something, overcome some self-evident truths. We must discover the magician who holds the souls of men under his spell. Where is he? How fight against him? p. 349"