Short Story Writers

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Nostalgia settled on my shoulders like the arm of a long-lost friend, urging me to look back and listen; it had been years since I heard such morning sounds, such silence."

"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”."

"I've seen children snatched away from their mothers, never to be reunited. I've seen husbands taken from their wives and kids and sent away to prison. I've seen grown men flogged by soldiers in front of their kids. That's how history is made, and it's our job to witness it."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The further from home you wander, the closer you get to Siberia."

"There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a stranger in a strange city."

"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."

"I get stage fright with short stories . For me it feels like stand up comedy: kill or die. I’m more confident when I begin a novel because I know I have space to fail"

"You must take a year off, one of these days, before you’re old and tired and weighed down by responsibility. Go away somewhere, and read. Read all the important books. Educate yourself, then you’ll see the world in a different way."

"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."

"Can you continue to love a person regardless of such shortcomings? Maybe because you hope to save them? Or because you can't help it? Isn't that what love is all about?"

"I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain."

"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."

"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."

"Not all of us have that luxury, of a past. My history doesn't offer me much in that respect."

"She drinks her Eva water. Their parents were taken down by cancer, heart attacks and strokes. Respectable diseases."

"Most of the children were shoeless and you were confronted with the dilemma that, no matter how much money you had and no matter where you could escape to overseas, you could not save yourself from your own country."

"Our job is to find out the truth, even if it is buried deep in the earth."

"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."

"Happiness is important, but I wouldn't say it is the main purpose of human existence."

"I don't have much of an imagination, but I have a mind bank of details, which I play with. It's how I daydream, so writing like that is natural for me."

"Hagar takes to prostitution whenrejection and hunger look her straight in the face"

"Sometimes poets have to be imperfect so their poetry can be perfect."

"People don’t fear the wind until it fells a tree. Then, they say it’s too much."

"We came to tell you sir, that our clinic is run-down and abandoned.We came to tell you that we don’t have a single borehole onMorgan street... we are here to protest against this neglect--- weare dying from diseases. We are dying from a lack of hope. Andthat is why we are here today to protest. And this is the way wefeel we ought to express our displeasure"

"Our story is over, the ink has dried, each of us must move on now and it will be as if we had never met, never loved, and never dreamt together."

"You don't need attention to write. All you need is passion for your work and an overwhelming desire to tell a story you genuinely care about. Readers can sense your sincerity and it separates you from pretenders."

"I didn't love him. He was a good, decent guy, but I wanted more at that time." She shrugged. "I was not so young anymore. Time was passing for me. I wanted more… excitement."

"Look, we are living under siege. Their very presence on our streetsand in the government house instead of the barrack where theybelong is an act of aggression. They hold us cowed with guns sothat they will steal our money—they will continue subjugating uskilling all dissenters one by one, sending them to exile till there isno competitor left to oppose them."

"There had been an accident. Bola’s family-father, mother, and twosisters had been in a car crash. It was late in the evening...theywere on their way to Ibadan for a visit...The father driving hadfailed to see the truck laying on its side in the middle of the road.It was a military truck carrying the furniture of an officer ontransfer from Lagos to Ibadan. The father and mother, who were in front, had died instantly; Peju, the elder sister, died on the way to the hospital; the other sister, Lola, sustained minor injuries"

"Look out there, see the long queue of cars waiting for fuel. Someof them have been there for three days...And we are a majorproducer of oil"

"More than once ourtaxi was forced to hug the kerb as siren blaring military jeepspassed at top speed...”"

"The houses were old and craggy and lichened. The place had theunfinished, abandoned appearance of an under waterscape.Crouching under the bigger or in their own clusters were hastilybuilt wood and zinc structures that housed an incredibly largenumber of families: the fathers were mostly out-of-work drivers,laborers, fugitives convalescing between prison terms"

"We don finally reach the end of the road. We don dey together since I was born, but now time don come wey me and you must part. Bye-bye.Goodnight. Ka chi foo. Oda ro. Sai gobe"

"I never wanted to be a writer; I just had stories I needed to tell."

"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 students, who should have been busy taking theirbaths and getting set for lectures, sat idly...discussing the boycottof lectures"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."