Chris Abani
Chris Abani
Christopher "Chris" Abaniis a Nigerian and American author. He says he is part of a new generation of Nigerian writers working to convey to an English-speaking audience the experience of those born and raised in "that troubled African nation"...
NationalityNigerian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 December 1966
CountryNigeria
kindness heart simple
You know, you can steel your heart against any kind of trouble, any kind of horror. But the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you.
imagination agents shapes
What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.
simple compassion world
What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.
love takes
It takes me forever to actually finish something like a ten-page essay. But, when I do, I usually love what they are. It's a complicated relationship.
ascribe mirrors
We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not - I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value.
african interested narratives ourselves stories writers
African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.
country men nigeria passage rites taught ways women
When I was growing up in Nigeria - and I shouldn't say Nigeria, because that's too general, but in Afikpo, the Igbo part of the country where I'm from - there were always rites of passage for young men. Men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women; that's essentially what it is.
best larger love
I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.
along believe continuum expressed forms genres require simply stops truly
I truly believe that writing is a continuum - so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don't write essays as often as I should.
My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the '50s.
african certain count modern mostly mythic south
I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.
minute web
Like most writers, I find the Web is a wonderful distraction. Who doesn't need that last minute research before writing?
amazing chocolate comic exchange homework mom older privilege reading taught time war wrote
I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too.
beginning born civil ended federal generate generation government growing history taught three war
I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years. And I was growing up in school, and the federal government didn't want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels.