Our Histories Cling To Us. We Are

At About The Age Of Seven … I Wrote Exactly The Kinds Of Stories I Was Reading: All My Characters Were White And Blue-eyed, They Played In The Snow, They Ate Apples, And They Talked A Lot About The Weather: How Lovely It Was That The Sun Had Come Out. This Despite The Fact That I Lived In Nigeria; We Didn’t Have Snow, We Ate Mangoes, And We Never Talked About The Weather, Because There Was No Need To.

How Easy It Was To Lie To Strangers, To Create With Strangers The Versions Of Our Lives We Imagined.

Creative Writing Programmes Are Not Very Necessary. They Just Exist So That People Like Us Can Make A Living.

If I Had Not Grown Up In Nigeria- And If All I Knew Of Africa Were Of Popular Images- I Too Would Think That Africa Was A Place Of Beautiful Landscapes, Beautiful Animals And Incomprehensible People Fighting Sensless Wars, Dying Of Poverty And Aids- Unable To Speak For Themselves And Waiting To Be Saved By A Kind White Foreigner.

We Did That Often, Asking Each Other Questions Whose Answers We Already Knew. Perhaps It Was So That We Would Not Ask The Other Questions, The Ones Whose Answers We Did Not Want To Know.