a.magazine’s African Interview Series

Chris Abani was born in Afikpo, Nigeria. At the age of sixteen, he published his first novel, Masters of the Board (1985), for which he suffered severe political persecution. Since then, he has written two novels: The Virgin of Flames (2007) and GraceLand (2004); two novellas: Song For Night (2007) and Becoming Abigail (2006); and four collections of poetry. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award & the PEN Hemingway Book Prize. He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside.
–
As a Nigerian living abroad, do you feel at home outside of Nigeria?

Yes, I feel at home everywhere. I think a writer is essentially without home outside of their art and maybe language, so even in Nigeria, I felt a certain displacement. But I like to think of myself as a more global soul. I think we all have to now, the way the world has changed, you know?

Do you write about Nigeria and Nigerian characters out of a specific need, obligation, or impulse? Does Nigeria exist in everything you write?

I don’t write about characters based on where they are from. Characters coalesce around an idea, a hope or even a burning issue and then slowly evolve to tell their narrative. There are characters in my books from all over the world. I don’t know if Nigeria exists in everything I write. No, scratch that, it must. It must because it is a part of me, so yes, the answer is yes.

It seems that most of your characters witness or take part in extreme brutality—mutilation, rape, massacre, and war. How do you prevent sensationalizing these events? How does writing about such devastation affect you personally? Are you able to separate yourself from your art?

I don’t know that most of my characters do. Some do. Some don’t. Here’s the thing, I am drawn to areas of silence, to loss around silence and so I am engaged in some form of recuperation, some kind of exploration of my own understanding of the world and its seemingly irreconcilable horrors and beauties. Nothing prevents me from sensationalizing these narratives, but they would be uninteresting and would yield nothing to me as a writer and a human being to do so. Writing is a kind of spiritual practice for me and so I am always looking for ways to turn everything towards light, towards transformation, but a real one that isn’t sentimental. I don’t if I ever truly succeed, but I keep trying. Yes, I am able to separate myself from my art. Can you imagine how awful a person I would be if I didn’t? I don’t take myself seriously, but I take my art deadly serious.

Is it easier to live in your art or in your life? Is there a distinction?

Yes there is a distinction. There is a way in which an artist has to move outside their own life, their own limitations or even moral sense in order to portray or create a convincing world. In that sense, I can be for gun control but write a convincing and committed character who is in the NRA. Does this make sense? That who an artist is in the world doesn’t have to reflect what they portray in their art.
It is always easier to live in art, I think, because in a way it is a remove from the quotidian difficulties of everyday living. The harder thing is to live in your life while making and holding onto the artistic imagination. This is what I do because it is all I know how to. There is a curious way in that in the Western imagination the writer or artist comes to occupy a more privileged position than most people. This is not the way it is necessarily viewed in other parts of the world. An artist is important but no more so than anybody else. We are playing our part to keep our humanity alive.

You published your first novel at sixteen. Were you writing poetry then too? How do poetry and prose provide different vehicles for expressing yourself? Do you consider yourself more a poet or a novelist?

Everyone writes bad poetry when they are young, although there are some who continue to write bad poetry even when they should know better, but I was primarily a fiction writer. I read and loved poetry but it was a form that I considered too grand for me then. I mean poets were Eliot and Yeats, you know?
Poetry is the only art form where language is the subject, so when I am trying to work through ideas that themselves seem ineffable, when I need to invent a language for some impulse, I turn to poetry. I don’t think of it as self-expression. I think it is more than just that.
I think that I am a viscous writer—I flow between forms, with difficulty but with joy. My friend the writer Colin Channer refers to me as bi-textual. Maybe I am.

You’ve used the phrase “kernel of the narrative thrust” before. Could you explain this? Is the kernel something you consciously create or something that arises organically out of your work? If it emerges, when in your writing process do you usually find it, and how do you know when you’ve got it? If the kernel is a conscious creation, what advice do you give writers for creating it?

The kernel is the thing you cannot name, or at least name well. It is the impetus for the work. It is the thing that you are struggling with that gives rise to a whole novel in order to explain it. It arises organically when a writer begins to engage in the world, when a writer breaks from the focus on self.
If you take the novel, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, the kernel of the book is the idea of a man who is incapable of love, true love, which requires the loss of self to some extent. The whole arises out of this struggle, which ties into Baldwin’s general philosophical engagement with the world, which is that the lack of love is the only perversion.

If you could meet any African artist—author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer, designer—who would it be? Why?

I would have loved to have met Bessie Head and to have spent more time with Yvonne Vera. Bessie wrote the most psychologically intense novel in African literature ( A Question of Power ) and was playing with form like the French writers, and Yvonne’s ability to use language to transform the world remains a large influence on me.