Chris Abani Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes I feel very alone. I am a bit of a nomad. Many people in sort of emerging countries, emerging economies, find themselves displaced. So there is that sense, and so I'm part of a whole, I think, group of displaced people. — Chris Abani

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. — Chris Abani

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. — Chris Abani

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot. — Chris Abani

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. — Chris Abani

Do you think anything ever changes, Salazar asked. That we can make a difference? That we will become a better species? I don't know, I'm not sure if it even matters. I think all that matters is that we don't shrink away from the truth and that we keep trying, Sunil said. I like that. Push the stone up the fucking hill because we should. Yes, — Chris Abani

All my characters exist in risk, in the places we are either too afraid to go to, or have enough privilege not to have to, but whatever the reason, these characters I fashion go before us and come back transformed for us. For me, at least. — Chris Abani

I watch what happens below and I
am grateful that I can smell my smell, smell my smell and live while below me it happens, it happens that night bright as day, but I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it, and I hide and am grateful for my smell crouched like an animal in that dark hot space — Chris Abani

Since I hold no judgments against my characters, no matter how heinous they might seem, I present them as real people with their own moral centers. We might feel those moral centers are mis-calibrated, but they are there and are the rudders that propel them. This makes reading my work a visceral roller coaster, 'cause the reader must embark on the journey of the protagonist equipped only with his or her own moral center. — Chris Abani

My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the '50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English. — Chris Abani

Love is at once the most creative and yet simultaneously destructive force in the world, and thus, in our lives. And I don't mean the Hallmark sentimental type of love, although that is part of it. But a deeper obligation that we have to each other: the obligation to reflect our humanness at each other, to reflect back the things others show us and we, them. — Chris Abani

The greatest thing about form and convention is that it saves you from having to reinvent the wheel. Now, whether you mount the wheel to a horse carriage or a Formula One racing car, make it plain or give it spinning rims, those are all craft decisions. But the fact of the wheel remains: it will turn if you set it down. That's what I mean about the beauty of the gifts genre can offer. — Chris Abani

If you encounter a human shadow burned permanently into the concrete in Hiroshima, you realize that this is the trace of a very ordinary person now elevated into the emblematic. Time, shame, complicity, or discomfort are the only things that make us pretend History is impersonal or far removed from the power and consequences of our every lived moment. — Chris Abani

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. — Chris Abani

If I don't get at least one e-mail every ten minutes, I feel unloved. Even junk mail makes me feel seen. Sad, I know. Sigh. — Chris Abani

We are hunting the demons that haunt others. We get a smell and off we go. And you know why, Sunil? You know why we are so good at hunting the demons of others? Because we are so good, gifted even, at stalking and evading our own. But all demons hunters think that they are really heroes, and you know what all heroes need? — Chris Abani

Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is. — Chris Abani

Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can. — Chris Abani

People think that writing is writing, but actually writing is editing. Otherwise, you're just taking notes — Chris Abani

There was a positive side to not trying at something: you could always pretend that your life would have been different if you had. — Chris Abani

The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news. I live there. We don't go home at the end of the day and think, "Well, I really know who I am now because the Wall Street Journal says that the Stock Exchange closed at this many points." What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture. — Chris Abani

I didn't leave Africa, I left Nigeria, and for political reasons. But ... I've never, never left Africa, and I certainly never left what it means to be Ibo. That is something you carry with you. — Chris Abani

Like most writers, I find the Web is a wonderful distraction. Who doesn't need that last minute research before writing? — Chris Abani

Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time. — Chris Abani

Listening to the clack clack of the pal fronds form a percussive background to the oboe throb of the sea, he dozed off. An hour later, he woke with a start and, standing up, dusted off the seat of his trousers. White sand, in fine glittering silicon chips, clung to him, catching the sun, turning him into a patchwork fabric of diamonds and ebony. — Chris Abani

The wind is calling in a voice I remember — Chris Abani

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. — Chris Abani

as his mother told Grandma Marie, there are no words for some — Chris Abani

She who had been taken and taken and taken. And now the one time she took for herself, the one time she had choice in the matter, it was taken away. — Chris Abani

Before you speak, my friend, remember, a spiritual man contain his anger. Angry words are like slap in de face. — Chris Abani

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. — Chris Abani

The question is, how do I balance narratives that are wonderful with narratives of wounds and self-loathing? And this is the difficulty that I face. I am trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of ethical questioning. I am asking us to balance the idea of our complete vulnerability with the complete notion of transformation or what is possible. — Chris Abani

Abigail read in Reader's Digest that all plane landings were controlled crashes. Like the way we live our lives, she thought. Bumble through doing the best we can and hoping that some benevolence keeps us from crashing. — Chris Abani

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. — Chris Abani

As with much of the world's problems, they become public
or much more of interest
the moment they begin to impact the West. — Chris Abani

Circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell - the strange inverse sense of apartheid. — Chris Abani

Sometimes it is enough to know that it is difficult. — Chris Abani

The Igbo used to say that they built their own gods. They would come together as a community, and they would express a wish. And their wish would then be brought to a priest, who would find a ritual object, and the appropriate sacrifices would be made, and the shrine would be built for the god. — Chris Abani

The Internet is really our meeting place. We have this amazing listserv. Every time I log onto it I feel a sense of pride, because if you log on and say, "Oh I was just in San Diego and I was in a park and I saw a lion," the flurry of replies on average is just like
wow! All these existential questions about what it means to be an African, and never having seen a lion at home, but having seen a lion here. Everything you say turns into this real philosophical debate
it's incredible in so many ways. And it's an invigorating place to be. — Chris Abani

If you want to know about Africa, read our literature
and not just 'Things Fall Apart,' because that would be like saying, 'I've read 'Gone with the Wind' and so I know everything about America. — Chris Abani

Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life. — Chris Abani

Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression
how long before the pot boiled over. — Chris Abani

I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience. — Chris Abani

I think it's an aggregation of all of the small acts that are really transformative. I think a group of small acts transform the individual. And maybe when the individual transforms, collectively we transform. — Chris Abani

I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don't know that there's anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little bit indulgent. — Chris Abani

He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present. — Chris Abani

My friend Ronald Gottesman says ... that the cause of all our trouble is the belief in an essential, pure identity: religious, ethnic, historical, ideological. — Chris Abani

Elvis, stop dat! You know it is taboo to whistle at night. You will attract a spirit. — Chris Abani

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things. — Chris Abani

Story is powerful. Story is fluid and it belongs to nobody. — Chris Abani

This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten. — Chris Abani

I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified. — Chris Abani

The problem is we're looking for something that doesn't exist. We're looking for authenticity. There is no such thing as authenticity. There is either good art or bad art. Art is never about its content. It's about its scaffolding. — Chris Abani

My grand uncle was a traditional priest, and he would always say to me as a kid, 'We stand in our own light,' which essentially for him meant we were entirely responsible for a lot of what happens to us and for the ways in which our lives play out. — Chris Abani

That women are mysterious and unknowable is something every young man grows up believing. Men, on the other hand, never think of themselves as mysterious or confusing, and we are often at a loss as to why women want to figure us out. — Chris Abani

Much of the image of the amazingness of America comes from the movies into other cultures. And it's much the same thing when you reverse it. Much of Africa is presented through poverty, through drought and war. [But] you're not presenting people, you're not presenting countries, you're not presenting complexity, and so people can't care about an amorphous mass called Africa. — Chris Abani

Nigerians are everywhere. There's an old joke, particularly about the Ibos, that when you finally land on Mars, you're going to find a Nigerian there who has a shop that is selling Coca-Cola
who took a speculative trip 20 years ago and has been waiting for everyone else to arrive. — Chris Abani

If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality. — Chris Abani

It is easy to forget the decadence of glass. How some of us find it only in fragments. The glass between us and the world is often the measure of our wealth. Looking out at the world through it colors the hunger beyond. — Chris Abani

What you hear is not my voice.
I have not spoken in three years: not since I left boot camp. It has been three years of a senseless war, and though the reasons for it are clear, and though we will continue to fight until we are ordered to stop-and probably for a while after that-none of us can remember the hate that led us here. We are simply fighting to survive the war. It is a strange place to be at fifteen, bereft of hope and very nearly of your humanity. But that is where I am nonetheless. — Chris Abani

There is no living African writer who has not had to, or will not have to, contend with Achebe's work. We are either resisting him - stylistically, politically, or culturally - or we are writing toward him. — Chris Abani

I would say it is because the striving and the power keep you from realizing just how helpless you really are. It protects you from facing the fact that others are manipulating you, that regardless of what you might claim, your philosophy is simply a way to rationalize what you do for others too afraid to do their own dirty work; that you are in a way also a victim of the apartheid state. You — Chris Abani

I think that those of us who are ordinary disappear easily into the backdrop of life and we take things for granted. We often wake up in our lives and wonder how we got there. But the characters I create, the people I am drawn to, are quite extraordinary (and not always in wholesome ways), and they offer us the chance to understand who we really are and how we became who we are. — Chris Abani

All power within the microcosm of my world was held and wielded by people who look like me. Plus, I think Nigerians all have this sense that they are better than everyone, including white people. So I have the privilege of a certain distance. It may just be that. So in a sense, I can't claim that as any ability that I have, simply a matter of circumstance. — Chris Abani

Sometimes we say we want an end to hate or racism or sexism. But we all participate in keeping these structures alive. If everyone decided to relinquish the past what would happen to people who feel that there hasn't been proper atonement made to them? And what happens to the person who feels that the constant atonement is their identity? — Chris Abani

Here's the thing: You rescue us every day in small, quiet ways, so why not in this way? Let us into your mystery, tell us how you would like to be loved, show us how to see you, really see you. — Chris Abani

My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never sentimental, that never look away from the darkest things about us. — Chris Abani

Fire and Water are archetypes, the split sides of consciousness; one aware, the other, not. The two parts of us that desire synthesis, yet resist it: the self and the shadow. But they are also the element of chance, of the random roll of dice. — Chris Abani

What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are. — Chris Abani

Your anatomy is a mystery that nobody bothers explaining to us. Even when we think we have mastered one woman's body, every body is different. — Chris Abani

The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time. — Chris Abani

Thoughts of Abigail filled her world. By all accounts she had bee a tall, thin, woman, whose eyes held a power beyond the black pools of er irises. Tall, thin, and dark, she, this Abigail, looked so much like the other that her father had named her the same She was more ghost than her mother, however, moving with the quality of light breathing though a house in which the only footprints in the dust were those of her dead mother. Even her laughter, at once wild and reigned in, was all Abigail. — Chris Abani

Fiction is more dangerous than nonfiction because it can seduce better. I think we all know this, know that deeper truths can be approached in fiction than in fact. There are risks for the reader, because after reading certain books you find you have changed irreversibly. There are risks for writers: in China, now, and Ethiopia and other countries right now, writers face real persecution. — Chris Abani

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. — Chris Abani

I have to have three or four books going simultaneously. If I'm not impressed in the first 20 pages, I don't bother reading the rest, especially with novels. I'm not a book-club style reader. I'm not looking for life lessons or wanting people to think I'm smart because I'm reading a certain book. — Chris Abani

There had been many such experiments when he worked in South Africa, in Vlakplaas, a notorious apartheid death camp. — Chris Abani

Anything a man can do, I can fix. — Chris Abani

When I was 10, I read James Baldwin's 'Another Country,' and that book broke me. Not because I was encountering homosexual sex and love for the first time, but because the way James wrote about it made it impossible for me to attach otherness to it. 'Here,' Jimmy said. 'Here is love, all of it. — Chris Abani

Circuses are about entertainment and juggling and animals and all that shit. Sideshows are about freaks, about people and the limits of acceptability. We push those limits. If a circus is an escape, Fire said, a sideshow is a confrontation. — Chris Abani

Narrative is a very feeble weapon in the face of human darkness and yet it's all we have. That we have to hang the transformation and survival of our species on the journey and transformation of one singular person so far outside of what we expect they can do. — Chris Abani

I read everywhere. It's like a bodily function. I don't need quiet. I write and read with the TV on. I follow the TV show while I read. TV doesn't require a lot of brainpower. — Chris Abani

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. — Chris Abani

Every successful artist comes from a family - parents or siblings or both - who, although equally gifted, chose not to pursue the treacherous and difficult path of the artist. — Chris Abani

In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself. — Chris Abani

My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the '50s. — Chris Abani

Literature is an aspect of story and story is all that exists to make sense of reality. War is a story. Now you begin to see how powerful story is because it informs our worldview and our every action, our every justification is a story. So how can story not be truly transformative? I've seen it happen in real ways, not in sentimental ways or in the jargon of New Age liberal ideology. — Chris Abani

My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet. — Chris Abani

But the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people — Chris Abani

I think that most writers who are trying to write important and difficult books are in many ways putting their own humanity into question. Sometimes the journey is finding out where you stand in relationship to your own humanity and to the humanity of others. — Chris Abani

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. — Chris Abani

What I do is create a lens through my work that corrects my readers' cognitive dissonance and says: you will see all of it - not what you want or what makes you comfortable, but all of it. And you will not erase what displeases you. — Chris Abani