I was stained by failure.
Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.
Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care.
Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.
Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.
And it’s wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It’s possible to love something and still condescend to it.
Why did people ask “What is it about?” as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.
There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.
When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.
Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You’re caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn’t go running with Curt today because you don’t want to sweat out this straightness. You’re always battling to make your hair do what it wasn’t meant to do.
The higher you go, the fewer women there are.
Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?
They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.
Stories matter. Many stories matter.
This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.
Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.
Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.