I fundamentally believe that no one can teach you how to write - finding out how to write a story is part of the process of creating a story - but you can really learn through exposure to different writing, to different art forms, to different modes of storytelling, and with mentors who are able to get you to step outside your comfort zone.
— Uzodinma Iweala
D.C. is in my blood, my diction, my sensibility and style. I am, though, in love with a city that cannot fully love me back.
Lagos is sometimes emblematic of disorder. In traffic, drivers make their own rules. There is a constant war between our street hawkers and our various forms of law enforcement deployed to eradicate the 'indiscipline' of poverty.
Around the world, our cities are not the idealised open, accessible, and cosmopolitan spaces of our dreams. More often than not, they are sectioned and controlled purviews of the radically wealthy, surrounded by clusters of have-nots.
I don't know if I want to be a writer.
Kidnapping causes a long-term rupture in the psyche of those kidnapped and of those who wait for their return. It doesn't end.
Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned?
Whether as living humans or as mythological figures, ancestors have always played an important role in the African popular and literary imagination. Sometimes, as in Amos Tutuola's famous short novels, they directly influence events. More often, as in the works of Chinua Achebe, both living and dead ancestors are sages offering valuable advice.
Medicine has an immediate impact, the ability to do good. Writing is such a solitary activity.
European authors often write books about the rest of the world that profess a vision of shared humanity but fall far short, casting the other as exotic or dangerous.
For me, I am really interested in how I can stretch myself to produce things. If, in the process, others take note and recognise that, then wonderful.
Washington, D.C., is not a subtle city. Unlike the capitals of other once-great powers which, many hundreds of years old, present a more seamless meshing of monumental memory and daily life, D.C. is constructed to shout, 'Here I am! I am powerful!' to the world.
Lagos is a fascinatingly infuriating place that its residents love - and love to hate. Licence plates on cars here proudly display the state motto, 'Centre of Excellence,' in what often seems a sarcastic swipe at the place we live in.
'Beasts of No Nation' began when I read an article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone during my final year of high school.
Nigeria shed the last of a succession of brutal military dictatorships in 1997 and adopted a democratic form of government only in 1999. Our elections of 2003, 2007, and 2011 were complicated and fraught with tension, but each one has shown remarkable progress.
Nigeria is a difficult place. It is not a country for the faint of heart. On a good day, when our larger cities such as Abuja, Lagos, and Kano are filled with the teeming masses going in so many different directions, flogged by the heat and sun, bumping down uneven roads all in the name of 'the hustle,' it can appear chaotic.
Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head - because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself.
Many great novels have shown a world torn to shreds by the brutality of war. To do so, their authors ground their texts in the details of destruction and decay.
In my senior year of high school, I read an article in 'Newsweek' about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. I felt a sense of shock - this was happening in the region where I'm from, and people don't know about it. I wanted to understand.
When you relate to a disease, you're afraid. When you relate to a person, there is compassion. You see someone that is like you, that could be like you. You can see yourself in that same situation.
Like all things, cities must change - even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.
As an adult, I discovered Claritin, and my whole world changed.
U.N.-orchestrated gatherings are typically the death of all spontaneity and innovation.
Sometimes writing it is a good way to understand something.
The kidnapped person is so tantalizingly close, kept alive by a devastating hope. Kidnapping or hostage-taking is perhaps the most disturbing form of terror because it turns this hope into a liability that can paralyze.
Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.
There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority.
War in Africa is hardly a new phenomenon, nor are voices telling its stories of terror and triumph. Yet some of the continent's most devastating conflicts - and the literature born from the experiences of their survivors - have often gone unnoticed in the West.
Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence.
When the HIV/AIDS epidemic first appeared, a lot of the reaction was that it's not happening here. It doesn't exist. It's not on the continent of Africa. Then we moved into this other phase, in which it was kind of like, it's everywhere.
