Black Voices Bookclub - Fiction by Black Authors

Selection for June...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was widely acclaimed when it was published in 2003.

Fifteen-year-old Kambili’s world is circumscribed by the high walls and frangipani trees of her family compound. Her wealthy Catholic father, under whose shadow Kambili lives, while generous and politically active in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home.

When Nigeria begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili’s father sends her and her brother away to stay with their aunt, a University professor, whose house is noisy and full of laughter. There, Kambili and her brother discover a life and love beyond the confines of their father’s authority. The visit will lift the silence from their world and, in time, give rise to devotion and defiance that reveal themselves in profound and unexpected ways. This is a book about the promise of freedom; about the blurred lines between childhood and adulthood; between love and hatred, between the old gods and the new.

Purple Hibiscus is a stunning debut that captures the fragile beauty of a young woman's awakening at a time when both country and family are on the cusp of change.

Our May selection.....

Trying to Filch the Blessings of the Idol Rich
‘Foreign Gods, Inc.,’ by Okey Ndibe

By JANET MASLIN

Okey Ndibe’s razor-sharp “Foreign Gods, Inc.” steps into the story of a Nigerian-born New Yorker called Ike, just as everything in his life has begun to go horribly wrong. The only thing worse than Ike’s present situation is the plan he makes to remedy it.
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Patricia Wall/The New York Times
FOREIGN GODS, INC.
By Okey Ndibe

Okey Ndibe
Ike, whose name is correctly pronounced EE-kay, has an Amherst degree cm laude in economics. But his accent has kept him from finding a job. So he works as a cabby, with customers who call him “Eekay,” which means “buttocks” in Igbo. He has made a bad marriage to a woman who walked off with his savings, and debts now overwhelm him. The only thing he has of value is something of age-old mystical significance that is not exactly in his possession. And, intellect notwithstanding, he gets the bright idea of acquiring and selling it from a trendy article in New York magazine.

A friend sends Ike the article about an art gallery called Foreign Gods Inc., which gives this book its terrifically apt title. Only in mimicking a slick American idiom does Mr. Ndibe falter, and that’s probably to his credit. (From the fake New York magazine: “ ‘A summons to heaven doesn’t come easy or cheap,” says a gallery patron, referring to the place’s most expensive upper floor.”) But the gist of the piece is that a dealer named Mark Gruels traffics in deities from faraway places, which mean nothing but money to either him or his customers. As the book begins, Ike arrives at the gallery to see a tanned woman holding a squat statue to her breast, leaving Foreign Gods and getting into her BMW.

Ike is desperate enough to believe that Gruels will pay big money for Ngene, the powerful war god that presided over the Nigerian region where he was raised. Mr. Ndibe has his own memories of war to draw upon: He grew up in the midst of the Biafran war and was a Nigerian journalist and academic before coming to the United States, as a protégé of Chinua Achebe. He has had a distinguished teaching career and is the author of one earlier novel, “Arrows of Rain” (2000). But “Foreign Gods, Inc.,” which arrives early in January, will still have the impact of an astute and gripping new novelist’s powerful debut.

Not far into the book, Ike is on his way back to Nigeria with only one plan in mind: to steal what he thinks is an inanimate object and bring it back to New York. That scheme alone is evidence of how far he has strayed from his roots, and how much of a re-education awaits him.

At first, he is simply struck by the physical changes to his native land: Where did all those zinc-roofed concrete buildings with satellite dishes come from? But then the sense memories of the place begin to seduce him, and he falls into a swoon of reminiscence that would be enchanting, if it were not constantly interrupted by the harsh realities of his relatives and former neighbors.

Ngene the war god plays some mysterious role in all of this. Much of the village’s hardship dates back to the disruptive visit of a British missionary who was determined to teach the superiority of Christianity to Nigerian pagans. Even this takes the form of materialism, as the increasingly mad Englishman, Stanton, insists that his God is more powerful because he owns everything, while the Nigerian gods possess nothing. Nothing but the hearts and minds of their followers.

Stanton is gone, but in his wake he left bitter divisiveness and a terrible conflation of religion and greed. So Ike returns to find that his mother, who for years has had Ike’s sister bombard him with plaintive, begging letters (“Mama wonders if you want us to eat sand”), has fallen under the spell of a pastor who sees religious commitment in terms of dollar signs.

The influence of America is everywhere, and so are its own foreign gods: Ike finds impoverished Nigerian kids watching old reruns of Michael Jordan playing basketball, talking about what they would do if they were as rich and widely worshiped as he once was. They’d buy houses. Cars. Shirts with brand names on them. And pizza, even though not one of these kids has ever tasted it. They’ve just seen people eat it on American TV, and the people look happy after they do.

Ike’s journey through his past is so richly evocative that he and the reader may almost forget what he went home to do. But by the time he turns his attention to Ngene, whose high priest is Ike’s uncle, it’s clear that Ngene is more than just a wooden artifact. The past has proved, to anyone who would take heed, that Ngene is powerful, indestructible, vengeful and not easily subject to the whims of others. So a great deal more than art dealing is at stake as Ike enacts the final stage of his crazy, misbegotten plan.

Throughout “Foreign Gods, Inc.,” Ike’s hard-won urban Americanness, the kind that allowed him to drive a New York taxi, slowly evaporates. It is replaced by a more primal, physical life, as he becomes more attuned to sounds and smells, especially to the stinks of suffering, failure and fear.

Mr. Ndibe invests his story with enough dark comedy to make Ngene an odoriferous presence in his own right, and certainly not the kind of polite exotic rarity that art collectors are used to. At one point, the novel compares him to the demonic Baal, and Ngene shows many signs of wishing to live up to that reputation. In Mr. Ndibe’s agile hands, he’s both a source of satire and an embodiment of pure terror.

REVIEWS | LAUREN FRANCIS-SHARMA

laurenfrancissharma.com PRAISE & REVIEWS "'Til The Well Runs Dry is unforgettable. Like the best poetry, it has all the high notes: a beautiful girl, a spell that

Our April 2014 selection....Til the Well Runs Dry

“’Til the Well Runs Dry is unforgettable...”—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Deep End of the Ocean

“Thunderous, witty, and deeply soulful... like the first time I read my aunt’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.” —Lucy Ann Hurston

A glorious and moving multi-generational, multicultural saga that begins in the 1940s and sweeps through the 1960’s in Trinidad and the United States

Lauren Francis-Sharma's 'Til the Well Runs Dry opens in a seaside village in the north of Trinidad where young Marcia Garcia, a gifted and smart-mouthed 16-year-old seamstress, lives alone, raising two small boys and guarding a family secret. When she meets Farouk Karam, an ambitious young policeman (so taken with Marcia that he elicits the help of a tea-brewing obeah woman to guarantee her ardor), the risks and rewards in Marcia’s life amplify forever.

On an island rich with laughter, Calypso, Carnival, cricket, beaches and salty air, sweet fruits and spicy stews, the novel follows Marcia and Farouk from their amusing and passionate courtship through personal and historical events that threaten Marcia’s secret, entangle the couple and their children in a scandal, and endanger the future for all of them.

'Til the Well Runs Dry tells the twinned stories of a spirited woman’s love for one man and her bottomless devotion to her children. For readers who cherish the previously untold stories of women’s lives, here is a story of grit and imperfection and love that has not been told before.

Between the Lines: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with Zadie Smith by Schomburg Center

http://new.livestream.com/accounts/7326672/events/2831224

new.livestream.com Watch Schomburg Center's Between the Lines: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with Zadie Smith on Livestream.com. Join award-winning Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie in conversation with author Zadie Smith as they discuss Adichie's dazzling new novel, Americanah. Adichie, one of the leading contemporary vo...

We will be meeting again in April.....stay tuned for the date and the new book we will be discussing!

Public Books — A Study in African Realism

publicbooks.org We are pleased to accompany Ian Baucom\u2019s review of Americanah with video of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in conversation with Professor Baucom and PhD student Ainehi Edoro at a public event hosted by Duke University\u2019s Africa Initiative and Center for African and African American Research earli...

Black Voices Bookclub - Fiction by Black Authors

Celebrating our fourth year, our book for September is "Passing" by African-American female author Nella Larsen. It is our 36th book. (Harlem Renaissance)

Nella Larsen
From Wikipedia

Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen (born Nellie Walker (April 13, 1891 – March 30, 1964), was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. First working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries. A revival of interest in her writing has occurred since the late twentieth century, when issues of racial and sexual identity and identification have been studied.

Biography

She was born Nellie Walker in Chicago, Illinois, on April 13, 1891, the daughter of Marie Hanson, a Danish immigrant, and Peter Walker, a West Indian man of predominantly African descent from Saint Croix, who soon disappeared from her life. Her mother was a domestic worker.[1]

After her mother married Peter Larsen, a Scandinavian, they had another daughter together.[1] Nellie took her stepfather's surname, sometimes using versions spelled as Nellye Larson, Nellie Larsen and, finally, settling on Nella Larsen.[2] The mixed family encountered discrimination among the ethnic white immigrants in Chicago of the time. The author and critic Darryl Pinckney writes, as importantly,

"as a member of a white immigrant family, she [Larsen] had no entrée into the world of the blues or of the black church. If she could never be white like her mother and sister, neither could she ever be black in quite the same way that Langston Hughes and his characters were black. Hers was a netherworld, unrecognizable historically and too painful to dredge up."[1]

As a child, Larsen lived a few years with her mother's relations in Denmark. Her mother believed in education and supported Larsen in attending Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, a historically black university. She was there in 1907-08, and the biographer George Hutchinson speculates that she was expelled for some violation of Fisk's strict dress or conduct codes. Larsen returned to Denmark for four years and then came back to the U.S., but struggled to find a place of her own.[1]

In 1914, Larsen enrolled in the nursing school at New York City's Lincoln Hospital and Nursing Home. Founded in the nineteenth century in Manhattan as a nursing home to serve blacks, the hospital elements had grown in importance. The total operation had been relocated to a newly constructed campus in the South Bronx. At the time, the nursing home patients were primarily black; the hospital patients were primarily white; the doctors were male and white; and the nurses and nursing students were female and black.[3] As Pinckney writes, "No matter what situation Larsen found herself in, racial irony of one kind or another invariably wrapped itself around her."[1]
Nursing career

Upon graduating in 1915, Larsen went South to work at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, where she became head nurse at its hospital and training school. While in Tuskegee, she came in contact with Booker T. Washington's model of education and became disillusioned with it. Added to the poor working conditions for nurses at Tuskegee, Larsen put up with the situation only until 1916.

She returned to New York, where she worked for two years as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital. After earning the second highest score on a civil service exam, she was hired by the city Bureau of Public Health as a nurse and worked for them through the flu epidemic of 1918 and afterward.[4]
Marriage and family

In 1919, Larsen married Elmer Imes, a prominent physicist; he was the second African American to receive a PhD in physics. After her marriage, she sometimes used the name Nella Larsen Imes in her writing. A year after her marriage, she published her first short stories.

They moved to Harlem in the 1920s, where their marriage and life together had contradictions of class. As Pinckney writes,

"By virtue of her marriage, she was a member of Harlem's black professional class. She and her husband knew the NAACP leadership: W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, James Weldon Johnson. However, because of her low birth and mixed parentage, and because she didn't have a college degree, Larsen was alienated from the life of the black middle class, with its emphasis on school and family ties, its fraternities and sororities."[1]

The couple were having difficulties by the late 1920s and divorced in 1933.
Librarian and literary career

In 1921 Larsen worked nights and weekends as a volunteer with Ernestine Rose, to help prepare for the first exhibit of "Negro art" at the New York Public Library (NYPL). Encouraged by Rose, she became the first black woman to graduate from the NYPL Library School, which was run by Columbia University.[5]

Larsen passed her certification exam in 1923 and spent her first year working at the Seward Park Branch on the Lower East Side, where she had strong support from her white supervisor Alice Keats O'Connor, as she had from Rose. They and another branch supervisor where she worked supported Larsen and helped integrate the staff of the branches.[6] She next transferred to the Harlem branch, as she was interested in the cultural excitement in the neighborhood.[7]

In October 1925, Larsen took a sabbatical from her job for health reasons and began to write her first novel.[8] In 1926, having made friends with important figures in the Negro Awakening (which became the Harlem Renaissance), Larsen gave up her work as a librarian.

She became a writer active in the in*******al literary and arts community, where she became friends with Carl Van Vechten, a white photographer and writer.[9] In 1928, Larsen published Quicksand, a largely autobiographical novel, which received significant critical acclaim, if not great financial success.

In 1929, she published Passing her second novel, which was also critically successful. It dealt with issues related to two mixed-race women who were friends and each had taken different paths of racial identification and marriage. One married a man who identified as black, and the other a white man. The book explored their experiences of coming together again as adults.

In 1930, Larsen published "Sanctuary", a short story for which she was accused of plagiarism.[10] "Sanctuary" was said to resemble Sheila Kaye-Smith’s short story, "Mrs. Adis", first published in the United Kingdom in 1919. Kaye-Smith wrote on rural themes, and was very popular in the US. Some critics thought the basic plot of "Sanctuary," and some of the descriptions and dialogue, were virtually identical to her work.

The scholar H. Pearce has taken issue with this assessment, writing that, compared to Kaye-Smith’s tale, "Sanctuary" is '... longer, better written and more explicitly political, specifically around issues of race - rather than class as in "Mrs Adis" .[11] Pearce thinks that Larsen reworked and updated the tale into a modern American black context. Pearce also notes that in her 1956 book, All the Books of My Life, Kaye-Smith said she had based "Mrs Adis" on an old story by St Francis de Sales. It is unknown whether she knew of the Larsen controversy.

No plagiarism charges were proved, and Larsen received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the aftermath of the criticism. She used it to travel to Europe for several years, spending time in Mallorca and Paris, where she worked on a novel about a love triangle, in which all the protagonists were white. She never published the book or any other works.

Larsen returned to New York in 1933, when her divorce had been completed. She lived on alimony until her ex-husband's death in 1942. Struggling with depression, Larsen was not writing (and never would again). After her ex-husband's death, Larsen returned to nursing. She disappeared from literary circles. She lived on the Lower East Side, and did not venture to Harlem.[12]

Many of her old acquaintances speculated that she, like some of the characters in her fiction, had crossed the color line to "pass" into the white community. The biographer George Hutchinson has demonstrated in his 2006 work that she remained in New York, working as a nurse. She avoided contact with her earlier friends and world.

Larsen died in her Brooklyn apartment in 1964, at the age of 72.[13]
Works
Quicksand

Helga Crane is a fictional character loosely based on Larsen's experiences in her early life. Crane is the lovely and refined mixed-race daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father. He abandoned her mother and Helga soon after the girl was born. Unable to feel comfortable with her European-American relatives, Crane lives in various places in the United States and visits Denmark, searching for people among whom she feels at home.

In her travels she encounters many of the communities which Larsen knew. For example, Crane teaches at Naxos, a Southern Negro boarding school (based on Tuskegee University), where she becomes dissatisfied with its philosophy. She criticizes a sermon by a white preacher, who advocates the segregation of blacks into separate schools, and says their striving for social equality would lead blacks to become avaricious. Crane quits teaching and moves to Chicago. Her white maternal uncle, now married to a bigoted woman, shuns her. Crane moves to Harlem, New York, where she finds a refined but often hypocritical black middle class obsessed with the "race problem."

Taking her uncle's legacy, Crane visits her maternal aunt in Copenhagen, where she is treated as a highly desirable racial exotic. Missing black people, she returns to New York City. Experiencing a near mental breakdown, Crane happens onto a store-front revival and a charismatic religious experience. After marrying the preacher who converts her, she moves with him to the rural Deep South. There she is disillusioned by the people's adherence to religion. In each of her moves, Crane fails to find fulfillment. She is looking for more than how to integrate her mixed ancestry. She expresses complex feelings about what she and her friends consider genetic differences between races.

The novel develops Crane's search for a marriage partner. As it opens, she has become engaged to marry a prominent Southern Negro man, whom she does not really love, but with whom she can gain social benefits. In Denmark she turns down the proposal of a famous white Danish artist for similar reasons. By the final chapters, Crane has married a typical black Southern preacher. The novel's close is deeply pessimistic. Crane had hoped to find sexual fulfillment in marriage and some success in helping the poor southern blacks she lives among, but instead she has frequent pregnancies and suffering. Disillusioned with religion, her husband, and her life, Crane fantasizes about leaving her husband, but never does.
Passing

Clare and Irene were two childhood friends, both of African and European ancestry. They lost touch when Clare's father died, and she moved in with two paternal white aunts. They allowed her to 'pass' as a white woman and marry a white man, who is a racist.

Irene lives in Harlem, where she identifies as black and commits herself to racial uplift. She marries a black doctor. The novel begins as the two childhood friends meet later in life. Events unfold as each woman is fascinated and seduced by the other's lifestyle. The novel traces a tragic path, as Irene becomes suspicious that her husband is having an affair with Clare. (The reader is never told whether her fears are justified or not, and numerous cues point in both directions). Clare's mixed race is revealed to her husband John Bellew. The novel ends with Clare's sudden death by "falling" out of a window. The end of the novel is famous for its ambiguity, which leaves open the possibility that Irene has pushed Clare out the window, or that Clare has committed su***de.

Many see this novel as an example of the plot of the tragic mulatto, a common figure in early African-American literature after the American Civil War. Others suggest that the novel complicates the plot by introducing the dual figures of Irene and Clare, who in many ways mirror each other. The novel also suggests erotic undertones in the two women's relationship. Some read the novel as one of repression. Others argue that through its attention to the way "passing" unhinges ideas of race, class, and gender, the novel opens spaces for the creation of new, self-generated identities.

Passing has received renewed attention because of its close examination of racial and sexual ambiguities and liminal spaces. It has achieved canonical status in many American universities.

Black Voices Bookclub - Fiction by Black Authors's cover photo

Amazon.com review... What do you think?

19, June 18, 2012
By Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States)

This review is from: I Do Not Come to You by Chance (Paperback)
Section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code, which addresses fraud schemes, including Internet scams, forms the backdrop of this lively and entertaining first novel "I do not Come to you by Chance" (2009) by a young Nigerian woman, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani. Besides offering a good story, Nwaubani's novel helped me understand a culture I know little about. The book moves quickly, is well organized, and has good character development. The author writes with considerable skill. She tells her story in the first-person voice of the chief character, a young man named Kingsley. Writing convincingly in the voice of the other gender is a formidable task, especially for a new novelist. Kingsley is a young man of great intellectual promise who received his degree in chemical engineering. His father, Paulinus, and his mother, Augustina, both received masters degrees in Britain but were unable to rise economically. Early in Kingsley's life, his father impresses upon him that "education is the only way of putting one's potentials to maximum use, that you could say that a human being is not in his correct senses until he is educated." Unfortunatley, at age 25, Kingsley is not able to get a job in the profession for which he has been trained. He lives at home and, to his chagrin, is financially dependent upon his parents. The novel is in two well-connected parts. In the first part, Kingsley describes his early life, his parents' marginal economic status, in spite of their education, and his own education. Kingsley had fallen in love with a student named Ola who jilts him due, apparently, to his lack of economic prospects. There is a telling scene of Kingsley's relationship to his mother's brother, Boniface, who enlists the young boy in his scheme to seduce girls. Boniface has little interest in education but is obviously a youngster on the make with no scruples. The first part of the novel closes with the illness and death of Kingsley's father, with a focus on the character of the Nigerian health system. The much-despised Boniface comes to the assistance of the family. He has grown fantastically wealthy, through uncertain means, and is known as "Cash Daddy". He takes a liking to Kingsley and, to his mother's consternation, brings him into his business, which is the setting for the remainder of the novel. The book describes the world of 419 Internet scams, which Kingsley masters quickly. He becomes remarkably adroit at writing email letters to people with money to spare in the United States, Europe, and Middle East and bilking them expensively and repeatedly using fraudulent but seemingly plausible business schemes. Cash Daddy's business provides the organization an support for the elaborate frauds. At first, Kingsley has qualms of conscience but they are predominantly squelched as he lives high and takes care of his family. He still cannot develop a love relationship to replace Ola and he is dependent on the services of prostitutes. Kingley's' mother spurns him and the dirty money. The book describes the fraud schemes in detail and the marks or "mugus" who are their victims. Kingsley has two chief mugus, named Winterbottom and Hooverson, who become his cash cows. Kingsley becomes dependent and fond of his uncle, Cash Daddy, for all his crookedness. As the book develops, Cash Daddy runs for high office in Nigeria's stuggling democracy, which offers Nwaubani the further opportunity to develop the problems of her country. The story is told with lightness and humor. The author develops her characters and shows the contrast between wealthy nations and struggling nations such as Nigeria without becoming polemical. She portrays Nigeria and its poverty and political corruption while showing as well her love for her country. This is an effective and good first novel. It reminded me yet again of how reading opens doors to other places and people. Robin

Book for June 18th Meeting....

Our 33rd novel is "I Do Not Come to You by Chance" by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani.

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is a Nigerian writer and author of debut novel, I Do Not Come to you by Chance ( released in the USA on May 5, and in the UK on May 14 ).


I do not Come to You by Chance - interview with author:

: Let’s paint a personal picture of you. What was growing up like? Where do you live now?

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani: I was born in Enugu, Nigeria. A year later, my parents moved to my hometown, Umuahia. I spent the first part of my childhood years in Umuahia Town—in the GRA, close to the railway station, amongst the expatriates and the Rotary Club members. I spent the second part in Umujieze Village, Umuopara, Umuahia—where none of the roads were tarred, where barefoot children yelped with wonder whenever they saw a woman driving a car, where I could look out of my bedroom window and see trees and foliage that were home to different wild animals.

At 10, I left home to attend boarding school in the Federal Government Girls College, Owerri. From there, I went on to study Psychology at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

I’ve been living in Abuja, Nigeria, but recently moved to Lagos.

: Tell us about your parents.

ATN: My father, Chief Chukwuma Hope Nwaubani, is regarded as the most-experienced Chartered Accountant in Umuahia, Abia State. Some years ago, he went back to study for an additional university degree and graduated as the best law student in his class, at the age of 63. My mother, Chief Mrs. Patricia Uberife Nwaubani, began her teaching career as the only black teacher in an upper-middle-class British school where the pupils offered her bananas and rubbed the skin on her arm to see if the black pigment would come off. She also worked in the Nigerian education sector and with the civil service, before resigning in 1983 to join my father in running his private accountancy firm. Both of them still work together. Both of them have, at some point or the other, been actively involved in Nigerian politics.

: How did you get started in writing? Was writing always ‘inevitable’ for you?

ATN: Like most writers, I started writing stories before I was ten. I earned my very first income from winning a writing competition at the age of 13. That was the first of several writing competition wins. At 15, I was awarded best poet and playwright in my secondary school.

But then, writing was just one of the many things I was good at. Such as chess and Scrabble and oratory and singing and washing dishes. In fact, I once boasted to a friend that I would be the very best dish-washer if I ever got a job in a restaurant. That, of course, was before I realised that washing dishes was not the most interesting way for a lady to spend her days.

Years ago, my mother wrote a novel which she never published; my godmother, Mrs. Angela Ukairo, co-authored some of the textbooks I used in school; and Flora Nwapa, the first female black African to have a novel published, was my aunty—my mother’s cousin. Yet, I was never inspired to serious writing. Until 2001 when one of my mentors looked into my future and told me that I was supposed to put my writing talent to less leisurely use. Something inside me clicked, and I suddenly knew.

: What sort of things did you read as a child? How did they affect how you write?

ATN: My parents purchased most of the books I read as a child. Most of them were about African children living in mud huts and hawking oranges to pay their school fees. I read so many of these books that I began wishing my family also lived in a mud hut with thatched roof, and subsisted on proceeds from our yam farm. It was not until I left home and experienced being broke a few times, that I finally realised there was nothing glamorous about lack.

As a teenager, I had more freedom over what books I read. At about the same time, books started disappearing from the shops and the available few became terribly expensive. (I am told that happened as a result of the series of military dictatorships in Nigeria.) Most of the books I could get my hands on were borrowed from friends who had borrowed from other friends, and most of the books I purchased were from second-hand book sellers who offered old stock at more affordable prices. Hence, three quarters of the books I read from my teenage years either had no front or back covers, or started from page 115. Still, I enjoyed them. In fact, it was many years before I found out that one of my favourite books of all time was called The Last Hurrah by Edwin O’Connor.

Fortunately, the Jilly Cooper and Sam Levenson and P.G. Wodehouse books all came with front and back covers!

With time, I learnt to identify the humour writers from the second-hand piles and found myself inadvertently moving away from ‘African stories’. I became concerned about this and raised the issue with different people. All of them had similar responses: ‘There is nothing to laugh about in Africa. War and poverty and hardship are our realities.’ That point of view seemed to make sense until I encountered Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes in 2006. It was one of the most dismal tales of hardship I had ever read, but the style was humorous. Eureka! I could write an ‘African story’ that did not necessarily taste bitter!

In December 2006, I was finally ready to write my first novel. I started clicking away in January 2007. By the end of February 2007, I Do Not Come to You By Chance was born.

: In tackling the 419 spectre in your first novel, have you felt a need to explain your country to itself? Or to the world - like an Achebe putting a human face on a demonised country? Have you feared the possibility of entrenching the stereotypes of association?

ATN: I didn’t feel the need to do anything apart from tell a story the way I knew it to be—things I had observed in a world I lived in. I wasn’t worried about those Westerners who think everything Nigerian is 419; I wasn’t worried about those Nigerians who are obsessed with changing the impressions of the West. I wasn’t too worried about stereotypes, either. Just like the lady crying because people are calling her fat. Is she crying because she is fat or because people are calling her fat? If we are so bothered about the way we are or the way the world perceives us, the first step is to change.

: Your title, 'I Do Not Come to You by Chance' sounds like a droll, found object. How did it end up on the cover of your book?

ATN: My 'droll' title was inspired by two quotes:

"It is not enough to be the possessor of genius—the time and the man must conjoin. An Alexander the Great, born into an age of profound peace, might scarce have troubled the world. A Newton, grown up in a thieves' den, might have devised little but a new and ingenious picklock."
--John Cleveland Cotton, Diversions of Historical Thought

and

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
--Ecclesiastes 9:11 I and my agent, Daniel Lazar, then went through heaps of 419 emails until we came across an opening line that reflected both the ‘time’ and ‘chance’ elements, and the personality of the novel.

: Here’s a quote from your book:

"Then came my father’s diagnosis. For a poorly paid civil servant to get caught up in an affliction like diabetes was the very height of ambitious misfortune."

Does writing humour come naturally to you, or is this a sheen you have to paint onto your literature, subsequently?


ATN: My sense of humour is my general outlook on life. I tend to view things from a quirky angle. I’ve been warned that I need to sound more serious, though. How else will the world know that I’m a serious African writer dealing with Deep Issues of the Continent?

For decades, Africans have been blaming the ‘colonial masters’ for things going wrong in our countries. With my writing career, I’ve decided to apply the same principle. If I meet people who are offended by my sense of humour, I will blame it on the British. Really, I have watched too many British comedies in my lifetime. I just love them. ‘From Keeping Up Appearances’ and ‘Only Fools and Horses’, to ‘The Catherine Tate Show’ and ‘The Kumars at No. 42’. On the other hand, if I meet people who love my sense of humour, I will tell them that it is inherited. Laughter and humour were never lacking in my family, not even in times of deepest crises. One of my science-inclined brothers actually did a stint of successful stand-up comedy. There is always lots of cheer and laughter amongst us when I and my siblings get together.

: The main protagonist in your new novel is male. Your first story for AW, Coming to The UK, also has a male hero. Do you have any special challenge getting into the head of a male character? Did you grow up with male siblings? Have you received any comments from men reading your pages who responded to your depictions? Is it time for Equal Opportunity feminists to picket your fiction? Is there a female protagonist on the cards?

ATN: It turns out that every single piece of fiction I’ve written has been in a male voice! I didn’t realise that there was anything unusual about that until people made comments about it. I’m not sure that I have any explanation. I guess an appointment with good old Sigmund Freud might be quite in order. But then, I do have three brothers whom I adore and it is possible that I grew up wanting to be like them because they were all so outstanding. At the same time, I’ve absolutely enjoyed being female and have always received admiration from the men around me.

It could also be that I try to distance myself as much as possible from the characters in my fiction. I really dread people reading my work and imagining me in any of my characters. Whenever I do decide to write about myself, I don’t think there’ll be any need to coat it in fiction. Recently, I started compiling some personal essays and they just might see the light of publishing someday.

For now, all I have to say to the Equal Opportunities feminists is that I am not Kingsley. Anybody spoiling for a fight should dig it out directly with Kingsley, whose thoughts and feelings were expressed in my novel.

A female protagonist? Hmm. I really do need to make that appointment with Sigmund Freud.

: Are there any Big Issues that will engage your writing? Are there subjects, themes, problems you are particularly passionate about? Would you say you have found your voice? Are you still searching?

ATN: There are issues I’m particularly passionate about and as time goes on, they’ll become clearer to everyone. For starters, I think it’s time Africans faced the hard fact about the source of our problems—not corruption, not poverty, not HIV, not the white man...but the way our people think. There are certain mindsets that have kept our societies where they are today, thought patterns that have governed our lives for centuries. It might be a bit lofty expecting the older generations whose minds are already crystallized, to change. But we can systematically start deprogramming our young people. If not, the story of Africa will still be the same in generations to come.

I don’t know that I was ever searching for my voice so I can’t say that I have or have not found it. I really don't approach writing in an academic way which means I’ll probably never have straightforward answers to these sorts of deep, intellectual questions.

: Can you give me a couple of examples of these 'thought patterns' or 'mindsets' and the problems they can cause?

ATN: For starters, our intrinsic culture abhors the rising of another in opposition to us. Therefore, we tend to believe that the increase of others is detrimental to us and will usually do anything to quell the next person’s progress if it doesn’t appear to benefit us directly.

Colonialism led to us becoming charges of nations who trained us to depend on them for support and to devote our efforts to the growth of an unseen nation rather than to ours. The Western world still relates with us as people who need to be looked after and that situation perfectly agrees with us because it absolves us of the responsibility for others.

Our culture also programmes us to deify some people while despising others as mere ants and cockroaches. This is one origin of the absolute disregard for the common man (ahem...woman) which manifests in different forms in our societies.

: What was the attitude of your parents when you began to show an 'unhealthy' interest in writing? How close have you come to their original aspirations for their daughter? To your own? What do they think of your writing? Do you ever cross out a line because you think of your mother reading it? – Or perhaps, down the line, your children?


ATN: Unhealthy interest in writing? Haha. Growing up in my parents’ house, woe betide you if my father ever caught any of us reading a novel without our Michael West dictionary right beside us, to check the meanings of new words. Such a diligent father was very unlikely to have considered writing unhealthy.

My parents had always wanted me to be a lawyer. All my friends’ parents also wanted them to be lawyers and doctors and architects and engineers. I wanted to do something different. Top on my list was to be a CIA or KGB agent.

After my Psychology degree, my parents wanted me to carry on studying, and would most likely have wanted me to go as far as a PhD or something similar. But from an early age, I was wise enough to realise that being excellent in academics could very easily lead to a nice, predictable life—a life that could stifle every other talent and innate desire that you might have. So far, I have resisted all efforts by family and former lecturers to re-imprison me inside the four walls of a school. So far, my life has been full of diverse occupations that have brought me fulfillment and made the world around me a better place.

Even before I reach out for a glass of water to drink, I usually consider what effects my action might have on the people around me and on posterity. I didn’t have to write anything and cross it out, though; every unworthy idea was pulverized right inside my brain before making it to my fingers. But I dreaded my parents reading my novel. I didn’t want them to interfere with their opinions and corrections and I wasn’t sure if they would think it good enough. When they eventually read the galleys, my father was full of praises, my mother rang me early in the morning to tell me how much she loved it, and then asked, ‘But how did you know all those things?’ I guess she meant all those things about 419. She probably won’t be the only person wondering about that.

: Are you more Nigerian than Igbo? More African than Nigerian? Do you have pan-africanist sentiments? Do you think the movement has had its day? If you were not Nigerian, what nationality would you be? Why?

ATN: My father is from Umuahia, my mother is from Oguta… that automatically makes me Igbo. I was born in Enugu, I own one of the internationally renowned green Nigerian passport… that makes me Nigerian. On the atlas, Nigeria is in Africa… that makes me African. Apart from that, I primarily see myself as God’s creation. However, I feel a deep sense of patriotism towards my country, Nigeria, and know that it is my responsibility to make her a much better place.

: How did you choose the '419' phenomenon as subject for your first novel?

ATN: I decided it was finally time to write my novel. I’d known I was going to write one since 2001. I’ve always had a fascination with human personality and the science of why people do the things they do, and I wanted that to be the framework of my story. One thing led to the other and the 419 thing appeared to be just right.

While hanging around the Western World, I had noticed that each time Nigeria was mentioned, the topic of 419 would usually arise. It might have been annoying if it was not quite amusing. Especially considering that the 419ers whom the Westerners hold in such awe, are people whom we in Nigeria (mainly Igbo land) mingle with every day. They are our friends and acquaintances and the people we love. Undoubtedly, 419 is a Nigerian shame, but it is also part of our history. I wanted my story to shed some light on this phenomenon. I didn’t realise that I had chosen a potentially fascinating subject until I met my agent. He guided me on how to do justice to the subject.

Now I’m so glad I wrote about it because for more than two decades, the “phenomenon” has been a major characteristic of Nigeria, yet it hardly features in our literature. I imagine what would have happened is that, some white man from, say, Nebraska or Louisiana, would have jumped out of the hedges one day with a novel about Nigerian 419. The novel would have become an international bestseller, and then, suddenly, every Nigerian writer would have become aggrieved about someone else telling what should have been our own story. All the anger would have led to an avalanche of 419-themed stories—from the Nigerian point of view.

: Is it the case that 419 practitioners seem to lend themselves to humourous caricature. I am thinking for instance of the scene in the book where Boniface the 419 kingpin holds court in his bathroom with his fully dressed lieutenants while he is himself sitting naked on a toilet bowl.

ATN: The nouveau rich generally lend themselves to humorous caricature. It appears that the advent of sudden cash does a certain something to the human brain.
The inspiration for my major characters was not difficult. Alas, there are several Cash Daddys riding around the streets of Nigeria. They come in various shapes and sizes—from megalomaniac CEOs and government officials to philanthropists and politicians, who believe that they are above whatever laws exist. There are several Kingsleys and Paulinuses as well. The Augustinas are a bit rare.

: Do you look forward to being able to do nothing but write, or will you prefer to be plugged into life via some other interface besides literature?

ATN: For me, writing is simply a means to an end. There’s soooo much else to do. I don’t think I ever want to come to the point where all I’m doing is just writing. Unless, maybe, it’s just for a period.

: What are these other interests - if they aren't still confidential!

ATN: Haha. Let me just say that my other interests will become very obvious to everyone as time goes on.

: This is another quote from your novel, I Do Not Come to You by Chance.

"Two days ago, it was the allegation that one of the prominent senators had falsified his educational qualifications. He had lived in Canada for many years, quite all right, but the University of Toronto had no record of his attendance."

It is supposed to be a fictional report on the 7pm newscast at Kingsleys' home. But it is not fiction, is it? This actually happened in the Nigerian House of Assembly. Have you found - in writing this book - that fact can be more unbelievable than fiction?

ATN: The only things fictional about my novel are the characters and the plot. Since the Nigerian setting itself is real, naturally, there is actual history in the background. But yes, many things that happen in Nigeria are so unbelievable that they could very easily be misconstrued as fiction. Recently, I heard about a house that caught fire in Aba. Because the Fire Service arrived after the house had been completely razed by the fire, an angry mob made their way to the fire station and burnt the fire station down! That is the sort of thing that happens only on the pages of novels or in soap operas, but in Nigeria, those sorts of incidents happen every day.

: Nigerians sometimes approach everything with inflamed ethnic nerves. In your novel, you treat your character's ethnicities (and yours as well) with comic irreverence.
'Cash Daddy had the unmistakable thick head and chunky features of the Igbos. Plus, a concrete Igbo accent. It did not matter whether it was a three- letter word or a five- letter word, each came out with its original number of syllables quadrupled, and with so much emphasis on the consonants that it sounded as if he were banging on them with a sledgehammer'

“What essatly do you not understand? She has told you her mind and it’s your business whether you assept it or not.” This tattling termagant, like many of her compatriots from Edo in the Mid- West region of Nigeria, had a mother tongue– induced speech deficiency that prevented her from putting the required velar emphasis on her X sounds. They always came out sounding like an S. I ignored the idiot.

Are you worried about its reception in some quarters? Do you think that Nigerians need to laugh more at themselves?

ATN: I didn’t treat my characters’ ethnicities with comic irreverence. I was simply being descriptive. Do the Edo people have an S speech deficiency? Yes. Do the Igbos sledgehammer their consonants? Yes. Case closed. Besides, having an Igbo accent or a speech deficiency is certainly not a crime.

Nigerians do laugh at themselves a lot, though, never mind that it hardly appears that way in our literature. Maybe we're afraid that the foreign aid and grants will stop coming if the world catches us laughing.

: There is probably an inverse relationship between the popularity of your novel and the pool of potential victims who might be taken in by 419 scams.You must have done some intensive research into the 419 phenomenon. Is it waxing or waning? What is the future, do you think?

ATN: Asking about the future of 419 is like asking about the future of the iPod. The scams have been metamorphosing along with the times; you never know what else they might come up with tomorrow. You would imagine that by now, everybody in the world has heard about 419 and is wary, but no. I met a white American man who had come to Nigeria for the first time in October 2008 for a one-week consultancy assignment. He had never heard the term 419 ever before! Plus, new mugus are born every minute and the 419 industry thrives on the availability of mugus.

: Have you started your next novel? Is the subject still secret? What sort of material do you write most naturally?

ATN: Eureka! You’ve just provided me with the perfect answer to those who keep asking about my next novel. Yes, the subject is still a secret!

Interestingly, non-fiction comes most naturally to me. I consider it my forte. Apart from stories I wrote as a child, it wasn’t until 2005 that I turned my attention to fiction. That Coming to the UK piece was my first proper short story. I wrote it in April/May 2005.

: Are you a compulsive writer?

ATN: Apart from loads and loads of emails, I don’t normally ‘write’ every day unless I have a major writing project so I’m certainly not a “compulsive writer”. When working on I Do Not Come to You By Chance, for example, I wrote almost all the time. And with the horrific state of power supply in Nigeria, I often woke up hoping that there would be electricity for long enough to get some serious writing done that day. The laptop on which I wrote my first draft had a battery life of only 20 minutes (It’s a long story; I got it for £100 in 2004). The laptop on which I edited my manuscript had a battery life of two and half hours. So whenever these ran out, I had to pack my inspiration into a cooler and wait—either for the power authority to ‘bring back the light,’ or for the standby generator to come on. Good thing that I usually do most of my writing in my head and just spit it out through my fingers whenever the time is convenient.

: Your characters call themselves by the most outlandish names: Cash Daddy, World Bank,

ATN: At the peak of the 419 era in the nineties, almost every 419er took on an outlandish nickname as soon as he hit it big. Their nicknames usually reflected their perceptions of their skills or their wealth. But the 419ers of these days go by more civilized nicknames, like CEO, Chairman, Director, etc. For some reason, their christened names suddenly become inadequate once the dollars start rolling in.

: There is a cultural parallel, isn't there? Traditionally, chiefs lose their own given names as well, moving - for instance - from 'Emeka' to 'The Moon that Shines for the Town'.

ATN: Thou art right! In fact, there is a cultural parallel in other aspects of the 419 lifestyle. Like the otimkpu, the group of men who follow them around heralding their masters’ presence and making sure that they are well noticed. The otimkpu can be likened to the praise singers of our culture who offer the same services to dignitaries, even composing songs for them or slotting their names into already existing songs.

: You live in Abuja, and still travel through many of the towns and cities you write about. Did you ever have a flutter in the gut about writing an expose this candid?

ATN: There was no need for me to have a flutter in the gut. Every honest Nigerian who reads the pages of my book will instantly recognise our society AS IT IS. Once in a while, though, I did wonder about the Nigerians in the Diaspora. Many of them seem so obsessed with our country’s foreign image, almost to the point of neurosis. However, the lust for a pristine foreign image should not prevent us from telling the truth about our society. I’d rather we spent all that energy tending to the decay inside.

Most of the scenes in my story are fictitious, but some mirror actual events. For example, I have watched friends torn between the choice of a struggling man whom they love and a ready-made man who will wipe away their economic sorrows. For example, I have listened to 419ers having loud conversations with ‘foreign partners’, not bothering that anyone might be eavesdropping. For example, my mother’s sister lost a friend and the proper use of her legs after their car was swept off the road by a state governor’s convoy. It was that governor’s third ghastly crash. He blamed it on his enemies’ juju.

: One of the themes you explore in your novel is the transition from '419 kingpin' to 'political bigwig'. Is this a viable prospect in real life? Is the 'industry' a factor in Nigeria's political life?

ATN: The smarter 419ers are always looking for ways to “clean out” their money. Many of them eventually metamorphose into business magnates, philanthropists, politicians... After reading a copy of my book, a friend who’s a top official in the Nigerian ministry of justice, confessed to me that his first job offer, right after graduating from university in the 80s, was as a letter-writer for a 419 kingpin. That kingpin who employed him is now doing a third term in the Nigerian House of Representatives.

The Nigerian government is fraught with different brands of thieves, anyway, so there’s certainly nothing odd about a 419er running for public office. And unfortunately, in our slightly modified version of democracy, whoever dispenses the most cash into the right hands wins the ballot.

: You touched the tension between the two Nigerians in your book. Poor Andrew:

He convulsed through his pockets again. Still, no passport. “It’s gone!” he announced three times. “I had it in this pocket,” he cried two times. “I’m quite certain of that.”
“You’d better go and report it immediately,” I advised. If not, a desperate immigrant could be out of the country with that passport on the next flight to the U.S.
Suddenly, his patriotism changed color. “This country is unbelievable! I haven’t even come in yet and they’ve already stolen my passport!”
His American accent had also vamoosed.
“Someone probably saw you putting it back in your pocket,” I said.
“I just don’t believe this! I’ve been looking forward to coming back home after all these years. I haven’t even been here up to an hour already, and now this!”

As love-hate relationships go, would you say that Nigerians at home look more indulgently at '419ners' than the Diasporans - who may experience more regularly the sharp edge of the stereotyping?

ATN: Oops! I’d better watch my tongue. You’re one of the Diasporans, aren’t you?

: Be my guest!

ATN: Andrew in my story is a typical example of many Nigerians in the Diaspora who are so full of looooove for Nigeria when they are away, but when they visit “home” and things start going awry, their love quickly changes colour. The best place to see them in action is at the airport, especially around Christmas. If there’s one place where things are bound to go wrong in Nigeria, it is at our airports. And the Diasporeans are always the first and LOUDEST to start scolding and groaning on about “This country!”.

With the Nigerians “at home” and those in the Diaspora, it’s simply a case of the Igbo proverb which says: it is the well-fed spirit that spoils the song for those who haven’t eaten. The two groups face different sets of challenges; hence, their focuses and concerns are different. Nigerians at home may look more indulgently at 419ers. At the same time, they may not look as indulgently on a man in the Diaspora will abandon his fiancé in Nigeria to marry a white woman—for the sake of a British or American or German passport.

: One of the 419 scams in your novel concerns a Nigerian cosmonaut who went to space on a secret Nigerian/USSR space shuttle. The USSR was dissolved and the Nigerian was stranded in space because his fellow Russians decided to cargo precious spare parts back to earth in his place. The Nigerian cosmonaut's salary has been run for years, is now US$35 million and a mark was required to liberate it...

Is this a real life scam? From the inventiveness of some of the scams floating about cyberspace, do you get the impression that some of Nigeria's best writers of fiction are currently in another profession?

ATN: All the scams in my book are “real“!

Nigeria’s best writers of fiction are definitely doing everything else except writing. Who can blame them when they are so busy looking for what to put inside their stomachs? As William Shakespeare famously said, “I’m not writing any f******* romance until I get some jollof rice!” Mrs. Shakespeare quickly obliged (in less than an hour), and as a result, Romeo and Juliet was born!

Truly, the best of Nigerian writing is yet to emerge. Right now in Nigeria, literature is perceived as being in the realm of academics, as if you have to have been an excellent student (and maybe bagged a degree or three) to be able to write a novel. Can you imagine what will happen when Nigerians finally realise that many more of us can write? Whether or not you’ve been to university or even to school; whether or not you are good at exams or can recite poetry or remember the full list of Euripides’ plays. When they realise that you can do it however and whenever you want. You can take four months, you can take four years, you can give up everything for it, you can do it on the side. The marketability of the final finished work is all that counts. Can you imagine the diversity of writing styles (not just stories) that will emerge from Nigeria? Believe me, the best is yet to come. And the next ten years are definitely a period to watch.

: If you were ever going to start or join a crusade in future against any social ills, what would they be?

ATN: I wonder. Right now, I’m more concerned about influencing young people, especially in my country and in Africa, to think differently. We must not continue with the same thought patterns that have kept our continent so far behind the rest of humanity in many ways. Preserving and projecting our cultures is wonderful, but a deeper form of love for our people and for the places we come from, is demanding change when it will move us forward.

: I see you compose directly to wordprocessor. I once lost a hundred pages of a novel to a dead computer - couldn't write for months afterwards. I hope you don't have any comparable horror stories on writing and new-fangled technology?

ATN: Thankfully, apart from one or two vanished emails, I haven't had any major technological disasters.

: And so may it remain, Adaobi. All the best with I Do Not Come to You by Chance, and thank you for speaking with us.