An interview with Chris Abani
An interview with Chris Abani, originally published in Little Patuxent Review in 2018.
Chris Abani gets understandably touchy when people relate his writing and his time in prison.
"The art is never about what you write about,” Abani has said. “The art is about how you write about what you write about. I was a writer before I was in prison.”
Thrown in jail in his home country of Nigeria three times for writing novels and plays that touched on the political, criticized the government and, once, resembled a coup that later occurred, Abani was on death row for a time. He was tortured and witnessed unbearable cruelty to his fellow inmates. But friends bribed prison officials and in 1991, Abani escaped, and moved to Great Britain.
And while he eschews talking much about that time in his life, one of his books of poetry, Kalakuta Republic (2001), sketches a portrait of the infamous Kirikiri prison and some of his fellow inmates, including his 14-year-old roommate, John James, who taught other prisoners to read at night using Spiderman comic books.
His poem “Waiting for Godot” includes the lines:
“Echoing comfortingly, the sound of Jeremiah/
straining words through shrouded candlelight/
like seeds through a sieve.”
John James bled to death when his captors nailed his genitals to a table, Abani has related.
And while Abani writes “against forgetting,” as he told The Guardian, he writes beyond his time in prison. He emigrated to the United States in 2001 and earned his doctorate in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California.
Now an English professor at Northwestern University, Abani has found time to write seven books of poetry and six novels, plays, screenplays and a book of essays. He and poet Kwame Dawes collaborated on a new collection of African verse, New-Generation African Poets. He is editing a Lagos Noir collection of dark crime stories.
He gives TED (Technology Entertainment Design) Talks. Dave Eggers writes blurbs for him. (“Chris Abani might be the most courageous writer working right now. There is no subject matter he finds daunting, no challenge he fears. Aside from that, he’s stunningly prolific and writes like an angel. If you want to get at the molten heart of contemporary fiction, Abani is the starting point.”) The New York Times raves about him. (“Abani is a fiction writer of mature and bounteous gifts.”)
The vulnerability of his writing, especially in his collection of essays, The Face: Cartography of the Void, is inescapable. He talks in this book about how he looks like his father, who abused drink and Abani’s mother: “I still carry the guilt of my helplessness.” In one chapter he numbers some realizations:
“37. My father is easier to love as a spirit, a ghost, than as a man.
38. My father’s face stares back at me from the mirror.
39. My father has been forgiven.”
His father, an Igbo man educated in England, married Abani’s English mother and returned with her to Afikpo, Nigeria. Abani is their fourth, and last, son. A Catholic convert, Abani’s mother taught Nigerian women about sexual health and fertility. Abani, at age 7, traveled with her. In a TED Talk, he relates how he used to translate for her: “And how swollen is your vulva?” he remembers asking women.
Abani regrets that Western civilization holds but one view of Africa, and resists portraying “a certain reassuring expectation of Africa.” Instead, his fiction is imaginative and hopeful and even whimsical, despite grim-sounding plot lines. He creates characters such as conjoined twins raised in a circus who become environmental radicals and suspects in a serial killing spree (The Secret History of Las Vegas), a professional Elvis impersonator in Lagos who mourns his mother, enters a life of crime and witnesses the leveling of slums, (GraceLand) and a self-mutilating girl who escapes Nigeria only to be forced into London’s sex trafficking underworld (Becoming Abigail).
Abani’s grandfather used to say that Abani didn’t belong with the living or in the land of spirits. Abani interpreted that his own way: “That meant I could be anything. Even Batman,” he wrote in The Face: Cartography of the Void.
In the act of finding one’s identity is violence, Abani has said. “We’re never more beautiful than when we’re most ugly. Because that’s really the moment when we know what we’re made of,” he told a TED Talk audience.
Abani is the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize and a Guggenheim Award.
__________
Susan Thornton Hobby: You are a prolific writer — plays, poems, novels, essays. It made me think of the Hamilton lyric: “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”
Chris Abani: I wish I wrote as much as I would like to. I think of myself as a lazy writer because I don't even write a fifth of the ideas that I have and can explore. Maybe I seem to write so much because I see everything as connected and writing as a form of talking and not a rarified thing. Who knows?
STH: You once said: “My characters are the people who we would normally try to erase from our daily lives.” Why write about these characters?
CA: I write against erasure, not as a political act, although there is a political dimension to it, but simply because I am interested in a complex, untidy and inconvenient humanity. What we erase is essential to understanding the whole self, and for me is full of rich metaphor and the dark matter of transformation. So these characters, as far out as they may seem, are simply my recognition and acceptance of all the shadows selves that are me or that others have, and to badly paraphrase Diane Arbus, function emblematically to highlight our own process of becoming by a constant accretion and erasure.
STH: In Kalakuta Republic, in the poem “Mephistopheles,” a prison lieutenant offers the persona the chance to do paperwork in his office, but he should definitely not read the copy of Anna Karenina on his desk. Can you talk about that image and what it offers the persona in the poem?
CA: Misdirection is key to magic, alchemy and transformation. It is also the space between direct and inferential statements and worldviews, it's a strategy for breaking taboo, for speaking the unspeakable, for subverting order and for transgressing in full view. So what the officer is saying is "there is a copy of Anna Karenina on the desk that you shouldn't read but if you do, well, there it is.” It's a way of addressing opposites. This kind of deflection is also often at the heart of crafting a poem. As for what the persona gains is the unsaid but implied knowledge that someone who has the power to hurt them actually is looking out for them even when they can't be seen to do that. It's a tender gesture.
STH: Bad poetry comes out of prisons, just like bad poetry can come out of a country club. You’ve said the craft is what is important to you - you once called it the scaffolding for art. Could you talk about that?
CA: I'm not sure what prison has to do with any of this. I have seven collections of poetry, only one about prison. As for craft, control is another way to think of it. It means that we gain proficiency of the modes of creativity we are working with, a deep understanding of material and the use of it.
Like a carpenter knows what wood works best for a desk or dining table and what for a bed, or what stain works best in a given decor. Or another way to think about it is whether as a big man a tailor would advise against making me a three-piece suit in red velvet because it might too hot and heavy and could make me look like a mutant tomato. Instead he might suggest a two-piece in a light linen. Such it is with craft. That an artist is working with material to position risk, epiphany and insight. In the end a poem is rarely about what we want to say but what can be said and how best to say it.
STH: In Secret History of Las Vegas, Sunil calls the one-upsmanship of suffering, “an impossible math.” Can you explain?
CA: There are ways in which as individuals within families or social groups, or even social groups within larger contexts, we can slip into the discourse of suffering via a hierarchy of trauma and/or pain. A sort of — I have suffered more than you, or my people have suffered more. When those modes of expression are used it is usually because the acknowledgment of the suffering by the non-sufferer is calling the non-sufferer into a place of accepting privilege and the non-sufferer has chosen to ignore the sufferer’s legitimacy, make sense?
And so then an impossible calculation begins because each successive claim is seen as nullifying the previous. So the All Lives Matter response to Black Lives Matter is one example. All Lives Matter cannot hear Black Lives Matter because it implicates them in a privilege and tacit complicity with a system that has so rendered the suffering of Black Lives invisible or mute that they respond by reading it as Only Black Lives Matter, even though that is never stated. See? It becomes an impossible math.
STH: You’ve talked about and written about the conflation of beauty and cruelty. In The Face: Cartography of the Void, you told the story of a bar argument in Benin City, in which a gangster cut his own arm with a beer bottle and told you: “This is the least I will do to you.” Your response, written years later, was surprising: “I suppose that too is a kind of love.”
CA: Is it cruel for a man to cut his own arm? Cruel to whom? Himself? I don't conflate cruelty with beauty. I simply suggest that the world is more complex and nuanced and simultaneous than we would like to think it is. I am implying that beauty is complicated and contradictory and not the same as pretty, which is easy. Rilke says (to paraphrase) that beauty is onset of a terror we are yet to bear or understand. What I am saying in Cartography of the Void is that there is no clear singular meaning to anything. It is the foregrounding of an African worldview that says that there is this and that and not this or that. Everything is connected to its shadow and to other shadows and since shadows are the product of light, then by implication, the connection of shadow to light. It is not the new age concept of connected but a deeper cut. The way Khalil Gibran says that no leaf can fall without the knowledge of the whole tree, thus one of us cannot commit a crime without our collective negligence and asks us to investigate how we are complicit in it.
It’s a complex ethical position. This fundamental paradox of manifest reality is inescapable and to do so is to live in the bubble of a lie or an unassailable privilege. As the Igbo say, a child can never outrun its shadow and this too is love. So by letting me know what he would do to me, but by not doing it to me, the gangster (regardless of his intent) shows me a kind of love. And him showing me at great cost to himself consequences I had not considered is a kind of love. Him showing me that he has little to lose in this fight clarified the terms of my own adolescent bravado to me and that too is a kind of love. That I am alive to write about it is also a kind of love. That people engage with the narrative of it and struggle to understand it is also a kind of love. No?
STH: Your influences are wide-ranging, especially James Baldwin, Russian novels and even comic books, is that right?
CA: Yes, my influences include those as well as the Psalms, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Upanishads, the Ifa texts of the Yoruba, Bob Marley, Miles Davis, Handel and Bach, Picasso and many others as well as the many languages of my being, and the music I listen to and all the things I discover about myself as I teach young people, all of it. I don't believe we can choose. Even the things we would like to negate and or erase about lives are our influences.
STH: You have a great empathy for creating female characters — Beatrice and Blessing in Graceland and Abigail in Becoming Abigail, and a few of your characters, while male, carry a longing for female sexuality. Can you talk about that?
CA: I am humbled that readers think I succeed in some of my attempts to expand consciousness and to embody different genders and descriptors and selves. All I can say is that I work hard to avoid spectacle but to rather create a visceral experience of it, a deeper human impulse not to ask, ‘why would a man want to be a woman?’ but what deep human yearning would I have that this would seem like a natural expression of that yearning. Does this make sense?
STH: You once said: “If there’s nothing at risk for you, it cannot be art.” Could you explain the risks you take in your writing.
CA: To be honest I am not sure. It sometimes seems like more of a feeling. But perhaps it is a form of inquiry and self-implication in the process and subject I am working through that allows for vulnerability and transgressiveness that has no value judgment. Maybe it is simply as an unflinching a look at what I have uncovered in process as possible. To mediate not via social anxiety but only through a craft that foregrounds as much transparency for the reader to encounter themselves without shame as possible.
STH: In your book of autobiographical essays, The Face, you speak of forgiveness, especially for your father, and many of your characters have much to forgive. What role does forgiveness take in your writing?
CA: [Jacques] Derrida (and I am paraphrasing here) has a wonderful essay on forgiveness in which he questions if it is possible since it seems the true way we enact it in the world is a kind of calculation or negotiation — I forgive you because x,y,z. I was also raised Catholic and the confessional and forgiveness are cornerstones of the faith. So it occurs to me that I am not sure what forgiveness is, what can be forgiven and how? [Eduardo] Galeano says that there are some languages from the Amazon that don't have a word for forgiveness but only one for forgetting. So I am asking what role memory and remembrance play in forgiveness.
Is forgiveness the release of an emotional charge to a memory or the release of the memory itself? I don't know. So my writing is always about wanting to ask better questions and to negotiate our own responsibility in our wounding and so forth. In the end, my writing tries only to approach the ineffable in circles of approximation and I hope that some epiphanies or apertures have been opened that allow my readers to find resolution for their questions or become more comfortable with uncertainty.
Chris Abani gets understandably touchy when people relate his writing and his time in prison.
"The art is never about what you write about,” Abani has said. “The art is about how you write about what you write about. I was a writer before I was in prison.”
Thrown in jail in his home country of Nigeria three times for writing novels and plays that touched on the political, criticized the government and, once, resembled a coup that later occurred, Abani was on death row for a time. He was tortured and witnessed unbearable cruelty to his fellow inmates. But friends bribed prison officials and in 1991, Abani escaped, and moved to Great Britain.
And while he eschews talking much about that time in his life, one of his books of poetry, Kalakuta Republic (2001), sketches a portrait of the infamous Kirikiri prison and some of his fellow inmates, including his 14-year-old roommate, John James, who taught other prisoners to read at night using Spiderman comic books.
His poem “Waiting for Godot” includes the lines:
“Echoing comfortingly, the sound of Jeremiah/
straining words through shrouded candlelight/
like seeds through a sieve.”
John James bled to death when his captors nailed his genitals to a table, Abani has related.
And while Abani writes “against forgetting,” as he told The Guardian, he writes beyond his time in prison. He emigrated to the United States in 2001 and earned his doctorate in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California.
Now an English professor at Northwestern University, Abani has found time to write seven books of poetry and six novels, plays, screenplays and a book of essays. He and poet Kwame Dawes collaborated on a new collection of African verse, New-Generation African Poets. He is editing a Lagos Noir collection of dark crime stories.
He gives TED (Technology Entertainment Design) Talks. Dave Eggers writes blurbs for him. (“Chris Abani might be the most courageous writer working right now. There is no subject matter he finds daunting, no challenge he fears. Aside from that, he’s stunningly prolific and writes like an angel. If you want to get at the molten heart of contemporary fiction, Abani is the starting point.”) The New York Times raves about him. (“Abani is a fiction writer of mature and bounteous gifts.”)
The vulnerability of his writing, especially in his collection of essays, The Face: Cartography of the Void, is inescapable. He talks in this book about how he looks like his father, who abused drink and Abani’s mother: “I still carry the guilt of my helplessness.” In one chapter he numbers some realizations:
“37. My father is easier to love as a spirit, a ghost, than as a man.
38. My father’s face stares back at me from the mirror.
39. My father has been forgiven.”
His father, an Igbo man educated in England, married Abani’s English mother and returned with her to Afikpo, Nigeria. Abani is their fourth, and last, son. A Catholic convert, Abani’s mother taught Nigerian women about sexual health and fertility. Abani, at age 7, traveled with her. In a TED Talk, he relates how he used to translate for her: “And how swollen is your vulva?” he remembers asking women.
Abani regrets that Western civilization holds but one view of Africa, and resists portraying “a certain reassuring expectation of Africa.” Instead, his fiction is imaginative and hopeful and even whimsical, despite grim-sounding plot lines. He creates characters such as conjoined twins raised in a circus who become environmental radicals and suspects in a serial killing spree (The Secret History of Las Vegas), a professional Elvis impersonator in Lagos who mourns his mother, enters a life of crime and witnesses the leveling of slums, (GraceLand) and a self-mutilating girl who escapes Nigeria only to be forced into London’s sex trafficking underworld (Becoming Abigail).
Abani’s grandfather used to say that Abani didn’t belong with the living or in the land of spirits. Abani interpreted that his own way: “That meant I could be anything. Even Batman,” he wrote in The Face: Cartography of the Void.
In the act of finding one’s identity is violence, Abani has said. “We’re never more beautiful than when we’re most ugly. Because that’s really the moment when we know what we’re made of,” he told a TED Talk audience.
Abani is the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize and a Guggenheim Award.
Susan Thornton Hobby: You are a prolific writer — plays, poems, novels, essays. It made me think of the Hamilton lyric: “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”
Chris Abani: I wish I wrote as much as I would like to. I think of myself as a lazy writer because I don't even write a fifth of the ideas that I have and can explore. Maybe I seem to write so much because I see everything as connected and writing as a form of talking and not a rarified thing. Who knows?
STH: You once said: “My characters are the people who we would normally try to erase from our daily lives.” Why write about these characters?
CA: I write against erasure, not as a political act, although there is a political dimension to it, but simply because I am interested in a complex, untidy and inconvenient humanity. What we erase is essential to understanding the whole self, and for me is full of rich metaphor and the dark matter of transformation. So these characters, as far out as they may seem, are simply my recognition and acceptance of all the shadows selves that are me or that others have, and to badly paraphrase Diane Arbus, function emblematically to highlight our own process of becoming by a constant accretion and erasure.
STH: In Kalakuta Republic, in the poem “Mephistopheles,” a prison lieutenant offers the persona the chance to do paperwork in his office, but he should definitely not read the copy of Anna Karenina on his desk. Can you talk about that image and what it offers the persona in the poem?
CA: Misdirection is key to magic, alchemy and transformation. It is also the space between direct and inferential statements and worldviews, it's a strategy for breaking taboo, for speaking the unspeakable, for subverting order and for transgressing in full view. So what the officer is saying is "there is a copy of Anna Karenina on the desk that you shouldn't read but if you do, well, there it is.” It's a way of addressing opposites. This kind of deflection is also often at the heart of crafting a poem. As for what the persona gains is the unsaid but implied knowledge that someone who has the power to hurt them actually is looking out for them even when they can't be seen to do that. It's a tender gesture.
STH: Bad poetry comes out of prisons, just like bad poetry can come out of a country club. You’ve said the craft is what is important to you - you once called it the scaffolding for art. Could you talk about that?
CA: I'm not sure what prison has to do with any of this. I have seven collections of poetry, only one about prison. As for craft, control is another way to think of it. It means that we gain proficiency of the modes of creativity we are working with, a deep understanding of material and the use of it.
Like a carpenter knows what wood works best for a desk or dining table and what for a bed, or what stain works best in a given decor. Or another way to think about it is whether as a big man a tailor would advise against making me a three-piece suit in red velvet because it might too hot and heavy and could make me look like a mutant tomato. Instead he might suggest a two-piece in a light linen. Such it is with craft. That an artist is working with material to position risk, epiphany and insight. In the end a poem is rarely about what we want to say but what can be said and how best to say it.
STH: In Secret History of Las Vegas, Sunil calls the one-upsmanship of suffering, “an impossible math.” Can you explain?
CA: There are ways in which as individuals within families or social groups, or even social groups within larger contexts, we can slip into the discourse of suffering via a hierarchy of trauma and/or pain. A sort of — I have suffered more than you, or my people have suffered more. When those modes of expression are used it is usually because the acknowledgment of the suffering by the non-sufferer is calling the non-sufferer into a place of accepting privilege and the non-sufferer has chosen to ignore the sufferer’s legitimacy, make sense?
And so then an impossible calculation begins because each successive claim is seen as nullifying the previous. So the All Lives Matter response to Black Lives Matter is one example. All Lives Matter cannot hear Black Lives Matter because it implicates them in a privilege and tacit complicity with a system that has so rendered the suffering of Black Lives invisible or mute that they respond by reading it as Only Black Lives Matter, even though that is never stated. See? It becomes an impossible math.
STH: You’ve talked about and written about the conflation of beauty and cruelty. In The Face: Cartography of the Void, you told the story of a bar argument in Benin City, in which a gangster cut his own arm with a beer bottle and told you: “This is the least I will do to you.” Your response, written years later, was surprising: “I suppose that too is a kind of love.”
CA: Is it cruel for a man to cut his own arm? Cruel to whom? Himself? I don't conflate cruelty with beauty. I simply suggest that the world is more complex and nuanced and simultaneous than we would like to think it is. I am implying that beauty is complicated and contradictory and not the same as pretty, which is easy. Rilke says (to paraphrase) that beauty is onset of a terror we are yet to bear or understand. What I am saying in Cartography of the Void is that there is no clear singular meaning to anything. It is the foregrounding of an African worldview that says that there is this and that and not this or that. Everything is connected to its shadow and to other shadows and since shadows are the product of light, then by implication, the connection of shadow to light. It is not the new age concept of connected but a deeper cut. The way Khalil Gibran says that no leaf can fall without the knowledge of the whole tree, thus one of us cannot commit a crime without our collective negligence and asks us to investigate how we are complicit in it.
It’s a complex ethical position. This fundamental paradox of manifest reality is inescapable and to do so is to live in the bubble of a lie or an unassailable privilege. As the Igbo say, a child can never outrun its shadow and this too is love. So by letting me know what he would do to me, but by not doing it to me, the gangster (regardless of his intent) shows me a kind of love. And him showing me at great cost to himself consequences I had not considered is a kind of love. Him showing me that he has little to lose in this fight clarified the terms of my own adolescent bravado to me and that too is a kind of love. That I am alive to write about it is also a kind of love. That people engage with the narrative of it and struggle to understand it is also a kind of love. No?
STH: Your influences are wide-ranging, especially James Baldwin, Russian novels and even comic books, is that right?
CA: Yes, my influences include those as well as the Psalms, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Upanishads, the Ifa texts of the Yoruba, Bob Marley, Miles Davis, Handel and Bach, Picasso and many others as well as the many languages of my being, and the music I listen to and all the things I discover about myself as I teach young people, all of it. I don't believe we can choose. Even the things we would like to negate and or erase about lives are our influences.
STH: You have a great empathy for creating female characters — Beatrice and Blessing in Graceland and Abigail in Becoming Abigail, and a few of your characters, while male, carry a longing for female sexuality. Can you talk about that?
CA: I am humbled that readers think I succeed in some of my attempts to expand consciousness and to embody different genders and descriptors and selves. All I can say is that I work hard to avoid spectacle but to rather create a visceral experience of it, a deeper human impulse not to ask, ‘why would a man want to be a woman?’ but what deep human yearning would I have that this would seem like a natural expression of that yearning. Does this make sense?
STH: You once said: “If there’s nothing at risk for you, it cannot be art.” Could you explain the risks you take in your writing.
CA: To be honest I am not sure. It sometimes seems like more of a feeling. But perhaps it is a form of inquiry and self-implication in the process and subject I am working through that allows for vulnerability and transgressiveness that has no value judgment. Maybe it is simply as an unflinching a look at what I have uncovered in process as possible. To mediate not via social anxiety but only through a craft that foregrounds as much transparency for the reader to encounter themselves without shame as possible.
STH: In your book of autobiographical essays, The Face, you speak of forgiveness, especially for your father, and many of your characters have much to forgive. What role does forgiveness take in your writing?
CA: [Jacques] Derrida (and I am paraphrasing here) has a wonderful essay on forgiveness in which he questions if it is possible since it seems the true way we enact it in the world is a kind of calculation or negotiation — I forgive you because x,y,z. I was also raised Catholic and the confessional and forgiveness are cornerstones of the faith. So it occurs to me that I am not sure what forgiveness is, what can be forgiven and how? [Eduardo] Galeano says that there are some languages from the Amazon that don't have a word for forgiveness but only one for forgetting. So I am asking what role memory and remembrance play in forgiveness.
Is forgiveness the release of an emotional charge to a memory or the release of the memory itself? I don't know. So my writing is always about wanting to ask better questions and to negotiate our own responsibility in our wounding and so forth. In the end, my writing tries only to approach the ineffable in circles of approximation and I hope that some epiphanies or apertures have been opened that allow my readers to find resolution for their questions or become more comfortable with uncertainty.
