The following article was originally published in the spring issue of Centrum's Experience magazine. Chris Abani's workshop is sold out, at this point, but he will be giving a reading from new work at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater on Friday, July 18, at 7:30 pm. The reading is free. Follow this link for more information about the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference.
"If you want to get at the molten heart of contemporary fiction, Chris Abani is the starting point."
—Dave Eggers
Here is a legend—a true one—that surrounds Nigerian-born author Chris Abani. In late 1985, after the publication of his first novel at the age of sixteen, a political thriller entitled “Masters of the Board,” he was arrested for trying to overthrow the Nigerian government.
This novel, although written at such an early age, wasn’t even Abani’s first publication. At the age of ten he’d won a writing competition for eighteen-year-olds, rolling down the aisle “like a little round basketball” to claim his prize.
“The shock on people’s faces brought home to me the impact that writing could have,” Abani says. “In the Nigeria of the time, it was considered that one shouldn’t write until their education was finished, usually in their late twenties or early thirties. But here was this child who wanted to write.”
Born at the beginning of the Nigerian civil war, Abani fled with his family during the conflict and didn’t return to the country until 1970, at the age of five. Known abroad as the Biafran War, the Nigerian civil war featured genocide against the Igbo language group—and other eastern Nigerian language groups—by the state of Nigeria. Millions of Igbo were killed.
After the war, the family moved back to land that had been held by the Igbo rebels, and Chris Abani grew up among “the detritus of war: burned-out tanks squatting in the middle of soccer fields, live grenades getting passed around in school, people hanging themselves because of what they had done.”
The government discouraged the teaching of the civil war in the schools, not wanting the eastern Nigerian youth to re-foment the revolution. Abani only learned the recent history of his own country from a Pakistani teacher, who, as part of a unit on the Jewish Holocaust, taught the Igbo genocide, as well.
Growing up surrounded by war, and drawn as he was to thrillers and comic books—“plus, I couldn’t play soccer well,” he says—Abani wrote his youthful spy thriller, in which neo-Nazis take over Nigeria to institute a Fourth Reich. In addition to international locations, the novel featured several national government buildings and locations.
Continue reading "Chris Abani's Search for a National Literature" »
