My passion is more about bringing the stories out from the African continent mixed with the West.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
What we are trying to do now, this new generation of African writers, is to write about what it is to be a human being living in a particular African country. These are stories that resonate with anyone, anywhere.
When I began 'All Our Names,' I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during that same period.
Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences.
I really fell in love with Africa.
I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.
I usually make sure that my stories are from Africa or my own background so as to highlight the cultural background at the same time as telling the story.
The fact that I have always been deeply invested in politics, and African politics in particular, inevitably played a role in my first novel and, of course, in my decision to write about a handful of particular conflicts in Africa as a journalist.
There are storytelling traditions that come from Africa that are unique from anywhere else.
I fell in love with Africa and began helping people fix things there.
African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.