Uzodinma Iweala Quotes
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When the HIV/AIDS epidemic first appeared, a lot of the reaction was that it's not happening here. It doesn't exist. It's not on the continent of Africa. Then we moved into this other phase, in which it was kind of like, it's everywhere.
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My parents have raised me and my three siblings to be aware of the privilege we have been afforded and the responsibility it brings.
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Nigeria is a difficult place. It is not a country for the faint of heart. On a good day, when our larger cities such as Abuja, Lagos, and Kano are filled with the teeming masses going in so many different directions, flogged by the heat and sun, bumping down uneven roads all in the name of 'the hustle,' it can appear chaotic.
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When I speak about 'we,' it gets very complex very quickly. Having grown up in the United States, but also being very much a member of Nigerian societies and also different parts of Nigerian societies, I understand that we construct particular 'we's.'
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For me, I am really interested in how I can stretch myself to produce things. If, in the process, others take note and recognise that, then wonderful.
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I think 'Beasts of No Nation' is a novel that hopefully will affect each person who reads it in a different way.
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I'm not a propaganda machine. I tell things how I see them. When I say, for example, that corruption is not the only thing the West should think about when they think about Nigeria, I'm not saying it doesn't exist but that people have the complete wrong focus. There's music, there's art, there's culture
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The kidnapped person is so tantalizingly close, kept alive by a devastating hope. Kidnapping or hostage-taking is perhaps the most disturbing form of terror because it turns this hope into a liability that can paralyze.
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I've got to keep on writing. That's non-negotiable. At the same time, one has to look at the world and recognise that writing is not the only thing to be done - I want to have an effect on the world.
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I'll confess that, from an early age, I was a huge fan of President Reagan because my parents bought me an enormous stuffed monkey that they named President Reagan - yes, I get it now.
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Lagos is sometimes emblematic of disorder. In traffic, drivers make their own rules. There is a constant war between our street hawkers and our various forms of law enforcement deployed to eradicate the 'indiscipline' of poverty.
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People don't talk about the amount of destruction in terms of human lives that happen, whether it's through slavery, or through, for example, what Belgium was doing in the Congo - the fragmentation of society that happened after that destruction of human life.
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Washington, D.C., is not a subtle city. Unlike the capitals of other once-great powers which, many hundreds of years old, present a more seamless meshing of monumental memory and daily life, D.C. is constructed to shout, 'Here I am! I am powerful!' to the world.
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Many great novels have shown a world torn to shreds by the brutality of war. To do so, their authors ground their texts in the details of destruction and decay.
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I don't know if I want to be a writer.
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No one can really relate to somebody who has given up entirely.
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I'm a black man in the United States, and there's no two ways about that. I have a shared common experience with other black men, and through that, there's an automatic understanding.
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Sensationalism only works for so long. Think of something like the Kony 2012 campaign. Its sensationalized, viral language got people all hot and bothered, but at the end of the day, there was so much it got wrong about the situation, and that did more damage to their cause than what they got right.
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When somebody says that six million people died in the Holocaust, there is nobody in the world who can understand that. It's only through story, reading books by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, that you really begin to understand the trauma and how horrible it actually was.
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The images that we see of Africa are so... that are so engrained in our minds are of this place that is terrible - like hell on earth. And that doesn't acknowledge the positive things - the many, many, many positive things - that people are doing.
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U.N.-orchestrated gatherings are typically the death of all spontaneity and innovation.
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I feel like it's not Africans who are afraid of China's rise in Africa. It's the West that's afraid of China's rise in Africa.
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Reading 'Search Sweet Country' is like reading a dream, and indeed, at times, it feels like the magical landscapes of writers like the Nigerian Ben Okri or the Mozambican Mia Couto.
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War in Africa is hardly a new phenomenon, nor are voices telling its stories of terror and triumph. Yet some of the continent's most devastating conflicts - and the literature born from the experiences of their survivors - have often gone unnoticed in the West.