CANR
WORK TITLE: Lagos Noir
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Abani, Christopher
BIRTHDATE: 12/27/1966
WEBSITE: http://www.chrisabani.com/
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CANR 277
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/books/review/chris-abanis-secret-history-of-las-vegas.html?_r=0 http://therumpus.net/2014/02/the-rumpus-interview-with-chris-abani/
RESEARCHER NOTES:Nigerian
PERSONAL
Born December 27, 1967 (some sources say 1966), in Afikpo, Nigeria; immigrated to England, c. 1991; immigrated to the United States, 1999.
EDUCATION:Imo State University, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1991; Birkbeck College, London, M.A., 1995; University of Southern California, M.A., 2002, Ph.D., 2004.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, poet, playwright, musician, and educator. Antioch University, Los Angeles, CA, instructor; University of California, Riverside, began as visiting assistant professor, became associate professor, then professor of creative writing; Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, Board of Trustees Professor of English.
MEMBER:American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2014.
AWARDS:Delta Fiction Award, Nigeria, 1983; Middleton fellowship, University of Southern California, 2001; Freedom-to-Write Award, PEN USA West, and Prince Claus Award for Literature and Culture (Netherlands), both 2001, both for Kalakuta Republic; Imbonge Yesizwe Poetry International Award (South Africa), 2002; Lannan Foundation literary fellowship, and Human Rights Watch Hellman/Hammet grant, both 2003; Pushcart Prize nomination, 2005, for short story “Blooding”; Silver Medal, California Book Awards for Fiction, Hemingway Prize, PEN New England, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction finalist, and Commonwealth Writers Prize shortlist, all 2005, and IMPAC Dublin Literary Award shortlist, 2006, all for GraceLand; Pushcart Prize nomination in poetry, 2006, for “A Way to Turn This to Light”; Chicago Reader Critic’s Choice, and New York Times Editor’s Choice, both 2006, both for Becoming Abigail; New York Times Editor’s Choice, 2007, for The Virgin of Flames; PEN Beyond the Margins Award finalist, 2007, for Becoming Abigail; PEN Beyond the Margins Award, 2008, for Song for Night; Distinguished Humanist Award, University of California, Riverside, 2008; Hurston-Wright Legacy Award; Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction, 2009; Ford United States Artists Fellow, 2014; Edgar Award for best paperback original, 2015, for The Secret History of Las Vegas.
WRITINGS
Also author of plays produced in Nigeria, c. 1980s, including Song of the Broken Flute.
GraceLand was adapted as an audiobook, Recorded Books, 2004. Author’s works have been translated into foreign languages.
SIDELIGHTS
Chris Abani is part of a new generation of Nigerian writers working to convey to an English-speaking audience the experience of those born and raised in that troubled African nation. Abani began writing at a very young age and published his first novel, Masters of the Board, while still a teenager. The plot of the novel, a political thriller, proved uncomfortably close to actual events; it mirrored a coup that was carried out in Nigeria not long after, and Abani was thrown in jail for six months on suspicion of having helped organize this attempted political overthrow. He continued to write after his release from jail but was imprisoned again two years later, after the publication of his novel Sirocco. The author was again released after a year of detention, but following another two years of writing, during which he composed several antigovernment plays that were performed on the street near government offices, Abani was once again imprisoned and placed on death row. Able to escape after eighteen months, thanks to the bribes his friends paid to prison officials, the writer immediately went into exile and settled in England for several years. Since 1999, Abani has been a resident of the United States.
Abani’s poetry collection Kalakuta Republic takes its title from a wing of the infamous Kiri Kiri prison in Lagos, Nigeria, where Abani and other political prisoners were incarcerated and tortured. Poems in the collection describe, in graphic detail, the horrors the writer witnessed there, particularly the various methods of torture used upon the inmates. Guards sodomized prisoners with rifle barrels, nailed them to tables by their genitals, and performed other ruthless types of torture; in one case a fourteen-year-old boy was so brutalized that he died. In his review for the New Statesman, Robert Winder commented that “the steady parade of torment he describes …, along with a sense of blank bewilderment in the face of such cruelty, is acutely drawn and held very tight.” Tanure Ojaide, writing in World Literature Today, noted that Abani “portrays the experience in indelible lines that haunt the reader as well as himself.” Ojaide added that the poet “succeeds in elevating art and humanity above the meanness and inhumanity of tyrannical leaders and their cohorts.”
In Abani’s poetry collection Hands Washing Water, he “explores place and humor, exile and freedom with poems of experience and imagination,” commented Karla Huston, writing in Library Journal. The collection centers on a series of poems in the form of letters between two lovers during the American Civil War. Other poems are about music, and all involve a dedication to language and communication. Abani’s works in this volume look carefully at “injustice and liberation from it,” Huston concluded.
Abani published his fifth collection of poetry, Sanctificum, in 2010. “These poems of pain, inquiry, and sacredness are candid, tragic, radiant, and witty, reportorial and dreamlike,” wrote Donna Seaman in Booklist. Ashanti White, reviewing the collection in Library Journal, noted that “Abani beautifully amalgamates the intelligible, the ethical, and the aesthetic.”
Abani’s novels include Sirocco and GraceLand, the latter published in 2004 and focusing on a teenage boy named Elvis Oke. The novel is set in 1983, and Elvis is trying to survive in the destitute town of Moroko, a slum on the outskirts of Lagos. His mother, Beatrice, died of cancer when Elvis was a young boy, but the teen still clings to the woman’s diary; the old-fashioned Nigerian recipes and bits of herbalism tucked in the pages of Beatrice’s journal serve as chapter dividers in Abani’s novel. In flashbacks, the reader glimpses fragments of Elvis’s childhood and life in a rural Nigerian village. They also witness the devastating effect Beatrice’s death had on Elvis’s father, Sunday, who turns to alcohol to cope. By Elvis’s adolescence, Sunday has finally found some solace in a relationship with a woman appropriately named Comfort—although she is nothing of the sort to Elvis. A high-school dropout, the teen now makes money performing as an Elvis Presley impersonator for Western tourists, despite the fact that he has few skills as a singer or dancer. According to John C. Hawley in a review of GraceLand for America, the teen’s “hopeless impersonation of his namesake for white tourists is painful to imagine.” Abani’s story takes a turn when Elvis’s friend Redemption convinces the boy that there is more money to be made in crime. Despite his initial moral qualms, Elvis is pulled into moneymaking ventures that grow successively more depraved as time passes.
“GraceLand draws a searing picture of a country devouring its own children,” Dinaw Mengestu commented in New Leader, adding that “what you learn about Nigeria [in Abani’s novel] will make you want to weep.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor interpreted the novel similarly, commenting that “Abani paints a compelling portrait of a society in frightening chaos.” However, Charlie Dickinson, in an online review for the Hackwriters website, focused on the more positive side of Abani’s tale, writing that the author “delivers what might be the ultimate tribute to the King, if the Elvis myth is really about a dirt-poor boy finally catching his dream and making good.”
In the novella-length Becoming Abigail, Abani tells the story of a woman who is sent to London from Nigeria by her father because of her self-mutilation and other disturbing behaviors, which have been fueled by feelings of guilt based on the fact that her mother died while giving birth to her. In her weakened state, Abigail also suffers sexual abuse from her relatives, and when she arrives in London to stay with her cousin Peter, she soon finds that her humiliations have just begun. Abani was inspired by a news story he saw about a woman who had been forced into prostitution. He augmented his knowledge on the subject of sex-trafficking considerably before setting out to write Becoming Abigail. In an interview for Colorlines, he explained: “I do a lot of research and try to immerse myself completely into the subject that I am writing about. The rest is just a matter of practice and of not holding back. The way I get past the research, past the facts of the matter to its heart is to collapse the distance between myself, as a writer, and the subject that I am writing about.” Writing in Essence, Janice K. Bryant cited the author’s “moody lyrical prose.” Kevin Greczek, reviewing Becoming Abigail for Library Journal, noted that Abani “offers a lyrical yet devastating account” and that his “abundant talent is clearly evident throughout.” A Publishers Weekly contributor called the work of short fiction “a searing girl’s coming-of-age novella.”
Abani’s novel The Virgin of Flames is set in Los Angeles, California, where troubled and impoverished mural artist Black lives a difficult inner-city life. While wildfires rage in the hills around the city, Black works in a spaceship he has constructed on the roof of a combination coffee shop and tattoo parlor. His work in progress is a fifty-foot painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe. When Black dons a wedding dress and burgundy lipstick to act as his own model, reports of sightings of the virgin surge in the city, and the faithful flock to the coffee shop in hopes of a glimpse. In other aspects of his life, Black takes his pleasure with a variety of female prostitutes, pursues an infatuation with a transsexual stripper, confesses his lack of ambition to a successful Rwandan businessman, pals around with a drug-addled dwarf, regularly receives the archangel Gabriel as a visitor, and struggles to retain an ever-weakening grip on his own sanity. Black also must deal with conflicted feelings toward his parents, who he discovers dressed him as a girl until age six in order to keep evil spirits from killing him, as they did all other males in his Igbo family. “Black hovers precariously on a kind of sexual abyss, unsure where he fits in,” observed a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who concluded that the novel is a “bleak, searing and sad portrait of outcasts.” In the book Abani “touches on the far reaches of psychic pain, religious and sexual, and creates a hallucinatory despair,” stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer. “Abani’s feverish portrait of a haunted artist embodies post-9/11 anxiety and the longing for peace,” commented Donna Seaman in Booklist.
In Song for Night, a novella, Abani tells the story of a fifteen-year-old Igbo boy named My Luck, a child soldier in West Africa who works as a mine diffuser along with the other boys in his platoon, all of whom are approximately the same age. They travel through areas where the enemy has preceded them and examine the ground for mines. Those they find they must diffuse. My Luck is mute, his vocal chords having been severed by soldiers when he was twelve so that he will not prove a distraction to the other diffusers if he sets off a mine and begins to scream. In an interview for NPR’s News and Notes, Abani explained: “A lot of my work has, I think, has always been trying to give voice in a way to people who don’t always have a chance to speak. So I felt, why not start with the conundrum where someone can tell the story directly but doesn’t have a voice?” Abani heads each chapter with a description of gestures—a sort of makeshift sign language—that the teenage soldiers have invented to communicate with one another. When a mine explodes in My Luck’s face, he is left for dead and as a result becomes separated from his platoon. From there he experiences a profound journey, both physical and spiritual, as he seeks out his lost compatriots. My Luck is both a victim and a perpetrator of the war; he himself acknowledges that not everyone can be an innocent in the proceedings, or the war itself would never take place. While he yearns for his simple child’s life from before he became a soldier and struggles to hold onto memories of more enduring pleasures that embrace life, he has also become mired in the death machine that is the war, developing a taste for rape and killing. Maud Casey, writing for the New York Times Book Review, observed: “The novella deftly frustrates any easy morality. … Abani attains a calibration as delicate as it is essential. As a result, Song for Night contains, at once, an extraordinary ferocity and a vulnerable beauty all its own.” A reviewer for Publishers Weekly remarked that “Abani finds in his narrator a seed of hope amid the bleak, nihilistic terrain.” Hazel Rochman, in a contribution to Booklist, noted that “the horror of what happens to this Igbo boy is intensified by his confusion and his tenderness.”
Although Abani’s writing is inextricably linked to suffering experienced under Nigeria’s military dictatorship, the author once stated of literature: “The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about. I was a writer before I was in prison.” In an online interview with Southern California Poetix Web site contributor Carlye Archibeque, Abani further commented of his work: “The problem is we’re looking for something that doesn’t exist. We’re looking for authenticity. There is no such thing as authenticity. There is either good art or bad art.”
The Secret History of Las Vegas is a thriller featuring Las Vegas detective Salazar and South African transplant Sunil. Salazar has determined to track down a serial killer before his retirement, and his biggest clue comes in the form of conjoined twins who go by the names Fire and Water. Salazar enlists the assistance of Sunil, a troubled psychosis researcher, in his investigation, which turns darker the deeper they get.
Despite criticisms of Abani’s exposition and character development, New York Times Book Review critic Marcel Theroux asserted that “what lifts the novel is its energy, the audacity of Abani’s imagination, and most of all the breadth of vision that supplies its moral context. The Secret History of Las Vegas has a global sweep and—what’s often aspired to, but rarely achieved in a novel—a feeling of thematic unity,” Theroux continued. “Fire and Water may perform at the Carnival of Lost Souls, but the true lost souls of the book are the ones with not physical but moral deformities. Fire and Water’s relationship finally becomes the emblem of a mutuality that has vanished from Sunil’s life. The most obviously damaged turn out to be the purest of heart.” Washington Post reviewer Mark Athitakis called The Secret History of Las Vegas a “clever thriller … brisk and funny in ways the genre demands.” Athitakis noted that “loose ends make a few thinly drawn characters stand out all the more. Yet The Secret History of Las Vegas brings an admirably global perspective to the crime novel.”
In 2016, Abani published the memoir, The Face: Cartography of the Void, part of the “Restless Books” series of essays that asked: “What stories does a face tell?” Abani contemplates the many people who have touched, slapped, kissed, washed, and shaved his face. With an African father and white British mother, and living in the United States since 2001, Abani was raised in the Igbo culture of West Africa and offers political, personal, and philosophical opinions derived from his childhood under a physically and emotionally violent father, his life as a political prisoner, and later as an academic in Britain and America. Reviewing the book for San Francisco Chronicle Online, Porter Shreve commented: “With great insight and compassion, Abani reveals that behind his—and every—face are unseen scars.”
Interviewing Abani for the London Guardian Online, Hope Wabuke noted that “Abani is concerned with questions of inherited trauma, questions of memory and privilege, of bearing witness, agency and representation.” Abani told Wabuke, “It’s the whole idea that you’re growing up with a generation who has suffered direct trauma and their trauma becomes your trauma, which retraumatizes you…There is something really powerful about this kind of generational transference of pain and melancholy.”
In his essay online at Quarterly Conversation, Daniel Evans Pritchard explained: “Abani spends the bulk of his essay exploring the resonances of trauma left behind by his abusive father, as well as the fraught position he and his siblings occupy between indigenous and imperial norms.” Adding commentary on Abani’s theme of social construction of the face and features that are racially tinged, Pritchard said: “Strangers in Abani’s native England would remark to his mother how noble it was of her to adopt these African children.” “It still amazes me that she never grew tired of correcting people,” said Abani.
Abani next edited the 2018 anthology of fiction, Lagos Noir, in which “Abani and a dozen other contributors tell stories that are both unique to Lagos and universal in their humanity,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly. Collecting thirteen stories, the book explores Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria and former capital with twenty-one million people, with stories addressing police drama, family struggles, religious practice, and humor. “In nearly every case, noir’s ritualistic revelation of evil fits surprisingly well in a city of tragically diminished expectations,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor. For Xpress Reviews, Dan Forrest observed that the book will appeal to “both the fan of contemporary African fiction and the newcomer interested in discovering some new voices.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America, August 2, 2004, John C. Hawley, “Oke’s Odyssey,” p. 26.
Black Issues Book Review, May-June, 2005, Michael Datcher, “West Coast Kinfolk: In Los Angeles, Chris Abani and Kamau Daaood Stand Out as Strong Limbs on the Family Tree of Literature,” p. 34.
Booklist, November 15, 2003, Bill Ott, review of GraceLand, p. 570; December 15, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of The Virgin of Flames, p. 20; August, 2007, Hazel Rochman, review of Song for Night, p. 39; April 1, 2010, Donna Seaman, review of Sanctificum, p. 18; December 1, 2013, Stephanie Zvirin, review of The Secret History of Las Vegas, p. 29.
Colorlines, November-December, 2006, Daisy Hernandez, “Chris Abani: The Acclaimed Nigerian Novelist and Poet Discusses His New Novel on Sex Trafficking, Representations in Literature, and Why Fiction Might Actually Matter,” p. 6.
Entertainment Weekly, February 2, 2007, Whitney Pastorek, review of The Virgin of Flames, p. 128.
Esquire, March, 2004, review of GraceLand, p. 54.
Essence, May, 2006, Janice K. Bryant, review of Becoming Abigail, p. 85.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2003, review of GraceLand, p. 1281; November 15, 2006, review of The Virgin of Flames, p. 1139; January 1, 2014, review of The Secret History of Las Vegas; March 15, 2018, review of Lagos Noir.
Library Journal, January, 2004, Edward B. St. John, review of GraceLand, p. 151; February 1, 2006, Kevin Greczek, review of Becoming Abigail, p. 68; November 15, 2006, Karla Huston, review of Hands Washing Water, p. 74; March 15, 2010, Ashanti White, review of Sanctificum, p. 107; January 1, 2014, Robert E Brown, review of The Secret History of Las Vegas, p. 90.
Los Angeles, January, 2007, Robert Ito, review of The Virgin of Flames, p. 76.
Mother Jones, March-April, 2004, Michelle Chihara, review of GraceLand, p. 86.
New Leader, January-February, 2004, Dinaw Mengestu, “At the End of Lonely Street,” p. 27.
New Statesman, May 21, 2001, Robert Winder, review of Kalakuta Republic, p. 52.
New York Times Book Review, January 28, 2007, Karen Olsson, “The Recycled City,” review of The Virgin of Flames, p. 8; September 16, 2007, Maud Casey, “Broken Boy Soldier,” p. 14; January 24, 2014; Marcel Theroux, review of The Secret History of Las Vegas.
Philadelphia Inquirer, March 21, 2007, Dan DeLuca, “Chris Abani’s Novel The Virgin of Flames and Collection of Poetry Hands Washing Water.”
Publishers Weekly, November 17, 2003, review of GraceLand, p. 39; January 9, 2006, review of Becoming Abigail, p. 30; November 6, 2006, review of The Virgin of Flames, p. 37; June 25, 2007, review of Song for Night, p. 29; November 25, 2013, review of The Secret History of Las Vegas, p. 35; April 16, 2018, review of Lagos Noir, p. 74.
Washington Post Book World, February 8, 2014, Mark Athitakis, review of The Secret History of Las Vegas.
World Literature Today, spring, 2001, Tanure Ojaide, review of Kalakuta Republic, p. 309.
Xpress Reviews, April 27, 2018, Dan Forrest, review of Lagos Noir.
ONLINE
Chris Abani Website, http://www.chrisabani.com (July 12, 2007).
Hackwriters, http://www.hackwriters.com/ (July 12, 2007), Charlie Dickinson, review of GraceLand.
Lavin Agency, http://www.thelavinagency.com/ (July 12, 2007), author biography.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (July 27, 2016), Hope Wabuke, author interview.
New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre Website, http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/ (July 12, 2007), author biography.
Northwestern University, Department of English Website, http://www.english.northwestern.edu/ (May 3, 2014), faculty profile.
PEN American Center, http://www.pen.org/ (July 12, 2007), author biography.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (March 22, 2007), Dan DeLuca, review of The Virgin of Flames; Dan DeLuca, review of Hands Washing Water.
Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development Website, http://www.princeclausfund.nl/ (July 12, 2007), “Chris Abani.”
Quarterly Conversation, http://quarterlyconversation.com/ (September 12, 2016 ), Daniel Evans Pritchard, “A Face to Meet the Faces That We Meet.”
San Francisco Chronicle Online, https://www.sfgate.com/ (October 22, 2014 ), Porter Shreve, review of The Face.
Southern California Poetix, http://www.poetix.net/ (July 12, 2007), Carlye Archibeque, author interview.
Truthdig, http://www.truthdig.com/ (April 18, 2006), Zuade Kaufman, “Chris Abani: The Truthdig Interview.”
News and Notes (radio interview program), November 7, 2007, National Public Radio, author interview with Farai Chideya.
Novels
Masters of the Board (1985)
Graceland (2004)
The Virgin of Flames (2007)
The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014)
Collections
Kalakuta Republic (poems) (2000)
Daphne's Lot (poems) (2003)
Dog Woman (poems) (2004)
Hands Washing Water (poems) (2006)
Feed Me the Sun (poems) (2010)
Sanctificum (poems) (2010)
There Are No Names for Red (poems) (2010)
New-Generation African Poets (poems) (2016)
Novellas
Becoming Abigail (2006)
Song for Night (2007)
Series contributed to
Akashic Noir
Lagos Noir (2018)
Non fiction
The Face (2015)
CHRIS ABANI’s prose includes The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song for Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me the Sun, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He holds a BA in English, an MA in gender and culture, an MA in English, and a PhD in literature and creative writing. He is the recipient of a PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and a Guggenheim Award. Born in Nigeria, he is currently Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University, in Chicago. He is the editor of Eight New-Generation African Poets and New-Generation African Poets.
Chris Abani: 'The middle-class view of Africa is a problem'
The prolific Nigerian writer, who fled to the US after being repeatedly imprisoned for his views, wants a more diverse representation of the continent
Hope Wabuke
@HopeWabuke
Wed 27 Jul 2016 17.06 BST
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 15.14 GMT
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Chris Abani: ‘There is a whole body of literature in traditional languages,’ he explains, ‘but the aboriginal voice will not be given the same accord.’ Photograph: Publicity Image
“W
hen a war is over, it takes another 10 years for a war to be really over,” the novelist and poet Chris Abani says over the phone. “And so I grew up in the detritus of that war; it is something that has haunted me for a long time.”
Abani is referring to the Nigerian-Biafran war, which began in his home country in 1967, when he was 18 months old. Although the war lasted less than three years, it proved a deep influence upon Abani’s life. “I remember things like, as an 18-month-old, having to hunt for snails and bush meat,” he recalls. “The perennial smell of mud and dirt and dying things.”
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The war is not the focus of Abani’s recent memoir The Face: Cartography of the Void, but rather an overarching ghost hovering in the background of Abani’s life. “I was born just a few weeks before the civil war arrived in our town,” he writes in one of The Face’s few direct mentions of the conflict. Instead, The Face is more of a deconstruction of the many personal, familial, ethnic, cultural and social forces that have shaped Abani’s life. Released as an ebook in 2014, The Face was published in print with a new cover by the graphic artist Kristen Radtke in the spring of 2016. This year also sees the release of New Generation African Voices: Tatu, a volume of poetry Abani coedited with Kwame Dawes as one of their many efforts to highlight contemporary African literature.
Abani, who grew up in Nigeria, was first imprisoned by the Nigerian government after his first novel, Masters of the Board, was published in 1985 and deemed too political. After being imprisoned by the government twice more for the content of his work, the last time on death row, Abani made his escape to England in 1991. He has lived in the United States since 2001 and now makes his home in Evanston, Illinois, where he is board of trustees professor of English at Northwestern University. He writes prolifically, and has published seven poetry collections and six novels.
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Abani is careful to clarify that his work “is not about the pornographic revisitation of pain or suffering”. These years, he eschews speaking publicly about his time in prison, not wanting that experience to become the sum total of his personal narrative. Rather, he tells me, his work is “against forgetting”. Abani is concerned with questions of inherited trauma, questions of memory and privilege, of bearing witness, agency and representation. Indeed, these themes can be seen throughout his career – from his poetry collection Kalakuta Republic and his novel Song for Night, which explore the more visceral aspects of trauma upon survivors of torture and child soldiers, to his novel Graceland, which follows a boy trying to escape the impoverished ghettoes and violence of Lagos.
“It’s the whole idea that you’re growing up with a generation who has suffered direct trauma and their trauma becomes your trauma, which retraumatizes you,” Abani explains. I tell him about a recent study which showed that trauma permanently alters one’s DNA, and the changed DNA is then passed down to succeeding generations. He has not heard of the research study, but the science makes immediate sense to him in terms of his own experience with the war in Nigeria and beyond. “When I talk to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the people who went through the Holocaust, through the Armenian genocide, it’s incredibly real to them even though they have lived their whole lives in Los Angeles. There is something really powerful about this kind of generational transference of pain and melancholy. Even though you don’t know the direct experience of it, you are still caught in the language of it, and trapped even more because you have nothing to push against.”
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The Face was challenging to write. “As with most people, thinking about my face in any literal way makes me so uncomfortable,” he told me. “The process makes one quite vulnerable.” The result, nonetheless, is a powerful, honest and deeply poetic accounting of the formation of a life. “The process of coming to selfhood is a process of violence,” Abani says. “I don’t know that there is another way. Even when it isn’t a direct violence on the body, it is often violence on the psyche. No matter how benevolent the process tries to be, it is always a treacherous journey between growth and pruning. The state and the family are often engaged in varying degrees of control, and control invokes and often enacts violence. It seems that this is the edge against which identity is shaped and resisted.”
Describing his experience as the son of a Nigerian father and a white British mother in the three main places he has called home, he writes: “In Nigeria, I was often confused for being Lebanese, Indian, Arab or Fulani. But not here in England or America. In these places, I am firmly black, of unknown origin.” It is difficult, in a time of violence against black bodies, and the cry of Black Lives Matter, not to hear the pain in Abani’s words.
When I ask him what this phrase in his book means to him now, long after first writing it, he pauses, then explains: “When you are a black person here, you are never an individual; you are always a collective. Whiteness enjoys that idea of being an individual. And so, whatever people have decided what the collective of blackness is, that is what you are until proven otherwise.
“There are social reasons why this hate has flared up, but it is not because of anything wrong that black people have done,” Abani continues. “It is simply that we are taking the privilege we are entitled to, including that of the presidency and of something as basic as the right to not be killed, and this triggers the fear of loss of privilege for whiteness.”
Abani’s exploration of personal, familial and cultural identities, all situated in conversation with questions of larger social significance, have created a work of great depth, compassion and insight. “I grew up with privilege in the midst of bad poverty,” Abani explains to me. “I have that double view.” This instilled in him an ability to see and articulate the very “complicated view of what it means to be a contemporary African”. Abani refuses reductive approaches to understanding African identity and literature: “In Nigeria, in west Africa and perhaps we can argue in all of African literature, the middle-class view of the world tends to become the view of Africa. And this is a problem.”
What is the danger in allowing the African middle class to subsume all other voices? “The whole concept of an economic middle class as we have it is a concept from Victorian England; it doesn’t exist within African culture in the same way. We are trying to have all the trappings of the western economic middle class without the infrastructure to support it. That means we have to continue to make other people impoverished because the only way of making that money is through corruption.
“There is a whole body of literature in traditional languages,” he explains, “but the aboriginal voice will not be given the same accord unless someone who can be trusted by the so-called establishment we are trying to penetrate says it is a viable voice.”
Our conversation ends when he arrives at his destination: a bookstore. He has been driving with his editor and is to give a reading from The Face. But what is on his mind is not the selection he will read, but his journey in the car driving through the alleys of the city – and how that was a metaphor for his thoughts on the ethics of character and narrative voice in fiction.
“I think the Yoruba word for an alley is kora, which sums up my work,” Abani says. He believes that what is most interesting are the “alleys” in the mind, these “liminal slippage places where all of the things we don’t want to deal with in the main street filter into the cracks and crannies”. This is the essence of his writing. Abani wants to look at the people and places which others usually overlook. “My characters,” he says, “are the people who we would normally try to erase from our daily lives.”
Board of Trustees Professor of English
Ph.D. University of Southern California
chris.abani@northwestern.edu
Website
847-467-1065
University Hall 113
Office Hours: Mondays & Wednesdays 2-3 & by appt
Specialization
Creative Writing
Biography
Chris Abani teaches Creative Writing (Fiction and Poetry) and Literature. He is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright. His fields of interest include African Poetics, World Literature, 20th Century British and American Literature, African Presences in Medieval and Renaissance Cultural Spaces, The Architecture of Cities and their Potential Symbiotic Relationship with their Populations, West African Music, Postcolonial and Transnational Theory, Robotics and Consciousness, Yoruba and Igbo Philosophy and Religion.
His prose includes The Secret History of Las Vegas (Penguin 2014), Song For Night (Akashic, 2007), The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007), Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006), GraceLand (FSG, 2004), and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985).
His poetry collections are Sanctificum (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), There Are No Names for Red (Red Hen Press, 2010), Feed Me The Sun - Collected Long Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen, 2003) and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001).
He has also written numerous essays, articles, book reviews and critical papers on art, poetry, cities and literature for local and international journals, magazines and newspapers.
His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian and Serbian.
He holds a B.A. in English from Imo State University, Nigeria, an M.A. in Gender and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London, an M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.
He is the recipient of an Edgar Prize from the Mystery Writers of America, 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.
Chris Abani has taught in numerous countries around the world including countries in sub Saharan Africa (Gambia, Nigeria and South Africa), the Middle East (Qatar), Central Asia (Thailand) and Europe (UK).
He is always at work on multiple projects.
Black Goat Poetry Series
African Poetry Book Fund
Awards
Chris Abani
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Chris Abani
Abani in 2007
Born
Christopher Abani
27 December 1966 (age 51)
Afikpo, Nigeria
Occupation
Author, poet, professor
Website
www.chrisabani.com
The poem "Ode to Joy" on a wall in the Dutch city of Leiden
Christopher Abani (born 27 December 1966) is a Nigerian and American author. He says he is part of a new generation of Nigerian writers working to convey to an English-speaking audience the experience of those born and raised in "that troubled African nation".
Contents [hide]
1
Biography
2
Education and career
3
Published works
4
Honors and awards
5
See also
6
References
7
External links
Biography[edit]
Abani was born in Afikpo, Nigeria. His father was Igbo, while his mother was of English descent.[1]
He published his first novel, Masters of the Board, in 1985 at the age of 16. It was a political thriller, the plot of which was an allegory based on a coup that was carried out in Nigeria just before it was written. He was imprisoned for six months on suspicion of an attempt to overthrow the government. He continued to write after his release from jail, but was imprisoned for one year after the publication of his 1987 novel Sirocco. After he was released from jail this time, he composed several anti-government plays that were performed on the street near government offices for two years. He was imprisoned a third time and was placed on death row. Luckily, his friends had bribed government officials for his release in 1991, and immediately Abani moved to the United Kingdom, living there until 1999.[2] He then moved to the United States, where he now lives.[3]
Education and career[edit]
Abani holds a B.A. in English and Literary Studies from Imo State University, Nigeria; an M.A. in Gender and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London, an M.A. in English from the University of Southern California; and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California.
Abani has been awarded a PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, the 2001 Prince Claus Awards, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Selections of his poetry appear in the online journal Blackbird. From 2007–2012, he was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. He is currently a Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.[4]
His book of poetry, Sanctificum (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), is a sequence of linked poems, bringing together religious ritual, the Igbo language of his Nigerian homeland, and reggae rhythms in a postracial, liturgical love song.[5]
Abani's foray into publishing has led to the formation of the Black Goat poetry series, which is an imprint of New York-based Akashic Books. Poets Kwame Dawes, Christina Garcia, Kate Durbin, Karen Harryman, Uche Nduka, Percival Everett, Khadijah Queen and Gabriela Jauregui have all been published by Black Goat.
In summer 2016 a broad selection of his works has been published in Israel by the small independent publishing house Ra'av under the title "Shi'ur Geografia" (Hebrew for: Geography Lesson) edited by Noga Shevach and the poet Eran Tzelgov. The collection received great reviews and offered Hebrew readers a first encounter with the poetry of Abani.
Published works[edit]
Novels
Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985)
GraceLand (FSG, 2004/Picador 2005)
The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007)
The Secret History of Las Vegas (Penguin, 2014)
Novellas
Becoming Abigail (Akashic Books, 2006)
Song For Night (Akashic Books, 2007)
Poetry
Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001).
Daphne's Lot (Red Hen Press, 2003)
Dog Woman (Red Hen Press, 2004)
Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)
There are no names for red (Red Hen Press, 2010)
Feed me the sun (Peepal Tree Press, 2010)
Sanctificum (Copper Canyon Press, 2010)
Essays
The Face (Restless Books, 2014)
Honors and awards[edit]
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2001
PEN USA West Freedom-to-Write Award, US
Prince Claus Awards.
Middleton Fellowship, University of Southern California, US
2002
Imbongi Yesizwe Poetry International Award, South Africa.
2003
Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, US
Hellman/Hammet Grant from Human Rights Watch, US
2005
Winner, Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. (GraceLand)
Winner, Hurston-Wright Legacy Award (GraceLand)
Silver Medal, California Book Award for Fiction (GraceLand)
Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (GraceLand)
Finalist, Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Books (Africa Region)(GraceLand)
Pushcart Nomination for Blooding. StoryQuarterly.
2006
A New York Times Editor's Choice (Becoming Abigail)
A Chicago Reader Critic's Choice (Becoming Abigail)
A selection of the Essence Magazine Book Club (Becoming Abigail)
A selection of the Black Expressions Book Club (Becoming Abigail)
Pushcart Nomination (poetry) (A Way To Turn This To Light)
Shortlisted for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (GraceLand).
2007
New York Times Editor's Choice (Song for Night)
Finalist, PEN/Beyond Margins Award (Becoming Abigail)
A Barnes & Noble Discovery Selection (The Virgin of Flames)
A New York Times Editor's Choice (The Virgin of Flames)
A New York Libraries Books For Teens Selection (Becoming Abigail)
2008
Winner, PEN/Beyond Margins Award for Song For Night
Nominated for Lamada Award (The Virgin of Flames)
Recipient, Distinguished Humanist Award (UC, Riverside)
2007 Pushcart Nomination for Sanctificum (poetry)
2009
Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction
Chris Abani is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright. Born in Nigeria to an Igbo father and English mother, he grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria, received a BA in English from Imo State University, Nigeria, an MA in English, Gender and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He has resided in the United States since 2001.
He 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.
His fiction includes The Secret History of Las Vegas (Penguin 2014), Song For Night *(Akashic, 2007), *The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007), Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006), GraceLand (FSG, 2004), and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985).
His poetry collections are Sanctificum (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), There Are No Names for Red (Red Hen Press, 2010), Feed Me The Sun - Collected Long Poems *(Peepal Tree Press, 2010) *Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne’s Lot (Red Hen, 2003) and *Kalakuta Republic *(Saqi, 2001).
His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian and Serbian.
Through his TED Talks, public speaking and essays Abani is known as an international voice on humanitarianism, art, ethics, and our shared political responsibility. His critical and personal essays have been featured in books on art and photography, as well as Witness, Parkett, The New York Times, O Magazine, and Bomb.
His many research interests include African Poetics, World Literature, 20th Century Anglophone Literature, African Presences in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, The Living Architecture of Cities, West African Music, Postcolonial and Transnational Theory, Robotics and Consciousness, Yoruba and Igbo Philosophy and Religion.
He is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.
AWARDS/GRANTS/HONORS
2014 - Winner of the Edgar Prize
2014 - Finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award in Fiction
2014 - Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
2014 - Ford United States Artists Fellow
2009 - Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction.
2008 - Winner, PEN Beyond the Margins Award ( Song For Night)
2008 - Finalist, Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Song for Night)
2008 - Nominated for Lamada Award (the Virgin of Flames)
2008 - Recipient, Distinguished Humanist Award (UC, Riverside)
2007 - Pushcart Nomination for Sanctificum. (poetry)
2007 - New York Times Editor’s Choice (Song for Night)
2007 - Finalist, PEN Beyond the Margins Award (Becoming Abigail)
2007 - A Barnes and Noble Discovery Selection (The Virgin of Flames)
2007 - A New York Times Editor’s Choice (The Virgin of Flames)
2007 - A New York Libraries Books For Teens Selection (Becoming Abigail)
2006 - A New York Times Editor’s Choice (Becoming Abigail)
2006 - A Chicago Reader Critic’s Choice (Becoming Abigail)
2006 - A selection of the Essence Magazine Book Club (Becoming Abigail)
2006 - A selection of the Black Expressions Book Club (Becoming Abigail)
2006 - Pushcart Nomination (poetry) for “A Way To Turn This To Light.”
2006 - Finalist for IMPAC Dublin Prize (GraceLand)
2005 - Winner, PEN Hemingway Book Prize. (GraceLand)
2005 - Winner Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction (GraceLand)
2005 - Silver Medal, California Book Award for Fiction. (GraceLand)
2005 - Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. (GraceLand)
2005 - Finalist, Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Books (Africa Region). (GraceLand)
2005 - Pushcart Nomination for “Blooding.” StoryQuarterly.
2004 - Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers. (GraceLand)
2004 - New York Times Editor’s Choice (GraceLand)
2004 - Nominated for The Kingsley Tufts Prize for Poetry (Dog Woman)
2004 - Nominated for The Griffin Prize in Poetry (Dog Woman)
2003 - Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, USA.
2003 - Hellman/Hammet Grant from Human Rights Watch, USA.
2002 - Imbonge Yesizwe Poetry International Award, South Africa.
2001 - PEN USA West Freedom - to - Write Award, USA.
2001 - Prince Claus Award for Literature & Culture, The Netherlands.
2001 - Middleton Fellowship, University of Southern California, USA.
1983 - Delta Fiction Award, Nigeria. (Masters of the Board).
EDUCATION: BA - English (Nigeria), MA - Gender and Culture (London), MA - English (USA), PhD - Literature and Creative Writing (USA).
Author Chris Abani Speaks on Race and the Human Face
By
Kiana Herold '17
,
Managing News Editor
Issue
145-17
| Tue, 03/01/2016 - 23:50
Renowned author Chris Abani delivered a speech titled “My Face and Ours: Views of Today’s America” in Stirn Auditorium on Feb. 24. Abani’s talk focused on themes from his new book of essays, “The Face: Cartography of the Void,” and was part of a lecture series taking place to honor Black History Month. Abani commented on the complex undercurrents of race and individual and collective identity in people’s interactions with their own and others’ faces.
A conversation between Abani and Latin American and Latino Culture professor Ilan Stavans, who was the publisher of Abani’s memoir, followed the lecture, and the event concluded with a question and answer session. The lecture was sponsored by the Victor Johnson Lectureship Fund, and President Biddy Martin selected Abani to be the speaker.
Abani is an award-winning author of novels, essays, poems, screenplays and plays. He has received a Guggenheim Award, the Prince Claus Award, PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award and the PEN Hemingway Book Prize, among others.
“Graceland” is one of his most well known works. One focus of his work is the collision of cultures he experienced growing up with a Nigerian father and an English mother. He is currently an English professor at Northwestern University.
Chief communication officer Pete Mackey, who was involved with planning the event, said that Abani’s lecture tied into themes touched upon by political strategist Donna Brazile’s recent talk on race and electoral politics.
“We chose Chris because of his excellence as a writer and public speaker, because his recent book, ‘The Face: Cartography of the Void,’ explores timely topics of race and identity in a candid and compelling way and because of the range of ideas his writing as an accomplished essayist, novelist and poet has probed,” Mackey wrote in an email interview.
Abani spoke on how a person’s race impacts the way that their face is viewed. While some worry about whether their face is considered beautiful, Abani said he is more concerned with how he holds his face and how others read his face in relation to personal safety.
Abani said that no matter how faces represent individuals, they are subject to being perceived as representative of racial groups.
“It seems like you are always caught between this problem, where any attempt to affirm your individuality, affirm your own privilege, becomes a simultaneous shameful thing, where you are simultaneously disavowing other kinds of blackness — making you a race traitor, but also putting you in a position where you are always begging for something that actually belongs to you,” he said.
Throughout his talk, Abani used personal anecdotes to convey his thoughts on contemporary issues. He shared stories from his childhood growing up in a biracial family in Nigeria and his experiences of discrimination in the U.S.
“Power, it has been argued, is in having fluidity — fluidity within a larger social context, but also within your own self-narrative, such as to accommodate and simultaneously thwart narratives that are projected onto you,” Abani said.
Abani consistently returned to the concept of the face and its relationship to identity throughout the talk. He noted that individuals are taught to see humanity in things that they perceive as human, and appealed to the audience to change their reflexive associations and attitudes.
“When I look at a face I try to challenge every assumption I have about that face and what that face is trying to tell me,” he said. “I try to touch it metaphorically in certain ways as to say, ‘Who is this face and what does this face mean to me?’”
Lagos Noir
Publishers Weekly. 265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p74.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Lagos Noir
Edited by Chris Abani. Akashic, $15.95 trade
paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-61775-523-1
In the introduction to this excellent anthology, Abani welcomes readers to Lagos, Nigeria, a city of more than 21 million and an amazing amalgam of wealth, poverty, corruption, humor, bravery, and tragedy. Abani and a dozen other contributors tell stories that are both unique to Lagos and universal in their humanity. An ambitious and observant policeman investigates the murder of a white woman, one of a series of crimes, in Jude Dibia's "What They Did That Night." A taxi driver's newfound riches disappear quickly in Chika Unigwe's "Heaven's Gate." A Bunyanesque hero stars in Nnedi Okorafor's amusing "Showlogo." A father bullies his rebellious daughter in Sarah Ladipo Manyika's "The Swimming Pool." A childless husband and wife pin their hopes on a powerful pastor in Onyinye Ihezukwu's "For Baby, for Three." Abani closes the volume with the witty "Killer Ape," about Det. Sgt. James Okoro, who idolizes Sherlock Holmes and welcomes the chance to solve a crime supposedly committed by a chimpanzee. This entry stands as one of the strongest recent additions to Akashic's popular noir series. June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lagos Noir." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 74. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532717/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b2a937df. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532717
Abani, Chris: LAGOS NOIR
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Abani, Chris LAGOS NOIR Akashic (Adult Fiction) $15.95 5, 5 ISBN: 978-1-617755-23-1
Noir comes to Africa.
Abani's introduction promises that these 13 mostly new stories--Nnedi Okorafor's "Showlogo" already appeared in an earlier version, as did the introduction--will reveal "much more truth at the heart of this tremendous city than any guidebook, TV show, film, or book you are likely to find." That claim is doubly disingenuous, since (1) the whole premise of Akashic's far-flung series, that noir is different from place to place, encourages genre tourism in exotic locales, and (2) this is, in fact, a book. So what does it reveal about Lagos? For better or worse, pretty much what you already suspected. A. Igoni Barrett's "Just Ignore and Try to Endure" and editor Abani's "Killer Ape" emphasize the perilously narrow frontier between humans and animals. Jude Dibia's "What They Did That Night" and Adebola Rayo's "What Are You Going to Do?" sketch bureaucratic corruption so deep that it's an unblinking fact of life. The family units in Sarah Ladipo Manyika's "The Swimming Pool," Onyinye Ihezukwu's "For Baby, for Three," Uche Okonkwo's "Eden," and Wale Lawal's "Joy" intensify rather than providing respite from the pervasive darkness. Chika Unigwe's "Heaven's Gate" and Leye Adenle's "Uncle Sam" suggest that foreign visitors to Nigeria are advised to watch themselves and their surroundings very carefully indeed. E.C. Osondu's "The Walking Stick" provides a reminder that some mysteries just aren't meant to be solved. And Pemi Aguda's "Choir Boy," perhaps the most evocative of all these stories, presents a deeply shamed robbery victim's portrait of an even more devastated victim. In nearly every case, noir's ritualistic revelation of evil fits surprisingly well in a city of tragically diminished expectations.
Nor should you think for a minute that Lagos has a corner on African noir. Akashic has Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Accra, and Marrakech waiting in the wings.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Abani, Chris: LAGOS NOIR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650861/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6cc2c3b1. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650861
Lagos Noir
Dan Forrest
Xpress Reviews. (Apr. 27, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Lagos Noir. Akashic. Jun. 2018. 224p. ed. by Chris Abani. ISBN 9781617755231. pap. $15.95; ebk. ISBN 9781617756481. MYS
The African megalopolis of Lagos, Nigeria, makes a perfect setting for mystery stories with a noir bent. Urban anonymity and alienation are key to noir, as are femmes fatales, con men, heist crews, crooked cops, and naive newcomers from the sticks. The sights, sounds, and equatorial heat of the big city heighten the tensions inherent in tales of robbery, murder, and other desperate acts. Crime is no respecter of class either, with stories set in the wealthiest, gated enclaves and the poorest of the poor shantytowns. The smell of local street food cooking over fires on every street corner is omnipresent. As with the far-flung locations of some of Akashic's other volumes, these exotic spots do not disguise the desperation lurking so closely under the surface of even the most sophisticated urban setting.
Verdict With its breadth of contributors, this latest volume in the publisher's city noir series will satisfy both the fan of contemporary African fiction and the newcomer interested in discovering some new voices.--Dan Forrest, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Forrest, Dan. "Lagos Noir." Xpress Reviews, 27 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537404943/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=90c54fba. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537404943
The Face
Cartography of the Void
By Chris Abani
(Restless Books; $2.99)
A year ago, Restless Books began publishing essays that answered the question “What stories does a face tell?” Chris Abani’s contribution is a fascinating meditation on identity that explores the novelist’s own mixed heritage and mixed feelings. A true citizen of the world, Abani was born in Nigeria to an Igbo father and an Anglo/Celt mother, and has lived since 2001 in the United States. “I come from ... a long line of noble people, a long line of mongrels,” he writes, noting that he has been confused for Lebanese, Indian, Arab, Fulani and Maori, among others. “But not in England or America. In these places I am firmly black, of unknown origin.”
In Nigeria people call him Okpa ihu nnaya, “one who has his father’s face.” And the weight of the essay pivots around the complexity of his relationship with his late father, who was brilliant but also physically and emotionally abusive. “To wear the face of someone you can’t help loving even as you can’t stop hating him is to be caught in an infernal struggle for your own soul.” With great insight and compassion, Abani reveals that behind his — and every — face are unseen scars.
A Face to Meet the Faces That We Meet
Essay by Daniel Evans Pritchard — Published on September 12, 2016
Published in Issue 45
The Face: A Time Code by Ruth Ozeki. Restless Books. 144pp, $9.99.
The Face: Strangers on a Pier by Tash Aw. Restless Books. 80pp, $9.99.
The Face: Cartography of the Void by Chris Abani. Restless Books. 96pp, $6.99.
In the third act of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the artist responsible for said portrait, Basil Hallward, sums up the central irony of the novella: “People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.” At this point in the book, of course, the reader knows exactly how well a sin can be concealed by a lovely face. Wilde’s own double life resonates as well in the scene, as it does throughout the story. The transgression of social and ethical mores, he knew well, doesn’t leave its graffiti on the body’s exterior. Rather, the evidence of one’s vices accumulate in the basement, collecting into a single object very like but not identical to the self.
To paraphrase Eliot, we all prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet. Whether what’s presented is an “honest” face that reveals some truth about a person’s inner life is completely beside the point. A face is a construction. It’s crafted—intentionally or subconsciously—to present a constellation of specific traits to the world, and the world in turn projects meanings onto and (mis)reads the features of a face. Dorian Gray, astute as the author who invented him, wonders “at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence.” The shifting misdirection of the face reflects the dynamism of the underlying self. That impermanence may be the face’s single most salient feature, and may be what makes the face most worthy of examination.
How much examination, though? Portraiture is a notoriously difficult art, not only for the challenge of evoking some dimension of character but also because it takes a tremendous amount of skill to render a face with any sort of originality. Every art museum seems to contain hall after massive hall of perfectly masterful portraits—and if we’re being completely honest, they are deadly boring. Wigs, hats, dresses, robes, uniforms, scepters, swords, tools, books, fans; the half-smile, the frown, the raised brow, the centered gaze, the distant look, the ruddy cheek, the jowl, the pert lip, the cleft chin, the laugh lines, the pallor, the angle of the nose, the blushing cheek: after the first dozen or so, one becomes basically as good as another. Different, yes; but interchangeable. It takes genius to reimagine the familiar. Rembrant’s portraits are recognizable from across the next hall. Artists like Velazquez, Sargent, Picasso, Lange, Freud, and Leibovitz are famous in no small part because their depictions of the face teach viewers a new way to see. The face seems to achieve this with more immediacy than any other artistic subject.
Restless Books, an independent press dedicated to publishing diverse international literature, has launched a new series of novella-length essays exploring the biographical, philosophical, racial, gendered, and aesthetic dimensions of one’s own face. At first blush it sounds like a marketing gimmick, an attempt to translate celebrity culture into literary style or to leverage the current confessional fad. It also risks the boredom of the 17th-century portrait gallery, over-burdening writers to be interesting without pandering, reflective without navel-gazing.
Which is why it’s no small feat that, for the most part, these first three installments in the “Face” series are so effective—and more so when read together. Ruth Ozecki, Chris Abani, and Tash Aw each approach their own face (that “planar surface housing a cluster of holes,” as Ozecki describes it) from characteristic perspectives, drawing from unique biographical and cultural sources. Their apparent disparities make certain echoes all the more surprising.
For example, how unlikely is it that both Abani, a Nigerian author of Nigerian and British descent now living in Los Angeles, and Aw, a Malaysian author of Chinese descent now living in London, would both have cause to mention the Cosby Show? Abani spends the bulk of his essay exploring the resonances of trauma left behind by his abusive father, as well as the fraught position he and his siblings occupy between indigenous and imperial norms. Near his essay’s midpoint he writes:
My generation struggled to reconcile the often conflicting, schizophrenic expectations of our parents’ old-world ideals and punishments with the equally schizophrenic Western ideals of parenting we saw on television. These came to a head with the Cosby Show.
I said to my father, “Dr. Huxtable tells his son, ‘Theo, I love you,’ and all you do is yell at me and tell me how I fail. How I embarrass you. How I betray you.” He was eating. He paused and looked up at me from the plate and said, “Shut your mouth before I rearrange your stupid face.”
Again, the face. That face. Always.
The show provides an alternative paradigm for Aw as well, whose reserved father unexpectedly opens up about the shame borne by Chinese migrants to Malaysia. “I used to wish that we could be more frank and touchy-feely with our parents,” Aw writes, “the way American families were in the Cosby Show and other programs we saw on TV, but now I feel suddenly uncomfortable, as if I have intruded into a space that was better left unexplored.”
This coincidence proves substantial. Abani’s Nigeria and Aw’s Malaysia are both multiethnic nations founded in the middle of the 20th century. Both are former British colonies that have faced major political and cultural challenges in the decades since independence. Both were thrust into the modern globalized economy in the space of a single generation, a shift that opened vast divisions within their respective populations.
The show highlights the great importance of fathers. Abani’s father is the central topic of his essay—the ghost of his abuse haunts the writer each time he looks in a mirror—and the volume serves as a cathartic exercise. Aw relates the immigration experience of his two grandfathers, with his father providing the central dramatic scene, but the women in his family are largely absent. Ozecki’s focus on her father is perhaps most surprising. She sees this man’s face in the mirror—in her eyes, in her broad forehead, in the scar from a sledding accident. She recognizes his disapproving look in her own face, remembers his anxiety about having his family depicted in her art, recalls that he died only a week before her first novel was published. Ozecki’s mother is more present in her essay than Abani’s or Aw’s mothers are in theirs, but Ozecki still discusses her mother most often in association with her grandfather, an artist.
What is it about the face that brings fathers to mind? Abani jokes about the evolutionary benefit to a newborn looking like its father (to limit the threat of cannibalism). It could be that children tend to experience their fathers as visual constructions, whereas a child’s relationship to its mother often begins with touch, scent, nourishment. Are the senses in this way gendered in their development? Ozecki writes, “My face was a surface onto which people, especially men, projected their ideas of race and sexuality.” Is there something inherently male about the gaze, or is this merely a case of Freudian signification? Or is there a sense in which the relation to fathers carries more social significance, offering itself up more prominently as a topic?
Another recurring theme is the social construction of the face—one’s features are inevitably put into a racially tinged context. Ozecki and Abani each have one parent of European descent, a contingency that makes both vulnerable. Ozecki recalls strangers approaching her on the street as a child to ask What are you? “In refusing to resolve into one thing or another,” she writes, “my face was the occasion for discomfort. . . . Half, hybrid, mulatto, chimera . . . in the uncanny valley, ordinary manners do not apply.” Meanwhile, strangers in Abani’s native England would remark to his mother how noble it was of her to adopt these African children. “It still amazes me that she never grew tired of correcting people.” Abani himself recalls one occasion where he was arrested by the Nigerian military:
Army trucks rolled into markets and soldiers would round up these refugees, separating families without a second thought—after all, they all looked alike—and drive them to the border. I once found myself being pushed into the back of one such truck, but my fluency in several Nigerian languages saved me. I was often confused for being Lebanese, Indian, Arab, or Fulani. But not in England or America. In these places I am firmly black, of unknown origin.
People project onto the features of a face a type of racial/ethnic identity that is, as Wilde scoffed, “simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence”—and also a lie. Well, not a lie so much as a fiction, something malleable that adjusts in differing circumstances. The race-making project rewards our collective “predilection for voyeurism,” to borrow Ozecki’s words. Aw, on the other hand, finds himself not accused of being the racial other but being constantly mistaken for the local ethnicity of whatever East Asian nation he happens to be visiting—Thailand, mainland China, Nepal, Hong Kong. He attributes this to “our wish for everyone to be like us. We want the stranger to be one of our own, someone we can understand.” His reading springs from a welcome optimism regarding the generosity of strangers, and also from his understanding of the interconnected history of the region. Tracing the long history of South East Asian migration via his grandparents’ experience fleeing war-torn China, Aw writes that it “might explain why I can pass for anyone, anywhere in South East Asia; might explain why no one ever guesses where I’m from.”
I could not help but think of Lacan as well—almost despite myself. Ozecki, of course, spends the first volume staring into a mirror, unpacking the accumulated details of her physical appearance, tracing the signification of each element, and each author works to resolve their identities—to borrow Lacan’s words—with the discordance with their own realities: Abani exploring the space between himself and his father, as well as his Afikpo heritage; Aw following the history of his family’s migration in a perspective that comes close to historical objectivity. Ozecki’s process circles the inner life, the psyche, the self. Abani focuses on the complications of familial relationships. Aw stands furthest from his own life, taking an almost impersonal tone, “skirting around the subject of his own past.” Body: family: object. Of course, each writer addresses their own lives, their families, and history, but the shift in focus from one essay to the next is notable. It is a fading impression, and one that becomes less tangible the more closely one looks for it—but the volumes do seem to sketch an outline that resembles Lacan’s idea of the mirror stage.
There are stronger resonances with the work of the religious philosophers Martin Buber and Emmanuel Lévinas, less familiar to literary readers but highly influential. Both thinkers build their philosophies upon the relationship between the self and the other. In his landmark volume, I and thou, Buber writes, “Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.” (Which could serve as a tidy paraphrase of Lacan’s jargon-obsessed opacity.) Lévinas expanded on Buber’s core ideas, describing the face-to-face encounter as the heart of all human experience. The abstractions that dominate our thinking—justice, goodness, love; perhaps even race and gender—are all extrapolated from the face-to-face. Ozecki, who may be familiar with Buber and Lévinas from her religious training, writes of “an understanding that can only emerge in the intimacy of the face-to-face meeting. . . . Their faces mirror mine, and my face mirror theirs, and this gives rise to a feeling of recursive kindliness and kinship that I haven’t felt in quite this way before.”
The face communicates with an immediacy that evades other artistic subjects. Its flux and primacy cannot be refused, and neither can the importance of recognition. The features require long, serious study to detail, but the face itself can be captured in a moment’s glance. Faces express emotion, hide the same, lie about our inner lives, or dramatize that inner life for strangers and friends. As a result, these novella-length essays are better read together than in isolation. Their cumulative effect ends up being far greater than the sum of the parts. For the strongest impact, it might even be worth waiting for the next round to be published, which is slated to include essays by Roxanne Gay and Lynn Tillman.
Daniel Evans Pritchard is a writer, poet, and translator as well as the founding editor of The Critical Flame, a journal of criticism and creative nonfiction. He serves a board member at Salamander and an advisor to AGNI. His work has been published by or is forthcoming from Harvard Review, Slushpile, Drunken Boat, Prodigal, Rain Taxi, The Battersea Review, The Buenos Aires Review, Little Star, and elsewhere. He lives in Greater Boston and yammers on endlessly at @pritchard33.