Where the Transformation Lies:
A Conversation between Chris Abani and Donnelle McGee
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/Barbey Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond 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).
Donnelle McGee: Much of your writing creates space for the other. Meaning, there is room in your narratives for those living on the margins. You often write about those individuals that most writers shy away from. Here, I am thinking of those unforgettable characters we find in the The Secret History of Las Vegas. I am thinking of Abigail in Becoming Abigail. Yet you always come with compassion as you write about the complexity of what it means to be human. Can you tell us how compassion informs your writing?
Chris Abani: I tend to shrink away from words like compassion, words that have such heavy and complex connotations when it comes to thinking about myself or the work I make, or even the impetus for it. There are perhaps obvious reasons for this, such as the ways work can be misread through such a lens, or even how that can inhibit me in my process. By this I mean that there is the temptation to shift the focus on following the work to trying to justify the terms I’m bringing to it, does that make sense? I think the word I keep coming back to is integrity. And certainly not integrity in any moral sense because, well, does that even exist in any measurable form? I mean integrity as the total of all the integral parts of a thing, a cohesive and robust way. An accounting for all the variables and the positions taken in making work. All the ways that my various forms of privilege, my perceptions, judgments, belief systems, moral world view have to be interrogated, reshaped and sometimes completely discarded.
DM: In your memoir piece--The Face—you turn the narrative to you. Here you explore your own mixed heritage. The reader is allowed to see you via your openness to pull the mask back to reveal sharp glimpses of a body that is fragmented but also whole. You remind us that our scars do not halt us. It can be difficult to write about the self. How do you approach the page when you know your words will take you to places you may not want to go?
CA: As a fiction writer my job is to get to the heart of a story, which for me is always one of transformation. To find where the transformation lies I have to uncover the core place of my character’s wounding. Once I uncover that, I stage the narrative so that a relentless pressure is brought to bear on my character until they are driven to confront that part of themselves or deny it with a vehemence that is itself a kind of transformation. This creates a deep connection between the reader and the character so that the reader substitutes themselves for the character. All of which is to say that when it comes to my own life, a process that is real and true, why would I balk? How could I? I bring the same integrity to everything I do. There is nothing I won't face in myself. There is no difference between my deep living and anything I do in the world. Integrity.
DM: What do you see your role is as a writer in the world? In Nigeria? In the U.S.? In England?
CA: I think in this question you might be asking what our responsibilities to community and to a social contract are. In a strict sense the role of a writer is to write. Nothing more. Just like the role of the carpenter is to build with wood. I have no romantic notions about this craft, that I have any more insight or wisdom or intelligence than anyone who isn’t a writer, nor I am endowed with a special responsibility because of this craft. To be a craftsperson is a privilege, and your first obligation is to attend to the craft. Being human is the real responsibility. The question for me is more about what is my role as a human. While that is relatively easy to answer (especially because our collective ancestry has taught us this and we need not reinvent the wheel) it is not easy to accomplish. In the Igbo and Yoruba philosophical traditions, humans, as the ones with a developed consciousness, one that can build and run simulations in time and space, are obligated to bring about the good condition. In these cultural worldviews, the good condition is the end of suffering caused by our lack of compassion and connectedness. I'm simplifying, but that's the general idea. So my only role is to bring about the good condition in myself and by extension in my work.
DM: You write across genres. Do you enter each narrative with form in mind? Or do you let the story/images guide you?
CA: Story, when approached right, will not only yield genre to you, it will yield structure and then form. I have a theory, borne out a bit by
experience, that craft (and subsequently all decisions made in making work) is fifty percent personality. So for me, lazy as I am, there is a lot of percolating, and then when things are ripe, I try to get out of the way and let the needs of the story guide me in the making. As for starting, that varies. Sometimes I start with a title, a simple image or even a question and then I wait for it. The only difference is that the waiting is not passive, it’s an active waiting. Chipping away until there is a sense of something deeper revealing itself, and from that moment the work takes on a frenzied pace.
DM: Can you speak on the fluidity of working between genres? When does the narrative take you to prose? To poetry? How do you navigate between genres?
CA: I published my first novel at sixteen, which is to say I have been doing this a very long time. I am fortunate that I began to do this seriously before I had developed any sense of failure or success. It was about exploring, about curiosity. I’ve been doing it so long that much of what you're asking lies in experience and now, I suppose, an intuition. Writing, like gender, like sexuality, is a continuum. We are only what we decide we are, what makes us comfortable at any time. Being Igbo, I know that life is infinitely negotiable and that we all yearn in the end for one thing—happiness. Fluidity is happiness to me. Things are often just that. As to how, well, I keep an open mind and focus on process rather than outcome. I also spend hours on rewrites, I also study and practice all the requirements of that genre until it becomes second nature. And I never get precious about having my way but rather only give privilege to the work. And I read and read and read. Widely and voraciously. But perhaps the most important thing is that I do not believe in difference or specialness. The template of everything from atom to galaxy is very limited, that is why it works.
DM: Social justice plays a significant role in the way you navigate the writing landscape. Yet your words are never sentimental or directive.
You find ways to connect the reader to seek truth and compassion via your sincerity. Has social justice always been a major theme in your work?
CA: There are many themes to my work, but I think there is one simple drive underlying it all—how do we become fully human and what does that mean. This means that I have to approach everything, every form of sentience, as if it has an equal and important inner life. That is harder than it seems. It entails having to extend every form of sentience the same grace, equity and complexity you wish for yourself, without losing a grip on what is practical. So there is no judgment, only discernment. Social Justice is a necessary byproduct of all of these processes. This is why there is no sentimentality or directive in the work because I try very hard to ensure that what I write arises out of integrity and not from any wish, moral or limited judgment or even expectation I have or want to impose.
DM: Your poems, and here I am thinking of Kalakuta Republic, never shy away from truth/trauma/those experiences that haunt the body. How do you approach trauma in your work in terms of writing through it?
CA: I am very troubled with the way certain words get thrown around these days. I don't know, beyond the medical jargon of tissue trauma, if an individual can suffer trauma. Just the same way an individual cannot be assassinated nor can a singular person experience genocide. Trauma, assassination, genocide, these to me are collective words. The trauma of war, the assassination of a president (which is really the killing of a nation), and the genocide of a people. Of course people have the right to describe their experiences in whatever way and context they choose, but for me, certain words have too high a stake to do much in delivery. They often unconsciously create paradigms of argument and defensiveness and quite frankly sentimentality that derail my attempts to render humanity. The most tangible place of experience for life is often the body. I read and write from the body directly, avoiding, as best as I can, interpretational value systems. This means I cannot shirk because there is no distance, no value system to hide behind and therefore nothing to shirk. Just an underdressed (but still crafted) account of a happening. So I never approach trauma, even when writing generational work on larger social contexts. I simply do what I've always done—ask what is human here and what can it mean.
DM: What will you create next?
CA: Hopefully an improved man with less sense of identity and more direct an experience of life. Something pleasant for all who encounter me in any form.
A Conversation between Chris Abani and Donnelle McGee
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/Barbey Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond 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).
Donnelle McGee: Much of your writing creates space for the other. Meaning, there is room in your narratives for those living on the margins. You often write about those individuals that most writers shy away from. Here, I am thinking of those unforgettable characters we find in the The Secret History of Las Vegas. I am thinking of Abigail in Becoming Abigail. Yet you always come with compassion as you write about the complexity of what it means to be human. Can you tell us how compassion informs your writing?
Chris Abani: I tend to shrink away from words like compassion, words that have such heavy and complex connotations when it comes to thinking about myself or the work I make, or even the impetus for it. There are perhaps obvious reasons for this, such as the ways work can be misread through such a lens, or even how that can inhibit me in my process. By this I mean that there is the temptation to shift the focus on following the work to trying to justify the terms I’m bringing to it, does that make sense? I think the word I keep coming back to is integrity. And certainly not integrity in any moral sense because, well, does that even exist in any measurable form? I mean integrity as the total of all the integral parts of a thing, a cohesive and robust way. An accounting for all the variables and the positions taken in making work. All the ways that my various forms of privilege, my perceptions, judgments, belief systems, moral world view have to be interrogated, reshaped and sometimes completely discarded.
DM: In your memoir piece--The Face—you turn the narrative to you. Here you explore your own mixed heritage. The reader is allowed to see you via your openness to pull the mask back to reveal sharp glimpses of a body that is fragmented but also whole. You remind us that our scars do not halt us. It can be difficult to write about the self. How do you approach the page when you know your words will take you to places you may not want to go?
CA: As a fiction writer my job is to get to the heart of a story, which for me is always one of transformation. To find where the transformation lies I have to uncover the core place of my character’s wounding. Once I uncover that, I stage the narrative so that a relentless pressure is brought to bear on my character until they are driven to confront that part of themselves or deny it with a vehemence that is itself a kind of transformation. This creates a deep connection between the reader and the character so that the reader substitutes themselves for the character. All of which is to say that when it comes to my own life, a process that is real and true, why would I balk? How could I? I bring the same integrity to everything I do. There is nothing I won't face in myself. There is no difference between my deep living and anything I do in the world. Integrity.
DM: What do you see your role is as a writer in the world? In Nigeria? In the U.S.? In England?
CA: I think in this question you might be asking what our responsibilities to community and to a social contract are. In a strict sense the role of a writer is to write. Nothing more. Just like the role of the carpenter is to build with wood. I have no romantic notions about this craft, that I have any more insight or wisdom or intelligence than anyone who isn’t a writer, nor I am endowed with a special responsibility because of this craft. To be a craftsperson is a privilege, and your first obligation is to attend to the craft. Being human is the real responsibility. The question for me is more about what is my role as a human. While that is relatively easy to answer (especially because our collective ancestry has taught us this and we need not reinvent the wheel) it is not easy to accomplish. In the Igbo and Yoruba philosophical traditions, humans, as the ones with a developed consciousness, one that can build and run simulations in time and space, are obligated to bring about the good condition. In these cultural worldviews, the good condition is the end of suffering caused by our lack of compassion and connectedness. I'm simplifying, but that's the general idea. So my only role is to bring about the good condition in myself and by extension in my work.
DM: You write across genres. Do you enter each narrative with form in mind? Or do you let the story/images guide you?
CA: Story, when approached right, will not only yield genre to you, it will yield structure and then form. I have a theory, borne out a bit by
experience, that craft (and subsequently all decisions made in making work) is fifty percent personality. So for me, lazy as I am, there is a lot of percolating, and then when things are ripe, I try to get out of the way and let the needs of the story guide me in the making. As for starting, that varies. Sometimes I start with a title, a simple image or even a question and then I wait for it. The only difference is that the waiting is not passive, it’s an active waiting. Chipping away until there is a sense of something deeper revealing itself, and from that moment the work takes on a frenzied pace.
DM: Can you speak on the fluidity of working between genres? When does the narrative take you to prose? To poetry? How do you navigate between genres?
CA: I published my first novel at sixteen, which is to say I have been doing this a very long time. I am fortunate that I began to do this seriously before I had developed any sense of failure or success. It was about exploring, about curiosity. I’ve been doing it so long that much of what you're asking lies in experience and now, I suppose, an intuition. Writing, like gender, like sexuality, is a continuum. We are only what we decide we are, what makes us comfortable at any time. Being Igbo, I know that life is infinitely negotiable and that we all yearn in the end for one thing—happiness. Fluidity is happiness to me. Things are often just that. As to how, well, I keep an open mind and focus on process rather than outcome. I also spend hours on rewrites, I also study and practice all the requirements of that genre until it becomes second nature. And I never get precious about having my way but rather only give privilege to the work. And I read and read and read. Widely and voraciously. But perhaps the most important thing is that I do not believe in difference or specialness. The template of everything from atom to galaxy is very limited, that is why it works.
DM: Social justice plays a significant role in the way you navigate the writing landscape. Yet your words are never sentimental or directive.
You find ways to connect the reader to seek truth and compassion via your sincerity. Has social justice always been a major theme in your work?
CA: There are many themes to my work, but I think there is one simple drive underlying it all—how do we become fully human and what does that mean. This means that I have to approach everything, every form of sentience, as if it has an equal and important inner life. That is harder than it seems. It entails having to extend every form of sentience the same grace, equity and complexity you wish for yourself, without losing a grip on what is practical. So there is no judgment, only discernment. Social Justice is a necessary byproduct of all of these processes. This is why there is no sentimentality or directive in the work because I try very hard to ensure that what I write arises out of integrity and not from any wish, moral or limited judgment or even expectation I have or want to impose.
DM: Your poems, and here I am thinking of Kalakuta Republic, never shy away from truth/trauma/those experiences that haunt the body. How do you approach trauma in your work in terms of writing through it?
CA: I am very troubled with the way certain words get thrown around these days. I don't know, beyond the medical jargon of tissue trauma, if an individual can suffer trauma. Just the same way an individual cannot be assassinated nor can a singular person experience genocide. Trauma, assassination, genocide, these to me are collective words. The trauma of war, the assassination of a president (which is really the killing of a nation), and the genocide of a people. Of course people have the right to describe their experiences in whatever way and context they choose, but for me, certain words have too high a stake to do much in delivery. They often unconsciously create paradigms of argument and defensiveness and quite frankly sentimentality that derail my attempts to render humanity. The most tangible place of experience for life is often the body. I read and write from the body directly, avoiding, as best as I can, interpretational value systems. This means I cannot shirk because there is no distance, no value system to hide behind and therefore nothing to shirk. Just an underdressed (but still crafted) account of a happening. So I never approach trauma, even when writing generational work on larger social contexts. I simply do what I've always done—ask what is human here and what can it mean.
DM: What will you create next?
CA: Hopefully an improved man with less sense of identity and more direct an experience of life. Something pleasant for all who encounter me in any form.