CHRIS ABANI QUOTES III

Nigerian author (1966- )

There was a positive side to not trying at something: you could always pretend that your life would have been different if you had.

CHRIS ABANI

Graceland


We go over the same territory, like a mower
religiously eating grass that will grow again.

CHRIS ABANI

Sanctificum


Before you speak, my friend, remember, a spiritual man contain his anger. Angry words are like slap in de face.

CHRIS ABANI

Graceland

Tags: anger


I spend my life hustling for small money, staying one step ahead of de police. But I will not do dat all my life. You see, I done read Napoleon Hill and as a thinking man, and with de grace of God, I go be millionaire before I reach thirty.

CHRIS ABANI

Graceland

Tags: wealth


The wind is calling in a voice I remember.

CHRIS ABANI

Song for Night


And night, free at last, stirred, stretching, feral.

CHRIS ABANI

Sanctificum

Tags: night


There are things you can only say
with a canyon. Or smoke
moving across a vally toward the mist.

CHRIS ABANI

Sanctificum


Deach becomes some men. Others wear it shamefully; others still, defiantly. Their protest choking, suffocating.

CHRIS ABANI

Kalakuta Republic

Tags: death


For is prayer not disobedience?
The questioning of God's order?

CHRIS ABANI

Sanctificum

Tags: prayer


Death is always the expectation here and when my throat was cut it was no different.

CHRIS ABANI

Song for Night

Tags: death


Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is. We seldom play games--we aren't that sophisticated.

CHRIS ABANI

"What Men Aren't Telling Us", O Magazine, Jul. 2008

Tags: men


Death is a flock of blackbirds low over muddy streets
in war-torn Sarajevo. Dirt-stained walls yearn
for all that is night. Elegies fall like raw silk.
If there is a way it is here.
Salt and ash.

CHRIS ABANI

Sanctificum

Tags: death


Sometimes we say we want an end to hate or racism or sexism. But we all participate in keeping these structures alive. If everyone decided to relinquish the past what would happen to people who feel that there hasn't been proper atonement made to them? And what happens to the person who feels that the constant atonement is their identity?

CHRIS ABANI

interview, UTNE Reader, Jun. 2010


To some I am a rabid vampire feeding
on their humiliation.

CHRIS ABANI

"An English Gentleman", Kalakuta Republic

Tags: vampires


My brothers must be as tired of this as I,
dragging love as a tally board behind us,
marking off an endless but complex math
of ego and one-upmanship and debt.
But the men who came before us didn't
teach us another way.

CHRIS ABANI

Sanctificum


Sex is not always a choice
lovingly made and enjoyed like
plump well-handled self-chosen fruit
teeth sinking into soft flesh in a dribble of pleasure.

Nevertheless
it abounds.
Some because it is the
truth of their being.
Some to deny, negate, sate
deep yearning, wordless, timeless.

CHRIS ABANI

"Passion Fruit", Kalakuta Republic

Tags: sex


We are hunting the demons that haunt others. We get a smell and off we go. And you know why, Sunil? You know why we are so good at hunting the demons of others? Because we are so good, gifted even, at stalking and evading our own. But all demons hunters think that they are really heroes, and you know what all heroes need?

CHRIS ABANI

The Secret History of Las Vegas

Tags: heroes


Much of the image of the amazingness of America comes from the movies into other cultures. And it's much the same thing when you reverse it. Much of Africa is presented through poverty, through drought and war. [But] you're not presenting people, you're not presenting countries, you're not presenting complexity, and so people can't care about an amorphous mass called Africa.

CHRIS ABANI

"In Conversation with author Chris Abani", Truthdig, Apr. 18, 2006


The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about.

CHRIS ABANI

attributed, Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction

Tags: writing


But the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people.

CHRIS ABANI

The Face: Cartography of the Void