“When 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.”
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.
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.
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“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.”
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.”
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