The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, 巴勒斯坦诗人Mourid Barghouti曾经写到：如果你想剥夺一群人的权利， the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "seco
Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: 当然了，非洲大陆充满了灾难： There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, 有的灾难，比如刚果猖獗的强奸，是无比巨大的； such as the fact that 5,00
Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, 后来的一个星期六，我们去Fide的村庄拜访， and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. 她的母亲向我们展示了一个精美别致的草篮--是
Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, 我每次回家的时候，都会面临那些令众多尼日利亚人头疼的事情：失败的基础设施，失败的政府。 but also by
I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, 我还记得当我到达瓜达拉哈拉的第一天， watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. 看着人们前往工作，在市集上吃着墨西哥卷、抽着烟、大笑着。
Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Lok. 我每次读到这一段的时候，都不禁大笑起来。John Locke的想象力真的是让人敬佩。 But what is important about his writing is that it represents t
What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. 这一切所表明的，正是在一个个的故事面前我们是何等的脆弱，何等的易受影响，尤其当我们还是孩子的时候。 Because all I had read
When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, 当我多年前听说作家们必须有极其不幸的童年才能取得成功的时候， I began to think about how I could invent horrible thi
Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, 在他发布了我的第一部小说的不久后，我前往拉各斯的一家电视台接受访问， and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I
I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as African. 我不得不强调，在我前往美国之前，我从来没有有意识地把自己当作个非洲人。 But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. 但在美国的时候，每当人们提到“非
