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CHRIS ABANI  In the five short months I've had the pleasure of knowing writer Chris Abani, encountering him first through his novel, Graceland, I've heard him read at three schools in the Bay area, though he lives six hours south in Los Angeles where he teaches at UC Riverside. Each time people crowded into the room and shared the narrow seats of metal folding chairs, all to hear Chris Abani read his work. At the most recent of these readings, in the poetry room at the University of San Francisco, he read from The Virgin of Flames, a novel that takes place in Los Angeles, a long plane ride from the Nigeria of Graceland and his earlier works. Abani follows his own path, unwilling to hover over only one subject, genre, or country. At the beginning of Graceland, a quote from African writer, Bessie Head, reads, "It seemed almost incidental that he was African, so vast had his inner perceptions grown over the years..." The same can no doubt be said about Abani, as evidenced by his newest novels, Becoming Abigail, which is about a trouble young girl in London, and The Virgin of Flames, which centers around a transsexual who haunts the streets of Los Angeles. Recently, Chris took time from his hectic schedule to email back and forth with me about the path he's forging these days.
Juliet C. Kinkade
March 2007 Moraga, California MARY Magazine: You write both poetry and prose and have even written a play. Regarding your first collection of poetry, Kalakuta Republic, you said that that specific subject matter—your time spent in a maximum security prison in Nigeria—could only be addressed through poetry. How do you decide which stories, what experiences, should be told through poetry and which through prose? What is the difference in the two media that spurs this differentiation? Chris Abani: I don't know. Experience might be part of it. That when you do something like this as long as I have, you acquire a good sense of what will work best with what form. It also requires a certain surrender, the surrender of self, of the ego of the writer, to put that in service of the story or the narrative or the subject and let it determine what form allows it the most resonance. Of course, one often moves back and forth within one form and between forms to fully discover this. So in a way, it is a joy, this discovery. |
| "I can tell you this: Every writer whose work you've ever loved has wrestled with questions, not books." |
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MM: Many writers—those of us who are just starting out, as well as those who have been writing for a very long time—feel the weighty responsibility to accurately represent the people, cultures, and stories in their work. Yet you have said there is no such thing as authenticity, there is only good art and bad art. Can you explain what you mean?
CA: It is important to remember that art—a novel, a painting, whatever—is a direct manipulation of narrative to create a certain effect for the reader/viewer. It is artifice, a lie essentially (which is not necessarily not untrue, just not fact). So how can it be authentic? Art that is representational is not art. It is simply a mirror of the artist's own narcissism. I mean, really, think about it: How dare any of us presume to speak for anyone else with any authority beyond that which the narrative gives us? And since the narrative, the work we make, is always specific and particular, that authority must be specific and particular so therefore it cannot be representative, right? It must be itself. Likewise, the idea of authenticity is an attempt at a hierarchy of authority that is based on little beyond socially acceptable mythologies. Authenticity is merely the resonance that a work of art achieves when an artist applies their integrity to a subject they have surrendered to; a controlled surrender, mind you. So take a novel like mine, The Virgin of Flames, which is set in LA and has caused critics to question the veracity of my manipulation of this city because I am from Nigeria originally, while saying Graceland is more authentic because it is set in Lagos, Nigeria. Well, the truth is that I have spent more time in LA than in Lagos, so which would be more authentic? Authenticity has become a way to not read the work, but the body of the artist. Hence, there is no such thing. MM: The book you wrote at the young age of sixteen, Masters of the Board, as well as the more recent Graceland and poetry collections, take place within Nigeria, your birthplace. And yet your two most recent works, Becoming Abigail and The Virgin of Flames, take place in London and Los Angeles, respectively. The characters and stories are very unlike your previous characters and also do not share your background. Has the typical reader of your work found these differences difficult to accept? CA: I don't think any artist has a regular audience. Audiences are built up over time with several works of art that appeal to each one differently. I think audiences and the "public" are far more forgiving and fluid than critics are. Critics hate artists to change subject, style, whatever, because criticism mostly relies on some idea of stasis, not necessarily of the work, but of the artist, because the critic most often is reviewing the artist, not the art. How can you have an opinion about the artist when they keep changing on you? I am a critic, too, and am often as guilty of this as the next critic. Smile. MM: It seems that, by refusing to be pigeonholed in one voice or style of writing, or even in one theme or genre, you are paving the way for new generations of writers in the future to find more fluid ways of writing and expressing their artistic questions. Do you feel a responsibility as a writer writing across so many different borders? CA: It is a scary thought to think that other people look to me for direction because I am myself looking for a path. I follow my own path and I hope every writer does that. It makes the field and the resulting work so much more interesting. I feel no responsibility to anything but the work itself and what my critical-creative sensibility tells me to do. With the rest I am as lost as anyone else. I think this is what being a mature writer is about, knowing that this work, whatever it is, happens despite our ineptness. Smile. MM: You once said if you have a story you tell, you have one book, but if you have a question to ask, you have a lifetime of work. You also said, regarding writing, that if there's no real question, there's no real risk. Can you tell us a little about having a good question and the risk involved with having a question to ask? CA: I can tell you this: Every writer whose work you have ever loved has wrestled with questions, not books. Toni Morrison has wrestled with the question of love—as power, as self-loathing, as redemption, as history, as community, and so forth, and in every novel it takes on a different mutability. Cristina Garcia wrestles with the questions of how much our life is a result of faith, of fate, of luck, of our own making, and how do our own lives intersect with those of others and affect theirs. So that I guess in making a way for our own redemption, we make it possible for others. My work has similar questions. What is the shape of our humanity and how is it achieved, what is redemption and is it possible and when, and what is it to be truly fluid, to be free? So these are examples of questions. You can spend a lifetime writing books to explore the different permutations of these. The risk that is necessary then becomes how far will you push your question in the service of discovery. Will you be safe and write predictable books that reconfirm what we all like to think, or will you come to the edge of discovery with everything you write? I don't know yet if I can do it—make strong art—so I hope this answer helps in some way. MM: Do you see writing as a way to stop history from erasing personal experience? Not just your own, but all previous generations, all the personal experiences you write about? CA: All writing is a form of erasure and also a form of history. This is the paradox of what we do. Every rock painting in a cave not only lets us glimpse the cultures thousands of years ago that made them, they erase them too, so that all we see is what is inscribed, when that is a pale imitation of all that is possible and veritable about a people and their experience. I think there is some truth to the assertion that I am attempting to elevate the personal (and not mine so much as the idea of the personal as mundane and ordinary) to the importance of epic. But I think when I succeed most, it is a careful balance between what is revealed and what is erased, like the idea of striptease that Roland Barthes speaks of. MM: You said in an interview with Michael Datcher, "People have always tried to create narratives." What do you think is behind the human need for narratives, and how does prose fill that need? CA: If I could answer that, I would answer the mystery of why we are here and whether God exists and if aliens really build technology to fly through time and space to come here and mutilate bovine. Smile. But I think that the fundamental thing that holds us all together is that we are trying to figure those questions out. Who are we? Why are we here and for what? That's why we make art. I think. Smile. Laugh. |