Nigerian author (1966- )
We go over the same territory, like a mower
religiously eating grass that will grow again.
CHRIS ABANI
Sanctificum
My finger travels the longest carved line on the face, the thickest welt, up that face. From the base of the jaw all the way up the cheek, stopping just short of the abalone shell eye. These lines cut into the wood are meant to mimic the ancient facial tattoos that marked these ancestors as men, as warriors, as worthy of carrying their lineage back into the place of death and yet forward into the place of tomorrow.
CHRIS ABANI
The Face: Cartography of the Void
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
The wind is calling in a voice I remember.
CHRIS ABANI
Song for Night
Before you speak, my friend, remember, a spiritual man contain his anger. Angry words are like slap in de face.
CHRIS ABANI
Graceland
There are things you can only say
with a canyon. Or smoke
moving across a vally toward the mist.
CHRIS ABANI
Sanctificum
For is prayer not disobedience?
The questioning of God's order?
CHRIS ABANI
Sanctificum
Deach becomes some men. Others wear it shamefully; others still, defiantly. Their protest choking, suffocating.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
And night, free at last, stirred, stretching, feral.
CHRIS ABANI
Sanctificum
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
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
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
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
Death is always the expectation here and when my throat was cut it was no different.
CHRIS ABANI
Song for Night
To some I am a rabid vampire feeding
on their humiliation.
CHRIS ABANI
"An English Gentleman", Kalakuta Republic
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
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
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
Circuses are about entertainment and juggling and animals and all that shit. Sideshows are about freaks, about people and the limits of acceptability. We push those limits. If a circus is an escape ... a sideshow is a confrontation.
CHRIS ABANI
The Secret History of Las Vegas
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