Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.
I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria - it always will be. I consider myself a Nigerian who is comfortable in the world. I look at it through Nigerian eyes.
There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
When I go back home now, when I go back to Nigeria now, I get off the plane in Lagos and I just don't think of race. I get on the plane and arrive in Atlanta, and immediately I'm aware of race.
I think I'm ridiculously fortunate. I consider myself a Nigerian - that's home; my sensibility is Nigerian. But I like America, and I like that I can spend time in America.
You know, I don't think of myself as anything like a 'global citizen' or anything of the sort. I am just a Nigerian who's comfortable in other places.
I sort of consider myself a Nigerian who spends a lot of time in the U.S.
To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.
From the very beginning, I think it's been quite clear that there's no way I could possibly say that trans women are not women. It's the sort of thing to me that's obvious, so I start from that obvious premise.
What I find problematic is the suggestion that when, say, Madonna adopts an African child, she is saving Africa. It's not that simple. You have to do more than go there and adopt a child or show us pictures of children with flies in their eyes. That simplifies Africa.
Evil is tolerable if purged of coarseness.
'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.
Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in 'real' African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.
In America, I feel black with all of the rubbish that comes with it.
I think white women need to wake up and say, 'Not all women are white,' three times in front of the mirror.
