If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness has set in. They have stopped seeing each other. It is not easy to see another person.

How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.

There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.

Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye … I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.

I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.