I'm not a 'strong warrior queen' like people think. I spend most of my day cooking and doing things with my sons.

I loved 1930's women's pictures'films by Josef Von Sternberg or William Wyler. So, I fashioned a style out of that. The integrity and ethos of what I would write, however, came from the films of Ousmane Sembene and from reading Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker.

In 1998, I was trained by the SPLA [Sudanese People's Liberation Army ] in London how to pretend to be a geologist.

As for feminism, I am a womanist more than I'm a feminist.

Even though I couldn't speak English, there were many times that my black-American parents could read my mind and I could read theirs.

I don't see a huge difference between the African condition and the black American condition. The only real difference is that black Americans live in the richest country on Earth surrounded by a majority white population and are almost entirely disconnected from their original culture and their God-given identity.

I believe that Christianity trains black people, especially black women, to think like slaves, and I believe that Islam is mainly fueled by its hatred for women.