I learned English by watching soaps as a kid, and since I don't have any formal education and can't teach at the universities like other literary writers do.

What makes me angry'is that it wasn't me who revealed that I had been with Osama Bin Laden. I originally denied being involved with Osama when the London Guardian threatened to 'out' me.

I have never received full credit from the SPLA [Sudanese People's Liberation Army], because the men are very sexist and feel that I'm acting out of place, bringing too much attention to myself - but for the funeral of our leader John Garang, they had me write the poem "Chol Apieth" to eulogize him, and that was their way of acknowledging my contributions.

Because I was in psychiatric treatment for most of my childhood and had to learn English and had to adjust to a white-dominated society, I truly know what being Sudanese refugees [adopting by white family] mean. It's not something that you can explain in the confines of an interview, but there is an immediate comfort, a connection between black phenotypes that is natural.

People don't want truth, they just want trash.

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

I'm an African woman, I suppose these thoughts torture me more than they do black American people, because it's like watching my own children trapped in a car that's sinking to the bottom of a lake and being impotent to save them'the black Americans have their own holocaust going on. You see the black man erasing black children from the landscape, you see black women desperately trying to get the black man's attention by wearing blonde hair and fake blue eyes, 500 years after he sold her and their children across the ocean.