The Famished Road

"It was the beginning of African literature getting a space in Western literary culture and it was very impactful on me because it told stories that I hadn’t come across before. It’s the story of a spirit child, and Africa has a strong spiritual tradition. In fact, our whole culture is based on a lot of spiritual practice. It’s not necessarily Christianity, but it’s a part of our life, of our connection to our ancestral roots. It goes with the stories that we tell. The folk tales we grow up listening to, and stories about our own relatives and family, defy our understanding of reality. The things that happened, the things we do, why we follow certain traditions: a lot is based in our spiritual beliefs. “I actually realized, in retrospect, that I chose three books about war” When this book came out I was, like, ‘Wow! I get this, this speaks to me, it makes a lot of sense.’ As a child, growing up, people always said to me, ‘You have the wildest imagination.’ But to me, a lot of my imagination didn’t feel like imagination. It felt like what was going on in my head, it was part of my reality. It’s not necessarily not real, just because other people don’t have the same experiences as I do. And I was a very lucid dreamer. I had this life that was so…I can’t even explain it. I just lived in my head and my imagination, and it spilled over into my real life and into my dream life. So, when I read The Famished Road , it felt like a reality I understand, about the spirit child moving in and out of the world. I don’t think you need to at all. It’s a story. You just have to be open to believing the story, or not even believing it, just being able to appreciate it, to find something in it that appeals to you—even if it’s just the language or the cadence of the words. Whatever it is, so long as you find something in that story that works for you, you don’t have to know everything. I don’t know everything about every novel that I read. Some novels will obviously hit differently than others, based on your own personal experiences and your mindset. No, they’re not. It’s just the simple principle that we are connected to the spirit and it’s an active connection. It’s not somewhere that’s only in the afterlife, it’s here in the present as well. That, I think, is endemic across all African cultures and traditions."