No Longer at Ease

"I read No Longer at Ease when I was going to school in Pakistan. It was the first novel by an African writer that I had ever read. In some sense it felt familiar. The main character leaves Nigeria, goes to study in Britain and is, as the title suggests, no longer at ease. It’s a novel that stayed with me, in part because it broadened my sense of who could write literature and what literature was supposed to be about. No Longer at Ease explores not just moving to a country but leaving a country and returning. The dynamic of somebody who moves in two directions—abroad and back again, was of real interest to me, as someone who had done that myself. I’ve bounced to and from Pakistan and America, and other places as well. The sense that we’re changed by migration—that home is no longer the same because we are no longer the same—was very powerful in that book and that’s part of why it sticks with me. So often the novels of migration that we read are the stories of migrants coming to one country and staying there. The Reluctant Fundamentalist isn’t that. It’s a story about not just immigration but emigration, return and the responsibility associated with return. In that sense, No Longer at Ease was a precursor—but not necessarily one that I had in mind as I was writing. What is interesting is that the book is ultimately about complicity. This character dreams about undermining colonialism but, in the end, after a career during which he resolutely refused to take any bribes whatsoever, he finds his life destroyed for taking a tiny bribe. This novel is about how we end up entangled in what we try to resist."