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" In my senior year of high school, I read an article in 'Newsweek' about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. I felt a sense of shock - this was happening in the region where I'm from, and people don't know about it. I wanted to understand. "

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" War in Africa is hardly a new phenomenon, nor are voices telling its stories of terror and triumph. Yet some of the continent's most devastating conflicts - and the literature born from the experiences of their survivors - have often gone unnoticed in the West. "

Uzodinma Iweala

War

Born

Triumph

" Kidnapping causes a long-term rupture in the psyche of those kidnapped and of those who wait for their return. It doesn't end. "

" Whether as living humans or as mythological figures, ancestors have always played an important role in the African popular and literary imagination. Sometimes, as in Amos Tutuola's famous short novels, they directly influence events. More often, as in the works of Chinua Achebe, both living and dead ancestors are sages offering valuable advice. "

" Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned? "

" There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority. "

" I think South Africa would be in a lot worse position had you not had visionaries like the Mandelas or the Oliver Tambos or the people there who came together after... both during apartheid and afterwards to create and structure their society. "

" European authors often write books about the rest of the world that profess a vision of shared humanity but fall far short, casting the other as exotic or dangerous. "

" Lagos is a fascinatingly infuriating place that its residents love - and love to hate. Licence plates on cars here proudly display the state motto, 'Centre of Excellence,' in what often seems a sarcastic swipe at the place we live in. "

" Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head - because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself. "

" I don't know if I want to be a writer. "

" When somebody says that six million people died in the Holocaust, there is nobody in the world who can understand that. It's only through story, reading books by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, that you really begin to understand the trauma and how horrible it actually was. "

" When you relate to a disease, you're afraid. When you relate to a person, there is compassion. You see someone that is like you, that could be like you. You can see yourself in that same situation. "

" Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence. "

" I suppose I'm pulled towards fiction because I really like the freedom it gives me. "

Uzodinma Iweala

Because

Fiction

" The kidnapped person is so tantalizingly close, kept alive by a devastating hope. Kidnapping or hostage-taking is perhaps the most disturbing form of terror because it turns this hope into a liability that can paralyze. "

" I don't think there is enough understanding of how diverse black America actually is. "

" Many great novels have shown a world torn to shreds by the brutality of war. To do so, their authors ground their texts in the details of destruction and decay. "

" I think the fact that we don't really... that the world really doesn't acknowledge how bad and how detrimental colonialism was; that people don't really try to explore it, you know, in popular media and news articles; that... that it's just kind of glossed over as this thing. "

" America is decidedly not 'post-racial.' "

Uzodinma Iweala

America

Decidedly

" Medicine has an immediate impact, the ability to do good. Writing is such a solitary activity. "

" Sometimes writing it is a good way to understand something. "

" Nigeria shed the last of a succession of brutal military dictatorships in 1997 and adopted a democratic form of government only in 1999. Our elections of 2003, 2007, and 2011 were complicated and fraught with tension, but each one has shown remarkable progress. "

" When the HIV/AIDS epidemic first appeared, a lot of the reaction was that it's not happening here. It doesn't exist. It's not on the continent of Africa. Then we moved into this other phase, in which it was kind of like, it's everywhere. "

" Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth. "