I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.

I think I’m ridiculously fortunate. I consider myself a Nigerian – that’s home; my sensibility is Nigerian. But I like America, and I like that I can spend time in America.

You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They’ll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.

leading blogger” about race.

If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair...

I find that women… deal with immigration differently. And I’m interested in that.

He spoke so effortlessly, as if his mouth were a musical instrument that just let sound out when touched, when opened.

Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care.

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

He often paused before he spoke. She thought this exquisite; it was as though he had such regard for his listener that he wanted his words strung together in the best possible way.

Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write...

…I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary....

I own things I like, but nothing inanimate that I treasure in a deeply consuming way.

If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible...

It doesn’t have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There’s a lot you can do with natural hair

I am a person who believes in asking questions, in not conforming for the sake of conforming. I am deeply dissatisfied – about so many things, about injustice, about the way the world works –...

I like the U.S. and feel gratitude towards it.

There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers.

The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is...

I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to black women’s hair. Hair is hair – yet also about larger questions: self-acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many...

Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them,...

Men ras är inte biologi; ras är sociologi. Ras är inte genotyp; ras är fenotyp. Ras är betydelsefullt på grund av rasismen.

She seemed so happy, so at peace, and I wondered how anybody around me could feel that way when liquid fire was raging inside me, when fear was mingling with hope and clutching itself around...

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.

You know it was love at first sight for both of us,” he said.”For both of us? Is it by force? Why are you speaking for me?””I’m just stating a fact. Stop struggling.”…”Yes, it’s a...

It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never...

I sort of consider myself a Nigerian who spends a lot of time in the U.S.

At some point I was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and who likes to wear lip gloss and high heels for herself and not for men.

If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise

In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came...

The best thing about America is that it gives you space. I like that. I like that you buy into the dream, it’s a lie but you buy into it and that’s all that matters.

racist.” Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute.

She felt as if she had somehow failed him and herself by allowing his mother’s behavior to upset her. She should be above it; she should shrug it off as the ranting of a village...

I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as ‘first and foremost...

Excuses don’t win a game. You should try strategy.

I look young. I heard this said so often that it became irritating. I once worked as a babysitter for a woman who, the first time we met, said she didn’t want somebody in high...

I think it’s possible to have been a happy child, as I was, and still question and push back with regard to societal conventions.

Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe...

But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is...

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are ‘unbelievable’ are those that are most closely based on the...

Ifem, how is the weather in America?

Sometimes life begins when the marriage ends

I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.

I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn’t matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt;...

The truth has become an insult.

What I find problematic is the suggestion that when, say, Madonna adopts an African child, she is saving Africa. It’s not that simple. You have to do more than go there and adopt a child...

‘No Sweetness Here’ is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.

Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.

Your life belongs to you and you alone.