I'm not a propaganda machine. I tell things how I see them. When I say, for example, that corruption is not the only thing the West should think about when they think about Nigeria, I'm not saying it doesn't exist but that people have the complete wrong focus. There's music, there's art, there's culture.
More Quotes by Uzodinma Iweala
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.
'Beasts of No Nation' began when I read an article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone during my final year of high school.
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.
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.
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.
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.