And it resonated with me. As the youngest of four boys, I often found it hard to come to terms with the expectations of masculinity around me: the performance of it, so to speak. Afikpo, when I was growing up, was caught in that moment between a centuries-old way of being and a more modern one. There were expectations of how one proved one's masculinity, but I wasn't interested in those. I had a fraught relationship with my father, and a sweet and gentle one with my mother.
And yet, not being gay myself, there is a level of confusion, of hurt, that I couldn't ever access. It always eluded me, made me feel like there was something more behind this story, something that was as tantalizing faint as the scent of Earl Grey Tea, but that would always remain closed to me.
And then again, perhaps not. Perhaps this is not the feeling of a straight man looking into the life of a gay man, unable to completely relate, but rather that of a self gazing deeply into another self and never ever being able to see it. Maybe it's the existential melancholy we all carry, that of knowing there is more to us, and wrestling with the frustration that it will always be out of reach, darting into our peripheral vision when we are lucky.
Whatever it is, I know that James Baldwin made me want to be a writer. More profoundly, he is largely responsible for the kind of writer that I have become. One, who like Jimmy, believes that all love is light and the only true aberration in the world is the absence of it — love, that is.
Chris Abani's new novel, The Secret History of Las Vegas, will be published by Penguin in January.
Read an excerpt of Giovanni's Room