On this quote from the book, highlighting how exciting life is in Nigeria: "I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes."
After writing that, I went on and wrote Open City, a book in which nothing happens. I took a very long walk in an American city and the narrator got up to not very much. And I think that quote, actually, is a pretty good example of sort of not taking what's in the book as the author's own view.
... The next line goes on to talk about if John Updike had had material that was more than Shillington, Pennsylvania, he probably would have won the Nobel Prize by now. And that's a dig at a man who at that time was still living, and is sadly gone away now, but it was maybe a little bit of a rhetorical move, and the reality is that there are important stories to be told from any corner of the world.
Having said all of that, Nigeria I find excessively exciting. It's actually overwhelming.
On the narrator's internal debate over why he doesn't live in Lagos, which he finds so invigorating.
I think that particular part was a little bit of an exploration of what a returnee's crisis might be. You know, it's a little bit of a trope ... you go to a place that you know well, and you just say "Well, why can I not return, why can't I live here?" ... There's a sort of vague sense of responsibility toward the place that formed you and all that. So I wanted to sort of dramatize that line of thought.
But for me, personally, I have not actually, really considered seriously living in Nigeria full time. This is my home here [New York and the United States] and this is the place that allows me to do the work that I do. ... I'm fortunate to be able to travel to many places, and to go to Nigeria often. And so I feel close enough to the things happening there without needing to live there.
Maybe I'm less angry and cranky about it because I don't have to live there, and I don't want to put myself in a situation where I then hate a place because I force myself to be there.
“ The first move towards true equality is to have the person you're addressing understand that you're just as complex as they are, and that your stories are just as important as theirs are.