Novelist, Chinelo Okparanta’s debut novel was gentle. Her next one will be unflinching: ‘Where Under the Udala Trees was gentle in its hopefulness for a changing world, Harry Sylvester Bird is a much fiercer critique—of race relations, of white-on-black power dynamics, of outright racism and lingering colonialist mentalities, of race-related microaggressions, of the historically biased white Western gaze in literature, of white Western exoticization of Africa, etc.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
I read several of the books in my parents’ library growing up—nutritional, pharmaceutical and chemistry books (my mother studied nutrition and dietetics and also studied and practiced nursing for some time); Jehovah’s Witness literature (my father is still a staunch Jehovah’s Witness); the Encyclopaedia Britannica (my father had a large collection of the encyclopaedia Britannica).
I also perused suspense novels, romance novels, and thrillers by James Patterson, Stephen King, LaVyrle Spencer, Danielle Steele, which were also present in my parents’ library. And then, of course, my mother took us to the Boston Public library very often after we arrived in the US in 1991, so I read books like the Sweet Valley High and Babysitter Club books.
For school, I read books such as Lord of the Flies, Island of the Blue Dolphins and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry those first couple of years after arriving in the US. I also read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the following years, Mariama Ba’s Une Si Longue Lettre, Camara Laye’s L’Enfant Noir, and many others, including Antoine de St. Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince and Voltaire’s Candide.
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