![]() Here was a book with characters who had familiar names like Okonkwo and Ezinma. For me, it was a glorious shock of discovery. I had assumed that books, by their very nature, had to have English people in them. ![]() I didn’t know that people like me could exist in books. ![]() This despite the fact that we lived in a town in eastern Nigeria where it rained instead of snowed and where we ate mangoes and cashews instead of apples. All my characters were white and blue-eyed and played in the snow and ate apples and had dogs called Socks. ![]() I was also an early writer and wrote stories in exercise books and illustrated them with crayons. At first, I read mostly British children’s books, in which all the characters were white and ate apples and played in the snow and had dogs called Socks. My mother says I started to read at age two four is probably closer to the truth. My father was a professor, my mother was an administrator. I grew up in Nsukka, on the campus of the University of Nigeria. It appears in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, along with other excerpts from the event. ![]()
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