![]() ![]() I came, as an older reader, to love language, and I often reread Derek Walcott and Jamaica Kincaid for that reason. ![]() ![]() They made me begin to write stories about people who looked like me and did things that I recognised, though a few of my characters continued to drink ginger beer! Achebe's Arrow of God was important to me because it transcended literature and became personal history – I read it as the story of a man who might have been my grandfather. Then I read Camara Laye and Chinua Achebe, who were a glorious shock of discovery for me. They stirred my imagination and opened up new worlds for me, but the unintended consequence was that I did not consciously, actively, know that people like me – little girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair did not form ponytails – could also exist in literature. This despite the fact that I had never been outside Nigeria I lived in a world where the people were mostly black and ate mangoes and didn't have snow and never talked about the weather because there was no need to. My characters ate apples and played in the snow and talked about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. ![]() Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. All my characters were white and drank ginger beer, because the British characters in the books I read drank a lot of ginger beer. ![]()
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