African tradition of storytelling which gives me a great freedom of interpretation of our myths and legends, greatly inspires me. - Véronique Tadjo

The challenge is that sometimes if you are a writer you might get completely enmeshed. People want you to take sides. When there is a problem they always want you to take sides. I don’t really like it.

Somewhere, a young man wallows in his suffering - his wound so deep he cannot draw a distinction between love and destruction. When he fights, he wounds his adversary like a fighter in search of victory.

But sometimes I say to myself, ‘There, Afri-cans are fighting, dying and I am doing not h-ing, My life is sheltered in the heart of this cityof stone. I just don’t know, I just don’t know.