I never wanted to be a writer; I just had stories I needed to tell. - Sefi Atta

Lastly, as you know, we have a few critics in the Nigerian literary community who are caught up in the old Igbo-Yoruba rivalry, which doesn’t interest me, but their reviews reflect that. I’m used to having different responses to my work. I don’t expect everyone to appreciate what I write and I’m thankful to readers who do.

You know, I’ve also been called a Lagos writer and a feminist writer, but I just tell stories that interest me in ways that interest me. Growing up in Ikoyi, I had friends who used drugs. Friends who discovered their fathers had girlfriends, second wives and other children. Friends whose mothers were victims of physical and emotional abuse. Friends whose parents got divorced. I never thought any of those families were dysfunctional. To me, such things were just part of family life. But I always heard about them from third parties because appearance was everything in Ikoyi, most especially the appearance of respectability.

In this particular novel, the Fanon quotation identifies the process we’re going through and explains our failures so far. What I then do is show we are products of complex pre- and postcolonial systems that determine our orientations. The heart of the story, though, is Remi Lawal’s difficult relationship with Nigeria.