When I started writing, it was a way to understand my own adolescence, and what came out was a revelation about my own teenage years...

Writing was my way to make sense of the world outside and inside my home. Despite the recollections of the adults in my life, I don't think I was a terribly articulate child. Writing was a way to give wings to the inchoate emotions and feelings inside of me.

Writing provided me as a teenager, first with a tool to navigate my way through a constantly humming nighttime swamp of inner traumas, and second with a means to comprehend and address the material world of race, poverty, and social backwardness that characterized my hometown at that time. Words, like music, gave themselves to me as companions and have always endowed my existence with a strength and resilience that otherwise I would not have.

Poetry is what has saved me through the years. I started writing when I was about nine. I discovered that I could go into a space where there is language-language that is mine, which is completely private and where I can do anything with it. I can curse at someone I cannot curse otherwise. I can create a space of beauty when all around me is poverty and deprivation. I can experience an uplifting of the spirit when all around me things are trying to pull me down. That act of writing the poem is the act that has centered me all my life.

I have often been asked how I came to write. The best answer is that I needed the money. When I started I was 35 and had failed in every enterprise I had ever attempted.

I started writing when I was very young. I didnʼt know at the time that I was to become a writer. I know that I read all the time. The house was full of books, and I remember rummaging through the cupboards and drawers looking for books to read. There were always books to read. I grew up in a village, a small town in the central region called “Abiadze”. My father was the chief of the village then called “Kyiakor”. He actually opened the village school with our class and some excellent teachers. My mother and another man from the village used to tell us stories every night. I think all of this prepared me to be a good writer.

I became a writer when I began to take it seriously.

I think people have to kind of hear the fact that I started writing when I was nine years old. I want people to know my story and all the things that I do. I realize that sometimes, it is important to tell your own story, in your own words. So, that you can also have young people realize that you don’t give up. You just have to keep dreaming and realizing those dreams.

"I started writing poetry when I was a child, my first published poem was when I was 11. I was brought up in a home that loved poetry and literature, especially the English language. But it was only when I was older that I realised that writing is so much more than words playing on a page.

I started writing naturally, not really knowing why. After more than twenty years since the publication of my first book of short stories, I believe that writing has become a necessity for me. As a human being, a black woman, writing helps me to make sense of the world. The more I write, the more I read, the more I see the world and its challenges—the deep inequalities, the constant struggles of the majority of the world’s population to live decently—the more I see writing as an urgency.

Writing [came] out of the situation that I was in, which was poverty, homesickness, being unskilled, uneducated. So out of that misery you begin to write things down. It wasn’t like: I’m writing a novel. But this kept growing, this stuff. Then it started to become ‘writing’ because you have to think and construct and shape and so on.

I had always wanted to be a writer as a child but couldn’t spell out this dream to myself because during the Cultural Revolution all writers were condemned. To be a writer was the most dangerous profession. I wrote my first poem aged 16 and destroyed it.

(Songwriting) It's a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience.

I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.