{"id":58351,"date":"2019-06-19T00:18:36","date_gmt":"2019-06-19T00:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58351"},"modified":"2019-06-19T00:18:36","modified_gmt":"2019-06-19T00:18:36","slug":"chris-abani-face-value-in-brooklyn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58351","title":{"rendered":"Chris Abani: Face Value in Brooklyn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Abani: Face Value in Brooklyn<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Restless Books<\/a>
\nBrooklyn, New York
\n2014-05-19<\/p>\n

\"attachment-537a688ae4b0e957bf2ed29e\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We were thrilled to welcome our friend and contributor Chris Abani<\/a> to New York this weekend to participate in <\/em>Lit Crawl NYC<\/a>. Chris came to discuss his forthcoming contribution to our series, <\/em>The Face<\/a>, and to read from his work-in-progress…<\/em><\/p>\n

…When I tell people that my mother was a white English woman and my father Igbo<\/a>, they look at me skeptically. It\u2019s a pause that really means; are you sure? You\u2019re so dark. It\u2019s a pause that I\u2019ve heard only in the West<\/a>. In Nigeria<\/a> most people know on meeting me that I\u2019m not entirely African. Nigeria has a long history of foreigners coming through\u2014the Portuguese in the 14th century, North Africans as far back as the 12th century, Tuaregs<\/a> and Fulani<\/a> to name just a few. In fact in the late 80\u2019s and early 90\u2019s the civil war in Chad<\/a> caused the very light skinned Chadians to pour into Nigeria as refugees. It was a disturbing sight to see hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of homeless Arab looking people begging for food in the streets and markets. The public outcry was so severe that the military government began a program of forced repatriation. Army trucks rolled into markets and soldiers would round up these refugees an, with no thought of separating families, after all they all looked alike, and drive them back to the border. I once found myself being pushed into one such truck but my fluency in several Nigerian languages saved me. I was often confused for being Lebanese, Indian, Arab, or Fulani. But not in England<\/a> or America<\/a>. In these places I am firmly black, of unknown origin…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I tell people that my mother was a white English woman and my father Igbo, they look at me skeptically. It\u2019s a pause that really means; are you sure? You\u2019re so dark. It\u2019s a pause that I\u2019ve heard only in the West. In Nigeria most people know on meeting me that I\u2019m not entirely African.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,12,395,8,10,20],"tags":[24072,1691,24071],"class_list":["post-58351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-uk","category-usa","tag-chris-abani","tag-nigeria","tag-restless-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58351"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58353,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58351\/revisions\/58353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}