Compilation of 25 powerful Uzodinma Iweala quotes.
Uzodinma Iweala, born November 5, is a Nigerian-American novelist and physician. Beasts of No Nation is the culmination of his thesis work in creative writing at Harvard. It shows a child soldier in an unspecified African country. Time Magazine, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Times, and Rolling Stone all highlighted the novel, which was released in 2005 and made into an award-winning film in 2015.
He published the non-fiction book Our Kind of People, on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Nigeria, in 2012. Later, in 2018, he wrote Speak No Evil, a novel about the life of a gay Nigerian-American boy named Niru.
Uzodinma Iweala is the current CEO of Harlem’s The Africa Center.
Uzodinma Iweala Quotes
- “I am fearing because I am seeing that the only way not to be fighting is to die. I am not wanting to die.”
2. “I’m still me, I want to say to him, your son, but that would hardly help if I am currently everything wrong with the world.”
3. “Kidnapping causes a long-term rupture in the psyche of those kidnapped and of those who wait for their return. It doesn’t end.”
4. “Are you lost if you know where you’re going – just not how to get there?”
5. “Beasts of No Nation’ began when I read an article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone during my final year of high school.”
6. “I would say, number one, don’t worry about getting published. Just write. Number two, just write. Three is make sure you read.”
7. “As an adult, I discovered Claritin, and my whole world changed.”
8. “I think the more complex your idea of who someone is or who a particular group is, the less able you are to separate ‘we’ and ‘outside’ or ‘us and them.’ I think that that’s something that we really, really need to pay attention to.”
9. “I am waiting outside in the darkness making myself ready for when I go in. So I am thinking as many good thing I can think because if you are thinking good thing, nothing bad is happening to you.”
10. “Anybody who tells you they’re not scared when starting a new book project is a very good liar.”
11. “Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.”
12. “There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one’s cultural superiority.”
13. “People just think Africa is this one thing. So if you’re from Nigeria, then you’re the same as somebody from Kenya; not realizing that within Nigeria, right, we have 250 different ethnic groups, right? Two hundred and fifty different languages.”
14. “I feel like it’s not Africans who are afraid of China’s rise in Africa. It’s the West that’s afraid of China’s rise in Africa.”
15. “When the HIV/AIDS epidemic first appeared, a lot of the reaction was that it’s not happening here. It doesn’t exist. It’s not on the continent of Africa. Then we moved into this other phase, in which it was kind of like, it’s everywhere.”
16. “Many great novels have shown a world torn to shreds by the brutality of war. To do so, their authors ground their texts in the details of destruction and decay.”
17. “I’m not a propaganda machine. I tell things how I see them. When I say, for example, that corruption is not the only thing the West should think about when they think about Nigeria, I’m not saying it doesn’t exist but that people have the complete wrong focus. There’s music, there’s art, there’s culture.”
18. “My father and I look up and then at each other. I can feel my heart separate from the rest of my body. I want to hand it to frothing old man in front of me and say, take it. It’s yours, because it has always been yours, if not for your sperm, your food, and the school fees that you pay on my behalf, then who and where would I be? Nothing. I am because you are. I say nothing. Each word I search for flies from my brain before I can send it off my tongue.”
19. “Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned?”
20. “Beasts of No Nation’ began when I read an article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone during my final year of high school.”
21. “There are skills you pick up on in a clinical environment in terms of how to ask questions, what to look for, how to listen that serve one well when trying to write.”
22. “I’m a black man in the United States, and there’s no two ways about that. I have a shared common experience with other black men, and through that, there’s an automatic understanding.”
23. “Everybody has an equal right to be on this earth and to be happy on this earth and to achieve on this earth. That’s kind of the way that I would like to try and go about living.”
24. “D.C. is in my blood, my diction, my sensibility and style. I am, though, in love with a city that cannot fully love me back.”
25. “Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head – because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West’s fantasy of itself.”
My favorites Uzodinma Iweala quotes are, “I feel like it’s not Africans who are afraid of China’s rise in Africa. It’s the West that’s afraid of China’s rise in Africa.” and Everybody has an equal right to be on this earth and to be happy on this earth and to achieve on this earth. That’s kind of the way that I would like to try and go about living.