‘As a person in the diaspora sometimes you ask yourself, well who will claim you? And then it really is up to you to claim a place for yourself.’
Granta Magazine’s Luke Neima speaks to Chinelo Okparanta, author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness Like Water, about being one of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists. They discuss homophobia, the inspiration of dreams and the challenges of having both a Nigerian and an American audience.
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘I wanted to be sure to approach their resistance to Nnenna’s homosexuality from a practical perspective – one of fear, rather than one of hate.’
‘All that thought of home gave the girl a sickly feeling, the longing of something so out of reach, something she wasn’t even sure she could any longer truly remember.’
‘The cultural presentations of the students – that juxtaposition of old and new world, of tradition and modernity.’
‘The year Mama fell sick was the year Njideka confessed to me that she was a runs girl.’
‘For a long time there was greater anxiety in Europe about the consequences of emigration than of immigration.’ From 1992, Hans Magnus Enzensberger on migration. Translated by Martin Chalmers.
