>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Silence ] >> Welcome to the African Middle Eastern Division and what I wanted to say is that our three sections, the African Section, the Hebraic Section and the Near East Section, each words, programs, conferences, exhibits -- there's a wonderful one on Armenia, across -- across the whole and each one has authors coming and speaking to our readers, to our patrons, to our guests. Today, the African Section in cooperation with the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library, a center which is headed by Rob Casper and the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa whose president and CEO, Bernadette Paolo will address you in a moment as will Rob Casper. The evidence section will be presenting the Fifth Interview in the series, Conversations with African Poets and Writers. This videotape series is meant to report for posterity the words and images of important African authors. In addition to their works which the Library of Congress holds, teachers, scholars, students and others interested in African culture will have a unique family source of reference for their research and an additional teaching tool to educate youngsters about Africa namely, an entire archive of African authors explaining in their own words the importance of their literary work and that of their colleagues to better understand Africa, African culture as a society. So it is my distinct pleasure to now introduce Dr. Angel Batiste, the African Area Specialist responsible for Nigeria here in this division who will conduct the interview today with our guest, Professor Helon Habila. Angel Batiste holds a doctorate in African Studies from Howard University and is often asked to be an examiner on the doctoral dissertation panels. She also holds a Master's Degree from the School of Library and Information Science at Catholic University. She's widely published including two major studies on African, South of the Sahara, Index of Periodical Literature and Growth and Famine in Africa, a Selected Bibliography. And now, a partner in this initiative, Robert Casper, the dynamic head of the Poetry and Literature Center of the Library of Congress will be addressing you as well. [ Applause ] >> Hi everybody -- can you hear okay in the back? Just wanted to make sure it's okay. Yeah, first of all I want to say thanks so much to Mary Jane Deeb who herself is a dynamic leader of African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library. I couldn't be more proud of the work we've done for our Conversations with African Poets and Writers Series. Today's event is -- is the wonderful culmination of a great first year. In the past year, the Poetry and Literature Center has joined forces with over 25 other sponsors and co-sponsors both within and outside the Library and the African and Middle East Division has been one of our most inspiring partners. I would also like to thank the African Society for the National Summit on Africa for their full support, ensured vision and here to conclude our introductions is the Africa Society's Director Bernadette Paolo. >> Thank you, thank you Robert [applause] and good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests. Thank you Dr. Mary Jane Deeb and Dr. Robert Casper and Dr. Angel Batiste and everyone associated with the Library of Congress for this program. And I would also like to acknowledge our staff members who are here who are from the continent, our Director of Programs, Patricia Bain who is from Uganda, Sarah Caruso who is from Kenya and Tatenda Mujeni from Zimbabwe. The Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa is really pleased to partner with the African Division of the African and Middle East Section and the Poetry and Literature Center of the Library of Congress. We have a shared mission; the African Society educates Americans about the continent of Africa, its countries, its promise, its economies and its enormous contributions to the world. And we do that through a number of programs, Teach Africa geared towards students with trained teachers and we do films with the Travel Channel in an attempt to showcase the positive sides of African countries that very few of us in the United States know a great deal about. It's really an honor for me today, then, to be a part of this program where we feature Helon Habila who is from the continent's most populous country, Nigeria. I wrote to Ambassador Adefuye yesterday, the Nigerian Ambassador to the United States and I told him that if the country of Nigeria were able to harness the intellect of its people, it's -- their entrepreneurial prowess and the ideas that they have on absolutely everything that Nigeria would want -- be one of the greatest forces on the planet. So Mr. Habila, you have a big job today [chuckle] in representing Nigeria. Helon Habila is internationally recognized as one of Africa's best contemporary prose stylists. His debut novel, Waiting for an Angel, won the 2003 Commonwealth Literature prize for Best First Novel by an African writer. The novel has been translated into many languages including Dutch, Italian, Swedish and French. His short story Love Poems won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2001. His second novel, Measuring Time was published in 2007. Habila's latest novel, Oil on Water, shortlisted for the 2011 Commonwealth Writer's Prize African Region Best Book. Helon has just edited the Granta Book of the African Short Story, an anthology of writers drawn from 20 African countries. He grew up in Gambe State in the northern region of Nigeria. After earning his BA in English at the University of Jos in 1995, he taught at the Federal Polytechnic Bauchi moving to Lagos in 1999. He wrote for the romance magazine, Hence and went on to become the Arts Editor at the influential Vanguard newspaper. We in the audience like the fact that he wrote for [chuckle] a publication that deals with romance because there's many of us in the audience who are romantics, speaking for myself I'm sure [background laughter]. In 2002, he moved to England to become the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia where he currently is doing his PhD work on the life of Dumbata Marichara [phonetic]. He has also been a Fellow at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program and the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College in New York. He has published stories, articles and poems in journals worldwide and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia. He currently teaches creative writing at George Mason University at Fairfax Virginia which is really a commercial for them to have one -- someone as distinguished as you, Mr. Habila, there. He is a founding member and currently serves on the advisory board of the African Writer's Trust, a non-profit entity which seeks to coordinate and bring together African Writers in the Diaspora and Writers on the continent to promote sharing skills and other resources [background noise] and to foster knowledge and learning between the two groups. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce to you Mr. Helon Habila. [ Applause ] [ Silence ] >> Well it's a great pleasure to be here. It's a big honor to be reading at the Library of Congress. I want to thank you for that introduction. I also want to thank the African and Middle Eastern Division, Dr. Angel and of course, Mary Jane -- thank you very much for organizing this and for inviting me and the responses your partners and your promotion of African literature. What I'm going to do is to read a little bit from my novel, Oil on Water which was just referred to and then after that I will also read a little bit from the Anthology, it's called the Granta Book of African Short Stories. It came out last year in Eckerd in England and is just coming out today actually in America. So it's a good thing to be reading while it's just coming out. I also will be doing some questions and answers afterward the interview -- interview series. For a little bit about Oil on Water, this is a book I wrote -- I wrote it about two, three years ago. It started life as a movie script actually. I was invited by a movie company in England to write a movie script about the Niger Delta because in 2007, that was when the crisis, the kidnappings, the violence you know was really at its peak and so it was topical -- it was in the news. Everybody was looking about it, especially the kidnappings and the violence. And so the movie company approached -- invited me to write a movie that they loved to call Blood -- Blood-Oil [chuckle]. I didn't see it in the same way as them. Physically I wanted to focus on the environment because I think that's what the situation is all about and there's a tragedy about that situation that the whole people you know, who are living, who are farmers and fishermen are seeing the environment destroyed over one generation, irretrievably destroyed because when you go there, it's really -- really sad at what's going on. So and I think if people had been pushed you know, to a certain point where they had to revert to violence because the country wasn't really helping them. An oil company was there to make profit basically and they wouldn't do anything unless the country pushed them to do and the country wasn't pushing them. So that's the tragedy of that situation I wanted to capture. But the movie company of course, wanted sensationalism; they wanted a story something like Blood Diamonds. So we parted ways after I had submitted a first draft and then I went on to write this novel which I think really focuses the attention on the environment. I want to read a section about a group of -- of villagers who had to leave their -- their community because of oil exploration and other things. This is an oral tale being told to the -- to the main character who's a journalist by the community leader who led his people away from that place [clearing throat]. Once upon a time, they lived in Paradise. It was a small village close to Ulo Island. They lacked for nothing. Fished and hunted and farming and watching their children growing up before them happy. The village was close-knit made up of cousins and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters and although they were happily insulated from the rest of the world by their creeks and rivers and forests, they were not totally unaware of the changes going on all around them. The gas squares that lit up neighboring villages all day and all night and the cars and TVs and videos and video players in the front rooms of their neighbors who would allow the players to be set up. Some of the neighbors were even bragging that the oil companies had offered to send their kids to Europe and to America to become engineers so that one day they could return and work as oil executives in Port Harcourt. For the first time, the close unified community was divided for how could they not be tempted with the flare in the next village burning over them every night its flame long and coiled like a snake whispering, winking, hissing. Already the oil company men had started visiting accompanied by important politicians from Port Harcourt holding long conferences with Chief Alliba, the Head Chief who was also Chief Iberam's uncle. One day, early in the morning, Chief Malabo called the whole village to a meeting. Of course he had heard the mammas from the young people and the suspicious whispers from the old people all wondering what it was he had been discussing with the oil men and the politicians. Well, they have made an offer. They have offered to buy the whole village and with the money and yes, there was a lot of money, more money than any of them had ever imagined. And with the money, they could relocate elsewhere and live a rich life. But Chief Malabo had said no. On behalf of the whole village he had said no. this was their ancestral land, this was where their fathers and their fathers' fathers were buried. They had been born here. They had grown up here. They were happy here and although they may not be rich, the land had been good to them. They never lacked for anything. What kind of custodians of the land would they be if they sold it off? And just look at the other villages that had taken the oil money. Already the cars had broken down and the cheap televisions and DVD players were all gone and now they're worse off than before. Their rivers were already polluted and useless for fishing and the land grew only gas flares and pipelines. But the snake, the snake in the garden wouldn't rest. It kept on hissing and the offer only grew larger And already far off in the surrounding waters, the oil company boats were patrolling sometimes [inaudible] sending their men to the village to take samples of soil and the water. The village decided to keep them away by sending out their own patrols over the surrounding rivers in canoes, all armed with bows and arrows and clubs and a few guns. But daily, Chief Malabo's feeling the pressure. As a chief, he had no control over the families' decisions about what to do with their land but as a chief, his word carried weight especially among the elders. But what of the young men who were still grumbling and looking enviously across the water at the other villages? The canoe patrol was somewhat of a desperate nature and this soon became very clear. It turned out to be the excuse the oil companies and the politicians who worked for them needed to make their next move. One day the patrol came upon two oil workers piling soil samples into a speed boat. There was a bit Squamish nothing too serious. One of the oil workers escaped with a swollen jaw, the other one with a broken arm but the next day the soldiers came. Chief Malabo was arrested, his hands tied behind his back as if he were a petty criminal on charges of supporting the militants and poaching against the federal government and threatening to kidnap foreign oil workers. The list was long but the law has said, "If the elders would consent to the oil company's demands, sell the land. The politician who introduced himself as their senator came all the way from Abuja and assured them that their situation was receiving national attention. It was in the papers and he was going to fight for them to see that their chief was returned safe and sound. With him were two white men, oil executives. The villagers chased them away. Others came but they were all liars all working for the oil companies trying one way or another to break the villagers resolve but the villagers remained firm. Chief Malabo whenever they went to see him told them not to give in, not to worry about him but they could see how he was deteriorating every day. And then they went to see him one day and were told he was dead. Here Chief Ibiram paused in his story, his voice breaking. They were given his body which was wrapped in a raffia mat and a white cloth and told to take him away just like that. The following week even before Chief Malabo had been buried the oil companies moved in. They came with the whole army waving guns and looking like they meant business. They had a contract they said. Chief Malabo had signed it in prison before he died selling them all of his family land and that was where they would start drilling and whoever wanted to join him and sell his land would be paid handsomely but the longer the people held out the more the value of their land would fall. That shifted so what happened, they sold one by one. The rigs went up, the gas players and the workers came and set up camp in our midst. We saw our village change right before our eyes and that was where we decided to leave -- 10 families. We didn't take their money. The money would be our curse on them for taking our land and for killing our chief. We left, we headed northwards. We've lived in five different places now but always we've had to move. We're looking for a place where we can live in peace but it is hard. So your question, "Are we happy here? I say, "How can we be happy when we're wonderers without a home?" That is some Oil on Water. It took me about two years to write it. I did the research about one year because basically I'm from the country. So I know exactly all about the situation but when you're writing a novel you have to also really be careful and interview people and know this is the place and all that. So researching took me about a whole year and then I did the script for the movie company which took me about six months and then of course I came back and I wrote the book in about four months because I had a first draft you know from the movie script. And that's Oil on Water , that's my top novel and this one is a totally different thing. It is not my own work because it is a collection of stories from different writers and what I was trying to do I was invited by Grancher a company in England to put together this anthology and so it's hard work. And I assure this is the last anthology I'm ever going to do. I'm never going to do it again. It's very hard. Working with others is not easy. You have to send emails to them, you have to wait for their reply, you have to wait and wait and wait sometimes they don't even reply and then you have to also get the copywriters. Of course it's the publisher who does that but you're involved. You're waiting anxiously to hear which stories are going to be available and which ones are not going to be available. And also how do you anthologize a country like Africa. It's a vast continent. Others have done it before people like Charles Larson has done it and I'm sure he can tell you it's very hard to do but my intention was to make sure that all the parts on the continent are represented which is not easy to do. What I did and I'm going to read a little bit in my introduction to illustrate the problems I encountered in anthologizing is to -- I wanted to have like I said all the sections but you have to translate that as well because some of the sections are not in English. Some of the regions are not in English. So I looked up stories where I had to take them based on the reputation of the writer then we translate them and then we discover they're not good [chuckle]. Then we have to let him go and then we have to start all over again. So it was really hard. How can you gather together the stories of a continent that is larger than China, Europe and the United States put together? How can you anthologize 53 countries -- well now 54 with Southern Sudan so 54 countries, a billion people and over 1,000 ethnic groups? I could have organized this anthology by region scrupulously making sure each of the 53 countries big or small has at least one story. This is the usual logic behind the pathogen of most anthologists of African writing. For instance Stephen Gray's excellent The Picador Book of African Stories, Chinua Achebe and CL Innes' ground breaking The Handbook of Contemporary African Short Stories, Rob Spillman's Gods and Soldiers and Charles Larson's Under African Skies. Some even have maps and diagrams explaining exactly where the stories originated and where the originating countries are situated on the continent. Another obvious way to arrange an anthology is by themes showing cadetting points of black Africa. This plan although I didn't use it here appeals to me more than the geographical one because it turns the focus on the writing itself rather than the countries of origin -- origins of origin. [Background noise] It is instructive to note that even when anthologists are arranged by region an unmistakable schematic pattern soon develops. Sometimes but not always themes are regionally determined. Achebe acknowledged this in his introduction to the hanuman book when he notes that most of the Southern African stories show a pain for in escapable bond to racism while in the West African stories there's a total absence of that, an absence verging of complacency and in North Africa, Islam a woman's place in the culture often the dominant themes but no region really has a monopoly on any particular theme. More often reading different writers side-by-side will simply show how similar we are as humans. So I eventually decided what I was going to do was to showcase -- was to focus on the younger generation of African writers, writers that have been described as the third generation African writers -- you know, the generation to which I belong and one interesting thing about this generation is that we are actually the generation that were born as Nigerians. You know, my parents weren't born as Nigerians because Nigeria got independence in 1960. So this is the generation of writers who were born as Nigerians, who grew up as Nigerians not just South African or you know just belonging to their ethnic groups and their kingdoms and all that and their later becoming Nigerians. So 1960s was independent generation of Nigeria. I decided to highlight their work here because they're younger, they have been less anthologized by anthologists but I also decided to put alongside them other older writers just to show what these writers grew up reading, you know, the writers that influenced them. Anyway I think I will stop here because we have questions and I'm going to come back to things like that in our question and answer sessions. So, okay [applause and beep]. >> For the African and Middle Eastern division we are extremely happy to welcome you here today, Helon. You've received -- you currently hold recognition as Africa's most exciting writer. >> Okay. >> So my first question to you, when did you start writing? >> Okay. >> Sorry, my first question to you, and I must say most of my questions are several part questions. I have so many questions that I'd like to ask. So they're several part questions. The first, when did you start writing? What influences your stories and why did you turn to writing novels as a medium of expression? >> Thank you for your question. When did I start writing? I think it goes back all the way to when I was a child -- when I was a kid in primary school and even before then. Actually I started listening to stories before you know I started telling stories and then writing stories. That's the progression. As kids we used to be gathered in the compound where we lived. Our mothers would tell us stories, folktales at night and in the morning when I go to primary school we had a teacher who'd call us to the front of the class to tell stories in vernacular not in English. So basically I would just you know repeat the tales I heard from my mother the night before, folk tales mostly folktales not just my mother the other women too would tell us stories. And I became the champion story teller in the school. [Chuckle] Believe me I was -- I would be taken from class to class to tell stories. That was how good I was. [Chuckle] We used to have like a story of competitions and I always won. So the point I'm making is that you start to understand the world through stories when you grow up listening to them especially as a child because stories have a logic of their own. they explain the world to you and if you're a child who's very sensitive and attentive and you have questions that nobody might have the answers to you begin to make up your own answers in terms of stories and to analyze things and to give things a logic and that was really what helped me as a child to answer lots of some questions that I came up against and from there I went to university where I read literature but I actually wrote my first novel when I was 17, which I didn't publish, it's still there somewhere in mothers house. Maybe one day I'll publish it [chuckle] but I took a chapter from the book and I got it published. So it came out when I was in my second year at university. So that was my first public story. It came out in an anthology tied to through left [inaudible] and some of my professors also have their stories in that same anthology. So I had the honor and the distinction of signing books from my classmates [chuckle] you know with my professors who sat down and signed the books to my classmates. So that was my style as a writer. That was how I came to writing from listening to stories. >> Now in your novels, Waiting for an Angel, Measuring Time and your latest Oil on Water, not only do we find a strong sense of imagination but we find memorable characters and we find real life historical events and situations. You've stated that you tell history through the eyes of ordinary people. Briefly outline for us what are the functions of your historical narrations? >> History yeah -- well history is very important to me and I think to all writers. The interesting thing about novels is that when you have a novel that is written even if the stories are futuristic it's still history because eventually it's going to be supersede. The time will come that the events in the book will be at the time that was supposed to be in the future and then it becomes history. So you always deal with events that are in the past. The very narrative stuff is always told in the past tense. So to whatever level you want to look at it there's always an element of history and in writing fiction but to come back to your question history itself, I'm very conscious of using history. I do it intentionally. I like the idea of using it. It's not just me. I think there's always the awareness, the idea of using history in Africa literature has always been there when you go back to the works of people like Chinua Achebe and the first generation of writers they always go back to history. Things [inaudible] historical novel actually even though it was written in 1958, published in 1958 but it deals with history and the idea is that the African writer -- the first generation especially saw themselves or see themselves as writing their nation into being. They're trying to answer back to certain ideas about the African nation, about culture, about religion, about history and all that. So basically people like Chinua Achebe were trying to answer that and to use history deliberately, religion and culture to show that the African had history, the African had religion, the African had dignity before the coming of colonialism. So Africa didn't just discover after colonialism. It's always been there and that's why things fall apart there. So with people like me, there's that's tradition that's established. History has always been important. With my first novel Waiting for an Angel, what I tried to do was to use contemporary history 1990s in Nigeria especially to look at the politics of that, the pro-democracy movement and to look at the place of the individual especially. The difference between me and people like Achebe I think would be that we're more concerned about the place of the individual and because I think sometimes the individual is neglected and African politics, African societies and all that. there's so much emphasis on the nation that the individual is often subsumed and taken for granted and I think writers imagination are beginning to pay more attention by necessity actually because we've been forced by so many -- by circumstances to begin to do that. So my history would be then to look at the individual and how he is trying to cope with the contemporary situation also as a subject of history. >> Thank you. Could you speak for a few minutes about the contemporary literature creations that are emerging both in continental Africa as well as in the Diaspora and also where do you fit into this current African literary trend? >> Yeah, I started to talk about that already. We have the first generation like I said and they are mostly now in their seventies, eighties and they started publishing in the fifties and the sixties but interestingly the publishing history in Africa goes back much, much longer than that especially in South Africa with writers like Sol Plaje who actually published his first book -- his novel Mahudi in 1931. Things fall apart was published in 1958 and is seen as the African novel and Achebe is South African novel. So there's always the assumption that the first novel was published in 1958 things fall apart but actually it goes back further than that, even Kamara Lai published before Chinua Achebe 1954. So but I think it's because of the importance of things fall apart that people began to call it the African novel and all that. so with people like me coming after independence we are the third generation. There's a middle generation who I feel so sorry for because they somehow got eclipsed by the sheer glory of the first generation of writers because they were so influential the first generation and also of course because the excessive politics I think of the middle generation the second generation who almost live max in their approach. They were a bit too ideological and they got eclipsed somehow. Then of course there was the economic down turn in African societies with publishing companies closing down in the '80s and '90s and all that and publishers like Hanuman pulling out. So there was a big low in publishing until people like me eventually came along and began to get published by foreign publishers. My first book was published -- I actually self-published my first novel Waiting for an Angel under a different title, Prison Stories in Nigeria because you couldn't get published by a traditional publisher where you send your manuscript and get edited and get paid and then get published and then get distributed all by the company. You had to pay and get published and I actually paid. I can't remember exactly how much I paid but I remember they gave me my 500 copies of my book and most of them are still there in my mother's house [chuckle]. So yeah these are the -- this is just a brief history then most of it now is published outside the country. The third generation thus things I'm telling you will happen in time and most of us sometimes live outside the country and I think we deal with subject matters that are slightly different from the first generation and the second generation. I think there's more focus naturally on our troubles, on also about the individual existential issues eventually overshadowing the highly political concerns of the first generation and the second generation. So -- but there's always politics, we always come back to politics. >> Just briefly because you outline, what are some of the dominant themes? >> Some of the dominant themes. I mentioned travel, things like exile. There's also -- I think we have more female writers now. I don't know if I'm wrong but here's a lot of them now publishing successfully. People like Adiche, people like Sophie Attar, people like Harriet Innes, people like Suzan Kabuli who was in this series and [inaudible] Walker. So there's that heightened awareness feminist issues in this new generation and I think it also has to do with the -- with the high awareness of the place of the individual in the African nation and I like to refer to us as the post nationalist generation somehow because we are a little bit less like I said earlier, concerned about the nation itself, you know? Not because we don't love the nation but because the way things are, a little bit disappointed by the nation. That's why most of us are living outside the nation and when you look at Chinua Achebe and the generation, they were concerned about the nation because they were rioting against colonialism. So they had to speak for the nation, they had to bring the nation into being, threat it into being you know. So that has been done. You know we cannot go back and start doing it all over again. So with people like Dambuzo Marachara, I think, people like Ben Aukri who are slightly older than [inaudible], I see them as a bridge. They are the people who after we've begun to share in this new you know, themes and concerns, you know, of writing in African literature. >> And finally I'd like to ask, what are you -- what is the future of African writing? What is the future of African Literature? What does African Literature have to contribute to World Literature and what type of international recognition is needed in terms of bringing more attention to African Literature? >> Yeah, I think if you want to understand a nation, better to understand its politics, its people, its culture. You have to read the novels, the poetry you know, of the people. So it's the same thing, the Africa Literature Choice offering, just the same thing as British Literature would offer about Britain, American Literature about America. It's the same thing that we do where we're makers of culture. That means we talk about people, how they live from day to day. We talk about politics. But we do it with an eye on individual, on the human element, not just [inaudible] history, you know, orthe philosophies, you know, or the meta physics. We try to do this [inaudible] individual to show that he has dignity, you know, he has hopes, he has dreams. And when you put this side by side with, like, Harry Porter in Africa, [inaudible] you know, for instance, you'll see what I am talking about. On CNN of course there will be the sound bytes about war. You'll see the refugees and the hunger and the dictators and all that. Where the people? Where are the human beings who live and love and eat food, you know, and are happy, you know? [Inaudible] some of them are really happy [chuckle]. So that's what the writer tries to do, to show you that there is another dimension that is being overlooked in the over simplified presentations of the news, you know. Sometimes even history is over simplified [inaudible] I think is more complex, you know, because it captures the way people speak, actually, you know, the kind of smells; it recreates that. It brings them into being really, I think, yeah. >> Thank you Helon. At this point if we can open up to the audience, five or 10 minutes for questions, and I'd like to note that we are being webcast so in asking your question you are giving your permission to webcast. >> Yeah? [ Inaudible audience question ] >> You're my audience [chuckle]. >> The question that was raised, what is the role of the internet in terms of the African literary scene at this point in time? And who are African writers writing for? Who was the audience that they are directing they're attention? >> I -- well there's a good book I can kind of refer you to is called The Ordeal of the African Writer, written by the man next to you, it's a very good book. It talks about [inaudible] and The Ordeal of the African Writer, written by Charles Larson. It's a very good book. [Background noise] But it talks about the history of the formation ad looks at how African books are published but what I can tell you is, my own experience, most of the publishing houses closed down in the I think late '80s, '90s, with introduction of the currency devaluation, all these things contributed in so many ways so that these foreign publishers who have their offices in all these African countries couldn't publish profitably because when they buy the raw materials in dollars and they go and sell the books in Naira they wouldn't break even. So they were losing a lot of money. A lot of them closed down. So when I came, when I started writing in late '90s, 2000 they weren't publishing companies because newsprint was very expensive. There was an austerity measure people were just buying food. So people couldn't afford to really do that. So in that vacuum we had the [inaudible] presses. They're just printing presses -- they're not publishers. Because they don't edit, they don't market, they don't review, they don't do anything. But right now -- but in way that was also good for us because we were able to get foreign publishers we actually are able to distribute our books more widely than people before us did -- even people who published with Hanuman of the series who weren't as widely distributed. They didn't have agents for instance they were just, they and they're publishers just who they dealt with. But right now the situation is much, much improved. Gradually, were beginning to have Local publishers, real publishers publishing in Nigeria for instance there is cassava republic who is my Nigerian publisher, you know because at a certain point after my first novel, published in England and America, I discovered that they weren't available in Nigeria. And I said, "What's the whole point? These are the people I'm writing for, I'm writing about and if they can't get the books then what's the whole point of it?" [Inaudible] Yeah so my publisher agreed to give me back the Nigerian rights to my book, all of my books actually and I got them reissued in Nigeria by a Nigerian publisher and now we have a lot of them coming up. There's in Nigeria, there's the Cassava Republic which is my publisher, there's Farafina in Lagos and there are so many others that I don't even know about. And they're actually publishers, they have editors you know and when my first book and second book where issued in Nigeria at the same time by them, they actually flew me to Nigeria and organized readings and book signings from city to city. So they're doing exactly what publishers here are doing. And there is more access to books, plus I sold more books in Nigeria than I ever sold at any of my readings anywhere. >> And I would like to note that these publications are available here in the Library of Congress. We can take two quick questions. >> I wanted to ask... [ Inaudible audience question ] >> I think I'm a poet of some [chuckle]. [ Inaudible ] >> More likely [chuckle]. [ Inaudible audience question ] >> Well, to answer the last question first, I still have people who are not speaking to me because of that. A lot of my friends who, you know, I turned down their stories because to me they were not what I was looking for. Not that they were bad but I wanted to have had a certain thematic, you know, concern. And also my taste, you know, sometimes as an editor you have to depend on your taste and your gut feeling. So I wasn't concerned particularly about the countries even though the editor who I was working with wanted as much representation as possible, I was just looking for good stories. And with countries like Nigeria, you know, there are more writers in Nigeria than, you knw, you have in say Ghana, so the problem with Nigeria was who to keep out not who to put in. I didn't -- I don't even have my story in the anthology; I decided to leave that space for another person. The same case with South Africa, more writers than space -- than we had space for. So that was really -- we decided on just the best stories that was how we did it. And the other question about my poetry, I actually started out as a poet. I was writing -- I converted -- [chuckle] converted to fiction, you know, sometime in 1999, and I wrote my first collection of short stories. Where before they were all poems because the situation in Nigeria you couldn't -- it was easier to write poetry and to get published in newspapers, you know, and to enter quick competitions and make some money. And, yeah, that was how I was known in Nigeria. Some of them are still surprised when they see me writing fiction, >> One last question. [ Inaudible audience question ] >> Are your publications in Nigerian? >> I write in English. None of my books are out in any Nigerian language yet. Maybe in the future somebody might, you know, translate them. But I won't do it myself. So -- but they're also out in some European languages, by European publishers. And just to add to that, you know, there are lots of literatures in local languages in Nigeria. It's not as if we all write in English. There's a huge Hausa literature market for this in Yoruba and Igbo, some of them are even made into movies, straight from their language. Like in Kano, the Kanywood movie industry makes movies from, you know, novels written in Hausa. So there's a huge market. It's just the tradition that most people, like me, who went to university and studied literature eventually end up writing in English. But I grew up reading Hausa literature mainly. >> Okay. Thank you Helon. Helon will be doing a book signing in the Library's gift shop, so for those of you who are interested in purchasing his new novel, as well as the Granta African Short Story, Marita Harper will be taking folks down to the gift shop and the author will be joining us there. We thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.