>> Speaker 1: From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> Joan Weeks: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the African and Middle East Division of the Library of Congress and to the conversations with African poets and writers lecture series. With our award winning author Okwiri Oduor. And today our program is sponsored by the Africa section of the African and Middle Eastern Division, The Poetry and Literature Center of the Library of Congress in partnership with the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa. I'm Joan Weeks, acting head of the Near East section. On behalf of all my colleagues and in particular, Dr. Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of the division who couldn't be with us today, I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to everyone. But before I get started I'd like to give you a brief overview of our division and its resources in the hopes that you'll come back to use our collections for your research in this beautiful reading room. The division is comprised of three sections that build and serve the collections to researchers from around the world. We cover 78 countries and more than 35 languages. The Africa section includes countries in all of sub-Sahara Africa. The Hebraic section is responsible for Judaica and Hebraica worldwide. The Near East section covers all of the Arab countries, including North Africa, Turkey, the Turkic central Asian, Iran, Afghanistan, the Muslims in western China, Russia, the Balkans and the people of the Caucasus. Today our conversations with Africa poets and writers lecture series is in its fourth year and we've had and hosted over 21 lectures. Now it is my great honor and pleasure to introduce Bernadette Paolo, she is president and CEO of the Africa Society for the National Summit on Africa who will talk about the society and what they do. I'd like to turn it over to Bernadette, thank you. >> Bernadette Paolo: Thank you [applause]. Thank you very much and thank you to Dr. Joan Weeks. You know as she said this is our fourth year interacting with the Library of Congress and I must tell you, on behalf of everyone associated with the Africa Society that we're always proud and we eagerly anticipate these programs. I want to thank not only Joan, but I want to thank Robert Casper, Dr. Angel Batiste, Eve Ferguson, Marietta Harper, and Matthew Blakely. I very seldom have the opportunity to thank all of these people and I think it's long overdue. I'd like to speak to you for a moment about the Africa Society and what our mission is. The Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa, as I indicated is pleased to partner with the African section of the African and Middle Eastern Division and the Poetry and Literature Center of the Library of Congress. In our view, it's a perfect marriage, for we are both committed to providing a platform for African literary figures that is accessible to people throughout the world who but for this program would not have this opportunity. You know it's very timely because many great luminaries we've had the pleasure of hosting, we started Chinua Achebe, the famous Nigerian author and the person who launched our series is Professor Ali Mazrui and they're no longer with us. And I know that both of them would be so very proud that we've continued our work and that we're hosting people like Okwiri today who happens to be the second Caine prize winner in a row that we featured at the Library of Congress. We at the Africa Society really focus on the countries, the peoples, the contributions, the economies and the continent of Africa and so having an opportunity to work with the Library of Congress and building a repository of information about the talent on the continent is something that fits into our mission and gives us great pleasure. I would also like to acknowledge my right arm, Patricia Bain, who was our director of programs who's from Uganda, as many of our staff people at the African Society represent African nations. And now I have the pleasure of calling on my colleague, Robert Casper, who's been really an integral part of this program for very long time. Robert [applause]. >> Rob Casper: As she said, my name is Rob Casper, I'm the head of the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library of Congress and we are proud partners in this series. Before I begin let me ask you to do what I'm going to do which is to make sure your cell phones and other electronic devices are turned off, so they don't interfere with the recording of this event. I also want to say that this program is being recorded for future webcast and if you choose to participate in the question-and-answer session, you give us permission for future use of the recording. And let me tell you a little bit about the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library of Congress. We are home to the poet Laureate consultant in poetry and we put on some 40 programs like this throughout the year. To learn more about the Poetry and Literature Center and our programs, you can visit our website, www.LOC.gov/poetry. You can also find out more about the library's African and Middle Eastern division and view webcasts from our series at their website, www.LOC.gov/RR/amed. And now let me tell you a little bit about this program. Okwiri Oduor will read from her Caine prize winning story, My Father's Head, and will participate in a moderated discussion with AMED area specialist, Eve Ferguson. We will have time and at the end of the event for questions and we also have copies of the Gonjon Pin and other stories that Caine prize for African writing anthology for sale, it includes Okwiri's story. So we hope you pick it up and we hope you have her sign her winning story. Speaking of Miss Oduor, let me tell you little bit about her. She is a 25-year-old Kenyan who studied law, but switched to writing, thankfully. As the cane prize winner, Miss Oduor had the opportunity to spend a month as the writer in residence at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. We are lucky to be getting her the end of her time here in the States. She was also invited to take part in literary festivals in her hometown of Nairobi, Kenya, in Cape Town and in Nigeria. I'm really happy about this gift Miss Oduor send in an interview with the New York Times, I'll be able to write a while without any distractions or without getting a part-time job, which I know is the dream of many a writer. She's working on her debut novel after writing a novella Dream Chasers that was highly commended by the Commonwealth book prize in 2012. She also directed the inaugural Writivism Literary Festival and Kampala, Uganda last year. African writers are in the spotlight now Miss Oduor said to the Times. There are more Africans writing and more Africans reading. There's a hunger for these kind of stories end quote. We are happy to hear her prize-winning story and more from her today. Please join me in welcoming the 2014 Caine prize for African writing winner, Okwiri Oduor. [ Applause ] >> Okwiri Oduor: Thank you, I'm really happy to be here. Thank you to the Library of Congress for inviting me and thank you for coming out. So I'll get right on with it. My Father's Head. I had meant to summon my father only long enough to see what his head looked like, but now he was here and I did not know how to send him back. It all started the Thursday that Father Ignatius came from Immaculate Conception in Kitgum. The old women wore their Sunday frocks, and the old men plucked garlands of bougainvillea from the fence and stuck them in their breast pockets. One old man would not leave the dormitory because he could not find his shikwarusi, and when I coaxed and badgered, he patted his hair and said, "My God, do you want the priest from Uganda to think that I look like this every day?" I arranged chairs in the yard beneath the avocado tree and the old people sat down and practiced their smiles. A few people who did not live at old people's home came as well. Like the woman who [inaudible] in the Stagecoach bus to Mathari North and the man whose one roomed house is a kindergarten in the daytime and a brothel in the evening, and the woman whose illicit brew had blinded five people in January. Father Ignatius came riding on the back of a bodaboda and after everyone had dropped a coin in his hat, he gave the bodaboda man 50 shillings and the bodaboda man said, "Praise God," and then rode back the way he had come. Father Ignatius took off his coat and sat down in the chair that was marked, Father Ignatius Okello, New Chaplain, and the old people gave him the smiles they had been practicing, smiles that melted like ghee, that oozed through the corners of their lips and dribbled onto their laps long after the thing that was being smiled about had gone rancid in the air. Father Ignatius said, "The Lord be with you," and the people said, "And also with you," and then they prayed and they sang and they dipped bread slices in tea and when the drops fell on the cuffs of their woolen sweaters, they sucked at them with their seamy cinnamon tongues. Father Ignatius' maiden sermon was about love, love your neighbor as you love yourself, that kind of self-deprecating thing. The old people had little use for love, and although they gave Father Ignatius an ingratiating smile, what they really wanted to know was what type of place Kitgum was and if it was true that Bagisu people were savage cannibals. What I wanted to know was what type of person Father Ignatius thought he was instructing others to distribute their love like this or like that, as though one could measure love on weights, pack it inside glass jars and place it on shelves for the neighbors to pick as they pleased. As though one could look at it and say, "Now see, I have 10 loves in total. Let me save three for my country and give all the rest to my neighbors." It must have been the way that Father Ignatius filled his mug until the tea ran over the clay rim and down the stool leg and soaked into his canvas shoe that got me thinking about my own father. One moment I was listening to tales of Acholi valor, and the next, I was stringing together images of my father, making his limbs move and his lips spew words, so that in the end he was a marionette and my memories of him were only scenes in a theatrical display. Even as I showed Father Ignatius to his chambers, cleared the table, put the chairs back inside, took my purse, and dragged myself to Odeon to get a matatu to [inaudible], I thought about the millet colored freckle in my father's eye, and the 50 cent coins he always forgot in his coat pocket, and the way each Sunday morning men knocked on our front door and said things like, "Johnson, there's no time to put on clothes even just come the way you are, the maid gave birth in the night and flushed the baby down the toilet." Every day after work, I bought an ear of street roasted maize and chewed it one kernel at a time and when I reached the house, I wiggled out of the muslin dress and wore dungarees and drank a cup of masala chai. Then I carried my father's toolbox to the bathroom. There I chiseled out old broken tiles from the wall and they fell onto my boots, and the dust rose from them and exploded in the flaring tongues of fire lapping through chinks in the stained glass. This time, as I did all this I thought of the day I sat at my father's feet and he scooped a handful of groundnuts and rubbed them between his palms, chewed them, and then fed the mush to me. I was of a curious age then, old enough to chew with my own teeth, yet young enough to desire that hot, masticated love, love that did not need to be doctrinated or measured in cough syrup caps. The Thursday that Father Ignatius came from Kitgum, I spent the entire night on my stomach on the sitting room floor, drawing my father. In my mind I could see his face, I could see the lines around his mouth, the tiny blobs of light in his irises, the crease at the part where his ear joined his temple. I could even see the thick line of sweat and oil on his shirt collar, the little brown veins that broke off from the main stream of dirt and ran down on their own. I could see all these things, but no matter what I did his head refused to appear within the borders of the paper. I started off with his feet and worked my way up and in the end my father's head popped out of the edges of the paper and onto scuffed linoleum and plastic magnolias and the wet soles of bathroom slippers. I showed Bwibo some of the drawings. Bwibo was the cook at the old people's home with whom I had formed an easy camaraderie. "My God!" Bwibo muttered, flipping through them. "Simbi, this is abnormal." The word abnormal came out crumbly, and it broke over the sharp edge of the table and became clods of loam on the plastic floor covering. Bwibo rested her head on her palm and the bell sleeves of her cream colored caftan swelled as though there were pumpkins stacked inside them. I told her what I had started to believe, that perhaps my father had had a face, but no head at all. And even if my father had had a head, I would not have seen it, people's heads are not a thing that one often saw. One looked at a person and all one saw was their face, a regular face shaped face, that shrouded a regular head shaped head. If the face was remarkable, one looked twice, but what was there to draw one's eyes to the banalities of another's head? Most times when one looked at a person, one did not even see their head there at all. Bwibo stood over the waist high jiko, poured cassava flour into a pot of bubbling water and stirred it with a cooking oar. "Child," she said, "How do you know that the man in those drawings is your father? He has no head at all, no face." "I recognize his clothes I said, the red corduroys that my father always paired with yellow shirts." Bwibo shook her head. "It is only with a light basket that someone can escape the rain," she said. It was the time of day when the old people fondled their wooden beads and snorted off to sleep in between incantations. I allowed them a brief, bashful siesta, long enough for them to believe that they had recited the entire rosary. Then I tugged at the ropes and the lunch bells chimed. The old people sat eight to a table and with their mouths full of ugali, sour lentils and okra soup, they said things like, "Do not buy chapati from Kadima's Kiosk, Kadima's wife sits on the dough and charms it with her buttocks," or, "Did I tell you about Wambua, the one whose cow chewed a child because the child would not stop wailing?" In the afternoon, I emptied the bedpans and soaked the old people's feet in warm water and baking soda and when they went off to mass I took my purse and went home. The Christmas before the cane tractor killed my father, he drank his tea from plates and fried his eggs on the lids of coffee jars and he retrieved his Yamaha drum set from a shadowy, lizardry place in the back of the house and sat on the veranda and smoked and beat the drums until his knuckles bled. One day he took his stool and handheld radio to the veranda and it sat at his feet, undid his laces and peeled off his gummy socks. He wiggled his toes about. They smelled slightly fetid, like sour cream. My father smoked and listened to orchestra [inaudible] on VOK and when the clock chimed eight o'clock, he turned the knob and listened to the death news. It wasn't long before his ears caught the name of someone he knew. He choked on the smoke trapped in his throat. My father said, "Did you hear that? Sospeter has gone! Sospeter, the son of Milkah, who taught Agriculture in Mirere Secondary School. My God, I'm telling you, everyone is going. Even me, you shall soon hear me on the death news." I brought him his evening cup of tea. He smashed his cigarette against the veranda, then he slowly brought the cup to his lips. The cup was filled just the way he liked it, filled until the slightest trembling would have his fingers and thighs scalded. My father took a sip of his tea and said, "Sospeter was like a brother to me. Why did I have to learn of his death like this, over the radio?" Later, my father lay on this foldaway sofa and I sat on the stool watching him, afraid that if I looked away, he would go too. It was the first time that I imagined his death, the first time that I mourned. And yet it was not my father I was mourning, I was mourning the image of myself inside the impossible aura of my father's death. I was imagining what it would be like, the death news would say that my father had drowned in a cesspit and people would stare at me as though I was a monitor lizard trapped in the streets. I imagined that I would be wearing my green dress when I got the news, the one with red gardenias embroidered in its bodice and people would come and pat my shoulder and give me warm Coca Cola in plastic cups and say, "I put my sorrow in a basket and brought it here as soon as I heard. How else would your father's spirit know that I am innocent of his death?" Bwibo said to me, "Everyone has a head behind their face, some people show theirs easy. They turn their backs on you their head is all you can see. Your father was a good man and good men never show you their heads, they show you their faces." Perhaps that was true, see even the day my father's people telephoned to say that a cane tractor had flattened him on the road to Shibale, no one said a thing about having seen his head. They described the rest of his body with a measured delicacy, how his legs were strewn across the road, sticky and shiny with fresh tar and how one foot remained inside his tire sandal pounding the pedal of his bicycle, and how cane juice filled his mouth and soaked the collar of his polyester shirt, and how his face had a mindless yet patient serenity, even as his eyes burst out and rolled in the rain puddles. And instead of weeping right away when they said all those things to me, I had wondered if my father really came from a long line of obawami, and if his people would bury him seated in his grave, with a string of royal cowries round his neck. I think I should stop there [applause]. >> Eve Ferguson: Thank you very much Okwiri that was beautiful. I understand you have been accepted into school here in the United States, you want to tell us a little bit about that before we go on with the questions. >> Okwiri Oduor: No. >> Eve Ferguson: No. Okay. >> Okwiri Oduor: No okay, I was accepted into the University of [inaudible], the iO Writers Workshop for [inaudible] creative writing [applause], but yeah. Thank you. >> Eve Ferguson: You're welcome. Okay let me start with the questions. When did you start writing and can you talk about the relationship between literary writing in your role directing a literary Festival. >> Okwiri Oduor: I feel like I always give a cliche answer to this question, you know, like when did you start writing. Every writer claims to have started in their childhood, but it's kind of true. I used to write these little storybooks for my brothers yeah when we were kids and I'd make up stories and draw pictures in them, so it was a bit of graphic novel kind of thing. And those are really fun to do and I graduated from that to writing compositions in school and just kept going. But my role as a literary event organizer, well people ask me what else I do apart from writing, maybe I should start telling them that because it makes me sound important. But no not really, I haven't done that in about two years, I just started the inaugural writivism festival in Kampala which is two years ago. Well it taught me a lot, it taught me to respect the boundaries that exist between writers and other people who love writing and do things for writing, but are not writers. So people who run festivals, people who market books, people who publish and how all these people come together for the benefit of the writer, the mutual relationships that exist between them, it also taught me that I would much rather spend my time writing than doing other things. >> Eve Ferguson: Okay. >> Okwiri Oduor: It was quite difficult like fundraising and reaching organizations trying to get our writers funded, the trips funded, organizing travel, organizing accommodation, things to do, it's just crazy. I'd much rather spend my time writing but. >> Eve Ferguson: Thank you, so Okwiri, what or who are the major influences on your work? >> Okwiri Oduor: I think the question, sorry the answer to the question changes a lot. Right now I feel like right now I'm just rediscovering Swahili literature. I have gone a couple of years without reading Swahili novels and I'm just getting back into it and remembering what a huge influence some of those writers had on my own life. Just if any of you has read Swahili writing they know how literate and how poetic and how beautiful the language is and I never realized I used to write in Swahili years and years ago and I think a huge part of how I write, how you know, I feel like I owe it to that background you know. But apart from that, there's different influences for different parts of my journey into being a writer. So I came into writing through reading and so that influences other people I met as young reader, so right from when I very young I read Enid Blyton books. I don't know the other day a friend and I were asking our American friends if they knew Enid Blyton and no one seemed to have an idea. And we were scandalized because that's all we read at home. She wrote [inaudible] and famous five books and I grew up on those as a young child. I just devoured them and I read those. They were very instrumental in introducing me to a love of reading and then after that when I read the classics I remember reading Shakespeare's March Into Venice and feeling very strange because I felt like I had read it before and like I had had a previous life because I had never read it, but I felt like I knew the story already and it was just a very strange feeling and I've taken it with me through. So reading the classics, reading Jane Austin, reading, you know, and then moving onto popular fictions, writers like Sidney Sheldon and John Grisham and Danielle Steele and all those writers. And then later on I came across-- was just talking about [inaudible] and came across her book [inaudible] and I feel like it changed my life. It introduced me to a different kind of writing and it was amazing encountering her, encountering other writers like Tanya Morrison and [inaudible]. Writers like those and then back to the continent writers like [inaudible], so I feel like it was a whole journey coming to where I am. I can't say one particular writer was a major influence in my life, but I owe all these writers because they introduced me a love of reading which introduced me to a love of writing and yeah. >> Eve Ferguson: Okay, thank you. So you've written short stories, a novella and are currently working on a novel. Why did you choose to write fiction as your creative outlet and have you ever delved into other literary genres like poetry? >> Okwiri Oduor: I once fancied myself a poet, but now I know better. I think [inaudible] a few years ago, I can't believe I did that. But I thought I was a poet, but at [inaudible] point I made the conscious decision to stop separating the genres and now I feel like I am blending it and I don't think I am writing poetry or [inaudible], but I feel like my fiction is a combination of both poetry. Yeah, it's just a blend of everything and that's how I like to write. How did I come to fiction as-- sorry what was the other part of your question? >> Eve Ferguson: Why did you choose fiction as your creative outlet? >> Okwiri Oduor: When I was younger I felt like I lacked control in lots of things like as a child I was a very shy child, I was very overwhelmed and a lot of things [inaudible] shy, I didn't speak much, but I thought lots of things. And lots of times I felt like I didn't have much control in my life and fiction is just a way to create a world whose characters I could control. I could control what happened to them, I could control what they thought and what they did and I could push the boundaries and so fiction became this small wormhole where I could go cuddle myself and find comfort. So that's how I came into it. >> Eve Ferguson: Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about the state of contemporary literature in Kenya? >> Okwiri Oduor: It's a very big question. I will try to-- I think I'll just talk about the writers of my generation, which is what I know best. I feel like it's the most exciting time to be a writer. There's so much going on. We have all these writers who are passionate about what they're doing about pushing boundaries, about creating new work, and experimenting. We have support for writers increasing writers, writers reading each other, writers critiquing each other, making each other grow. I feel like even myself I'm a product of this community. I had the support of other writers, we were reading each other, we were building each other, we were getting rejected here and there and coming to cry in each other's arms and pushing each other to keep going. Beyond that I-- there's lots of work being produced right now. There's a lot-- beyond the work that's being produced, there's lots of work being consumed and there's a hunger for it. And also the publishing is growing. Young writers are not looking to place their work in the west anymore, there's lots of places at home, places like [inaudible] and Short Story Day Africa which is doing amazing work. They first published my store before it won the Caine prize, it was first published in Short Story Day Africa. There's [inaudible] in South Africa, there's [inaudible] in Nigeria which publishes peculated fiction, there's [inaudible] Kalahari review [inaudible] review. There's so much, so many places that's publishing work by writers and it's really exciting. And I know for example Jalada which is a collective [inaudible] sent a call out for its fourth anthology. It just had [inaudible] now they're doing one on language and it's just exciting, I can't wait to see where it's all going. So we're reading each other and it's just not in Kenya, I think it's a whole African movement reading. Because social media is also making it very easy to connect with each other, so it doesn't feel like the community doesn't just exist in Kenya, it exists in Nigeria, in South Africa, in Uganda, in Ghana. We're reading each other and growing together. I know writivism literature [inaudible] in 2013 has grown a lot since then. It has workshops in Kenya and in Nairobi and [inaudible], African cities. Bringing African writers together and doing all the work. So there's many initiatives, there homegrown prizes like the [inaudible] in Nigeria. There's other prizes, Jalada has a literary prize, of course, there's a Caine prize. And so I guess in short what I'm saying is it's very exciting right now, it's an exciting time to be a writer, an African writer. And [inaudible] I mean [inaudible] is contestable, but what I mean is that we're no longer looking to put our work in Europe or in America, we are growing our own readership and it's so exciting I can't wait to see what comes after this renaissance. >> Eve Ferguson: Thank you. Now let's go to your prize winning story. What prompted you to write My Father's Head, which seems a little bit surreal? Can you talk about the story a bit? >> Okwiri Oduor: Yeah, I was in a time of transition. I woke up one day and I was an adult and I couldn't fathom what had happened. So I guess I was thinking about that a lot, you know, what happens next. Suddenly I'm an adult and I'm thinking about things like what comes of adulthood, you know, like death and I was thinking about home because I found myself away from home and I was thinking a lot about what it means, you know, what does home mean and where is home and can one make a home in themselves and can one return to their home and is home the same after they're gone and does it change and in what ways does it change and do the people you leave at home remain there waiting for you. Do you have people that belong to you and yeah. But what's funny is that every time I look at this story I feel like I see it in a different way. So currently I resonate a lot right now with the loneliness that's inside it. The last few months have been in the US and it's been an interesting experience, experiencing America as an African. There's many ways, while I'm still coming to terms with many things, but one of those is this loneliness that you feel, you know, you go back home to yourself and you know where [inaudible] and in the story the old people who go home to themselves they live together, but they're all very lonely. The character who goes home to herself. And just thinking about loneliness and beyond the loneliness I think I'm also drawn to the relativity of reality. What you're talking about surreal, I'm very much drawn to that. I feel like reality, I will never quite comprehend the world that we live in, I feel it's very mysterious and there's lots of it I will never comprehend and there's just very many different concurrent realities. And I experienced that growing up in Kenya because I come from a very different culture and yeah, so trying to understand how reality can be perceived differently through different eyes and the story has that as well. Like the father who has a very different reality comes back from the dead and the daughter who is a very, you know, the father coming back from the dead is as real as the daughter just going to the old people's home where she works and none of this surreal, at least in the world that they exist. All this is, what should I call it, realism within the world that it exists and also come from a place where this is not magic realism, but realism I mean magic realism is what you would call it as an outsider looking in. But for people who have these fantastic lives that they're living it's the reality. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is that reality is very relative and I'm very drawn to that in my fiction. So not just in this story, but even the novel that I'm working on, yeah. >> Eve Ferguson: Okay, I can honestly say and I don't not know if other people in this audience have experienced the loss of their father, but it really does ring very true to the feelings that one has when they experience that. So coming to my last question for you before we open it up to the audience. How do you see the future for African and African [inaudible] writers and what steps need to be taken to broaden the relationship or the readership of African literature to the international community? I know you said that your young African writers no longer write specifically for that audience, but how do you feel that the works that are written to speak to other Africans are perceived by the international community? >> Okwiri Oduor: Well, I could start answering that by giving you my wish list of what I hope happens. I hope to have more art taught in schools. I hope for more interactions between Africans and the [inaudible], you know, the Caribbean and African Americans and I hope for more exchanges between Africans themselves. You know, I hate that if I wanted to go to school in South Africa or in Ghana or in Tanzania, I have to pay the same fees that a European or an American has to pay, but I have to pay Visa fees and I think that's sad. I hope that there will be more cultural and artistic exchanges between Africans. I'd love to go to Nigeria and learn [inaudible] and for I don't know a South African to come to Kenya or Tanzania and learn Swahili and I'd love to see more African languages taught in schools and I'd love to see more work being done in translating African languages into other African languages or into English. I'd love to see more exchanges between Anglo fluent and [inaudible] and francophone Africa. I'd love to see more people writing in Swahili and Uribe and Lingala and Zulu and, you know, [inaudible] Sukuma, all those African languages. And I think all of these things, I'd love to see more better distribution of books in Africa. You know, I was in Johannesburg the other day and I was very surprised to find that there's a thriving literary culture there and I was not aware of that until I went there and in fact, it's very sad I mean it's very sad that I cannot access these books unless I'm in South Africa. That I can't find them in Nairobi, I can't find them in Lagos, I can't find them, you know, in other African cities, it's sad. I'd love to read other Africans, but the distribution networks are not where they should be. I'd like to see book taxes slashed because right now they're just horrendous. I'd like to see more poetry being written. Yeah, I think there's so many things that can be done which cumulatively affect, which improve the state of literature and I think all these things can be done and will have an effect on that. What is the other part of your question? >> Eve Ferguson: I think you answered it. And at this time that concludes my portion of the program and I'd like to open up the floor to questions from the audience for Okwiri. >> Okwiri Oduor: Thank you. >> Speaker 2: I have a general question and a specific question and I'll stick to the specific question. I was in [inaudible] in 1971 and I heard a [inaudible] poetry reading at one point, which is-- and for those of you who are not familiar with this, it's kind of a [inaudible] Swahili poetry tradition, usually it-- well in the case of when I was there, it was [inaudible]. And I wondered what has happened to that. Is that still [inaudible], is that still being done, are there people at least along the coast in the Swahili coastal communities from Mogadishu all the way down to Mozambique is that still happening? >> Okwiri Oduor: I really hope that's still happening. I think I've heard of the Maulidi Festival, I'm not sure actually. I really can't tell you for sure, which I think it's sad because that's another thing on my wish list, I'd love to travel much more within African countries and attend more festivals. I'm not sure about that unfortunately I can't answer you. >> Bernadette Paolo: Okwiri, that was very [inaudible] and the conversation was equally interesting. >> Okwiri Oduor: Thank you. >> Bernadette Paolo: You were writing about a great deal of emotion [inaudible] and that's followed by a very honest series of answers. So my question to you is are those characters that you developed, are they predicated on associations that you've had or are these experiences that you feel were just sort of a transference to the character? >> Okwiri Oduor: Well to the extent that an artist can't create art from without themselves, they have to create what's within themselves. So I guess the characters in that sense are characters from my own life or maybe extensions of myself. But I would go with the latter which is that their transferences of experiences. For example, in My Father's Head I had just been working between Somalia and the north eastern part of Kenya right before the Kenyan incursion into Somalia where Kenya sent its troops in Somalia and, you know, we've seen the repercussions, they're still being belt today and unfortunate events. So I was so far away from home and it made me think a lot about, you know, what is home, you know, [inaudible] is home what we make it. So seeing as I was on the road and doing all these things and meeting death in many forms, it made me think a lot about, you know, the meaning of home. So in that way that experience is really transferring to my work. >> Speaker 3: Hello great reading, great questions for the Q and A. You mentioned [inaudible] as one of your literary influences. What are some of the literary techniques that you may have influenced by her as well? >> Okwiri Oduor: I don't know what techniques specifically, but what I think I learned from her was how to use emotions and also how to use silence to speak very loud words and, you know, how the things that you withhold are the things that speak the loudest words. Also just how she layers and textures her novels and, you know, the colors. It's just a very enriching experience, it's-- I don't have words to explain what it feels like to read her and I would love to meet her someday. Yeah, so I learned not techniques specifically, but art I guess. >> Speaker 4: You mentioned that you used to write [inaudible] the influences of [inaudible]. Do you see yourself publishing in [inaudible] in the future? >> Okwiri Oduor: Yes, actually I just published on Jalada the literary journal I was talking about earlier, I just published a translation that I made of [inaudible] story, which is in our afro feature anthology. This story was called The Last Wave and [inaudible] I translated it to [inaudible] and it was an interesting project that I undertook because it wasn't just translating it, it's just because it's science fiction or, you know, I had to create lots of words that did not exist and I had to think not just in Swahili, but to think-- it was quite interesting, you know. I never learned the jargon, you know, being [inaudible] how to call light years in Swahili I had no idea how to and still have no idea. But it's just rather interesting, it was a rather interesting experience that the first translation I did was one in which I had to create all this language for. But at the same time it's not that strange to me because I feel like even within the English that I write I'm constantly having to make up or not make up English, but make up a way of using the English so that it's not in English and it's in [inaudible] other Englishes and I feel that yeah it's something I'm constantly experiencing in my work so it was interesting to me to do the same thing that I'm doing in English, but in Swahili. >> Eve Ferguson: Anymore questions? >> Speaker 5: Hi Okwiri. >> Okwiri Oduor: Hi [inaudible]. >> Speaker 5: Wonderful to have you here. I'm wondering if and how your [inaudible] has changed since you won-- as a writer has changed since you won the Caine prize, have you changed your artistic practice or do you see yourself differently because everyone has fallen for you work or has it [inaudible] the way you sort of conduct or create your [inaudible]? >> Okwiri Oduor: Well the thing is I think when I won the Caine prize I sort of blogged that I was working on a novel and maybe I shouldn't have because everyone asks me about it. But and so now I find I have to work on it. But it's good, it keeps me accountable. I did feel I was-- I did think of myself as a writer before, but now I feel like there's more eyes on me. Sometimes it feels overwhelming because it feels like I'm expected to do a particular kind of writing or I'm expected to hit certain deadlines or, you know, everyone's asking, you know, where's your work, we're waiting for your work. You know, maybe you experienced that I'm not sure, I'd love to hear. >> Speaker 5: [Inaudible] talking about definitely. >> Okwiri Oduor: But it's been amazing because the gift that I received through the prize it meant that I could take time off and just focus on my writing. So in many ways I have settled into myself as a writer because I have no other full-time job and everyone else is going to work and I was there sitting at my computer and I had to confront myself and to think, you know, this is me, this is my life. If I don't write, then I don't deserve the title writer and just half bullying myself into it, calling myself names. You know, you're not a writer like stop pretending you're fooling people so I had to deserve the title so keep going. Yeah pretty much. >> Eve Ferguson: Okay. >> Rob Casper: I think that's a good place to end. Please thank our reader Okwiri Oduor. [ Applause ] [Inaudible] have you sign it and we hope to see you soon. Thank you. >> Speaker 1: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.