Petina Gappah Quotes

You know, we're missing so much as African-Americans and we should be concerned about what's going on in Africa.

African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.

Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.

Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They're devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.

Wakanda, in short, is the Africa of black dreams.

I am part of the pan-African diaspora.

I've always said that even before Cameroon, I belong to Africa.

I was raised with a father who really believed in the bridge between all Africans around the world.

There are some people who are happy to be African writers. They are pan-Africanists. I'm not a pan-Africanist. I think African countries have a lot in common. But we are also very different.

As much as I'm a black person from America, I'm a black person from Africa, too.

I believe that a psychological, cultural, and philosophical migration back to Africa will solve our problem.

There's always to me a universality - one of the things I learned early on as a journalist and a writer is that there's a universality in specifics. The more specific you get, the more universal it can be.

One of the things that made the Black Muslim movement grow was its emphasis upon things African. This was the secret to the growth of the Black Muslim movement. African blood, African origin, African culture, African ties. And you'd be surprised - we discovered that deep within the subconscious of the black man in this country, he is still more African than he is American.

We must learn to live the African way. It's the only way to live in freedom and with dignity

Story, finally, is humanity's autobiography.

I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.

Why are so many of us enspelled by myths and folk stories in this modern age? Why do we continue to tell the same old tales, over and over again? I think it's because these stories are not just fantasy. They're about real life. We've all encountered wicked wolves, found fairy godmothers, and faced trial by fire. We've all set off into unknown woods at one point in life or another. We've all had to learn to tell friend from foe and to be kind to crones by the side of the road. . . .

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story.

I glance into the faces of all these people out for a Sunday stroll, but I'm not seeing eyes and noses and mouths. I'm seeing stories. Every person has a story. All the hopes and dreams. And fears. And secrets. In every face.

We know nothing about Africa, although our roots are there in terms of our forbearers. But I mean as far as the average Negro today, he knows nothing about Africa. And I think he's got to face the fact that he is an American, his culture is basically American, and one becomes adjusted to this when he realizes what, what he is.

Everybody's got a story that could break your heart.

The best stories are universal stories that have been told for as long as humanity has existed it's just figuring out new ways to do it, with language, with structure. And so I'm always trying to do that.

Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories.

Some tropes are universal. Boy meets girl. Betrayal and revenge. The search to discover a hidden truth.... A mother's love isn't cliché, it's universal. These things are archetypes. They're the building blocks of myth and legend. They are a big part about what it means to be human.