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xiii Preface I lived in Nigeria from when I was seven until I was ten but, before writing this book, I had almost no conscious memory of that time, or indeed of the first twelve years of my life. There were things I knew had happened because they were a part of the family stories my mother told, but these were far from being direct recollections of my own experiences. The first time I wrote about Nigeria the story startled me with its immediacy. It came from an unknown place inside myself. It was the first short story I ever got published and it contained the germ of this book. I made a list then of incidents, things, and people I associated with my time in Nigeria. Several years later, during a residency at an artists’ colony, I started writing from the list, choosing whatever item drew me that day. The stories came as if they had been gathering inside for years. Beyond the small effort each morning of launching myself from whichever point on the list had drawn me, I did not try to make anything happen. My only work was the moment to moment work of being true to the words and images as they came. As I wrote I was startled again by the vividness with which Nigeria became present to me. The sensory perceptions were so acute I doubted I could be inventing them. Nigerian artifacts xiv such as the wooden figures of twins came into my mind with names—Ibejis—I would later check and find accurate. In this way writing returned memory to me, and yet it was vital to me that I did not have to make what I was writing objectively true. In writing I was discovering truth. I could only do that by refusing to fret about whether what I wrote was actually true or not, so I gave myself, in the writing of this book, complete permission to lie. As I wrote I found I was writing the story of a child to whom truth, fact, sense were desperately important but who nonetheless told stories she knew weren’t true. She told so many stories she lost track of what was true and what wasn’t. The particular panic that gripped her then was one of the few feelings I’d always remembered . I knew that girl was me. Some of the lies I told as a child were of the ordinary, boastful sort, but some were an attempt to tell truths that were at the time (and for many years afterwards) unspeakable. I have come to believe that in each of us the truth wants to tell itself. Often it can only do so through fiction. P r e f a c e ...

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