A. Igoni Barrett Quotes

A White man in Lagos has no voice louder than the dollar sign branded onto his forehead

My say is this: when you live in a worldwide bullring, bullshit is what you'll get. If they say I cannot be my mother's son, then it must be that I'm her daughter.

[...]No human being has ever directly seen their own face. It's impossible within nature - the most you can do is glimpse your nose and, for those with full lips, the curve of you upper lip. And so we only see ourselves through external sources, whether as images in mirrors, pixels on the screen, or words on the page, words of love from a mother, words of hate from an ex-lover.
Long before Furo's story became my own, I was already trying to say what I see now, that we are all constructed narratives.

Womanhood comes with its peculiar burdens, among them the constant reminder of a subordinate status whose dominant symptom was uninvited sexual attention from men

It is easier to be than to become.

Lagos was built from blood and sweat, and raw ambition. Abuja was designed as a playground for the rich.

On this island of existence, the survivor is the man who understands he is trapped.

Dreams can lose their way and turn up on the wrong side of sleep.

No one asks to be born, to be black or white or any color in between and yet the identity a person is born into becomes the hardest to explain to the world

And he learnt how it felt to be seen as a freak: exposed to wonder, invisible to comprehension. About

But love does not mean marriage, a baby, forever. Love means you make me happy until you don't.