Here in the marshy Mid-West it is the season of the long leg wading birds pairing, nesting, and stalking shallow water for tadpoles and fingerlings. Mostly sand hill cranes in profusion but occasionally great blue herons, or most exciting of all, snowy egrets. On another continent prolific novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright Chris Abani was inspired by a similar avian.
He grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria and earned a BA in English from Imo State University, Nigeria; an MA in English, Gender, and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London; and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is the author of the poetry collections Sanctificum (2010), There Are No Names for Red (2010), Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems (2010), Hands Washing Water (2006), Dog Woman (2004), Daphne’s Lot (2003) and Kalakuta Republic (2001). His many books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), Song For Night (2007), The Virgin of Flames (2007), and Becoming Abigail (2006). Abani is the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into many languages. He has also published essays in the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere.
He is currently a professor of English at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Although Abani’s writing is inextricably linked to suffering experienced under Nigeria’s military dictatorship, the author once said of literature, “The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about. I was a writer before I was in prison.”
White Egret
The whole earth is filled with the love of God. –Kwame Dawes
A stream in a forest and a boy fishing,
heart aflame, head hush, tasting the world—
lick and pant. The Holy Scripture
is animal not book.
I should know, I have smoked
the soul of God, psalm burning
between fingers on an African afternoon.
And how is it that death can open up
an alleluia from the core of a man?
How easily the profound fritters away in words.
And the simple wisdom of my brother:
What you taste with abandon
even God cannot take from you.
All my life, men with blackened insides
have fought to keep
the flutter of a white egret in my chest
from bursting into flight, into glory.
—Chris Abani
White Egret from Smoking the Bible. Copyright © 2022 by Chris Abani.
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