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Your 1972 short story "Girls at War" is surprisingly feminist in its nuanced view of African women, yet it voices none of the stereotypical polemics common to Western feminism. Stylistically, how did you manage to compress so much information and insight into such a short narrative? If you've been through a civil war and come close to all kinds of death, it's not very difficult to make a whole lot of talk organize itself into a strong, brief statement. One of the ideas behind this story is the humbug of powerful men in that difficult situation. Then there is the innocence and idealism of schoolgirls compared to the sickening cynicism of those "in charge." Put the two together and you have a very tragic story.

The female characters who pop up in your fiction are always interesting because, even though they tend to speak softly, what they actually say and represent is always significant. Are you conscious of this when you are writing? Yes. Because what they stand for is the very thing which the male-dominated society does not consider. If you go back to Things Fall Apart, all the problems Okonkwo has from beginning to end are related to ignoring the female! And that is where he is a flawed hero. Women stand for compassion.

Although the endings of some of your novels and short stories seem pessimistic, they also serve a therapeutic function. Should a well-written tragedy provoke catharsis and healing? Yes. Tragic things for me are so close to the meaning of art that it's almost inevitable that stories of importance must end that way. Someone came to see me in the hospital after my car accident and said, "Why should this happen to you?" I replied: "Who do you have in mind this should've happened to?" All my experience says that life is tragic, but not in the sense of meaning "hopeless." Life is tragic because you are supposed to rise above tragedy, not because life is pointless or futile. Things of great weight "come heavy."

Nothing of great worth comes easily? That's right. The lessons we learn, the wisdom we acquire, all come from this recognition. The nature of experience is heavy. So we shouldn't spend all our energy running away from the truth. This is why you cannot explain why there is suffering. It's there—you must recognize it, and engage it.

I know you survived the Nigerian civil war while supporting the Biafran secession. In retrospect, do you think it would have been better to have attempted some sort of United States of Nigeria, where Biafra might have had more cultural autonomy, yet remained part of Nigeria under a federal authority? That was actually what was proposed! The element that is absent from what you just said is that the British—who had granted independence to Nigeria and left—warned us they were not going to tolerate any fiddling with the Nigerian model they had created. That is what determined the fate of Biafra. 

After teaching undergrads at a liberal-arts college like Bard for almost two decades, what have you concluded about using multicultural literature to eradicate racism and xenophobia? The number of children who are reading Things Fall Apart in high school has increased enormously, especially among the students who take my classes. For me, that's a very good sign. Because this generation has a lot of responsibility waiting for it. And how they link up with others their age in distant places may well determine how our civilization survives in this century.