-: Well, Chigozie Obioma, thank you for coming.
I appreciate you.
-: Thank you, Professor Kalu Osiri,
for inviting me here.
-: So, I'd like for you to tell us a little bit about
how you came to develop such a love and passion for reading.
-: I came to reading as I like to say by serendipity.
I was living in Nigeria in (inaudible)
in the west of Nigeria, which is in West Africa,
and I was a little boy at the time,
and I liked to play football,
which is soccer in the American plans.
I would stay out late, against my parents' wanting,
and play in swampy areas,
which would always lead me to getting infected
with usually malaria.
I ended up at the hospital, and my dad would stay with me.
Usually spend the night with me.
And I remember that during those times, I just,
for whatever reason, I just wanted him
to always tell me stories.
He would tell me these stories,
and so later on,
when I had grown to be older,
one day I asked him, "Dad, why don't you tell me a story?"
At that time I was much older.
I wasn't falling ill as frequently anymore.
He was like, "Well, you can read.
Why don't you read them yourself?"
He gave me a book from his shelf.
It was dog-eared, without the cover.
I just remember sitting down and reading that book,
and becoming very perplexed, and fascinated,
because I discovered that one of the best of the stories
or the most memorable of the ones he told me,
had been gotten from the book.
Before then, I used to revere my dad.
I thought this was this great genius
who made up these things.
I would brag to my friends. But then, this was the source.
This was what he was doing.
He would read these things
and present them as though they were his creation.
The moment I discovered
that this was in fact the source of stories,
I began to read very much, and they encouraged me.
At some point, I was reading so much,
that I could not even pay attention
in the classes any longer.
I would put books under the desk and be reading in class.
I even started failing.
They had to put limitations on my reading.
I've just written an essay for The New York Times on this,
coming January 9. Actually no, December 9.
It is a longer essay if you want to read that story.
That was how I came to loving reading.
-: That's wonderful.
It's certainly wonderful to have you on the campus,
on the campus of The University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
I'm collaborating with one of your colleagues,
(inaudible).
He and I are taking group of students to Ghana next year,
and so there will be business students
and non business students,
who are going to be working on a project in Ghana,
and one of the things we are doing is he,
being an English professor, is going to suggest a book,
perhaps a fiction, that students are going to read,
that will help students gain some access
to the Ghanaian culture.
Some people might be wondering,
why do business students have to read fiction?
I'd like to get your thoughts on that.
What are some of the benefits of reading?
-: I would answer that question
by taking you back to a
kind of an international event
that happened in Mexico some time ago. I think in 2006.
Where the chief of the police force,
in a particular city,
decided that all of the new recruits,
and even the police officers,
all of them had to read.
He made a list that was required for them all to read.
It was, it made the news, because people were wondering,
why should police men and women have to read
as a requirement to being officers?
He gave three reasons, that I think were very interesting.
He said that, number one, reading, obviously,
equips you with vocabulary and the ability to
articulate your thoughts in a more concise and clear ways,
so apparently gives you a repertoire of words
and so you become more versatile with language.
Number two reason he gave was that reading helps the people
to acquire experience by proxy.
Thereby, becoming better empathetic people.
I like to, I tell my students in the fiction classes,
that in fact the idea of fiction itself,
whether it be through the medium of novels or film,
is a human mystery.
Because it's kind of a miracle that we,
even though we know going into a film studio or cinema
that these is make believe, these characters did not exist,
the experiences that they have are fictive,
yet we invest in them, we find ourselves crying,
being, some people just saw the play version
of The Fishermen in London.
Someone wrote me this long email about how they were crying.
Even though he knows that this is fiction.
So why? It's just because there's something
about the human experience, the human condition,
that we all can identify in those characters,
even though they are in fact not true characters.
They are not human beings.
If we read about a situation
and we continuously invest in them,
we come to a better understanding of what it means,
for instance, to suffer grief,
and we become more empathetic.
Police officers or business students,
going into particular places,
where their own family
or is different from their own experience,
would have the ability to better empathize
with whatever they encounter there.
The third reason he gave was that reading is in fact
an ethical practice.
He made the point, the argument,
that there is a humility to reading.
So you again, you surrender yourself to this experience.
Except maybe you have a read for classes,
nobody forces you to read.
So you're surrendering yourself in some ways to it.
It makes you, in many ways, a more humble, a better person,
somebody who has the ability to better live a more
(inaudible) life in general,
which I think makes good leaders and entrepreneurs.
And I would add that reading in fact has the ability to,
it broadens your mind.
It gives you ... It, because it's like energy,
or exercise, like exercise,
you're exercising your mind, your intellect,
so the more you read, the more active your mind is,
so it's not dulled by reading.
Rather it's tempered and sharpened by it.
This is why I think that most great people,
even Bill Gates,
it doesn't matter what their field is, read.
Obama just gave a list on his Facebook page a few days ago
of like all the books he just read in the past few months.
The guy is a voracious reader.
Name world leaders, even Warren Buffet,
and so I think for business students, medical students,
reading will enhance whatever you're trying to do.
-: That's really powerful, because,
so the way I'm thinking about this is,
if the more business students read,
they essentially are developing
to becoming more effective leaders, more ethical leaders,
and they increase their emotional intelligence.
-: Yeah. Yes.
That is of course business terminology,
but yes, it does do all of these things,
and in fact, you talk about how UNL,
you guys are taking students to Africa,
how UNL business school or English department,
architecture and all this different fields,
should have some kind of global outlook to them,
so if you are that kind of person who wants to
encounter different cultures,
then you have to have the ability to be more empathetic
towards different people and diverse cultures.
Having developed that empathetic ability
would take you places.
If you go to contacts or places where
there are certain things that are so different,
in a negative way or diminutive way,
to your experience,
instead of being condescending towards that experience
or that reality,
you will be able to better manage it.
-: Wonderful.
What next should we expect from you?
What do you have cooking now, on your stove?
-: I don't know if we've mentioned it earlier,
but I'm primarily a fiction writer,
so I teach fiction here at UNL.
I have my second novel being published
in January, on January 8,
and we are launching it here in the home front,
at the Johnny Carson Center.
The title of the novel is
An Orchestra of Minorities.
It's a novel set in Umuahia,
in the east of Nigeria,
and in the early 2000's.
It's a love story about this very provincial guy
who is a poultry farmer
who falls in love with a woman who is from a kind of a
well to do family and is about to become a medical doctor
and so they face these difficulties in their relationship.
He sacrifices everything he has to be able to be with her.
But there's a twist there,
in that the story is told by a Chi,
which is in the Igbo
cosmology is the personal god,
or a kind of a guardian spirit
that we believe every human inhabit.
The story is told as a testimony to (inaudible)
supreme god, and so it's a cosmological novel
that takes place, half of it, in cosmic space,
and half in terrestrial space,
on the earth.
It's very ...
It's broad in scope.
The Chi is a (inaudible) spirit
that has been coming and going for some seven hundred years
so the novel also charts a map of Igbo history.
In fact, some of it takes place in America,
in the 1900's.
So the Chi had embodied a host who was a slave,
so through the Chi's
own map of history,
I'm able to chart this long historical evolution
of the Igbo people and the West African history, I'll say.
I hope that every, all of your students, and everyone,
will attend that lunch, and we'll read the book.
-: Certainly.
Chigozie Obioma, author and professor
at the University of Nebraska,
thank you so much for joining me.
-: Thank you very much Doctor Kalu Osiri.