Binti: The Complete Trilogy

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Three Augusts in a row, Binti’s story came to me. It happened each time I returned to Buffalo, New York, after spending the summer with my family in the south Chicago suburbs of Illinois. In the August of 2016, I wanted to take a break from writing. I didn’t think I’d have the ending to Binti’s story for a while, years even, and I was fine with that. Then I sat down one evening and the entire story came to me. First the end, then the middle, then the beginning.

Over three days, I scribbled down the plot in the little Ankara cloth-covered journal I’d bought in the Lagos airport. But I didn’t answer the call to adventure immediately. I had courses to teach and another novel to edit. I went to South Africa and gazed at the Lion’s Head, went to the Arizona desert and followed a Pepsis wasp, I saw the White House while it was still worth seeing, and I had a conversation about microbes with a Ph.D. student during a lunch with the African Cultural Association at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. When winter break arrived, the moment I took off my professor hat to give the writer’s cap that I always wear some fresh air, whatever it is that takes hold of me to make me write descended on me.

So first and foremost I want to thank that thing that grabs, that whispers, that urgently tells. I’d like to thank my Ancestors, who walk in front of, behind, beside, fly above, and swim beneath me. Thanks to my daughter, Anyaugo, for demanding to know what happened to Okwu. Thanks to my editor Lee Harris and my agent, Don Maass, for their excellent feedback. And thanks to my beta reader Angel Maynard, who responded with, “Mind blown!” after reading the first clean draft. And finally, thank you to the rest of my immediate family, my mother, sisters Ifeoma and Ngozi, brother Emezie, nephews Dika and Chinedu, and niece Obioma. Without you all energizing my life, the Binti Trilogy would never ever have happened. I love you all.