Uwem Akpan was born in Ikot Akpan Eda in Ikot Ekpene Diocese in southern Nigeria. He was educated in Nigeria, Kenya, Nebraska, Washington, and at the University of Michigan, where he received his Master of Fine Arts degree. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003; in 2007, he began teaching at Arrupe College, a Jesuit school of philosophy and humanities in Zimbabwe. He first came to the attention of the reading public with two short stories in The New Yorker, followed by a collection of stories, Say You're One of Them, published by Little, Brown in 2008 to great acclaim. In April of that year, he spoke with Susan Felch at a session of Calvin College's biennial Festival of Faith and Writing. An edited excerpt from their extended conversation follows.

Are all of the stories in Say You're One of Them like the stories in The New Yorker? Are they all about children from Africa and written from the point of view of these children?

The five pieces—two novellas, two short stories, and one short short story—are all about children, issues that affect children; but what I tried to do was to tell these stories from different perspectives. One of the novellas, "Luxurious Hearses," is narrated in the third person, but it's still about the plight of a child stuck in a bus, traveling from northern Nigeria to southern Nigeria. He was born in the south. The father was a Catholic, the mother was a Muslim. One thing led to another, and the mother ran away with the children up north. The two brothers started practicing Islam at the ages of three and five, and one of them got really deep into Islam and joined a marauding crowd that went around burning churches. At one point, he stole something, and they cut off his hand. Yet he really thought he was a Muslim, until there was a riot in the city, and his friends started saying to him, "You were not born here. You were baptized as a baby. You are not a true Muslim." And they wanted to kill him. So he ran away and joined the Christians fleeing south, but he had to hide his hand all the way in that bus, because if they had known he was Muslim, they would have eliminated him. So that's what the story is about. I'll let you figure out whether he got to the south and how the trip went.

The other novella has to do with child trafficking. I needed to explore for myself—how does a child get trapped in this? How do all the adults also get trapped in this? Somebody shows up and says to the women in the city, "Oh, somebody needs nannies in Europe, somebody needs nannies in the U.S. and there is money to be earned here." And they jump at it. It is only when they arrive in the West they realize they've arrived in a brothel and can't get out of it. I wanted to see how children feel their way through these issues, and what that does to them.

The shortest of the stories in the collection is about two children in Ethiopia. Their parents are very liberal—a Christian family and a Muslim family. Their children play together, they call each other best friends, and then something happens one night, and the two children can no longer communicate. Their parents say, "No, you can't talk to your best friend," and the story is about how the children look for ways to still communicate before the final break between the families occurs.

One of my students asked about your favorite Bible story, and you said you loved the Old Testament stories and the miracles that show the power of God. Yet in your own stories it seems that God is not very powerful. He doesn't save a 12-year-old from becoming a prostitute, and he doesn't save a nine-year-old from witnessing the murder of her mother. So how do you think about the presence of God in these situations of desperation and great evil, which are there in real life and are there in your stories?

Yes, I like the miracles in the Old Testament, because they're just incredible. I mean the whole thing of Moses standing there, and when they're holding his hands up, they're winning in battle, and when they drop his hands, they are losing. The awesome power of God is unmistakably evident in the Old Testament, so much so that people begin to think that when the Messiah came, he would be this very powerful presence, he would save them from suffering, he would liberate them in a very concrete way, and there would no suffering anymore. But Christ came and suffered terribly and died, and it's become very difficult for some people to accept this—that God can put his son through suffering and allow human beings to choose. It's something still happening today. People suffer terribly, because of bad choices. This kid is innocent, but the politicians have made the decisions in their country to steal the money and not to implement good policies. There is evil in my stories and in the world.

I hope these stories will allow people who take religion very seriously and don't like their religion to be critiqued to look and say, "All right, this is one way religious people act, people who say they've been baptized. They have seen the way, they believe, they hope to go to heaven. But this is one way we fall. We have ideals, but we don't measure up many times." And there is sin. So these stories could serve as a critique to remind us, when we say we believe, to think, "What do we believe in?" When we are very triumphalistic about religion, and there's no humility at all involved, and we are ready to kill another person because of religion, where does that take us? I have no answer to the problem of evil in the world.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, another Jesuit, sometimes felt his vocation as a priest and his vocation as a poet were in conflict. Not always, but sometimes. What do you think about your two vocations, or do you not think of writing as a vocation?

I do think of it as a vocation. More and more I'm beginning to believe that Christ was a priest and a poet. The parables he told, the way he always found a way to be among the excluded—there was something very poetic about that. And even more so, since Christ is God, what that immediately means is that when he was sitting there with the apostles, he could read their minds, he knew what each was thinking, but he had a way of allowing them to be. I find that very poetic.

That is how I see my vocation. I should be able to be poet and priest, even if I'm not writing. I still want to have that poetic sentiment to connect with my congregation. But it's difficult, I must say, since the particular art form I've chosen is one I must sit alone to practice. Maybe if I were a diocesan priest, it would be easier. But a religious priest who lives in a community finds it more difficult. I've been lucky that I write at night when the world is asleep and my community is asleep. For a long time I did not have a laptop, so I had to wait to use the community computers until everyone else had gone to bed and had finished writing their seminary papers, their theology reflections, their philosophy reflections. Then I would have access to the computers to do my writing and to get off the computers before they came back, because this would be counted against you. The idea was, "These computers were meant for students to write their papers, and you are here writing some stories—we don't know." One time I was so down, I thought I should leave the seminary because these vocations could not be combined. I was losing my stories, many of them, because I had no place to really save them. Viruses would come through and the computers would crash. So I finally said to myself, "Okay, I'm thinking of leaving." I sent emails out to my friends and said, "This is my last year." And then one friend wrote back to me and said, "No, impossible. I'm going to send you a laptop." So he got his laptop, shipped it to me in Kenya, and the bulk of the stories in this collection were saved on that laptop. It was an old laptop, but it did its work. It would take five minutes to boot, but it saved me, it saved me.

So yes, there are struggles. I don't get to choose where I go, and if you are in a parish situation, you don't really have control over your time. It's complex, but it's a kind of complexity I'm ready to engage in, because these children, they've suffered, they've suffered far more than I am suffering. I keep saying to the Blessed Sacrament, "Listen, God, do not make the pain of trying to tell these children's stories be too painful, more painful than what the stories are, what the children are going through." You meet these children, they have a sense of humor, they still wake up every day. So that's how I've been trying to do this.

How do you want people in Africa to read your stories and how do you want people who are not in Africa to read your stories? A technical way to ask this question would be, "Who is your ideal reader?" But my students have a more personal question, "Does Father Akpan want us to change as a result of having read his stories?"

I want to celebrate the voices of these children. But in "Luxurious Hearses," I also wanted to talk about the Muslim-Christian conflict. In Nigeria, there were many Muslims who got killed trying to hide Christians, the southerners, who were caught up in the conflict. And as the violence moved south, there were Christians who tried to hide Muslims and were hunted down and killed. We don't celebrate that enough in our country or in our world. I want to say, "People are doing this; this sort of heroism is possible."

Generally the first thing I hope to do is to give the reader a chance to enter into the context of these children, to be moved by the story or stories. For me that is the key: to grab readers and put them in this situation and let them struggle with their emotions. At the end, let the reader decide what he or she wants to do. One of the powerful verses in the Bible is Jesus saying to the would-be apostles, "Come and see." Once you have seen, if you can un-see, fine. If you cannot un-see, then it's for you to know what to do. I want my stories to work first as stories, before people say, "Okay, now I want to do something." Then if people begin to want to do something for African children or for children in America, or even to love their own families more, I would be very happy. A lady in Ann Arbor said, "I read your story, and I went back home, and I really hugged my daughter. We've been quarreling forever, and I gave her the story to read, and we really sat down and talked." That meant a lot to me.

Susan M. Felch is professor of English at Calvin College and director of the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture .