Short, poetic and beautiful. This was amazing writing. I admit that his Nigeria may not be the Nigeria of today, but it was wonderful to glimpse the view of identity and being from some before me.

Abani's fiction is sharp and observant. This is a non-fiction treatment of his face, a mixture of Celtic, German and Igbo and others. African history is woven into his story while examining the role of culture, race, language and country. Abani reaches into his own life to further explore the topic. A compelling and fresh view of the face in our world. Abani has given us a gift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6b_S...

Chris Abani's essay is a meditation on his family history, through the lens of his own face - the face of his father, his grandfather... He briefly speaks of the history of his English mother, tracing back to the Norman Conquest, and shifts to the history of his Nigerian father, and the country of his birth and youth. Abani uses humor, mythology, and linguistics to define beauty in a West African context:"In West African thought, compusure creates beauty. Balance. Equanimity. Serenity. The essen...

Abani meditates on the idea of the face: the image you present to the world as well as the front-facing part of his own head - Ancestry, beliefs, language family and history rolled into one. It is a beautiful book - and beauty itself is more than looks as one can learn here.

What Abani labels his Caveat could serve as instruction for essay writing --CAVEATEverything in this book is true, even when the facts have been blunted by time and memory; even as I misremember, even as I misrepresent. Everything in this book is a remembrance, so none of it may be true at all.But it doesn't matter.

September 2021 Book Club. Many good reflections (pun not intended) about how your face is a mirror, a map, a history and a future. Our identity is many things and our face represents some of those things outwardly.

The face is culture, genealogy, emotion, a target, a sight for sore eyes, a wall; Abani explores the multifaceted dimensions of his own visage with candor, humor and wisdom. This was my first Abani and I'm eager to read more!

Abani is an extremely gifted essayist. This poetic memoir deserves to be read multiple times throughout the year...

The second in this series that I've read. It's a great idea--small, smart-looking books by interesting people, each one containing a single essay about their face...and by extension, all the history, family baggage, political ethnography, and everything else that goes along with it. A face connects to just about everything, if you come at it right.Abani uses his essay to write about his mixed-race heritage (his mother is a white Englishwoman, his father a black Nigerian), his complicated family

A short interesting book about looks framing identity.

The second volume I’ve read in the three part essay series that asks authors to write about the face. The structure of this one didn’t work quite as well for me as the Ruth Ozeki volume but I still really enjoyed Chris Abani’s take on the subject. He describes how as a mixed race person he constantly gets mistaken for someone he is not, a refugee from Chad in Nigeria his home country, a Maori in New Zealand, an Aborigine in Australia while in Europe and North America he is simply black. He looks...

As soon as I completed this short book (just 89 or so pages), I knew it was one I’ll need to reread. I read this during my summer reading slump, which was a bad decision because I didn’t retain much of what I read. The mood was all-consuming and even this short, interesting read couldn’t pull me out of it.Chris Abani’s Cartography of the Void is part of the Face series, three short books (so far) by different authors about their faces and identity. I read Ruth Ozeki’s A Time Code, which is part

A really good balance of cultural history and personal history. Some lines about his dad made me teary-eyed (particularly “37. My father is easier to love as a spirit, a ghost, than as a man.”) but were also well integrated with his personal introspection. The definitions of the different types of conceptions of beauty are incredibly interesting.

Just read it for the philosophy of beauty and the variety of ways in which it can be understood--- as balance, as collected-ness, as being true to one's own essence. A perfect companion to Chinua Achebe's Home and Exile, perhaps.

The work of Chris Abani crosses national boundaries. He calls himself a “global Igbo,” referring to his lineage, and to the fact that he has so many foreign influences on his experience as a Nigerian. Brought up privileged in an educated middle-class household with a white British mother and an Oxford-educated Igbo father, Abani had access to western music, American novels, Bollywood films, Indian mysticism as a youth. He was a precocious fourth son, starting to write in his early teens.His face...

Abani is a major writer. This book is a small format 70 page essay on the meaning of "face": the face you present to the world, the face people see, the face we seek to save, and all the issues we must face as humans. I tagged poetry here as well because some of Abani's little lists are magical.Too bad he ended up not being able to use all those bad jokes collected by his brothers.

Love Chris Abani. Love this."There are no easy ways to speak these words. No way to honor love and truth without something getting lost in translation. It is made even more complex when one party is dead, silent to this world. And how do you tell a story that is commonplace and felt by all without giving in to sentimentality. But the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people."

A beautiful little book.But a big heart from Chris Abani makes it a big, great book. A book that I am definitely going to re - read many times. I love this book. Fantastic. What a MASTER PEN! Beautiful.

A short little book for #1 of the year. This memoir covers Chris's relationship with his father, how he is always misidentified by people, Igbo traditions. He cuts right to the heart of things and doesn't waste a word. I would like to read more by this author.