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INTERVIEWER
r>There’s a phrase that comes up in a lot of your books: “All stories are true.” What do you mean by that, and how does it relate to your work?
WIDEMAN
The source of that phrase is Chinua Achebe, and Achebe’s source is Igbo cultures, traditional West African philosophy, religion, etcetera. It’s an Old World idea and it’s very mysterious. Rather than say I understand it, let’s say I’ve been writing under the star or the question mark of that proverb for a long time and I think it’s something that challenges. You peel one skin and there’s another skin underneath it—all stories are true. It was a useful means to point out that you don’t have a majority and a minority culture, you don’t have a black and a white culture—with one having some sort of privileged sense of history and the other a latecomer and inarticulate—you have human beings who are all engaged in a kind of never-ending struggle to make sense of their world.
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