The mighty novelist and poet Chris Abani will leave you speechless.
This clip from a TED talk he gave this past February in Monterey introduces us to a master storyteller at the top of his art: In the talk, Abani skillfully sets us up for innocent expectations of his Nigerian childhood, feeds into them with cheerful stories about his beloved, opinionated British mother, only to gently tear us apart with tales of police brutality, teenage imprisonment and heart-breaking acts of kindness, often from complete strangers.
In Abani's own words:
What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion. Every day acts of compassion.
Watch this clip on Telling stories of our shared humanity, or an older one on Learning the stories of Africa from the 2007 TED conference. Then have a good cry. Then go & buy the books.
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