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Daily Maverick

Post-festival blues, coffee with Abi Daré and the rage that becomes fiction

Abi Daré's fiction holds both fury and grace; it's a call to pay attention, to care and to act. The Franschhoek Literary Festival always leaves me a little undone – dizzy from too many beautiful sentences, breathless from conversations that move the soul sideways. This year was no exception. I returned home sleep-deprived and elated, still tasting the air of rooms that held stories like flame. And just as the post-festival blues began to creep in, I found a cure: coffee with Abi Daré. We met the day after the festival, still wrapped in the echoes of my panel discussion with her, John Boyne and Sven Axelrad. Abi carries the kind of presence that makes you sit up straighter – soft-spoken, but with a quiet fire in her eyes. Over cappuccinos, we spoke about girlhood, grief, climate rage, class mobility and how fiction can do the hard work of truth-telling without breaking the reader. I began by asking her about the journey from The Girl with the Louding Voice to And So I Roar, and the pressure, both internal and external, of writing a second novel. 'After The Girl with the Louding Voice was published, I was exhausted but proud,' she said. 'And then came that question every writer dreads: 'So, what's next?' My agent asked if I was working on something, and suddenly I felt this enormous pressure to perform. I tried writing something that just didn't work, and that's when my mother called.' Abi laughed, remembering her mother's critique. 'She said, 'The book isn't finished. You need to do more with this character.' I told her, 'Mom, the book literally ends with the words The End', but she wasn't having it. She knows me too well. The next thing I know, she's sending me a 20-year plan for what Adunni (the main character in the book) should do next.' That conversation, together with the persistence of real-world issues affecting girls in Nigeria, pushed Abi to research her next book. What began as a broad Google search for 'top issues facing the girl child globally' slowly narrowed into a sharp, heart-wrenching understanding of what she needed to write next. 'I zoomed in from global to Africa, from Africa to west Africa, and then to Nigeria,' she explained. 'I looked at child marriage, gender-based violence, child labour, female genital mutilation, the use of girls in so-called baby factories… I knew that if I was going to write another book, it had to matter. I had to care deeply about the story.' I told her what I'd said on stage: that her book is beguiling in its ability to be both entertaining and devastating: 'You slip into the narrative, lulled by humour and charm and then you realise you're deep in a story about gender-based violence, climate change and generational injustice. It's a rare balancing act.' Abi explained that she does not have a blueprint for how to accomplish this. 'I just know that I write the hard stuff first. I do the research, watch videos, sometimes I cry. And then later, I go back and try to claw out whatever light I can find – a song, a joke, a ridiculous misunderstanding. That's when the humour shows up. That's where I find breath again.' We talked about a scene set in a forest where a few rural girls being offered for a ritual 'sacrifice' tell their story – a structural and emotional crescendo in the book, with each girl in the circle representing an 'issue' facing rural girls in Nigeria. 'I agonised over that,' she said. 'I wanted the girls to speak their truths, but I didn't want to overwhelm the reader. I focused on tone. I kept it tender, even when it was raw.' Abi's gift is exactly that – her ability to deliver unbearable truths with a feather-light touch. She makes readers laugh in one paragraph and flinch in the next. Abi uses a character, Zee-Zee, to show how education shapes voice, confidence and visibility. Zee-Zee's ease with language and pop culture becomes a stark contrast to the other girls, whose lack of education limits not only their expression but the way the world sees or refuses to see them. Abi explained: 'Characters like Zee-Zee, embody privilege and the belief that some girls are immune to the horrors others face. But none of us are. Privilege doesn't shield you. 'That's the point: we have to stand together, because the threads of gender inequality connect us as women.' As our conversation deepened, Abi spoke candidly about the class tensions that shaped her own life – about moving between worlds, and the emotional labour of navigating those divides. About rage. 'Writing The Girl with the Louding Voice changed me,' she said. 'After the book, I couldn't go back to Lagos and pretend. I started visiting schools in the slums. I read to the girls. I paid rent for their classrooms. I saw girls using newspaper instead of sanitary towels. I couldn't unsee it.' That awareness threads through her stories. Her fiction pulses with empathy – not in the abstract, but in the granular: the rust on a blade, the silence of a girl who's been hurt, the joy of a mother finding hope in a flooded field. And always, she returns to the girls. Their voices, their futures, their fire. In And So I Roar there is a drought in the village and the community blames the failed crops (a result of climate change) on girls and women, whom they see as a last-resort form of 'currency' or survival. The girl, in this case, is no longer a child to nurture or educate; she becomes a resource to be used, often through child marriage, labour or exploitation. She is 'harvested' for economic relief. 'If the crops fail, the girl becomes the crop,' Abi said, explaining how climate change intersects with poverty, violence and education. 'If her parents can't sell food, they sell her. It's brutal. But it's real.' While researching the intersection of gender and climate change, Abi followed this hunch – that in deeply superstitious communities, women might be blamed for environmental disasters. Unsure if this was far-fetched, she reached out to a grassroots organisation working in rural Nigeria. To her astonishment, a local expert confirmed it: women were indeed being accused of witchcraft when the rains failed to come. What began as intuition became a chilling fact, and it found its way into her fiction. 'I thought I was making that up,' she said. 'But then I spoke to a man who runs a green centre in Nigeria, he confirmed it: women are being blamed for the weather. That became part of the book.' Our conversation turned, inevitably, to tradition and patriarchy – the sacred cows that are often protected at women's expense. I shared a story about traditional courts in South Africa and the ways in which the Traditional Courts Bill tried to force rural women into systems that silenced them. 'We have to keep roaring,' Abi responded. 'In the book, I show how it is possible for the wives of the chiefs to slowly shift. It's quiet at first, then loud. That's how change happens. Not always through outsiders, but through someone inside – a woman who knows the language, who's walked the road.' Abi doesn't write polemics. She writes people. But the politics is there, humming beneath every sentence. 'I start with the human,' she said. 'But you can't separate the political from the human, especially in a place like Nigeria. You can't ignore the failed systems, the corruption, the injustice. I don't want to write trauma for trauma's sake. I want to write it in a way that leads to empathy. To action.' And she does. Her books are bridges – from rage to compassion, from laughter to resistance. Our conversation drifted from literature to lineage, from politics to parenting. Abi spoke of her daughters, of watching YouTube videos with them about girls walking long distances to school, of grounding privilege in empathy. Her fiction holds both fury and grace – a call to pay attention, to care, to act. Our conversation left me with the thought that stories such as And So I Roar don't just tell the truth. They shift it, gently, towards justice. DM