An Interview with Ibi Zoboi: Tucson Festival
Amy Morris: Good afternoon
Ibi Zoboi: Good afternoon. Hello
Amy Morris: Hi. My name is Amy Morris. I am one of the librarians in Pima County Library. And we are here at the Tuscan Festival.
Ibi Zoboi: Wonderful.
Amy Morris: And this is Amphi High School who will be interviewing you
Ibi Zoboi: Hi it is great meeting you all.
Gael: Hi, it is a pleasure meeting you. I will start by saying my name is Gael or G depending on which is easier to pronounce but I’m here today to introduce my friends. We are the Amphi book club as you can see and we’re thankful that you have given us the opportunity to interview you today on behalf of our supporters of the Amphitheatre High School Miss Amy Morris and our librarian Miss Burleson. So thank you very much for letting us interview you.
Ibi Zoboi: Thank you for having me. I am sorry I couldn’t be there in person. I was just exhausted. I’m not used to travelling this much so I’m giving myself a break in these troubled times. So, I’m looking forward to your questions and I’ll answer them the best that I can.
Gael: Thank you again for being here Miss Zoboi. The first question I have is in the books in the books do you paint a detailed picture of Brownsville and the residents of the people that live there? Is there any influence from you growing up in Bushwick that influenced in the book?
Ibi Zoboi: Absolutely. And I also lived for about two years in the neighbourhood of Brownsville, and I wanted to set it in Brownsville because instead of Bushwick because Bushwick is gentrified now. I don’t what it looks in Arizona but gentrification in New York looks like where Bodega used to be. Bodega is a corner store. There would probably be a nice coffee shop. So Bushwick when I was growing up there are a lot of burnt down and dilapidated buildings and it was during the war on drugs where there a lot of people who were addicted to drugs and it was treated as a crime instead of an illness what’s happening in Brownsville with Pyrobliss I am making a connection to the war on drugs and what people did to their communities because they were not well. This is not because they wanted to destroy their communities because they were addicted to a substance and it was criminalized. So, I wanted to make a sort of commentary on the fact that we put blame on the victims and not usually the people who cause those neighborhoods to be damaged in that way.So, absolutely Brownsville was definitely based on my childhood in Bushwick but I didn’t want to want to set it in Bushwick because Bushwick has already changed. Brownsville has not been gentrified. It’s in the process of being changed. So it’s almost there but not there and I hope the people who were there can hold on to their communities.
Shireen: Hi, my name is Shireen and recently I’ve read one of your books called American Street and there’s like a lot of rational discrimination and immigration and family separation in that book. And Fabiola went through a lot. How are Fabiola and Okoye similar?
Ibi Zoboi: Oh wow! They are similar. Thank you for pointing that out. Fabiola is a fish out of water, meaning you know her home, her safety was in Haiti. Just like Okoye, his home was in Wakanda. So, she arrives to United States and sees a neighborhood that is in need of help just like Fabiola moved to the West side of Detroit. She didn’t know how to help the neighborhood, but she had family members who were in need of help as well. So, they are very similar. Fabiola is tough and she is a fighter but not quite like Adora Malage but Okoye of course is tough and is a fighter, but she has to have empathy. She has to grow into her empathy. In the way Fabiola had to grow into a fighter and a warrior in order to get her mother out of detention center. So, thank you for pointing that out.
Monica: Hi, my name is Monica, You and I are kind of similar because we both grew up, we were born out of the US. I was born in Sudan and you were born in Haiti. My question for you is: What kind of life did you have in the US after you came here?
Ibi Zoboi: What kind of? Sorry I missed that. What did you say? What kind of?
Monica: Life.
Ibi Zoboi: Life?
Monica: Life. Yes, after you came here?
Ibi Zoboi: So, I came here when I was very young. I was four years old. I heard you thank you so much. I was four years old, so I was younger than you were. But I still feel like like I still haven’t really been Americanised. I’m still very much an outsider in many ways because I’m still connected to my culture. So, life for me was very tough growing up because I wasn’t allowed to do things like play outside with the kids in the neighbourhood because my mother wanted to protect me. She did not like what she thought some of the kids were doing. American culture was something still very foreign to her.So, she didn’t want me to be assimilated. She wanted me to get an American education but not be like an American teen because she had all these stereotypes in her mind about what being an American teen is like. So, I still find it hard to be fully Americanized even as an adult. So even my children find it hard because I still cook cultural foods. Our home is looks like it’s filled with lot of culture. So we’re kind of balancing two worlds in the way that many of you are if your parents are from a different culture. Thank you for that question.
Luam: Hi, my name is Luam. I would like to ask you why did you choose or create Okoye over more prominent characters in the Black Panther?
Ibi Zoboi: I think Okoye is a prominent character. Come to T’challa and Tachaka are cool, Shuri is cool, but Okoye deserves her own story. Okoye is about 18 or 19 years old in the book. So, she’s a teenager and Tree and Mars are a little bit younger than her. So, I think she’s an important character and she’s the one that I most relate to. I relate to Shuri as well. So, I really wanted to write about Okoye.
Gael: Thank you for your time, Miss Zoboi. It was lovely speaking to you.
Ibi Zoboi: Thank you for having me.
