Tope Folarin finds his place in the literary world

Tope Folarin is the winner of the 2013 Caine Prize for African writing.

There was a time when Tope Folarin came almost daily to Politics and Prose not to sip iced lattes, as he’s doing on this recent Sunday afternoon, but to learn his craft by reckoning with language. Back then, he sat in this bookstore cafe and copied poetry into a raggedy notebook.

“It pained me that I couldn’t afford to buy the books,” Folarin says, leaning in to take another sip.

Four years ago, as he wrote down verse after verse, his academic pedigree as a graduate of Morehouse College and aRhodes Scholar were meaningless. He was out of work and unsure where he fit into the Washington scene. He did know that the story he would someday tell would be of the complexity of blending cultural and national identities. In his case, Ni­ger­ian and American.

Last week, the 31-year-old was awarded the prestigious Caine Prize, given annually for a short story by an African writer. With the prize, Folarin gained instant legitimacy, but his achievement also spurred a conversation in the literary world about the boundaries of the far-flung African diaspora and what it means to be an African writer.

Folarin, who has lived in Washington, D.C., for five years, has not returned to the homeland of his Nigerian parents since he was about a year old. His childhood memories are those of the place he was born, Ogden, Utah, and later Grand Prairie, Tex., where he was reared.

Lagos is a place he sees only in his dreams. His mother, who became ill when Folarin was young, returned there when he was 6 years old. He has not seen her since. She and other relatives in Nigeria are souls with voices he cannot touch.

So is he an African writer? Is he an American writer? Does growing up virtually cloistered in Utah, eating moin moin and jollof rice in a household where Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey are played on repeat, make you Nigerian enough?

“It’s the same conversation I’ve been having my entire life about ‘where do I fit?’ ” Folarin says. “I was prepared for the questions.”

Toying with those queries (and sometimes accusations) has been an important part of Folarin’s coming of age as a storyteller. It is his relationship with Nigeria, a place he hardly knows but at the same time knows intimately, that shapes his writing and sense of self.

Amid the buzz of the bookstore cafe, his voice is devoid of any discernible accent — a result of his father’s insistence that his children mimic newscasters Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. Folarin, slight and ebony-skinned and dressed in a polo shirt and jeans, seems as much at home behind the cafe table as behind his black-framed glasses.

Folarin, an assistant in Washington to a member of the board for the entity that oversees the audits of public companies, says the mosaic of short stories he is currently polishing form a novel, and the story for which he won the Caine Prize — “Miracle” — is a chapter from that as-yet-unpublished book. “Miracle” is set in Texas at an evangelical Nigerian church where the congregation has come to witness the healing powers of a blind pastor-prophet. The prophet praises the flock as those who “haven’t forgotten your people back home.”

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