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Essay by Anna Polonyi •

What does it mean to revise a novel? I’ve been doggedly asking this question ever since attending workshop beside Afabwaje Kurian, whose stunningly written debut novel, Before the Mango Ripens, was released on September 24, 2024.

In Mango, Kurian draws a moving portrait of a small Nigerian town in the throes of wresting power from American missionaries. Set in the 1970s, Mango is a tightly plotted work of literary historical fiction that investigates what it means to live in community. Interspersed with occasional dips into the town’s collective consciousness, Kurian follows five central characters on trajectories that come to test their faith and commitment to one another.

Zanya, an ambitious young Nigerian who works for the reverend, sets out to prove himself capable of leading the church. Jummai, a talented cook eager to escape her own family, bears a secret that might prove to be Zanya’s downfall. Tebeya, a passionate doctor trained abroad, has returned home to work at the local clinic, much to her family’s dismay. We also have Katherine, an American nurse at the clinic who secretly resents having to be in Nigeria, let alone report to a Nigerian; and Reverend Jim, who bears a grudge against Zanya so deep, he’s willing to compromise the mission’s work to prove a point.

Kurian is one of those rare writers who can span the epic and the intimate in a single sentence, bringing to life an entire community in all its complexity and contradictions. She pulls it off in a way that seems effortless, but I happen to know it wasn’t.

“To make art sound effortless,” the composer Stephen Sondheim once said, “takes a lot of effort.” And this effort is what Kurian and I discussed in the interview below for CRAFT. It’s the effort of revision—a notoriously elusive aspect of novel writing that has fascinated me for years.

Kurian and I met at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I’d come to our MFA program with the hope of gaining insight into the black box of revision. Still high from completing a first novel draft of my own, I eagerly soaked up all craft concepts thrown my way. In my first semester, our workshop instructor related the story of a woman who’d run up to her at a festival to report that she’d finally completed a draft of her novel. “Congratulations,” our instructor had told her. “Now the real pain begins.” She’d described, with some relish, the look of utter horror on the new writer’s face. As it began to dawn on me that my own work was far from over, I put the question to each of our teachers, with mounting urgency: “So, how do you do it? How do you revise a novel?”

Visiting professor Chris Adrian showed me the tarot cards he’d taped up on his wall to help him envision his project, leaving me impressed but even more mystified. The short story writer Ethan Canin recommended sitting down with a single revision in mind for each writing session, advice that worked well for short form but gave me trouble when it came to longer work. Paul Harding, who led the novel workshop Kurian and I attended, kept recommending time, a writer’s best tool: set the manuscript aside for as long as it takes to forget about it and you’ll gain fresh perspective. But I was brimming with impatience to be done and the advice sounded suspiciously passive: surely there was something I could do?

Looking back, I realize my question was impossibly vast. Our instructors were doing their best to impart what had worked for them. Because revision is a deeply personal endeavor; mystical, even, in the sense that it involves a conversation between you and something greater than yourself, which is the work or the vision for it that compelled you to set pen to paper in the first place.

“Revision is an overlooked, underaddressed, even invisible aspect of our work,” Peter Ho Davies writes in The Art of Revision. Unless you’re a literary scholar or editor, it’s rare to read and compare multiple iterations of the same book-length draft. “Most of us,” Davies notes, “never get to trace the genesis of any work other than our own.” Which is why it’s so exciting to me to glimpse the before and after of a revision process through Kurian’s work.

In its final form, Mango grabs us by the collar from the very first page and doesn’t quite let us go until the end, after we’ve reached a natural culmination point with all strands of the story converging into a grand finale chorus. This kind of forward propulsion was not always apparent. If I had to use just one word to describe the early draft of Mango we read in workshop, it would be: ample. As in: Ambitious in scope. Epic in nature. Generous with its characters. But also: meandering in ways that tempted the reader to wonder where we were headed and why. So what did Kurian do to pull off the stunning feat that Before the Mango Ripens feels like today? And might looking at this magic more closely reveal something about the hidden machinery of revision?

Kurian’s initial draft contained roughly the same cast of characters, but with more of them granted their own point of view. Paradoxically, though we got to experience a wider range of perspectives, this broader approach did not contribute to a stronger sense of the community. The first draft also spanned a much longer period of time—and while arguably more things happened, the story itself did not feel complete. Reading Mango in its final form, I noticed Kurian had made some crucial decisions about whose voices to foreground. While the missionaries’ perspectives were still part of the story, she’d rewritten their chapters so that they almost always shared their pages with a Nigerian character’s point of view.

What emerged from our interview were the tough choices Kurian had to make around whose story she was telling, which resulted in letting go of pages that amounted to nearly half of the book. Below, Afabwaje Kurian talks about revision as a faith walk and the empathic shift that needs to happen, at some point, in every writer’s journey: the distinction between writing for the self and writing with another person’s experience in mind.

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Anna Polonyi: I love genesis stories. Will you tell me yours? As in, what was the initial spark for this book?

Afabwaje Kurian: There were three years of just trying to find my way into the novel. I was writing about a particular protagonist and I was really curious about his history, so I ended up going to Nigeria in 2015 and interviewing many of my relatives who had grown up in the ’70s. Missionaries came to my family’s town in my parents’ childhood, so my family was used to interacting with them. My uncle told me a story—this would have happened in the ’30s or ’40s—about how one of my relatives would walk along with a missionary, and when the missionary got tired, my relative would carry him on his back. My uncle was kind of unfazed by this story but I was really bothered by that image: my relative carrying a white man on his back. For racial reasons, of course. In colonial times, it seems like this was par for the course, carrying the white man’s luggage. But he was carrying the white man himself. That image really stuck with me.

 

AP: And that’s an image that shows up in the book, right?

AK: Yes. Except I flipped it on its head. Instead of just carrying the white man because he’s tired, Zanya carries Reverend Jim Clemens to save him. And that’s something that affects Jim throughout the book. It’s hard for him to come to terms with the fact that he was saved by an African man.

 

AP: One thing that really struck me in Mango is nuance. Given our current cultural context, it would have been easy to frame the missionaries as the bad guys. But the text refuses to do this. It’s critical toward their venture but it also allows space for them to be human on the page, which is brilliant. Was that something you were thinking about as you were writing?

AK: I think I try to write with empathy for each of my characters. I didn’t really want to villainize the missionaries, or the townspeople, for that matter. I’ve seen it done and it wasn’t something I was interested in. There are so many shades of gray. And I was really interested in exploring them. One of the best compliments about the novel I got was when someone said: “I know Katherine is racist. But I really like her.” And I was like, “Thank you.”

 

AP: [Laughter.] That ambivalence is delectable, really.

AK: It’s a tension I want people to feel because I think it’s so easy to pigeonhole and stereotype. We do it often, without really understanding people, their fears, their weaknesses, or their vulnerabilities. Christianity is complex. I wanted to showcase that complexity through the various voices I chose.

 

AP: Tell me more about that idea.

AK: There were missionaries who came to genuinely share their faith, and to say: I respect your culture, I respect your customs, and I’m also wanting to share my faith. And then there’s someone like Reverend Jim who’s coming to share his faith, but also with the colonial mindset that Africans are spiritually inferior and it’s his duty to save them. I was interested in exploring all of those voices because I think all of those voices exist.

 

AP: I’m thinking of the reverend’s character: I did not expect to feel for him, blinded as he is by bigotry and racism, but then—through a moment of misunderstanding and vulnerability—he managed to move me all the same. How did you do that?

AK: I’m interested in expressing two traits that seem to be in opposition within each of my characters. You can be sharp eyed and racist. Just like we can lie to ourselves, and also be truth-seekers. In the novel, Jummai is unassuming and strategic. I think these choices create tension for readers and mitigate the risk of flattening a character. Reverend Jim is both blind and perceptive. He doesn’t trust Zanya for racist and ignorant reasons. But he’s also seeing something in Zanya beyond what, say, Gary [another missionary] sees. Jim is annoyed or irritated with Gary because Gary loves the locals and is on the other extreme. They’re all saints to him. And maybe you’re not approaching Nigerian people, African people as complicated and human when you’re putting them into these basic categories of either villain or saint, right?

 

AP: Right. The book never lets us dwell in either of those categories; it’s like it refuses to give us any easy moral shortcuts.

AK: And that was something I wanted to explore, this idea of the white man hunting the sins of the Nigerian people, the weaknesses of the Nigerian people, while also being wholly blind to the sins and weaknesses of his own people. In this case, specifically, what’s happening with Doctor Nelson Landry at the clinic or with Gary Parson and his marriage. For instance, Reverend Jim reacts differently to the divorces of the African people versus the missionaries themselves.

 

AP: On a craft level, one of the ways you build nuance is precisely because you have multiple points of view. I loved Mango’s commitment to telling the story of an entire community—polyphonic structures are so rewarding, but so hard to pull off! How did you know when you had a complete cast, so to speak?

AK: Nami and Zanya came to me first. Then once Katherine’s voice came to me, I had a better understanding of what the book needed to be—a novel that featured the voices of both Nigerian and American characters. I also based it on what missionaries used to build in communities: a school, a clinic, and a church. Who was going to fill those roles? It was really crucial knowing that these are the three institutions that are often built in communities where missionaries go. So once those were staffed, so to speak, in my novel, it started to feel complete.

 

AP: It’s surprising to me that Nami came to you first, because in this final version, she’s a minor character: as Zanya’s fiancée, we see her on the page, but we never experience the story through her eyes. How did you decide who actually got the mike?

AK: Oh, I gave everyone the mike in the beginning. It was open mike night. [Laughter.] You want a mike? Here you go. Which was what ended up making the novel a bit more bloated than it needed to be. I was so interested in everyone’s story. I wanted it to be communal. I wanted it to be about a town. But at the end of the day, you have to ask: Whose novel is this? Whose story is this?

 

AP: Which led you to make some cuts, including Nami?

AK: It was a major revision. I had to sit down and think to myself: Which voices do I want to elevate above the others? Which story has a natural arc more interesting and compelling than another?

Nami’s story just wasn’t as compelling to me as Jummai’s [the Parsons’s domestic worker]. I held onto it for a really long time, and that’s why you have workshops, so people can give you feedback on your characters. People gave me that feedback. But I just kept on holding on to her. It was not an easy decision. After open mike night, to then say: No, we only have this many microphones and they can only go to these many people….

 

AP: You’ve mentioned before that Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which has fifteen different narrators, helped you in this process. How?

AK: Going through As I Lay Dying was really crucial when it came to looking at the characters. Who actually speaks up and how often do they speak up? How much real estate do they take up in the story? Structure was important for me to learn. I wanted to make sure that I gave the three Nigerian characters the most real estate.

 

AP: Something else I noticed is wow—this book has forward momentum. It just grabbed me with that first mysterious opening and didn’t let me go. The earlier draft I’d seen had more of a slow-burn effect. What were the changes you made? And how did you come to realize that you needed to make them?

AK: Oh, Anna. The revision process. One thing I realized is: you can’t privilege every single voice. Obviously, cutting back that number was really, really important. But I also thought about how I can get into and out of a scene quickly, and into and out of a chapter quickly, which is something I had to learn to do. I think it’s hard to learn as an author that there are certain things that you write for yourself and not for the audience.

 

AP: How do you mean?

AK: A lot of times you think that whatever you’re writing is going to be utilized in some way. But no, you’re going to lose hundreds of pages because you’re writing in order to understand the character that you’re building. I didn’t get that at first. But when you realize you wrote this scene for yourself, to understand a character for instance, that helps you to cut back and see what’s essential here. Something starts to crystallize for the character and for their arc.

 

AP: It sounds like part of the revision process is also a shift of empathy—you’re stepping into your readers’ shoes and imagining the experience of the novel from their perspective.

AK: Absolutely. Another thing I did was step out and read books in different genres, which you should be doing anyway, and I have done before, but I went back to them. Reading crime thrillers, for example, to say, okay, how do I balance this literary voice and style with knowing that it needs to be propulsive? Studying how that balance was achieved was incredibly helpful in realizing: oh, you’re spending too long in this chapter. You’re giving me paragraphs and paragraphs that are actually slowing the story down, slowing the reader down, and they’re not in service of the story. That’s what I ended up realizing and learning.

 

AP: Being in service of the story feels like a crucial but also humbling lesson for fiction writers to learn.

AK: This is why feedback and workshops are so important. It’s hard to kill your darlings. And it’s so easy to think that, oh, of course this chapter about the strike is important, of course I should have ten paragraphs about the strike. When in fact you can distill the information into a simple exchange or line of dialogue. Two timely sentences can give you more depth than sometimes an entire chapter will.

 

AP: We’ve talked before about revision as a faith walk. Can you speak to that concept? 

AK: I think writing is a spiritual process. It’s about trusting the story; having faith that decisions you’re making will pan out in some way, or even if they don’t, that you will have the strength, the fortitude, or whatever is needed in order to be able to continue. To me, faith is like walking along only having a lamp that lights the first couple of steps in front of you and feeling as if you can’t see everything that’s ahead of you. It’s the unseen.

 

AP: Which reminds me of that E. L. Doctorow quote I love so much: “Writing is like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights but you can make the whole trip that way.”

AK: Yes! With a novel, it’s the same thing. An idea comes to you and you decide to write into it. You have no idea what it’s going to be. You have no idea if the hours that you spend writing this paragraph or this chapter will actually amount to anything. It’s a step of faith each time you sit down at the computer.

 

AP: And that holds true for the revision process too, when you’re having to make decisions without necessarily knowing how they will pan out.

AK: I made a major change to the story, which meant losing 250 or 300 pages of what I’d written. I remember exactly where I was when I realized that. I remember just sitting down and thinking: This is a step of faith. You have to do this. You’re holding onto it still because you want control. You want to know that, oh, it’ll all turn out okay, right? But you don’t know. It was a significant number of pages to lose. But then it also opened something up. When you relinquish control and trust something greater than yourself, it opens up these possibilities for you. And that’s what it did for me.

 

AP: I want to come back to the novel workshop we were both in, taught by Paul Harding. How do you think the workshop helped you on this book?

AK: I found it incredibly helpful to have people who are generous with their time sit, like you said, with your manuscript. In workshop, there are a lot of voices coming at you. You walk away with a stack of manuscripts, with all types of handwritten comments and notes.

There are times when I’ve read feedback and it didn’t strike me at that moment. But then two years later, I’m like, my gosh, this person was right. I just couldn’t see it at the time. So maybe there’s faith there too: that even if you’re ignoring something at the time, it will come back to you and hit you later on in the process. Trying to navigate what’s true about the story for you and what to listen to in the feedback is also a faith process, a process of discernment.

 

AP: You teach a class on fast drafting—what is that exactly, and how did it come out of your own writing process on this book?

AK: Fast drafting is just writing a draft very quickly, but it helps if there is some form of structure or preparation beforehand. The whole point is to give yourself space to just kind of tap into the imagination and be excited about what could possibly come without immediately going into a space of revision. Not to have your doubts encroach on you, not to think too deeply about the story. There’s time for that later.

The act of fast drafting is getting yourself out of the way so that you’re able to sink into this world and just imagine fully.

When I was doing the novel workshop, I actually ended up fast drafting because I signed up for the workshop knowing I only had 200 pages or so. It meant that in six weeks, I needed to add about 200 more pages.

 

AP: Yikes.

AK: But I loved it. From morning until midnight, I was just writing. This is similar to what Jean Hanff Korelitz shared about her approach to The Plot and what Kazuo Ishiguro did for The Remains of the Day.

 

AP: Wow. I don’t think I knew that. When we saw each other in class every week, you were surprisingly cogent.

AK: Yeah. I remember seeing you and feeling like I was a little panicked and high-strung because I was running on adrenaline. But it’s the best thing I ever did for this novel. I’m really grateful for the novel workshop with Paul because it pushed me, and I don’t know how long it would have taken me otherwise to write it all out. Fast drafting was exciting to me because it got me out of my own way and allowed the story to just unfold. Keep in mind that what also allowed me to fast draft effectively was all the research I had completed up to that point and the three or four years I had under my belt of trying to understand the novel. By that point, I simply needed to allow my imagination free rein.

 

AP: The idea of fast drafting reminds me of what we were talking about earlier—that shift in empathy you need in later drafts, once you’re no longer writing just for yourself but for others. Do you think the two are linked?

AK: Yes. Amy Tan said: “Only when I finish the book can I go back to the beginning and write in the voice of all that happened.” So you’re writing out the story just to kind of get a sense of where you’re going and then that ends up serving as a roadmap. I think there’s a joy in not having these mental obstacles that you set up for yourself and being able to write without worrying about the outcome.

 

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AFABWAJE KURIAN is a Nigerian-American author who received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Callaloo, swamp pink, The Bare Life Review, and Joyland Magazine. She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, the International Writing Program, and The Writer’s Center. She has received residencies and fellowships from Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and Ragdale. Find Afabwaje on Instagram @afabwajek.

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ANNA POLONYI is a fiction writer and journalist with an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a former Fulbright fellow and teaches English and creative writing in Nantes, France. Find Anna on Twitter @akilincs.