WHAT MAKES NIGERIAN WRITER CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE THICK


#ChimamandaAdichi

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie born (15th September, 1977) is a Nigerian novelist, nonfiction writer and short story writer. She has been called "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young Anglophone authors that is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature.

In an exclusive interview granted to Tavis Smiley’s show,   Chimamanda Adechie bears her mind on her writings and other issues that won her accolades. Excerpt below:  
Tavis: Best-selling novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is one of the world’s most acclaimed writers. Her novel, “Americanah” won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2013.

Her earlier novel, “Half of a Yellow Sun” which deals with the civil war that broke out in her native Nigeria back in 1967 has been turned now into a movie. It can be seen on various Starz channels. We’ll start our conversation tonight with a scene from “Half of a Yellow Sun” starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton.

Tavis: So how’s it feel seeing your work on the big screen?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Not too bad.

Tavis: Yeah. How do you think they did with the adaptation?
Adichie: The film, I like. I like it. I wasn’t sure that I would because you never knew, but I like it. I like the art of it. I think that it captures Nigeria in a way that’s really beautiful. But I also think it’s different from – I think that film is a very different thing from a book, so I wasn’t expecting the film to be exactly the book. But I think it captures the spirit of the book.

Tavis: What was it about the book that was essential for you to not be lost in the film?
Adichie: The sense that, when people are in a war – and, in this case, in Biafra – that they find ways to retain their humanity. I think, for me, I wanted the novel to really be a human story and I think the film does that. So it’s about war which I think is important, but it’s really about how people in the middle of war, people get married, people fall in love.

Tavis: You may have just answered the question I want to ask, but let me ask it anyway, which is, given that you weren’t even born in ’67, which you don’t have to be around to write about history, obviously, but what was it about that particular war that you wanted to bring to life in your novel, in your text?
Adichie: Well, I wasn’t alive, you’re right, but I feel as though I inherited the shadow of that period. My grandfathers died in the war. My parents lost everything they owned. I feel as though my family’s path was really affected by the war and I wanted to remember.

I think that Nigeria, and in general I think many countries in Africa, there’s a kind of willful forgetting. There’s a sense in which we don’t remember our recent past and I think it’s important to remember. So I think, in some way, what I wanted the film to do was tell a human story, but also become a kind of collective way of remembering what happened.

Tavis: You said something a moment ago that I find fascinating and it is something that is applicable not just to the people of Nigeria or to Africa, but this is certainly true of Americans in many respects, this notion of willful forgetting, willful forgetting. What’s behind that for you? What do you think motivates that, particularly in your country?
Adichie: Well, I think that the people who – so the war is fairly recent when you really think about it and there are people who were active in the war who are still alive. So there are people for whom it is beneficial if we don’t remember.

And I think there’s this idea that everybody wants to be comfortable, so let’s just let things be because we all need to be comfortable, which I think applies to the U.S. in the way that there’s a sense in which America’s history, particularly America’s racial history. We’re all supposed to forget it because everybody’s supposed to be kept comfortable.

I think in Nigeria, because Biafra is still very much a contested part of our history, there’s still differing versions of what happened. People just really are contested. So because of that, it’s just more comfortable if we don’t talk about it.

But I think it’s important to remember because I think that a consequence of not talking about what happened to us is actually much more dangerous than the consequences of talking about it.

Tavis: And what do you regard – what do you see those consequences as today, the consequences of not talking about it?
Adichie: That we repeat history. I think many of the things that are happening in Nigeria today, if we go back to 1967, we can explain them. We have politicized ethnicity. We have people politicians who use ethnicity as a tool and it’s happening now. And I think that, if we’re very conscious of what happened 50 years ago, we’re less likely to repeat it. So I do think that it’s a serious possibility unless we remember actively.

Tavis: Since you spent time, obviously, in both places, this notion of willful forgetting that you raised a moment ago, compare and contrast to me how you think that plays itself out in America. You talked about the Nigerian example, but what’s your sense of how that notion plays out in our country where race is concerned?
Adichie: I think it’s the strangest thing. In some ways, I wrote about that in my most recent novel, “Americanah.” I wanted to in some ways make fun of the idea that – I think race is the subject in this country that is most burdened by so many things. It’s weighted.

And it just seems to me that it’s so burdened and so weighted that the only way people think they should deal with it is to pretend that it’s not there. So it’s not so much that people have forgotten, I don’t think. It’s that people choose to think that they have forgotten and I don’t just mean slavery.

Because I think that often the conversation about race in this country becomes reduced to slavery and I don’t think that’s just what it’s about. I think that, even after slavery, I think Jim Crow, I think the present, the very clear racial disparities. But there’s a sense in which they’re not really confronted because I think people are just uncomfortable.

So there’s a way of talking about race and it seems to me that the outcome is that everybody remain comfortable, which I also think is very dangerous. But I think that it’s important to have conversations. Everybody talks in this country about having the conversation about race, which I don’t think anybody has had [laugh].

And I think the reason is that, to actually have it, people have to be willing to be uncomfortable. And I think in this country, non-Black people, people who are not of African descent or rather people whose ancestors are not slaves because I think that there’s a difference, those people are not willing to be uncomfortable.

Tavis: Are there conditions that you can imagine that might make it possible for those persons to be willing to be made uncomfortable? Or is this a conversation – if there is no answer to that question, that means what you’re suggesting is that this intractable issue will never be addressed?
Adichie: No. I’m actually quite optimistic. I think that people – I think it can take a certain kind of leadership. I think it will take time. I think it’s possible. I think if you have certain kinds of leaders – I mean, a friend of mine said something about needing people from the community of resistance to address the resistance. So I think that certain kinds of leaders in certain positions can make that conversation happen.

So I’m generally optimistic, actually. I think that it’s possible. It hasn’t happened, though. I mean, people talk, but it just hasn’t happened. Nobody’s talking about it publicly in sort of mainstream discourse. It’s just not being talked about in honest and open ways, I don’t think.

Tavis: If that conversation hasn’t happened in the era of Obama, then what do you think it might require? What’s it going to take then for us to have that conversation?
Adichie: I actually think that Obama can make it possible. It won’t happen in the two years left, but Obama having become president, I think that he occupies this really fragile place and I think there’s something about his being there and his being very careful.

I think the way that Obama has gone about race, which is really by not addressing it in a way that’s overt and direct and helpful, in some ways, I think even that is an indictment of America’s racial issues because he, I think, as the first Black man to be president, is in a position where he has to be extra careful.

But I think what it means is that the next person who’s not necessarily Black, but who thinks that this conversation is important, I think it makes it more possible for that person to start it.

Tavis: And if that person is a woman?
Adichie: Oh, even better [laugh]. If Hillary wins, yes.

Tavis: You referenced “Americanah,” your latest novel a moment ago, which is a national best seller, one of the 10 best books of the year, as I mentioned, as chosen by The New York Time, now out in paperback. For those who haven’t read this, what’s the storyline here?
Adichie: It’s a love story, but it’s also social commentary. So it’s about this young woman who lives in Nigeria, comes to the U.S. to go to school and she has a man she loves who leaves Nigeria and goes to England. It’s about many things.

And one of the things I wanted to do, I wanted to write about race in the U.S. as an outsider, as a person who came to the U.S. and became Black because I didn’t think of myself as Black when I was in Nigeria. So race became this new identity for me when I came to the U.S. I wanted to write about that and how strange it can be.

But also, I wanted to write about a kind of immigration that is familiar to me. I think when we hear about Africans immigrating, we think about people who have run away from burned villages and war and poverty. And that story’s important to tell, but it’s not the story I know.

And I wanted to write about the Africa I knew which is the middle class educated people who are leaving not because their villages are burned, but because they want more choices in the way that, you know, throughout history, people have left their homes looking for more. So that’s what I hoped. Also, I think it’s quite funny, if I may say so myself. So I hoped that readers would laugh.

Tavis: When you said a moment ago that you didn’t think of yourself as Black until you came to the U.S., that raises two questions. Let me ask them in the proper order. Question one, what did you think of yourself as in Nigeria?
Adichie: I thought of myself as Nigerian as Igbo. But, again, I think America is very interesting because it’s the one place where identity is such a central thing for people. It really isn’t, I think, in many parts of the world…

Tavis: Is that a good thing or a bad thing, that identity is so important to us?
Adichie: I mean, I don’t think it’s a symbol of good, but I think it can be bad and I think it can be okay, but I think it’s also because of America’s history as a country that has so many people. It’s a country of immigrants. Everybody came from somewhere and, because of that, identity becomes a thing. In Nigeria, it really wasn’t. So I thought of myself as Igbo in certain cases, but I didn’t really think of myself as anything really.

Then to come to the U.S., I became Black and I also became African in the U.S. because, coming from Nigeria meant that people would turn around and say, “You’re African. Tell me about Namibia.” And then I would think I actually don’t know anything about Namibia because I lived thousands of miles away from where they come from [laugh].

Tavis: So how did you navigate then the journey of becoming Black and becoming African once you arrived on our shores? I mean, I woke up this way in this country, so I haven’t had that journey per se [laugh]. So how did you navigate this journey of becoming Black all of a sudden?
Adichie: You know, for me, learning that I was Black, I mean, I have to say to people when I talk about this book that I’m very happy to be Black, that I wouldn’t change anything about this. I think this is the most beautiful thing. But coming to the U.S., it was realizing that this identity came with baggage and I remember my first year in the U.S.

I had just come and the first essay I wrote in a class, the professor comes in and says this is the best essay and who wrote it? And I raised my hand and he looked surprised. And I realized he didn’t expect the person who wrote the best essay to be Black.

And I guess also my name doesn’t sound stereotypically Black. It’s kind of a strange name. That could be anything. I remember just realizing that that’s what it meant, that Black was weighted with all of this negative stereotypes and assumptions.

And so, for a while, I didn’t want to be identified as Black. I found myself pushing away that identity and wanting to be seen as Nigerian because I felt that it was my way of separating myself from this group that had been, you know, stigmatized by all kinds of really terrible stereotypes.

So you know, what it took for me was reading and learning and watching. So I read a lot of African American history. I just watched. I watched America, so I went full circle and I became – one day, I was sort of like, “You know what? I’m Black. I’m all of these other things, but I’m Black.”

In some ways, it’s also a choice because I think, when you’re not born in the U.S. and when you’re a person of African descent, in some ways, identifying as Black becomes a political choice because it means that you’re willing to acknowledge that race is a real reality and is an institution and really matters.

Because the people I know – I know immigrants from the Caribbean and from Africa who say things like, “Oh, you know, race is overblown. It really doesn’t matter,” that kind of thing. So for me, it became a political choice.

But at the same time, it’s important, I think, that America doesn’t seem to realize that there are many kinds of Blacks, that there are many ways to be Black. So there’s this assumption that Black is one single thing.

Clearly, for me, it isn’t because I think that I navigate race as different from the way somebody who’s born in the U.S. would because there are things for me as a Nigerian that don’t just resonate as much, I think.

Tavis: So that’s your story in your journey of becoming Black in America. The other part is this African piece. If I had a dime for every horror story that I’ve heard from Africans about their encounters with African Americans when they arrive on these shores, I think I’d be independently wealthy just writing a book about those horror stories.

So do you have horror stories about learning to get along with and to embrace African Americans in this country?
Adichie: No. I am sorry to disappoint [laugh].

Tavis: Actually, I’m glad to hear that [laugh]. I’m not disappointed at all because I’ve heard so many.
Adichie: Well, I guess – I mean, but here’s the thing. I think that, you know, African Americans are Americans and there are certain things that one can generalize about Americans. There’s just a general – you know, I think it has to be said – a kind of ignorance about the world. America is very insular, so you come from a different part of the world and they’re like, “What? Nigeria? Is that like near Honduras?”

So I think that ignorance plays into – I think that often Africans expect African Americans to somehow know more than others just because of how we look alike. So, surely, you must know about Africa, but they’re Americans and they don’t [laugh].

But, no, I have really good friends who are African American and maybe it has something to do with, you know, I came here to go to school. I had a few friends in undergrad. I had many friends in grad school and the conversations that we’ve had, they’re not always comfortable, but I think that they’re important.

And one of such conversations I write about in the book, I make fun of it actually which is I think one way of closing the conversation about slavery is to say, “Well, Africans sold us.” I just think it’s so simplistic and it’s a way – if you say that, then there’s nothing left to be said.

And I think saying that also negates the fact that slavery itself was an institution that benefited a particular group of people. And had those evil African chiefs not sold them, they would still have had a way to get them across the Atlantic.

So, no, sadly no, I have no horror stories. I’ll have to invent some for next time [laugh].

Tavis: No, no. I’m happy to hear that your journey was a road well paved and not a bunch of potholes in it in terms of the relationships with Black Americans. How have you held on to that essential African part of you?
Because the one thing that America does do is offer the opportunity for you to assimilate and there are many people who come here and take the opportunity to do just that. And before you know it, they’ve forgotten and left sometimes deliberately and unapologetically everything about who they essentially are or were when they arrived in this country. So how have you held on to the essential African parts of you?
Adichie: By refusing to have an American accent, eating Nigerian food and listening…[laugh]. Actually, when I came to the U.S., I did a very good American accent for a while. Can I have some water, please? And then I realized it takes so much energy…

Tavis: To do it [laugh].
Adichie: To do it. I spent my whole life saying “water” and then to have to say it “water,” I just thought this is too much work. And, also, I become a fake version of myself when I’m doing that. I think the thing about being a false version of yourself, you just never quite reach your potential.

So I feel as though the energy that I use in saying, “Can I have some water, please?” I could use it and do something actually useful. So I chose to sound as a I sound which means, of course, that often customer service people on the phone will say, “What’s that, ma’am?” But I’ll just repeat myself until they understand.

But also, I think it’s having come here when I was 19. I was, I think, in some ways formed and being raised in the family where it was very clear. My parents are really lovely people. My father is a professor, but it was a sense in which it was clear that we are Igbo people and, you know, this is what we are. We go to ancestral hometown.

There’s just a very strong sense of rootedness and I carry it with me. I think the reason I’m comfortable in the world – and I am really – is because of that. I carry that5 Igbo rootedness in me wherever I go.
Tavis: Were you sent here or did you choose to come here?
Adichie: I chose to come here because I was fleeing the study of medicine. I was supposed to be a doctor and, after a year, I realized that this was not working out for me.

Tavis: How did your professor daddy handle that?

Adichie: My father, God bless him, was supportive, but here’s why. He already had a doctor. My sister is a doctor.
Tavis: Okay.

Adichie: And I’m the fifth of six children, so I think that he has a doctor, a pharmacist, an engineer, so his kids have done the proper think that, you know, middle class Africans are supposed to do. So I think they decided that they could sacrifice the strange one who wanted to write and do strange things. So they’re all right, let her go.

Tavis: How did writing become your avocation? How did you know that this was your calling in the world?
Adichie: You know, I don’t know when I didn’t know. When I was four…

Tavis: You’ve always known it.
Adichie: Yes. I was the child who was always writing stories and that’s the one thing. That’s the one thing that constantly has made me truly happy. That’s the thing I love. You know, I’m happy to be published and read and it’s still a kind of wonder to me that people actually pay money to read what I wrote [laugh]. But the thing that I love is the writing and I’ve always loved it, always, always.

Tavis: Is it always and forever going to be fiction?
Adichie: Never say never. I don’t know.

Tavis: I raise that only because the issues that you raise in your novels are real world issues.
Adichie: They are.

Tavis: And you approach it from a fictional perspective, but you could very easily, it seems to me, have written about some of these subjects, certainly the Nigerian war from a nonfiction…
Adichie: But I think fiction affords something that nonfiction doesn’t. I think that the stories you can tell – for me, fiction doesn’t mean it’s a lie, but I think actually fiction can often be truer than nonfiction. If I wrote nonfiction about the war, I would have to protect peoples’ identities. I would have to think about the ethics of telling certain stories.

So I think, for me, fiction just seems a much more – I don’t know – a much more powerful way of getting into certain stories that are difficult.

Tavis: What for you then is the blessing, the joy, of being a writer? I hear your point that you are still surprised that people actually pay to read your stuff.
Indeed they do and they pay well to read your stuff [laugh], as evidenced by this one being out in paperback now. If they weren’t buying it, it would never have gone to paperback. But what’s the blessing? What’s the joy for you in being a writer?
Adichie: I think it’s that people read what I wrote and it actually means something. And I mean not just entertainment which I think is important, but that women read it and they say to me, “You make me feel stronger. I feel validated.”

Or somebody said to me once that “Half of a Yellow Sun” was her story and made it possible for her to tell her family what had happened to her in the war and she hadn’t talked about it until she read the book.

So I think it’s that possibility, that just really incredible part, that you can tell a story and it can move somebody. It can touch somebody’s life in a way that really matters. That, I will never stop being grateful and moved by that.
Tavis: So early into your career when you have your writing career, you have this sort of acclaim, the acclaim that you have, and nine million-plus views of your TED talks on the internet, I mean, nine million. That’s a lot of views for a TED talk or two.

When you have this kind of acclaim so early on in your career, how do you process that and does that put a certain kind of – for lack of a better word – pressure on you into the future of your writing?
Adichie: No, no.

Tavis: You don’t feel that at all?
Adichie: I think the pressure is simply just the fear that I felt from the beginning, which is just sitting down and you’re worried that you’re not going to write a good sentence. I mean, I don’t really remember these things when I’m sitting down at my desk. One, I enjoy – it’s really lovely. People are reading the book, it’s gotten recognition, it’s a really lovely feeling.

When I’m sitting down in my study, I really don’t remember. I don’t remember because that terror, I think, that comes with creating is always there. It’s that I’m sitting there thinking I will never write a good sentence again and I don’t think I want to live if I can’t. I mean, it’s just that basic terror of creating. It’s always there.

So, no, if anything, it’s maybe if I finish a book or a story, just before it comes out, I have that anxiety of, “Oh, my Lord, what have I done?” but not during the creative process, no.

Tavis: Well, you’re doing it well and we are all the better for how well you do it. A national best seller now out in paperback. It’s called “Americanah: A Novel.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of it, and her book has turned into a film now.

“Half of a Yellow Sun” is seen now on various Starz channels, so you can tune in to see that as well. Chimamanda, an honour to have you on this program, and thanks for your time.
Adichie: Thank you. Lovely to be here.

 

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