Written by Stephanie Sadler
Tuesday, 14 April 2009 00:00
Seven caught up with award-winning Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to ask about her new collection of short stories The Thing Around Your Neck, gather a bit of advice for budding writers and find out about her upcoming feature on The South Bank Show.
In Nigeria’s Igboland is a place called Ogidi village which holds colourful masquerades and wrestling matches in its square. It is a place of red earth and indigo trees, of agriculture and arts and crafts. This is where Chinua Achebe, author of the 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, a man who has been called the “father of modern African writing”, spent his childhood. ITV’s The South Bank Show has filmed the village spectacles for its upcoming double feature on two of the most influential and inspiring African authors of our time: Achebe and 31-year-old Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Nearby Ogidi, in the south of this West African country, is the dusty student town, Nsukka, where Achebe took a job at the University of Nigeria after his home was destroyed in the Biafran War. He moved to Marguerite Cartwright Avenue on campus. Coincidentally, Adichie’s parents both held jobs at the university – her mother the first female registrar and her father Nigeria’s first statistics professor – and she grew up in this same house. She walked the same paths through the campus as Achebe, ate in the same kitchen decades later and looked at a similar view from the windows. But, Achebe is Achebe and Adichie is carving out her own literary niche.
She has been busy leaving her mark on students and critics alike, humbly sweeping up prizes for her two acclaimed novels Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and delving into the complex worlds of Nigeria and America in her latest collection of 12 short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck. It was released this month in the UK. “All but one [of the short stories] was previously published,” Adichie said. “I worked with the editor to decide which stories to include, but it was mainly just which ones I liked the most and which I thought were strongest.”
The collection of cameos is suffused with homesickness, longing, the intricacies of trying to adapt to a new culture without compromising one’s identity, family, love and love lost. They are tales with dark undertones. Most of the main characters are female – strong, yet complicated, often coping alone or frustrated in their relationships. Unlike her novels, which are set in Nigeria, the majority of these short stories take place in America – a reflection of her current situation.
After a short stint at the University of Nigeria studying medicine, the 19-year-old Adichie went to pursue a communications degree in America and, later, completed an MA in creative writing at John Hopkins University in Maryland. Splitting her time between Nigeria and the States, Adichie loves both countries for different reasons and gains clarity by moving between them. “Nigeria is the home of my house and America is the home of convenience,” she told me. “It doesn’t really affect my work; it is what it is, but it helps to write about Nigeria when I have distance from it and America does give me that.”
Adichie says she has a “complicated affection” for America, and snapshots of immigrant life are heavily presented in The Thing Around Your Neck. In the title story, a Nigerian woman has a relationship with a white American man who is infatuated with Africa and African-ness. Though there is love between them, she struggles with the simplicity of his views, with the emotional dissonance that comes with adjusting to life in a country so different from her own and with the complexities of her own identity. She wades through the stereotypes she had of Americans, surprised at how reality differs from her expectations while being confronted with the way Americans have pigeonholed her as a certain type of African. People are amused by her ability to speak English (an official language in Nigeria) and ask if she has a real house in Africa. Reactions to her were “abnormal – the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice.” In the story, Adichie writes of the loneliness and alienation of this girl’s new life: “At night, something would wrap itself around your neck, something that very nearly choked you before you fell asleep.”
Touching on the plight of first-generation immigrants in the West, Adichie said this is a topic she would like to explore further in future projects. “I spend a lot of time in the US which means I have a lot of material, so it would be nice to be able to use it,” she said.
In “Monday of Last Week”, Kamara – short for Kamarachizuoroanyi, meaning “May God’s Grace Be Sufficient for Us” – takes a job babysitting for a “half-caste” child called Josh with a worrisome father and an elusive artist mother. She is waiting for her green card. Kamara’s husband finally sent for her from Nigeria after six years apart and she faces the changes that life in America has cast on the partner of her memories. Her own identity is tested by the demands of her new life and her wavering confidence by a request from Josh’s mother.
One of this collection’s stories set in Nigeria – “A Private Experience” – pulls an intimate situation from the chaos of a religious riot. It sets two women – one young, one old – in an abandoned shop, takes them away from the ugly fighting in the streets, the upturned market that sold oranges and groundnuts, gives them solitude from the “shouting in English, in pidgin, in Hausa, in Igbo”. Chika, a medical student and an Igbo Christian, leads a completely different life than the Hausa Muslim woman who shows her gentle kindness in this stuffy safe haven with its squeaky wooden shutters swinging in the air and a rusted water tap in the corner. The ethnic tension crashing down outside is eased inside of this small, secluded moment when the older woman reveals her pains to Chika, shares her wrapper and her scarf.
The Thing Around Your Neck opens with “Cell One” which was first published two years ago in the New Yorker and later in Best African American Fiction: 2009. It explores the corruption of power systems in Nigerian jails, of bribery and brutality, by creating believable characters who nudge the reader toward these realities. It is set in the familiar Nsukka, like much of Adichie’s writing. Nnamabia, a teenager accused of belonging to a violent cult, is wrongly arrested and shocked by the frailty of tough boys thrown into the prison system and inhuman treatment of his fellow inmates. We watch, through the eyes of his sister, the evolution of his character.
Adichie said she doesn’t start her fiction with a sense of moral outrage, but “I do feel strongly about certain issues like race, gender, politics of power and how it affects people’s lives. I find myself writing about them.”
Purple Hibiscus, Adichie’s debut novel, opens the layers of these issues in Nigeria that fall around the people, slowly unfolding them and holding them out for examination like the trumpet-shaped petals of a hibiscus plant reveal the inner stigma of the plant. The core. This emotional tale, an evocative portrayal of political unrest, rebellion, spiritual fanaticism and buried secrets told through first-person narrative by the privileged 15-year-old Kambili, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2005, among other awards, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
Adichie’s most epic achievement so far, however, has been internationally-acclaimed Half of a Yellow Sun. The title was inspired by the emblem on the flag of Biafra, the subject of this applauded novel. Adichie’s website calls it a tale of “moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all.”
In 2007, Half of a Yellow Sun won Adichie the coveted Orange Prize for Fiction and, in 2008, she took home the MacArthur Foundation “genius award”. She was presented with the Italian Nonino Prize in 2009. When I asked Adichie what sort of pressure this put on her as a writer, she responded, “Not very much, to be honest. I don’t really think consciously about it. They are very lovely to get, but I don’t wake up in the morning thinking about how I won the Orange Prize and what I have to do because of it. I wake up and read and write and do the things I want to do.”
So, what is next besides an appearance on The South Bank Show in May? A venture into film.
Adichie’s reach is already international – her work has been translated into over 30 languages – but, as she pointed out, “Film has a wider audience.” Andrea Calderwood, who was behind the award-winning The Last King of Scotland has taken on the project of satisfying that wider audience by producing Half of a Yellow Sun. At the insistence of Adichie, the screenwriter is Nigerian, though there is not yet a cast, so the release date will be in the distant future.
“The people who are involved are very good,” Adichie said of the production. “I suggested Biyi Bandele write the script. He is Nigerian, but he’s also a very good writer and not just going to write about some white men going to save Africa.”
Bandele, who lives in London, has written novels of his own – the latest called Burma Boy – as well as many plays produced by the likes of the Royal Court Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1997, he even adapted Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for the stage.
When Adichie is not writing, she occasionally runs creative writing workshops. Before earning her MA in African Studies from Yale University in 2008, she was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University in 2005-2006 where she taught introductory fiction. Recently, she held a series of workshops in Lagos for Nigerian writers – published and unpublished – with the aim to bring different perspectives to the significant art of storytelling. “People, in Nigeria as well, are much more interested in the idea of being a writer than putting in the work,” she told me. “I suggest reading widely. I am much more drawn to realistic fiction than experimental fiction, but if I was putting on a workshop for new writers, I would include both in the reading packet. It’s important for new writers to see a wider range of what is possible.”
There is a story in The Thing Around Your Neck called “Jumping Monkey Hill” about a writer’s workshop in South Africa led by a white man with a posh British accent called Edward Campbell. His criticism of the lead character Ujunwa’s personal story, saying, “This is agenda writing; it isn’t a story of real people”, highlights plenty of issues. Adichie says the story is about the larger question of who determines what an African story is. If you have a workshop of African writers organised by British hosts, only the British idea of what an African story should be is praised.
The common compulsion to categorise African writers, to say that there is a certain way to write an “African” story, to be African – or to be anything, for that matter – is something Adichie feels strongly about. Writers from African are just that – writers. Adichie feels that tags like “black” or “African” come with baggage and the subtle suggestion that they are not on par with “mainstream” writing. She encourages writers to tell their story. It is what it is.
The importance of storytelling has a long history in Africa and, as well as inspiring budding writers, Adichie has been praised for keeping the tradition a vibrant one. Printed on the back cover of The Thing Around Your Neck is a quote from Achebe: “Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytelling.”
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is available from Fourth Estate for £14.99
See the full interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie >>
Friday 30 July 2010
