The Art and Politics of Pioneering:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, D’banj and Lupita Nyong’o: Part 1
Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o. Photo credit: unknown.
What do the writer and public speaker Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
the singer and agricultural entrepreneur D’banj, and the actress, model and
video director Lupita Nyong’o have in common? Aside being sparkling, middle-class-raised
Nigerian and Mexican-Kenyan celebrities in their thirties who have in the last
few years attained unprecedented global acclaim for their work, they are also
pioneers, not broadly in their fields but in their willingness, by chance or on
purpose, to break new grounds in style, connecting with their art other genres.
Adichie, a 2015 TIME 100 personality, ventured into music when her “We Should
All Be Feminists” talk was sampled by Beyonce in her song “Flawless” from her
2013 eponymous Grammys 2015 Album of the Year-nominated set. D’banj, amidst
racking up endorsement deals including becoming the official African ambassador
for Beats By Dre, participated in the 2014 World Economic Forum and became
Nigeria’s first United Nations Youth Ambassador for Peace. And then Lupita,
Lupita whose star remains one of the brightest since her victory at the 2014
Oscars for a gripping performance in Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon
Northup’s memoir 12 Years a Slave, Lupita
who is defying conventional notions of beauty as necessarily light skin
complexion and was named People’s
Most Beautiful Woman as well as Glamour’s
Woman of the Year, both in 2014. With these milestones, each of these three have
been introduced to wider audiences, their fiery fames resting on what, in
Achebean terms, are “solid personal achievements”.
D'banj is a two-time winner of the MTV African Music Awards Artist of the Year, in 2008 and 2009. Photo credit: unknown.
So what particularly do Adichie and
D’banj have in common? The first is that they have both been the Nigeria Future
Awards Young Person of the Year: Adichie in 2008, D’banj in 2009. The second is
the Biyi Bandele-scripted movie adaptation of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun: D’banj’s song “Bother You” is said to have
been inspired by the movie and was supposed to serve as part of its soundtrack.
The third is that the public consumption of both artists’ greatest works has at
different times been censored in Nigeria. When, in 2011, D’banj released one of
the greatest Afro-pop songs of the twenty-first century in the cheeky “Oliver
Twist”, the lyrics, with references to “bom bom”, were deemed “lewd” by the Nigerian
Broadcasting Commission. The song was promptly banned. Adichie’s novel was
never going to be banned, and so Bandele’s movie faced it. The long delay in
the issuance of certification for what was then the biggest-budget Nollywood
movie in history [at N1.27bn, $8m] by the Nigerian Film and Video
Censors Board was described by Bandele as “a clumsy, heavy-handed ban in all
but name”. Popular opinion was that the unofficial ban was due to the movie’s
subject-matter, the Biafran War of 1967-70. Yet the move by the NFVCB came as
little surprise because this, after all, was Nigeria—a country where History is
barely taught in its secondary schools, where younger generations are shoved into
the same willful forgetfulness blinding their elders.
Chimamanda Adichie: her trademark smile. Photo credit: unknown.
There is also the fact that their parents
initially had different dreams for them: Adichie was to be a doctor and D’banj
was to follow in his father’s steps and join the military. While Adichie began
Medicine and Pharmacy in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, D’banj began
Mechanical Engineering in the University of Lagos, and herein lies the
coincidence: in order to escape the expectations of their families, D’banj left
for the UK to pursue his music dreams and Adichie left for the US where she
eventually studied Communications and Political Science in Drexel University,
graduating in 2001 and then getting an MFA in Creative Writing in 2003 from
John Hopkins University. She would, in 2008, get another master’s degree, in
African History. And then there’s the Genevieve Nnaji factor: her starring in both
the Half of a Yellow Sun movie and
D’banj’s “Fall in Love” video.
The ties between Adichie and Lupita, on
the other hand, cross the arts and entertainment, through the personal and end
up in the global political. Both are Yale-educated (for their master’s degrees)
and exhibit refreshing confidence in their identity. When news came that Lupita
had optioned the film rights to Adichie’s Americanah,
it was met with excitement, partly in the way that fans roar with approval when
their favourite celebrities collaborate. But there was more to it: a nascent
Hollywood brand continuing in literature and a literary brand prolonging her
stay in the movie industry. And yet this news was no great surprise; in some
quarters, it was expected, hoped for, and publicly marked an association that
will, perhaps, remain symbolic. It would appear to have naturally fallen on
Lupita who, with her natural hair and gleaming dark skin, her wholesome
acceptance of her Africanness, happens to be the most visible embodiment of the
kind of black African woman Adichie outlines in Americanah. She fits the profile of Ifemelu in the novel and would
do her justice as she has done 12 Years a
Slave’s Patsey, if she eventually, as expected, takes that acting role in
addition to her production role. Again, both women were nominated for MTV
Africa’s 2014 Personality of the Year and Lupita took it.
And Lupita and D’banj?
They share
Adichie in common.
Born in 1977, Adichie’s body of work—three bestselling novels
(Purple Hibiscus, 2003; Half of a Yellow Sun, 2006; Americanah, 2013), several prize-winning
short stories and a collection (The Thing
Around Your Neck, 2009), viral talks (“The Danger of a Single Story”, 2009;
the 2012 Commonwealth Lecture, “Connecting Cultures”; “We Should All Be
Feminists”, 2013, which was published in 2014 as a monograph), and several
essays—has seen the most wondrous acclaim for an African writer since the elderly
set of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Doris
Lessing, Naguib Mahfouz, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. She has been translated into 30
languages. But before these, she had authored a collection of poetry (Decisions, 1997) and a play (For Love of Biafra, 2000), both of which
are relatively juvenilia.
Coming to fore in a culture whose
veneration seemed reserved for aging minds, Adichie’s popularity among young
African readers stems partly from her being young and a brilliant speaker, but
mostly from her writing style, a style so clear and filled with humour, so easy
to relate to in its brilliance, and then, crucially, the high number of central
young characters in her work. While most of her own generation cite Achebe
(she, for example) or Ngugi (Binyavanga Wainaina, for example) as influence,
most of the younger generation blossoming in the 2010s, especially among the
yet-unpublished, cite her or her contemporaries. The positive reception of Purple Hibiscus helped usher in a decade
of brilliant writing on the continent. Her novel, though, is only part of an overarching
story that includes Helon Habila’s Waiting
for an Angel (2002), the success of the Caine Prize, and the efforts of
such literary houses as Kwani? and Farafina which collectively spurred this
production that has introduced what the Times
Literary Supplement described as “a procession of critically acclaimed young
Anglophone authors that is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers
to African literature”: Uzodinma Iweala, Teju Cole, Doreen Baingana, Sefi Atta,
Dinaw Mengestu, Uwem Akpan, Chika Unigwe, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, Lola Shoneyin,
Chibundu Onuzo, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chinelo Okparanta, Taiye Selasi, Yvonne
Adhiambo Owuor, Chigozie Obioma, and so many others. She has talked of the
reluctance of agents and publishers to gamble on her Purple Hibiscus manuscript due to its being set in Africa and written
by an African who writes like no known literary names, the wisdom being that no
one would read it (a debacle Achebe faced with the Things Fall Apart manuscript), and the ridiculous case of one agent
who tried to convince her to set the story in America and then to “use the
African material as background”. Purple
Hibiscus went on to win the 2004 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the 2005
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and was shortlisted for the
2004 Orange Prize and longlisted, that year also, for the Booker Prize.
Previously, in 2002, she had been shortlisted for both the Commonwealth Short
Story Competition, for “The Tree in Grandma’s Garden”, and the Caine Prize
which eventually went to close friend Binyavanga Wainaina, for “You in America”
which would later appear in The Thing
around Your Neck as the title story. In 2003, her “That Harmattan Morning”
was a joint winner of the BBC Short Story Awards, and “The American Embassy”, which
also appears in her collection, landed an O. Henry Prize. She took the
2002/2003 David T. Wong International Short Story Prize for “Half of a Yellow
Sun”, the fore-running story often forgotten in the euphoria of its eponymous
novel despite being arguably Adichie’s very best short story.
In 2007, the novel Half of a Yellow Sun made her the first African woman to win the
Orange Prize and last year placed at Number 10 on BBC Culture’s Greatest Novels
of the Twenty-first Century So Far, with Americanah
at Number 13, Adichie being the only non-Westerner to make the top twenty. Acclaimed
as “the first great African novel of the twentieth century”, it was also
awarded the 2007 PEN Beyond Margins Award and the 2007 Anisfield-Wolf Book
Award among others, and was last year named winner of the Best of the Best of
the Baileys Women’s Prize winners (the former Orange Prize) in the last decade
(2006-2015). Her relevance was cemented with Achebe’s blurb describing her as a
“fearless” writer “endowed with the wisdom of ancient storytellers” and who
“came almost fully made.” In 2008, she won, alongside 24 others, the then-$500,000
MacArthur Genius Grant: the first major novelist from Africa to do so, with Ethiopia’s
Mengestu following suit in 2012. 2009 saw her named winner of the International
Nonino Prize and, in 2010, she was included in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list. Americanah, described by a Kathryn Schulz in the New York Magazine as “an early…admirable
stab at something new: a Great Global Novel”, took the National Book Critics’
Circle award for 2013 and the 2013 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction,
and was a finalist for the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize, the 2014 Andrew Carnegie
Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the 2015 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The
novel made BBC’s Top Ten Books of 2013 list as well as the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2013, the latter of which helped
move it up Amazon’s bestselling books list, to as high as No 179. It would go
further elsewhere: it would reach as high as No 10 on the New York Times Paperback Fiction Bestseller List (as at May 25,
2014), placing that week above—wait for it—E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey (at No 11) and George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones (at No 13).
Hers is part of the larger continental
story of female domination in writing. Adichie’s extraordinary success, by helping
draw the attention of the literary world back to Africa, paved way for the 2010s
set of whom the most prominent are NoViolet and Selasi, a generation reveling
in the publishing world’s hunt for regional voices not seen since the 1980s-90s
rush for Indian writers that saw the discovery of Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati
Roy and Kiran Desai, among others.
This success no doubt inspired her to
begin the annual Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop in Lagos, where she
is assisted by Binyavanga and Aslak Myhre. Other facilitators have included, at
different times, Jeffrey Allen, Tin House
editor Robert Spillman, Chika Unigwe, Eghosa Imasuen, the memoirist Faith
Adiele, to name a few. Every year, since 2009, a group of twenty to twenty-four
writers are selected from applications from all over the continent, lodged in a
hotel in Lagos and guided in fine-tuning their writing. And this is the most
important part: graduates of her workshop have gone on to earn acclaim also: Tolu
Ogunlesi won the Arts and Culture Prize in the 2009 CNN Multichoice African
Journalism Awards, and then their Business and Economics Prize in 2013; Adeleke
Adeyemi won the 2011 Nigeria Prize for Literature for his children’s book, The Missing Clock, under his pen name
Mai Nasara; Jekwu Anyaegbuna won the 2012 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for
Africa Region for “Morrison Okoli (1955-2010)”; Elnathan John has twice made
the Caine Prize shortlist, in 2013 for “Bayan Layi” and in 2015 for “Flying”;
Uche Okonkwo won the inaugural 2013 Etisalat Flash Fiction Prize; Onyinye
Ihezukwu won the 2014 Heinfield Prize; Pemi Aguda won the 2015 Writivism Prize;
and Arinze Ifeakandu won a fellowship offered by the American magazine A Public Space and then made the top
five of the BN Poetry Award, both in 2015. And these are only some. “After the
workshop, my writing changed, the way I observed things changed,” Arinze says,
alumni of the 2013 workshop. “Her success has given a lot of us confidence that
our stories are worth writing. And her workshop…has kick-started many literary
careers and friendships,” says Ogunlesi, who attended the inaugural workshop.
For Imasuen, the nurturing of a whole new set of talents is all down to her: “I
think that is her place, not the books, which are important by themselves, but
that she brought a new generation of writers together.” One finds this idea of
community in Adichie’s own definition of herself as a “hopelessly sentimental
Pan-Africanist.”
Adichie with Eghosa Imasuen. Photo credit: unknown.
In the way that brilliant new writers
are compared to brilliant older compatriots, the Washington Post’s Book World detailed her as the “twenty-first
century daughter of Chinua Achebe”, sparking comparison to Achebe. Femi
Osofisan identifies her reflection of Achebe in “her delicate manipulation of
syntax and trope…control of irony and suspense…mastery of those subtle details
that build and heighten effect.” Writing in The
ScoopNG, James Eze digs the parallels deeper: By siring a new generation of
writers through her workshop, Adichie is replicating Achebe’s opening-of-doors role
as the pioneer editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series. The online
writers’ community of her workshop’s alumni favourably compares, he argues, to
the community of writers founded by Achebe: the Association of Nigerian Authors
(ANA). And her confrontation of racism in Americanah
as well as her TED Global Conference Talk in Oxford, “The Danger of a Single
Story”, both echo Achebe’s 1975 seminal lecture in the University of
Massachusetts: “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”
While admitting how flattering being
Achebe’s “daughter” is, Adichie insists that it puzzles her how Anglophone
African literature has parents—Achebe as father, Flora Nwapa as mother—while
American literature, for instance, has none, pointing out in that nuanced
manner the condescension attached to such tags. The Achebe link spills into
politics as well: last year, there were rumours of her rejection of honours
from the Nigerian and British governments, just as Achebe famously turned down
national awards in 2004 and 2011. It touches literary awards as well: Achebe
also won the International Nonino Prize, in 1994. But, aside fiction, there is
a line between them: while Achebe was a formidable academic and visionary
social critic, Adichie is primarily a cultural critic who nevertheless has an
intimidating academic record littered with summa cum laude degrees and
fellowships. She was a 2005-06 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, where Americanah is partly set, and a 2011-12
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard University. And all
her books are partly set in the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka
where she grew up.
Not one to hide her admiration for
other writers, she has talked about their influence on her: from
unconditionally reading Enid Blyton to decidedly being “saved” by Things Fall Apart and Camara Laye’s The Dark Child, to carrying her
favourite Achebe novel Arrow of God
within her, to a 2005 PEN Conversation with Michael Ondaatje during which she
informed the Canadian-Sri Lankan novelist that she might pass out just for
talking with him, to wishing she had written Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, to
another high-profile 2014 Conversation with Zadie Smith (“Watch Zadie Smith and
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Talk Postcolonial Lit”) in what is unarguably one
between fiction’s two biggest black women of the twenty-first century, to
loving Kiran Desai’s and Chika Unigwe’s fashion senses, to criticizing the
racist and misogynist V.S. Naipaul in Americanah
and in an interview. “What was so striking was her own confidence and
authority,” Salman Rushdie said of her 2005 PEN Conversation with Michael
Ondaatje: “All of us there that day could see that someone remarkable had just
arrived. A star is born, I remember thinking, and so it was.” Eze recounts an
earlier prescient declaration by Obi Iwuanyanwu, professor at Central State
University, Dayton, Ohio. It was still 2003, and Adichie had just won the David
T.K. Wong Prize for Fiction for the emotionally-gripping short story, “Half of
a Yellow Sun”, when Professor Iwuanyanwu said: “Given my knowledge of similar
astounding young writers in history, I would make bold to describe her as a
genius. I believe that Chimamanda, who was born seven years after Biafra, is
destined to write the Great Biafran Novel.”
The 2007 Orange Prize ceremony: Adichie with novelists Kiran Desai and Zadie Smith. Photo credit: unknown.
Adichie is also known to help other
writers, writes Eze, including the critically-acclaimed Teju Cole who she recommended
to her literary agency and hosted a pre-publication luncheon in his honour to
introduce editors to his now multi-awarded Open
City. It appears to be little coincidence also that, after attending her
workshop this year, Akwaeke Emezi was signed to her agency, The Wylie Agency,
which represents the crème de la crème of literature and of African writers:
Binyavanga, Taiye Selasi, Yvonne Owuor, NoViolet Bulawayo, Helen Oyeyemi, and
so many others. And it is now well known that she did introduce the novelist
Elnathan John to her agent.
Not every writer manages to keep both
literary critics and readers on almost the same plane of excitement but Adichie
has with her selection and exploration of her subject matter. Her first novel,
set in the 1990s, is about family and how religion and national political
events shape its dynamics. Her second, set in the 1960s-70, a decade before she
was born, is a love and war novel of astonishing emotional depth, described by
American novelist Dave Egger as having “the scope and breadth of Tolstoy, or
Chekhov, Edward P. Jones or even Steinbeck”, Adichie herself possessing “the
kind of unwavering command of history and humanity that puts her in that
company”. Her most recent sprawls from the 1970s to 2010 and stirs a host of
subjects—racial politics, gender, hair, academia, blogging, reading itself—so
much that Binyavanga calls it “the most political of Chimamanda’s novels.” In
choosing such big issues as religious fundamentalism, Biafra, and racial
politics, with powerful, relatable themes as family, contrasting but comparable
cultures, love, friendship, military rule, academia, she firmly, with each
work, contributes to major discussions—even, decisively impacts them.
She is vocal, criticizing Nigeria’s
anti-gay law in a tender but insistent essay (“Why Can’t He Be Like Everyone
Else?”), denouncing the misconception that fashion-loving women are
shallow-minded (“Why Can’t a Brilliant Woman Love Fashion?”), and, most
recently, admitting to being influenced by Pope Francis (“Raised Catholic”).
“The new law that criminalizes homosexuality is popular among Nigerians. But it
shows a failure of our democracy, because the mark of a true democracy is not
in the rule of its majority but in the protection of its minority,” she
observes. “A crime is a crime for a reason. A crime has victims. A crime harms
society. On what basis is homosexuality a crime? This is a law that will not
prevent crime, but will, instead, lead to crimes of violence.”
In stating her mind like very few,
refusing to conform to expectations of females as meant to be seen rather than
heard, she borders on the honesty and empathy and lack of apology that
characterizes her fiction: Aunty Ifeoma and Amaka in Purple Hibiscus, Odenigbo and Kainene in Half of a Yellow Sun, Ifemelu and Blaine in Americanah. These were what she echoed at the 2015 Girls Write Now
Awards where she received their Groundbreaker award: “Forget about
likeability.” And she does all these with disarming rhetoric. This also is,
unfortunately, where the criticism emanates from. The Caine Prize controversy
of 2013 during which she was criticized for insisting that the prize is “not
the arbiter of the best fiction from Africa”, and referring to the shortlisted
Elnathan as “one of my boys”, is example; the opinion being that, since she
herself had once been shortlisted in 2002, she was wrong to dismiss the prize especially
now that she has become big. Her critics were back again when, last year, they
felt she was taking her feminism too far by refusing to be addressed as “Mrs”,
preferring just her name or “Ms.” Her defenders have called it just one more
example of misogyny, the discomfiture of male egos that it is a woman that is
the face of African literature in this century. “When a woman becomes very
famous, men in her field often resent that success…and jump at the chance to
attack her,” says the academic Aaron Bady who did the Boston Review interview in which Adichie made her Caine Prize
comments. Early last year, in her OlisaTV
interviews, her most personal so far, she has put in context her statements,
and will have won more fans for her willingness to continue having difficult
conversations. “The Chimamanda I know is a sensitive soul,” says Imasuen,
echoing what a host of others insist on: her good nature, her warmth.
Importantly, Adichie is increasingly finding herself in positions from where
she could lead these difficult discussions. She co-curated the 2015 PEN World
Voices Festival where she delivered the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture,
stating that “to write is to reject silence”. She was also enlisted to co-headline
last year’s Emirates Airline Festival of Literature alongside thriller novelist
Alexander McCall Smith.
With her 2013 TEDxEuston lecture, “We
Should All Be Feminists”, Adichie, according to National Geographic on her inclusion in their Henry Louis Gates Jr.-compiled
list of Africa’s Greatest Innovators in Arts and Sciences, “stepped into the
realm of politics” and, according to her Radhika Jones-written TIME 100
profile, “found her voice as cultural critic” (sic). While her previously best
known talks, 2009’s “The Danger of a Single Story” for TED which has reached up
to 8 million views and 2012’s “Connecting Cultures” Commonwealth Lecture, have been
on the need for respect for racial diversity and historical circumstances, “We
Should All Be Feminists” debunks the myth surrounding feminism, simplifies it,
and then cites cultural evidences that in the end turn not into an aggressive
female-power rant but an empathetic rallying call not merely for women but
particularly for men. The Beyonce feature has now instilled into popular
culture her memorable lines: “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make
themselves smaller, we say to girls: you can have ambition but not too much,
you should aim to be successful but not too successful otherwise you will
threaten the man”; and “Why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we
don’t teach boys the same?” and “Feminist: a person who believes in the social,
political and economic equality of the sexes.” Growing up, she had been
feminist without knowing what the term was. “The oppression of women makes me
angry,” she says.
“I was immediately drawn to her,” Vogue would note Beyonce as saying. “She
was elegant and her words were powerful and honest.” It was a two-way thing,
both artists gained: Beyonce’s feminist credentials were finally solidified, accepted
by critics as legit, and Adichie was introduced to new audiences. “The success
of both of those talks,” writes Vogue’s
Eric Wagner, “[arguably] changed her from a successful author into a
celebrity”. In 2014, the talk was published, first as a fifty-two page
e-monograph and latter in print, and “Flawless” was ranked Numbers 7 and 9 by Pass & Jop and Pitchfork Media respectively on their Best Music of 2014 lists. The
mother album, Beyonce, was nominated
for the 2015 Grammys Album of the Year which, had it won, would have made
Adichie, a speaker, a Grammy winner in a singing category. Late last year, the
monograph’s Swedish translation was made mandatory for the country’s sixteen
year-olds.
And this is where, in this Internet
age, visibility counts. Adichie is adored, too, because she is seen. Most of
her new following, attracted by the Beyonce song and the movie adaptation, may
not have read her but have watched her speak. With a Facebook following
steadily approaching the 500,000 mark, she, perhaps, is the best example of literary
fiction-writers globally, and writers in Africa generally, accumulating the
kind of celebrity clout hitherto reserved for entertainers, sportsmen and
political and religious leaders. A 2010 Nielsen BookScan source puts it that at
525,438 copies, Half of a Yellow Sun
was the third bestselling Orange Prize-winning novel ever, behind 2004 winner Andrea
Levy’s Small Island’s 834,958 and 2005
winner Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk
About Kevin’s 646,373. While the Orange prize organizers continue to cite
these three novels as their most successful, the figures have no doubt
increased in these five years since then, and her novel could be chasing the 1
million mark. Americanah, before its
France publication, was noted by France
24 last year’s January to have shifted 500,000 in the US, on its way to
being translated into 25 languages; and this was in roughly a year, and at a
much faster pace than Half of a Yellow Sun.
These figures—like the bafflingly static 11 million for Things Fall Apart—obviously do not factor in pirated copies, which
are unfortunately more distributed than originals in developing publishing
industries like Nigeria’s. While not attracting the publicity of its
antecedents, Purple Hibiscus, it must
be noted, remains her most read novel in Nigeria, although due to its lack of
cross-over into Nollywood, it has lost premier popularity to Half of a Yellow Sun—word-of-mouth and
news popularity, that is. Yet it is the only Adichie novel one is likeliest to
find in the most unassuming of market bookstalls, likely to have been read by
the average schoolgirl or boy, and one that would equally smash as a movie
adaptation. Her only requirement for the Half
of a Yellow Sun movie was that it be shot in Nigeria, and it was, in
Calabar. But even with international A-listers like Chiwetel Ejiofor and
Thandie Newton and Anika Rose-Noni and Nollywood icons Genevieve Nnaji and Zack
Orji and Onyeka Onwenu in it, even with the prospect of the hotcake potential
cast of Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo and Brad Pitt partaking in Americanah’s adaptation, and despite one
of Hollywood’s few most powerful men Will Smith calling to her to say how much
he loves her work, she insists that adaptations of her novels aren’t measures
of success for her. “I’m excited. I’m quite happy,” she says. “[But] for me,
success is that I have a book out. A woman said to me, ‘Your book made me feel
less alone.’ That is success.”
Adichie's three novels on a bookstand: Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah.
In this insistence is her sense of
focus. She is a writer primarily. In it she seems to whisper an acknowledgement,
and gratitude, for how far she has come, because she did not just smash, did
not just become Chimamanda overnight:
she worked for it, earned it. Before Purple
Hibiscus, “I wrote some other bad novels which I hope nobody ever sees,”
she recounted at the Kwani at 10 Anniversary in the University of Nairobi.
“Writing is the thing that gives meaning to my life. And if I hadn’t been
fortunate enough to have been published and to have been read, I would still be
somewhere writing.” Asked about winning prizes in a CNN interview, she said:
“It’s lovely to win. But that isn’t why I write. What matters the most for a
writer, I think, is to be read.” Talking of reading, there was the small
dissatisfaction of some fans with Americanah,
its not being on the same level as Half
of a Yellow Sun. Aside the general unfairness to artists in judging their
works by relativity rather than on individual merit, we are in danger of losing
foresight in this particular case. Make no mistake about it, Americanah is not just a Great Novel but
a Great Book, whether standing on its own or in comparison to any other book: a
reviewer calls it “a polemic disguised as a novel.” That Half of a Yellow Sun is immortal does not diminish Americanah’s greatness: with the previous,
it is all wisdom and skill; with the latter, it is those two things plus
something else that doesn’t come naturally: experience. Americanah can only be written by one who has proven herself with something
as classic as Half of a Yellow Sun. It
is an occasional minor debate in the online community of writers as to what her
next work will be: 2016 will be three years since her last, and she has yet to
exceed four years in gap. For one who tackles only challenging subjects, there
may be limited options: Would it be something very modern, embracing everything
from terrorism to the Ebola outbreak? Would it be another historical fiction—on
the Slave Trade? Would it be another collection of stories? Or a political
thriller? Or would it be a genre she admits to not quite understand—science
fiction? Would it even be fiction? A memoir? A collection of essays?
Her recent work has been “practical”. She
contributed a short story to The Art of Saving a Life Project, a The Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation’s initiative that “brings together more than 30
world-renowned musicians, writers, filmmakers, painters, sculptors and
photographers to demonstrate how vaccines continue to positively change the
course of history.” Entitled “Olikoye”, the story centered on the work of Nigeria’s
former health minister, the late paediatrician and activist Dr Olikoye
Ransome-Kuti. Other contributors include Angelique Kidjo, Sophie Blackall,
Thomas Ganter, Alexia Sinclair, and the novelist Yiyun Li. She also contributed
a column titled “The Feminine Mistake” to the July/August issue of More magazine guest-edited by Michelle
Obama.
Adichie poses for her Vogue UK's "Today I'm Wearing" photo shoot. Photo credit: Vogue UK.
But despite all this, despite being featured in Vogue UK’s March edition of “Today I’m
Wearing”, which confirms her place—with her trademark headgears and prints—as a
fashion It-Girl, Adichie is skeptic of being called a celebrity and, rather
reluctantly, tags herself a “public person.” She was included in Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers of
2013 as well as Forbes’s The 40 Most
Powerful Celebrities in Africa, in 2011, and New African’s 100 Most Influential Africans of 2013. Named one of TIME’s 21 Female Authors You Should Be
Reading, and one of CNN’s Most Inspiring Women of 2014 alongside the late
Ebola-fight hero Dr Stella Adadevoh, and one of Arise’s 100 Dynamic Women in 2015, she was nominated for Forbes Africa’s 2014 and 2015 Person of
the Year awards as well as YNaija!’s
2014 Person of the Year award. She wrote Binyavanga’s 2014 TIME 100 profile and is included in their 2015 list, the only other
included novelist being Japan’s Haruki Murakami.