Great Female Writers - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Female & African American Identity
Recommended Age for Reading: 15+
Biography
Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977 and grew up in the university town of Nsukka. Her family had lost almost everything during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) and this conflict forms the subject-matter of her best-known novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Adichie went to study in America aged 19, and since then has divided her time between the United States and Nigeria. Adichie has spoken and written extensively about how, when she arrived in America, she was identified for the first time with the colour of her skin; race was a concept she learned through experience. This forms the main theme of another of Adichie’s best-known works, Americanah. Adichie is a renowned public speaker as well as a novelist; she delivered the TED Talk ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ in 2013. Adichie’s main concerns as a writer are female and African American identity, and she repeatedly explores the extent of an individual’s autonomy in determining cultural identity.
Why read Adichie?
Adichie is a postcolonial author, and reading her books opens our eyes to different cultural perspectives. She depicts what the postcolonial theorist, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, advocates in world literature: ‘a liberating perspective within which to see ourselves clearly in a relationship to ourselves and other selves in the universe’.
She explores how language itself shapes our perception of world cultures – what does it mean to write about Nigeria in English? – and by writing fiction, with its wealth of individual detail, she invites us to empathise with people of different national and racial identities. In her 2009 TED Talk, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, Adichie demonstrates how ‘the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story’; her novels break down such stereotypes about countries and people. Adichie uses universal themes of love and loyalty to show us the connections between all people, and the necessity of open-mindedness in our interactions with different cultures.
Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)
Set in Nigeria in the 1960s, this novel explores the country’s civil war and the devastating impact it had on individual lives. At the centre of the narrative are the twins, Olanna and Kainene, well-educated young women who fall in love, Olanna with a university professor and Kainene with an expatriate Englishman. The lives of these characters intersect against the backdrop of civil war, as Adichie uncovers the untold horrors of this conflict. The narrative is in turns gripping and tragic, and it illuminates a period of world history which is rarely explored in the classroom.
Americanah (2013)
This tale of love and resilience begins in Lagos, Nigeria, as the teenagers Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. The country is under military dictatorship and people are fleeing. Ifemelu, whose university education is being disrupted, departs for America, whilst Obinze plans to join her. However, Obinze doesn’t manage to enter the country, and the two remain apart. Thirteen years later the two find themselves again in Nigeria and their lives again intersect. Adichie explores the nature of hybrid identity in her depiction of immigrant experience. She reveals how race is at the centre of personal and public life in America, uncovering enduring prejudices as well as demonstrating the potential for connection which emerges when different cultures coexist harmoniously.