Profiles
June 4 & 11, 2018 Issue
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Comes to Terms with Global Fame
As her subjects have expanded, her audience has, too, but visibility has its drawbacks.
By Larissa MacFarquhar

“We have to go further back, to 2005. I’m in Warri, in Delta State, I’m working as a doctor, and my mom and I are having a fight. She’s saying, You’re stagnating, you read medicine and you haven’t gone further, you could do better! I was happy, I was in this quiet place becoming a provincial doctor, but in Nigeria that is a lack of ambition, so my mom was angry. She showed me a photograph in a magazine of a young woman with beads in her hair, and she said, Look at this small girl, she has written a book of horticulture, about flowers—you could do something like that. She didn’t care what I did, really, she just wanted me to do more. So she told me, Write books! Don’t just sit there dishing out Tylenol. I said O.K. So I got a computer and started writing.”

Eghosa Imasuen was twenty-eight. He was living near his parents, in a small city some two hundred and fifty miles southeast of Lagos. He read a lot, mostly thrillers and science fiction, pulp paperbacks he bought from secondhand bookshops for a dollar or less. “Literature to me was recommended reading in school, which was Chinua Achebe. ‘Things Fall Apart,’ ‘Arrow of God,’ ‘Things Fall Apart,’ ‘Arrow of God,’ ‘Things Fall Apart,’ ‘Arrow of God.’ I tried to read Ben Okri once—I couldn’t get past page 10. After a while, these books were fifty years removed from me, and they are set in the way past. You didn’t feel it.

“But I always had this idea for a novel, genre fiction. I start writing, and my entire copy is shit. It’s really bad. I’m like, Oh Bleep, this is so bad. So I go online and I read about Chimamanda, the girl in the magazine who got me insulted by my mother. Eventually, I travelled to Lagos and bought her novel ‘Purple Hibiscus.’ I started reading it in the taxi to my aunt’s place.”

That was the problem with our people, Papa told us, our priorities were wrong; we cared too much about huge church buildings and mighty statues. You would never see white people doing that.

“I got to my aunt’s. I kept on reading it.” The prose was clear and deceptively simple. The story unfolded slowly, calmly, its violence muffled by the confusion of its narrator, a guileless teen-age girl. There were surprises but no tricks.

“Why did He have to murder his own son so we would be saved? Why didn’t He just go ahead and save us?”

“On the bus back to Warri, a five-hour trip, I finished it. I didn’t sleep. Then I got to my flat and opened my computer, got my file for my novel, trashed it, deleted the trash, and started again.”

“Purple Hibiscus” was the story of a rich family dominated by a tyrannical Catholic man, Eugene. Eugene’s father never converted, so Eugene won’t allow him into his house, and forbids his children to accept their grandfather’s heathen food in the few minutes they spend with him each year. He brutalizes his children into submission, but because he deeply loves them. When he beats them, he weeps.

the belt stopped, and Papa stared at the leather in his hand. His face crumpled; his eyelids sagged. “Why do you walk into sin?” he asked. “Why do you like sin?”

He also donates anonymously to orphanages and hospitals, and publishes an anti-government newspaper even when threatened with death. He is a man in the Achebean tradition, whose principled intransigence brings about his destruction.

Before Imasuen read the book, he had thought that middle-class Nigerian lives like his were too boring and marginal to write about. He worried about his readers losing interest—when he was writing his first manuscript, he thought there had to be a spaceship, or a flashback in time, and the whole thing had to be constantly cutting back and forth, like a movie trailer. “Purple Hibiscus” was a revelation: “I knew those characters. It was as if my generation had been given permission to speak. The cliché of American fiction is being about Long Island and idle housewives, and I realized, We are allowed that now—we can write banal shit! And there’s an audience for it.”

Around the time that Imasuen was getting yelled at by his mother, the author of “Purple Hibiscus,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who is now regarded as one of the most vital and original novelists of her generation, was living in a poky apartment in Baltimore, writing the last sections of her second book. She was twenty-six. “Purple Hibiscus,” published the previous fall, had established her reputation as an up-and-coming writer, but she was not yet well known.

Although there had been political violence in the background of her first book, she had written it as a taut, enclosed story of one family; her second, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” would be much larger. She was constructing a story of symphonic complexity, with characters from all over Nigeria and many levels of society, twisted together by love and the chance encounters of refugees. It was the story of Biafra—the secessionist republic in Igboland, in eastern Nigeria, which existed for three years in the late nineteen-sixties, through civil war and widespread starvation, before surrendering to the Nigerian government. The book would be a story in the tradition of the great war novels; she had no interest in clever literary experiments.

Later, this book would win the Orange Prize and be made into a movie. Then she would publish a book of short stories, “The Thing Around Your Neck,” and win a MacArthur Fellowship. Her third novel, “Americanah,” which would win the National Book Critics Circle Award, would be larger still, describing the disorientation, release, and cruelties experienced by young Nigerians abroad, and their outsiders’ dissection of America. As her subjects expanded, her audience would, too, until her celebrity became untethered from her books and took on a life of its own. She would give a ted talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” which would be viewed more than eighteen million times. She would give a tedx talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” which would be sampled in a Beyoncé music video and distributed in book form to every sixteen-year-old in Sweden. She would become the face of Boots No. 7 makeup. She would become the sort of person who attended Oscar parties and was photographed with Oprah and Brigitte Macron. But all this was in the future.

Sitting in Baltimore, Chimamanda found that writing her Biafra novel was arousing in her a degree of obsessiveness that she had not experienced before. She did nothing else. She was nominally enrolled in an M.F.A. program at Johns Hopkins, which gave her a stipend for two years, but for weeks at a time she avoided classes and stayed inside to work, leaving only to go downstairs to buy bananas and peanuts, or to pay for a delivery of Chinese food. If she felt restless, she jumped rope.


“I wanted to make sure you were both happy enough with your life to withstand a major setback with your food.”
When she wanted to reset her mind, she read Derek Walcott. It didn’t matter which poem—she just wanted to hear his voice. She liked some other poets, too, but only modern ones. If a poem had a “thee” or an “O” in it, she turned the page.

When she did venture out to campus to teach, she dressed in a way that she felt conflicted about. She had noticed that, in American academia, a girly style—bright colors, patterns, frills, bows, ruffles, heels, eyeshadow, pink lipstick, all the accoutrements of femininity that she had always loved—was taken to be the sign of a silly woman. She felt she had to prove herself, so she had decided to dress in the businesslike, anhedonic manner of serious American feminists.

It had been nearly ten years since her first stint in America, as a college student, when, as she later put it, she discovered that she was black. Her roommate at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, learning that she was from Africa, had been amazed that she knew how to use a stove, that she didn’t listen to “tribal music.” She had since imbibed, bit by bit, the semiotics of race in America, which she had initially found mystifying. She now understood why people got offended at the mention of watermelon, or fried chicken, or hair.

She had decided to set her Biafra story in Nsukka—the town in Igboland where she had grown up, and where her father had taught statistics at the university—and to center it on the household of a radical professor. It was a mark of her obsessiveness that she felt almost superstitiously particular about where she wrote each part. To write the first section, which described the early sixties, before the war began, she moved back into her parents’ house and wrote in her childhood bedroom.
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