Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Interview: The Right to Tell Your Story
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- čas přidán 24. 07. 2024
- "A strong woman is not something I find remarkable, it's something that I find normal." Interview with the acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie about the power of writing against violence and war.
Writer Chimamanda Adichie talks about having an inquisitive mind and explains how she has always felt the need to read and write. Even as a child Adichie felt a passionate interest in history and in human character. In this interview she talks of war, religion, skin color and love: "I'm a believer in love. Love can heal." Although she feels furious about some of the things people do and say, she explains: "I try to pretend that I'm cynical and sarcastic, but deep down I'm just a hopeless romantic."
Realistic fiction demands that you make your characters round, even though they are flat and simple in real life Adichie says, and goes on to explain how she feels guilty when exposing real people in her books, because they are unable to answer back.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b.1977) was born in southeastern Nigeria but moved to the US to attend College. In 2003 she completed a masters degree in creative writing, and in 2008 she received an MA in African studies from Yale University. Adichie published poems, plays and short stories before publishing her first novel 'Purple Hibiscus' in 2003. Her big break through was with her second novel 'Half a yellow sun' from 2006, about the Nigerian-Biafran War. In 2013 she published her third book 'Americanah'.
Chimamanda Adichie was interviewed by Synne Rifbjerg at Louisiana Literature 2011
Edited by Kamilla Bruus
Produced by Marc-Cristoph Wagner
Stills: Andreas Johnsen
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2013.
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Supported by Nordea-fonden. - Krátké a kreslené filmy
I am in absolute awe as to the extreme brilliance and inguiety of this rounded persona - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Telling the stories we rather prefer to sweep under the carpet. A true model of courage, boldness gifted with the price of fearlessness. Reading and listening to her leave me no choice but reflect, ponder and meditate what truly I can do to enrich my little fictional stories not for the sake of being a literal star but the Joy that comes with feeding once soul and enriching the world by making our little creative contributions through our polished stories. Thank you for inspiring me and the rest, the world.
What a thoroughly beautiful woman.
I thoroughly enjoyed this.
You keep saying, I don't know. But you answer it properly. You do know chimamanda ngozi adichie. I like you talking about hair, it is political, how can hair is political. The mind goes any direction, isn't it. Daniel
As a writer, I have experienced this myself where positive stories about Africa are rejected, but negative stories are accepted and published by publications and the truth is as long as African writers depend on Western entities for funding that will continue to be the case...
She is so fly!
We are confident in writing.
Is true, love can heal.
Makes me want to read Purple Hibiscus !
beautiful and arresting speech
Chimmy!!! love her
As an African-born American (in the East African tradition) I absolutely admire and applaud the work that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is doing with her writing, public speaking, and her intellectual activism. She shines light on a marginalized group of people particularly African immigrants living in the West while raising awareness on key societal realities like women's issues, racism, classism, etc. All these pursuits that she mostly pens in her writing helps push the conversation forward on important subject matter on an engrossing, educational, didactic, and creatively, thought-provoking platform. With all that aside--I do have some criticisms to her writing. Having read her 2007 novel, "Half of A Yellow Sun", and her 2014 novel, "Americanah" I feel in many ways she's overly ambitious in her writing. While her characters in her books are, indeed, multi-dimensional and complex where Adichie does a good job in articulating their worlds and way of life, the multi-part narratives isn't constructive for a novel and, in many ways, confounds her overall message. Concision is tantamount to good writing. By eliminating verbosity and any loose tangents concision establishes clarity and lucidity to the morale of the story. Plus, its clean and organized in its structure--which in no way means a novel needs to be predictable and boring. Five-hundred pages is way too long for a novel and while both novels "Half of A Yellow Sun" (543 pages) and "Americanah" (588 pages) doesn't really stray off on a tangent it does bring in multiple major and minor characters to ongoing storylines mixed in with various themes that often leaves the reader confused and misguided to the original story arc itself. Simplicity is not only important in writing a novel for a wide market of readers because of sales it is vital in getting at the point of why the story is even being penned in the first place. There's no need to pack in all important subject matter and topics in one respectful novel. Leave your reader time to breathe, think, and reflect. If we are writing a nonfiction book that's a whole different thing in terms of concision. I felt after reading both novels that the story is so ongoing that it probably wouldn't really end--which was exactly the feeling I had afterwards. Both novels could really keep going in introducing new themes one after the other with no conclusion or closure. And, what great writer would not want one heck of a conclusion to their story? "Half of A Yellow Sun" which was the better-written book, in my opinion, was essentially a 3-person narrative in the backdrop of the Biafra War (Nigerian Civil War) during the mid-to-late 1960s. The three main characters are written simultaneously in chapter breaks from each other. Along the way, however, the timelines change and the story is no longer moving in chronological order, until later, it does again. Since this is Adichie's writing style--due to it also employed in her later novel "Americanah" I felt confounded as to where she is leading me as the reader. Her topics of love, war, violence, lessons in history, national identity, tribal/ethnic identity, patriotism, parenting, sexual expression, and so on gets lost in its juxtaposition constantly being inter-weaved in and out with no sense of understanding why and what to get at in context to the building of the story. Less is more--whether we are writing a novel, a screenplay for film, a teleplay for television, a script for stage-acting, or even an outline for a documentary film. Adichie should take one topic and one character and ride with it. For "Half of A Yellow Sun" I thought the character of Ugwu, the houseboy, as he goes through a loss of innocence during the war was far more intriguing of a storyline in development than the other two characters. Adichie could break each character down into their own respected novels as a series-part on the Biafra War, for example. Concision, in this case, is not only your friend but can save you and ensure a timeless legacy--if done well. As far as "Americanah" is concerned--again, a loose soap opera novel consisting of multiple themed-storylines with varying minor characters where the two major characters as part of a romantic entanglement carries the narrative over a time-frame spanning more than a decade. Plus, the blog entries that summed up the end of most of the chapters felt like the entire book was written as a freestyle, op-ed piece on race, hair, national identity, an immigrant experience in the U.S. and U.K., and more, which, really belongs more to the blogosphere than anywhere else.
I am waiting for your manbooker winning novel.
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She looks so young here.
Why did she feel the need to insert publishing in a poor African country. Publishing in an African country would have been descriptive enough.