CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007 with her novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Purple Hibiscus is her first novel and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2004 and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, longlisted for the Booker Prize and was winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy award for debut fiction.
Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka, where she attended primary and secondary schools. Her short fiction has been published in literary journals including Granta, and won the International PEN/David Wong award in 2003. She was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University for the 2005–06 academic year. She lives in Nigeria.
by Clare Garner
FOR AS LONG AS she can remember, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s hero has been the internationally acclaimed Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. She grew up in the house previously occupied by him and first read his novels at the precocious age of ten. Arrow of God is still her favourite book and, to this day, she returns to his work whenever she wants to rekindle her writing spirit.
So, picture the thrill when she received an e-mail saying that he admired Purple Hibiscus. It was early September and Adichie was sitting in a dusty cyber cafe in Nsukka, where she grew up. She was becoming impatient with the mountain of e-mails and nearly passed over what turned out to be the highest accolade of her life. It read: ‘Just a short note to let you know that our family has been following your career and rejoice with you on every success! Dad has read Purple Hibiscus and liked it very much. Give him a call at…’ It was signed by Achebe’s son. ‘It was the best e-mail of my life,’ Adichie delights. ‘My idol was telling me I was doing a good job. I was so ecstatic. I went slightly crazy.’
With wisdom beyond her years, Adichie forbids herself to read reviews. It is not that she fears criticism; besides, reviewers rave about her work. She simply does not want to be distracted by what they say. ‘It would get in the way of my being true to myself,’ she says. But feedback from Achebe is another story. So far she has been too shy to call, but she will do soon.
‘Reading Achebe gave me permission to write about my world.’
Adichie has been writing since the age of six. At first she crafted stories for her mother, complete with illustrations, which were inspired by the English children’s classics on which she was reared. ‘I didn’t visit England until I was older, so before then I was very much writing fantasy. Reading Achebe gave me permission to write about my world. He transported me to a past that was both familiar and unfamiliar, a past I imagined my great grandfather lived. Looking back, I realize that what he did for me at the time was validate my history, make it seem worthy in some way.’
Adichie has spent most of her life on a university campus, first in Nigeria and then in America. Her parents both worked at the University of Nigeria, in Nsukka: her father as Professor of Statistics and her mother as the institution’s first female registrar. They raised Adichie and her five siblings in a university-owned house and sent them to school on campus. Adichie started out reading medicine there but, after a year, realized she was only training to be a doctor because that was the done thing for high achievers like herself. She transferred to Connecticut State University to read Communication. ‘I love the American sense of “can do” and will always be grateful for the fact that you can come here and feel suffused with this sense of possibility. I couldn’t have published my novel in Nigeria without the money to pay the publisher.’
But her heart longs for home. Indeed, Purple Hibiscus was born out of such longing. ‘I was living in Connecticut and hadn’t been back to Nigeria for four years. I was intensely homesick. It was winter here and terribly cold. I looked out and saw this blanket of white and thought: “I want home.”
‘I wanted to write about colonialism, which I think every African writer does without meaning to. The way we are is very much the result of colonialism – the fact that I think in English, for example.’ Her vehicle was religion, an abiding obsession since her early teens. As a child she went to Mass and Benediction every Sunday and loved the drama of it all: the incense, the vibrant singing in Latin, the big hugs after the services. Theology became her thing. ‘I feel sorry for my parents. I really wasn’t your average teenager. Until about 19 I was in my intense period of God searching. I read the writings of St Augustine and fat books about Church history. I was always asking questions. I wanted to know why some people had car accidents and some didn’t. I wanted to capture God in a bottle.’
In Eugene Achike – or Papa – Adichie created a character who tries to prove how Christian he is by condemning his past. ‘This is very much a theme in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. I wanted to write the modern take. I wanted Papa to be a man who did horrible things but who, ultimately, wasn’t a monster. Unless he was complex it would be easy to dismiss him. There are lots of people who are kind and generous and thoughtful but, in the name of religion, do all sorts of awful things.’
Now Adichie is working on her next novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the civil war of 1967-70. She is planning to move back to Nigeria, with a possible semester of teaching in America each year. ‘I’m definitely going to live in Nigeria,’ she says. ‘I belong there and the reason I care about it is that I belong. It’s very important for me to matter in Nigeria, to make some sort of difference. I want people back home to read my books, for women to feel empowered by them, and for people to be inspired to be writers.’ This does not seem an unrealistic ambition. It is easy to imagine that one day it will be Adichie who is making a young Nigerian writer’s heart leap with an e-mail congratulating them on their work. She knows how good that feels.
September 1977, in Abba, Anambra State, Nigeria.
University Primary School, Nsukka; University Secondary School, Nsukka; Eastern Connecticut State University (BS summa cum laude, Communication); Johns Hopkins University (MA, Creative Writing).
Adichie is the fifth of six children. She has two older sisters, two older brothers, and a younger brother. At the age of 19 she moved to the United States to live with her eldest sister, Ijeoma, who has become as much a friend as sister.
While studying for her Creative Writing masters degree, from which she graduated in 2004, Adichie had a teaching assistant post in Expository Writing at the university. Over the past few years she has written extensively. Besides Purple Hibiscus, she has had short stories published in anthologies as well as in British and American journals.
Purple Hibiscus was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004, and shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2004. It also received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award 2004. Her short story ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ won the PEN/David Wong shortstory award 2003.
‘Transition to Glory’, cited as Distinguished Story, in Lorrie Moore (ed.), The Best American Short Stories, 2004 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
‘Half of a Yellow Sun’, in David Eggers (ed.), The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
‘American Embassy’, in Laura Furman (ed.), Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 2003 (New York: Anchor Books, 2003).
‘Women Here Drive Buses’, in Tracy Price-Thompson and Taressa Stovall (eds), Proverbs for the People, an anthology of African-American fiction (New York: Kensington, 2003).
Favourite Books
1. Arrow of God
Chinua Achebe
2. Woman at Point Zero
Nawal El Saadawi
3. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Ayi Kwei Armah
4. Efuru
Flora Nwapa
5. Reef
Romesh Gunesekera
6. Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
7. The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
8. Reading in the Dark
Seamus Deane
9. A Strange and Sublime Address
Amit Chaudhuri
10. One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez