Chimamanda Adichie spoke exclusively to Vogue about a host of things from feminism to racism in Nigeria as well as the American civil rights biopic, Selma amongst other things. Here are excerpts:
Feminism – gender equality – is a cause she cares about passionately. You don’t have to spend long in Nigeria to witness the deeply patriarchal nature of the culture, where men are always greeted as “sir” and women are lucky to be greeted at all. But Adichie was brought up in a progressive household. Born in 1977 in eastern Nigeria, she grew up in Nsukka, a university town. That part of the country is still, she says, the place where her soul is most at home; she dreams of having a farm there one day. Her father, James, was professor of statistics and, later, vice-chancellor at the University of Nigeria; Grace, her mother, was the university’s first female registrar – no small achievement. As it happens, her parents were staying with her when we met, in the beautiful stone-floored house she built about a year ago. Married for 51 years, they have a pride in their daughter that shines in their faces, as does her love for them. Right from the beginning, her books were distinguished by strong female voices: Kambili in Purple Hibiscus, Olanna in Half of a Yellow Sun, Ifemelu in Americanah.
Talking about race with Adichie is fascinating. “I only became black when I came to America,” she writes in Americanah; her character Ifemelu’s experience is drawn from her own. “In Nigeria I’m not black,” she says simply. “We don’t do race in Nigeria. We do ethnicity a lot, but not race. My friends here don’t really get it. Some of them sound like white Southerners from 1940. They say, ‘Why are black people complaining about race? Racism doesn’t exist!’ It’s just not a part of their existence.” But it has been part of hers in America, where her experience “is always shaped by race. Somebody sends a limo to pick me up, and I just notice an attitude that the white, older male driver has. He’s thinking, that’s who I’m picking up? And I can’t help thinking, if I were white, would he have a problem? If I were black and male, would he have a problem?” She has focused her attention on gender inequality because here in Nigeria, that’s her primary experience of inequality. In Nigeria she would know why a driver would have a problem with her: “Because I’m a woman.”
But all the same, she says she was “personally furious” that Ava DuVernay’s film about the American civil rights marches, Selma, was almost entirely overlooked by the Oscars. “I took that very personally. It’s almost a slap in the face for a person who wants to believe in some kind of progress; 2014 was such a difficult year for America and race.”
On Being Chimamanda: To spend time in Lagos with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, to stand on the shore of the lagoon as she poses, laughing, for Vogue’s photographer, to drive through the city’s crowded roads, to share a drink with her and her friends, was very special. But for all her fame and success, she remains down-to-earth. When I ask her if she sees herself as a feminist heroine, she looks puzzled. Her heroines, she says, are “the nameless women in the market, who are holding their families together. They are traders and their husbands are out drinking somewhere… It’s those women I admire. I am full of admiration for them.”
You can read the full story here.
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