When Beyonce’s single Flawless hit the music stands in 2013, suddenly everybody knew Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The song had featured the Nigerian author and used lyrics from her now famous essay We should all be Feminists. That she was a hugely talented, award-winning author was irrelevant and it was as though she needed Beyonce to “make her famous”. She had, by then, published three remarkable novels – Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah and a collection of short stories – The Thing around your Neck. But I guess we live in a time where pop stars will always be more famous than authors.
A little taken aback by the sort of fame that came after her association with the Beyonce song, Adichie in an interview to a Dutch publication said, “I was shocked about how many requests for an interview I received when that song was released. Literally every major newspaper in the world wanted to speak with me about Beyoncé. I felt such resentment. I thought: Are books really that unimportant to you?”
Adichie burst into the literary scene in 2003 with Purple Hibiscus – the story of a Catholic tyrannical Nigerian father who brutalises his children into submission. Purple Hibiscus was about one family, the canvas for her next novel Half of a Yellow Sun was much larger and far more complex. In this novel Adichie managed to weave together the lives of three characters swept up in the Biafran war for independence. The Washington Post described her as “The 21st Century daughter of Chinua Achebe” when this novel was released. It also won her the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007. She then wrote The Thing around your Neck in 2009 – a searing and profound collection of short stories. Then came Americanah. Adichie calls Americanah her “f**k-you” novel. She says she wrote the novel when she no longer felt that she needed to be a “dutiful literary daughter” responsible for her country’s history.
A New Yorker article by Larissa MacFarquhar observes, “As her subjects have expanded, her audience too has but visibility has its drawbacks.” It goes on to say that in Lagos, Adichie is “as recognisable as the President.” This public scrutiny means nothing she says or does goes unnoticed. She was criticised for appearing in public with her natural hair. When she exerted her right to embrace her natural hair, she offended many African women who interpreted this as criticism of their choice to straighten their hair. Hair went on to become the most recurring metaphor in her novel Americanah, which is about a Nigerian Igbo girl fitting in to American society. Gradually, she begins to find the idea of “fitting in” revolting and fights back – first by going back to her kinky African hair and then by giving up on the American accent.
She was also accused of being a “sell-out” and a “capitalist”, particularly on Twitter, when she allowed “We should all be Feminists” to be written on Dior T-shirts. In her TED Talk with the same title, she points out that she is a happy African feminist — “one who does not hate men, who likes lip-gloss and wears high-heels for herself but not for men.”
Adichie’s voice is powerful and distinctive because she is not afraid to be unpopular. She is okay with being disliked. “The desire to be liked is something women need to get over,” she says.
She addresses controversial issues of race and gender with disarming ease. She speaks in a language that doesn’t alienate, yet is her own. She is also very political. And has been very vocal of gender issues in politics. In the essay Now Is the Time to Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About for the New Yorker, she says, “Why is America so far behind in its representation of women in politics…Would a woman who behaved exactly like Trump be elected? Now is the time to stop suggesting that sexism was absent in the election because white women did not overwhelmingly vote for Clinton. Misogyny is not the sole preserve of men.”
Awarded the 2018 Pen Pinter Prize in memory of the late Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter for “her refusal to be deterred or detained by the categories of others”. However, Adichie’s unique strength lies not only in her own “refusal to be detained by the categories of others,” but in inspiring an entire generation across gender, race and culture to break barriers and re-examine life as we know it.
