By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS,
New Delhi : Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2007 for her book “Half of a Yellow Sun”, paints snapshots of the roller-coaster called America in her new book, “The Thing Around Your Neck”.
The collection of 12 short stories has been published by HarperCollins.
“I really hoped what the stories would do is to present a different meaning of what it is to be a Nigerian navigating the American continent,” Adichie told IANS in an e-mail interview from Enugu, a small university and historical town in Nigeria.
“Sometimes, when we talk of immigration, there is one generic story, but I also wanted to deal with class and how class affects immigration and how class often determines the kind of immigrant one is,” the young novelist said.
Adichie was born at Abba in Nigeria’s Ambra state in 1977. She grew up in the university town of Nsukka, where she went to school. She attended Princeton University later.
Her first novel “The Purple Hibiscus” was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It was also long-listed for the Booker Prize and was the winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy award for debut fiction in 2004.
Most of the stories in Adichie’s new book are about migration-how the rookie immigrant from the African backwaters reacts to things American- like the introductory hot dog with mustard at the airport soon after arrival. And what folks back in the shanty towns fringing the great African cities would expect them to get-a car, a gun, handbags, shoes and perfumes.
“A lot of the stories are not about me, but based on things that actually happened,” Adichie said.
Adichie describes her writing as an acknowledgment of the fact that she grew up speaking and studying English.
“I grew up speaking English and Igbo (the native tongue) at the same time, so I consider both my first languages. It is true for a lot of middle-class people from formerly colonised countries that you invent a language where you’re speaking English but throwing in Igbo words, for instance, or you’re speaking Igbo and you’re throwing in English words,” she said.
Adichie’s prose reflects the colonial assimilation of cultures, which the writer attributes to the westernisation of Igbo.
“My siblings and I, for example, speak an Igbo that’s very different from my father’s because our Igbo has become anglicized. But my father’s Igbo is still quite beautiful and rich. I hope my writing somehow acknowledges my language experience, the fluidity-the fact that English is mine. But it’s a particular kind of English. I want to write about characters who speak mostly English, I suppose, but who also are very much part of another language, and who sometimes have their English conditioned by Igbo,” the writer said.
Adichie grew up reading a lot of British children’s books.
“Purple Hibiscus”, Adichie’s first novel, did very well in Nigeria.
It is about 15-year-old Kambili, who lives in fear of her father in a repressive home. But a military coup liberates her and she discovers laughter in her aunt’s home where she goes to live. It also unlocks a terrible secret at the heart of her family life.
” ‘Purple Hibiscus’ was enormously popular, and is now on the syllabus for the West African Examinations Council, the secondary school examination.
Its success has been gratifying,” she said.
“I was a bit more worried about ‘Half of A Yellow Sun’, because in that novel I was digging around in places that people didn’t necessarily think I should be digging around. There were people who thought it better to leave the past alone. But ‘Half of A Yellow Sun’ has done quite well. And I think it started a conversation. Once I was at the airport. I was going to visit my parents, who live in the east. I was just thrilled to see four different people at the airport reading my book. Nigeria, by the way, is not a country of readers, at least not novel readers. Nigerians will read newspapers and gossip magazines, and that’s it,” Adichie said.
“Half of a Yellow Sun” is the tale of three different lives-a houseboy, a young woman and a professor-in the Nigeria of 1960, torn by civil war.
(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at [email protected])