Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - PEN Pinter Prize 2018

good evening I feel very moved and very honored and a little emotional it means very much to me to be here I feel I feel deeply appreciated by people who I respect and admire and that means very much to me thank you thank you so much Allah meeya I I wish I had met Harold and I wish he was here and I've read your walk and I read about you and I have known it not only admired you for very long but also been very charmed by your love story with Harold because I love love thank you Phillip for your lovely Wars I appreciate it very much and thank you Ella because you're just sublime and that reading I wrote the book but I remember sitting there thinking what's happened to me to happen next thank you it was riveting thank you my my lectures titled shut up and write on art and citizenship some years ago at one of my reading events in Lagos a young man in the audience raised his hand to ask me a question his question was a UN African writer now at first glance this is a particularly peculiar question I was born and raised in Nigeria I wrote a novel about a central moment in Nigerian history I speak Hebrew one of the indigenous Nigerian languages I have only one passport which is Nigerian and by all accounts Nigeria is in Africa yet I was being asked if I was an African writer this by the way was a question I had been asked a few times before and always by a fellow African but before I go further with this African writer question I would like to talk about writing itself I've been writing since I was old enough to spell I do not remember a time when I was not drawn to stories reading them writing them finding them I have this memory from childhood sitting in the backseat of my mother's car looking out of the window and suddenly feeling a melancholy pang a kind of muted mourning because what I saw through the window as we drove we're stories so many stories waiting to be told and I knew that I would not be able to tell them all when my writing is going well it gives me what I like to describe as extravagant joy and when it is not going well there is no greater source of depressive anxiety because of its hold on the emotional boundaries of my life because it is central to my own sense of who I am my writing is a deeply private act if I did not have the good fortune I have today of being published and read and being honored with the pen Pinter prize I would be somewhere unknown unread but writing and yet it is too simple to claim that writing is a private act end of story if it were so I would write in a diary and put it away in a drawer I write because I have to I also rank because I want and hope to be read and so an audience or the possibility of an audience moves writing from a private to a public space who do I write for the most honest answer is that I really do not know because I never consciously think of audience while writing fiction but perhaps an answer that is more comprehensive is that I write the kind of fiction I liked read and so I write for whoever enjoys the kind of fiction I enjoy after my first novel was shortlisted for the orange prize but did not win a woman in Nigeria a stranger who came up to me at the airport and told me congratulations we will win next time her use of the word we moved me very much there was in this Venus a kind of collective ownership of my walk a kind of pride that spoke not only to my achievement but to a larger collective triumph and when I did win a few years later I had many moments of being hugged by strangers in Nigeria being told that I had represented us and I to in some ways came to see it as a prize for Nigeria and for Africa because I was the first woman from there to win although of course I alone got to keep and spend the prize money [Music] but the glow of this weenus dims too quickly or perhaps it remains bright but sits alongside a shadow and that that is the shadow of expectations because to talk about our winning to gesture to this collective ownership of a literary prize is a statement about a shared identity a shared citizenship but herein lies the conundrum the person who is hugged at the airport is the citizen the representative of Nigeria of Africa and yet the person who was the citizen is not quite the person who is the artist Proust wrote that a book is a product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits in our social life in our vices to this I would add that the two selves are not entirely disconnected how could they possibly be but that there is a certain unhinging between the two much as there is and the character of a Zulu in Chinua Achebe's era of God who when he's performing his sacred duties as the priest of Allah becomes another person another version of himself his self as different from and yet as genuine as the self he is in his former life as a farmer still artists are also citizens it would be dishonest to suggest that our art were entirely disconnected from our lives as members of a community I am reminded of my social studies teacher in primary school in Osaka who would often say in a booming voice as a preface to answering any question at all man is not an island neither is woman I think art is shaped by where we come from the South African writer s Chi in fact lately writes that under apartheid black South African writers wrote mostly short stories because of the urgency of their political situation the political space shaped the form of their fiction it is difficult in the West to talk about the connection between creating and citizenship because of the general ideas placed around art that it is the thing apart that an artist by creating suddenly becomes a citizen of an imaginary and a political land of other artists there are people in the West who use the expression political almost as a pejorative in reference to a walk of literature I emphasize the West because in parts of the world called developing art is often not seen as automatically separate from politics it is in some ways true that art is a thing apart because unlike politics art functions in great spaces art humanizes it goes below the surface but we also live in a world in which the nation-state dominates in which the value the world gives us as human beings can be determined by the passports we carry I cannot imagine what it is like today to be a writer who has a Syrian passport or who is a citizen of Yemen or El Salvador or the Democratic Republic of Congo countries in which an artist's freedom of movement and perhaps freedom to create is constrained by political realities for me traveling with a Nigerian passport means carrying the weight of assumptions it means to be at many ports of entry automatically suspects to travel with a Nigerian passport is to constantly confront the sneering disbelief of immigration officers when I say I am a writer it is to be asked to step aside for more questions it is to feel that you are guilty of something but of course citizenship goes beyond a mere passport it is a sensibility a sensibility I think that is often shaped by where worns formative years are spent while I have a great affection for America and live part time in America and have come to consider it a second home I was not formed in America's churning cultural crucible I did not grow up there and I'm not sure that I can ever truly be an American since I will never understand the game of baseball sort of like cricket citizenship per person like me rook from a country like Nigeria in a continent like Africa it's not just a sensibility it is also a condition a condition that arises from being what I like to call inhabitants of the periphery and what do I mean by this I'm not merely referring to political expressions like third world but to the phenomenon of being outside the centre in ways more subtle than mere politics in ways metaphysical and psychological I do not merely mean I do not mean merely having what Shin watch away called a history of the dispossessed but also inherited and experiencing as an essential part of one's personal history and accumulation of uncertainties or to borrow from the title of the Zimbabwean rights assisted ankyrin Baz novel a nervous condition we are people conditioned by a history and by our place in the world to look towards somewhere else for validation we are conditioned to learn a lot of untruths and half-truths about who we are and some of us make the choice to consciously unlearn these but even the very act of unlearning takes on a colonial coloration and feeds into our nervous condition we are conditioned by the knowledge that we come from a place that has long been derided if I walked into an average classroom in any Western country and asked the students to tell me what comes to mind when I say Africa at best the answer would be something about safaris and beautiful zebras at worst it would be the usual stock images of poverty and war and helplessness we are conditioned by this knowledge what this conditioning results in I think is a curious mix of defensiveness and aspiration now among Nigerians complaining about our problems is an art form most conversations quickly become a litany of complaints about government corruption no light no water etc but if a foreigner were to say the same things to recite the same litany of complaints Nigerians would become defensive sometimes angrily so I have always been curious about this brand of defensiveness which I myself often exhibit by the way it seems to me that we have it because we assume that the complaining nigerian is aware that nigeria is not only about its problems is aware of the human complexity knows of the intelligence and ingenuity of people knows how they cry and laugh knows what motivates them and what they aspire to and what they find meaningful and we suspect that the foreigner does not know these other stories about us and so we worry about being defined solely by what we do not have and by what we are not and so our defensiveness emerges linked to this defensiveness is a certain aspiration the same nigerian who is angry about a foreigner writing or talking about our problems in the one-dimensional way will be thrilled when that same fariñas is something good about us or admits one of ours into some esteemed foreign rant it would have to be a foreign rank in the so called West of course which is where our education conditions us to look toward for validation some years ago my Nigerian publisher told me a story of a man who had told him that I was not authentic because I was guilty of what this man called writing for the West when my publisher responded by saying that my novels were widely read all over Africa the man then said I was still not authentic because I published first in the West now this anecdote would ordinarily be unremarkable if not for a little PostScript this same man a short while later contacted me to say that he had started writing fiction and asked if I would help him get published in The New Yorker what I wondered was more representative of in authenticity than that bastion of Westerners The New Yorker and I should say that getting people published in The New Yorker is a power I very much wish I had and so its be a Nigerian writer published in what we call the West is to be a repository of both pride and suspicion it is to be scrutinized for the right kind of African representation you are required to perform the rituals you're required to bow to the expectations of citizenship once years ago as I discussed this question with the Senegalese friend a brilliant academic historian he told me quite simply you no longer belong to yourself and what he meant was that by making the choice to write realistic fiction about a place like Nigeria I have become to many people from where I come from a part represents in a whole there are now expectations of citizenship that come with my writing but on whose terms do I no longer belong to myself and that is why that question I was asked are you an African writer was not about geography but about loyalty and my answer was no I have no objection at all to be in Africa in fact it is all I know how to be and so I cannot possibly be anything else and so my answer to the question are you an African writer was no not because I am NOT proudly African because I most certainly am and the idea by the way of being proudly anything of linking pride and identity is a preoccupation of people who are inhabitants of the periphery if you are in the center you have the automatic privilege of not needing to declare your pride because your place in the world has never been in question are you an African writer I said no because I have increasingly been troubled by the subtle and not-so-subtle constraints that the question mine's at that same public event in Legos another young man told me that he had been a keen fan until I began to do what he called talking about this feminism issue and this gay issue which he hoped I would stop otherwise he could not continue to support me now I appreciated his honesty but I suggested to him that it might be best to keep his support to himself he was referring to my opposition to a Nigerian law that criminalizes homosexuality a law that I find not only deeply immoral but also politically cynical he was also referring to a speech I had recently given about feminism using concrete details about Nigerian life in an effort to start a much-needed conversation about the full and equal humanity of women it wasn't so much this young man's disagreement that mattered it was the language he used to voice it the language of citizenship I could not as an African claimed to be a feminist because feminism and being african were mutually exclusive feminism was a sickness of the West and Warner had appropriated by being poisoned by the West as for gay people homosexuality was on African and my supporting the rights of gay people meant a disregard of African culture Harold Pinter wrote that in his life as a writer and creator he agrees that something can be both true and untrue but in his life as a citizen he does not agree he must know what is true and what is false I have thought about this often and have quoted it often because it articulates so well the sense of unhinging this tension I feel I did not choose to speak out about social issues because I am a writer but my writing gave me a platform to speak about issues that I have always cared about I do not think that writers should necessarily speak out on political issues but I also do not think that art is a valid reason for evading the responsibilities of citizenship which are to think clearly to remain informed and sometimes to act and speak art can illuminate politics art can humanize politics but sometimes that is not enough sometimes politics must be engaged with as politics and this could not be any truer or more urgent today with the political landscape of many Western countries so blatantly awash in what Harold Pinter called a vast tapestry of lies upon which we feed we must know what is true and we must call a lie and lie still I am left often with a strange feeling of vulnerability as though pulled in two opposing directions I do not want my art to be judged merrily on generic ideas of citizenship and yet I do not want to use my art as an Armour of neutrality behind which to hide I am a writer and I am a citizen and I see my speaking out on social issues as a responsibility of citizenship I am struck by how often the speaking out is met in Nigeria not with genuine engagement whether to agree or disagree but with a desire to silence me a journalist once helpfully summed it up for me people in Nigeria don't like it when you talk about feminism they just want you to shut up and write and yet even the writing the art has its own burden of expectations that question are you an African writer is also about the people who tell me that as an African writer I should not write about sex in my fiction or that as an African writer I should not write about a subject that is likely to divide Africans or a subject that portrays Africans in a bad light or that an African would never do something that my character did in a novel or that an African would not use a ward that a character of mine had used or that an African would not make the choice that my character had made flora WAPA the pioneer of Africans women's rights in in English wrote wonderful witty fiction about women in a world that she described in her own words as dominated by men but in many interviews she stated clearly that she was not a feminist but what is feminism anyway I think Rebecca West said it best I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is I only know that people call me a feminist whenever i express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat but for formalities sake let us use this definition feminism is an acknowledgement of and desire to change the fact that men have been most if not all of the world had social economic and political privileges solely because they are men flora wapas work both acknowledged ensured a keen desire to complicate this phenomenon of male privilege she give women agency she showed the full complicated complexity of women but she would not accept that she was a feminist obviously feminism because of its history in the West is a contested ward perhaps flora WAPA rejected it because it was a ward that was seen as too representative of the concerns of middle-class white women which were not always the same as those of so-called third world women or perhaps WAPA rejected it because as I suspect she wanted to comply to an expectation of citizenship to perform citizenship to declare her loyalty at the altar of authentic African honest one in which feminism did not exist some years ago I began to call myself an African feminist in response to that idea of feminism and african has been mutually exclusive and then a nice young woman in nigeria told me after reading an interview in which i had said that i was an african feminist that feminists were just angry women who could not find husbands i then thought that I had better modify things even further and call myself a happy African feminist [Music] it was all partly tongue-in-cheek but it did reflect a certain anxiety and ambivalence that I felt now I find it completely unnecessary to twist myself out of shape in my eagerness to perform citizenship I am a feminist and it is an identity I will define for myself but it demonstrated to me the power that comes with a very act of naming something until I had to confront that label feminist I was simply a human being who from childhood had been aware of and alert to the many ways in which the world did not grant the same dignity to women as it did to men but confronting that label feminists suddenly meant that it had power especially presented as it was as something in a position to African mess and because I wanted to perform citizenship at some deep unreasonable level I sometimes still want to that label gained much more power than it really deserved that allow me to tell a little story I was visiting my ancestral hometown a BA in Anambra State it was 2003 I had at that point strong romanticized ideas about my hometown I still do I love the rhythm of listening to all people talking and I do so with a keen wish that I could speak the beautiful proverb rich version of eboo rather than my modern English influence Tebow I would take walks and think to myself my great-grandfather walked on this land my great-grandmother planted this tree that sort of thing all of which gave me a simple lasting contentment so it was 2003 and I was walking from our country home to my family's and ster ancestral homestead to visit my uncle it was in the middle of Hamilton the soil was baked and the dirt roads were cracked the cracks sometimes widen its wide into large colonies two women two girls were walking ahead of me there were local had earlier seen them chatting to one of the bread hawkers and on the roadside there were walking talking laughing and then one of them slipped and fell she she said something as she fell I expected that it would be something anymore perhaps the common exclamation like a war but the exclamation that came out of her mouth in English was my first thought was that I needed to write that down in my notebook my second thought was that if I wrote that scene in a short story the esteemed gatekeepers of African authenticity would disputed and would prefer that she break into an emu energy complete with proverbs now even I wish she had said something else but what made that seem interesting and perhaps fiction worthy was that she did not and for me what is essential in fiction is what hichy Wells has called the jolly coarseness of life the expectations of citizenship however often get in the way of engaging honestly with this jolly coarseness one of my favorite novels is the dark child by camara Laye the book of startling beauty defiant optimism and the most layered nostalgia the dark child is about a quiet childhood in the plains of Guinea a book which begins with the simple sentence I was a little boy playing around my father's heart and then leads us into a world of wonderfully realized characters his father is a goldsmith who makes gold trinkets his mother has supernatural powers he observes festivals hunting rice harvest the transition to manhood school and girls camara Laye wrote this book in 1954 in the heat of anti colonial and some African critics felt that the book was not sufficiently scorched an african critic famously asked him was it really like that for you brother what the critic meant was not only was it really that easy was it really that happy but also how dare you betray us how dare you not show your anti colonial rage but for me camara Laye is beautiful novel was anti colonial because it quietly and insistently portrays the complex humanity of people whose humanity had been made negotiable to justify their exploitation and it refuses to allow the reader look away from this the expectations of African citizenship certainly affect how a writer is read but obviously not only by fellow Africans to carry that label African writer in the so called West is to be a voice to explain your country's politics it became clear to me shortly after I was first published that my walk was often looked at through a political lens I would do public readings and often be asked or even be told that my novel was a political allegory that my abusive father character represented Nigeria's brutal dictator why I wondered must my character somehow represent something political why must I always have words like socio-political link to my walk why am I not asked about the interpersonal relationships between the characters about love obviously I know the reasons that modern African novels have their roots in the anti-colonial struggle and that so little African writing is known outside Africa that the easy response is always to read it as some sort of native explanation of an unknown place that it is almost impossible for a novel to be read first as a story of human beings before being read as say a political allegory but it does not change the truth which is that when I sat down to write the father character in Purple Hibiscus I was not thinking I shall now write an important allegorical representation of Nigeria's military culture instead a character had come to me with a hushed voice and an almost broken spirit a teenage girl who was nothing like me and who I wanted to explore that question are you an African writer is one I have been asked many times and there are times when I have answered yes yes that reflected my ambivalence but also my anxiety not to be misunderstood I belong was what my yes said I belong but that yes often came with a whisper you must let me belong on my own terms on multiple terms for that is the essence of art and I would like to end with some words from a South African writer Bessie head who lived most of her life in Botswana when she was asked the question why do you write her response was this I am building a stairway to the Stars I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me that is why I write [Applause]

Channel: englishpen1921

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Keywords: Nigeria, feminism, literature, free speech, freedom of expression, English PEN, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writing, Africa

Id: s2xyMBzkCeo

Length: 31min 47sec (1907 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2018