#Kwaniat10 Lecture III: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[Applause] I'm not usually known to be shy but I'm quite shy right thank you I I am shy I am very happy to be here and I thank you for this warm welcome I am particularly happy to be here because I know that other writers have been here before me at this wonderful University of Nairobi I feel happy to know that Chinua Achebe has been here but a Google Earth young girl has been here a queer ma cherie mughal so i feel their shuttle somewhere and I'm happily standing in the shadow I want to thank Tom or Jambo the only thing I want to say about him is that I think this continent needs many many more professor of literature like him I also want to thank that wonderful and the wonderful theater group I don't think I have heard the story of Eve turned into this wonderfully submerse of feminist statement and I'm going to keep that in mind being is it's like a homecoming for me I grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Osaka and there's something about being here at the University of Nairobi that reminds me of Asuka even this space reminds me of the Arts Theatre in Osaka and also the way that we were observed formalities and there's a nicely set up table and the flowers it's very familiar it would be exactly the same thing in the sukkah however I don't think that any professor at Asuka would have the kind of fantastic humor but we just select the bitter and I'm also amazed that people here seem to have kept the time now in Asuka in the in the University of Nigeria and suka version of this advant which would be quite similar but the only difference would be that a 15-minute talk the first 15 minutes will be spent on the intro doctor and on telling us how it's not going to be a long talk so I just want to say thank you to my K and brothers and sisters we're making an effort to keep the time I also particularly want to thank vessel and geotab um because her grease reminds me of my mother who herself is a brilliant University woman who's passionate about women it's lovely to meet you I also want to thank everybody else here I just feel a little overwhelmed I don't usually but I do so I'd like to start by I'm talking about growing up as a teenager when I was growing up in a Sukkah and slowly becoming aware of Africa through reading it places like this held a kind of romance for me this is like my career like Nairobi I imagine them as better versions of Asuka I imagine them with avenues that were tree-lined and a kind of genteel grace that comes with the accumulation of African knowledge so I romanticized these places and I would imagine for example the gathering in 1962 of African writers at McLaren where they gathered to argue and to agree and disagree but really mostly to acknowledge and to affirm one another I like to describe myself as a hopelessly sentimental pan-african except of course for when the African Cup of Nations is being played because then I just descend into a rabid screaming Nigerian nationalism but then I go back to my hopeless and sentimental pan-african once Nigeria's kicked out so and this this description of myself as a hopelessly sentimental pan-african is as much a political definition as it is an emotional one it's a pride in the history of beanie people and Zulu people it's a kind of special crush on Thomas Sankara it's a kind of special morning for leaders like him unlike Tom Boyer and and Patrice Lumumba it's a presently interest in the politics of Malawi and Ghana it's listening to the wonderful money Leakey money yesterday and wanting to cry just hearing her talk about what life was like for her as a young woman in Kenya but most of all it's the kind it's also reading this wonderful novel called dust by Yvonne a jumbo war which all of you must read it's reading that book and discovering in that book something familiar something that I share but portrayed in a way that perhaps I wouldn't portrayed and it is a kind of heartbroken love for a continent that I long to feel whole again thirteen years ago I was an undergraduate in the u.s. I was writing I've been writing since I was old enough to spell writing has always been what I love but I was also practical I was raised by practically more parents and so I had to think about ways of earning a living so my plan had been that I when I was in Nigeria my plan had been that I would become a doctor because you know you do well in school they tell you you have to be a doctor and I was going to become a doctor and I was going to become a psychiatrist and my plan was to then use my patient stories for my fiction now at some point at some point I realized that I would make a very unhappy doctor and that maybe my patients might not survive my care so I decided to leave medicine and I ran away to America and studied the media so my plan was to walk in media but always to write it's important for me to say that writing and publishing are two very different things for me writing is the thing I love writing is the thing that makes me happy when it's going well writing is the thing that gives meaning to my life and if I hadn't been fortunate enough to have been published and to have been read by many of you I would still be somewhere writing I would probably be unemployed living in my parents house but I would be writing but so I was in the u.s. I I was going to school studying media thinking about how I'll get a job so that I could support my writing I was writing short stories I also wrote a few terrible novels but I hadn't showed anybody my work I was writing it a very private personal thing for me I would come back from school and write until one o'clock in the morning and little sleep and then and this was the internet was still fairly new but then one day online I found out about this website where if you were a writer you could post your stories and have other people give you feedback this website was called zoetrope so I signed up and I started to post some of my stories and I started to get feedback from people and most of the feedback was well-meaning sometimes helpful but mostly not so for example someone I remember that one of them my readers said to me that that Kara had written about a character who was not very nice and this reader said to me that the character wasn't very nice but it was understandable because this character had grown up in poverty in Nigeria now I wanted my walk to be vigorously engaged with to be vigorously liked or disliked but not to be patronized not to be patted on the back and said oh you poor African it's okay if you're bad because you're a poor African I wanted mine to be characters who if they were untimed were understood to be a kion kind because human beings can be unkind and not because they had grown up in a childhood that didn't have Disneyland so one day on the site this American man sent me a message and said have you met the other African I'm actually planning to write a novel called have you met the other African what movie and he gave me this other Africans name so really at the time they're just two Africans on this website and so I then searched for this name and this was a long and authentically confusing African name so I searched for it I found the story I read the story I loved the story I wrote a long response back and this other African was called binya Van Gerwen ina there was something there was something different about about history but it's hard to define it's something and I realized now looking bad but that it was there's something about discovering being abandoned discovering history on that site that touch the kind of loneliness in me a kind of literary loneliness loneliness I didn't even know I had until I found in your anger so for me finally here was someone who understood it wasn't about liking or disliking what I wrote but it was about getting it about understanding it it was about somebody who knew who recognized the eyes with which I looked at the world via Vanga became what I like to call the first of my truth-tellers the readers who read what I write and who say I like this oh I don't like this but I know where you're coming from I hadn't given anybody the manuscript of the novel I was working on at the time and over that later I became Purple Hibiscus but after exchanging emails have been evander oh and then we moved from exchanging emails on the websites of exchanging personal emails I was in the u.s. at the time it was relatively cheap to have internet even that was still quite new but in Africa it wasn't and being evanka ran up the bills of his poor dear father by sending me long pontificating emails every other day about how to solve the problems of Africa and what he if any of you know being a banker and how he's known to talk and talk and not stop he writes in exactly the same way we formed a friendship we formed a friendship on that website and it's a friendship that for me has become very meaningful and that I know will be a part of me for the rest of my life we didn't always agree we still don't always agree yeah I wonder like science fiction and fantasy and strange Chandra's that I don't understand I don't think he has much patience for kind of sentimentalizing that I sometimes do both of us discovered for example that we love camera lies the African child when we were growing up and I like to imagine myself in a Sukkah and being abandoned a crew and while reading this book their African child and both of us are loving it and it's having this particular meaning for us and this meaning again goes back to what I said earlier about about a certain kind of pan-africanism that's difficult to define but you know it when you feel it be evanka was very knowledgeable and he was full of research he and I don't know how he did it but he just had information about every imaginable thing one of which was the Keane prize so he will each day who send me an email about this scholarship you can apply to you can Africa and this and I don't know when he got the time to write but apparently he did but he would also send short stories but he told me about the Kane prize and it was the surprise that he said was were African writing and he said we should we should send in our stories now at the time I didn't think my story was a good fit because in my somewhere in my mind African literature had to feature such things as color knots and calabashes and and that sort of thing and here I was writing about sort of headstrong Nigerian women who were in the US and so I said to Pina vanden oh I oh I won't I don't think it and he said no you have to you have to so really he bullied me into sending my story in to the hint prize and he sent his in after going through this long process of getting it published which itself was and oh and I was absolutely writing a long an impassioned rant of an email to the organizers of the King prize but that's another story and so I was startled that we have and then I was shortlisted for the prize and for me I remember when I heard the news that I was shortlisted which was lovely nice but I also remember thinking finally been around and I will meet so yeah or maybe more had passed and so finally we met in London at the came price ceremony which being Evander one I've forgiven him for winning I just forgive him yesterday no um we haven't got one because it was a story that deserves a win and history discovery home was so beautiful but if being Ivanka hadn't won it would be Nirvana hadn't won the King prize I don't think that Wanya would have started in the way that it did it was inspired by by many of the people who are still involved with Pawnee but also largely by being a vanga sense of he has a wonderful generosity his sense of community and this awareness going back to my age of pan-africanism that we cannot walk the paths we walk alone so for me to be here today celebrating 10 years of Pawnee is a thing of pride I feel a kind of unreasonable pry that I was there at the beginning and 10 years later quani has gone from being a dream to being this institution with its own character publishing great talents Quanah can boast of having published Yvonne's story the weight of whispers which itself was another very worldly winner of the King trines and quani has wonderful people like Angela who I'm going to embarrass by saying you're just so lovely and elegant and you're my idea what a beautiful east african woman is [Applause] and also Billy Billy Ahura who Billy looks so much like my brother okay that Billy has really for me is one more proof of a very crazy but really insistent theory I have which is that every African has a brother sister in another African country but you don't know about now Billy's African brother is my brother okay looks exactly like Billy but of course we could ask whether Billy's mother was a very Nigeria but anyway my first novel purple hibiscus was published in 2003 which is also when the first print edition of pawnee came out I just wanted to talk a little about the publication process of Purple Hibiscus I was in the US as I said earlier and I had written this novel which it wasn't the first novel I wrote I wrote some other bad novels which I hope nobody ever sees but Purple Hibiscus is the first one that I loved and I wanted to get it published and I started to send it out to agents and I got many rejections and I remember that many of the rejections were about if there were not about the story they were about where the story was set they were about the characters and populated the story so one agent said to me I like your writing but nobody knows we're Nigerians and so why don't you consider setting this in America and this is my favorite part of the email that which I will never forget he said and use the African material as background now I wasn't sure I would for a minute I thought how can I do that because I was very desperate to be published and I thought how can I use the African material as the background but then the whole novel is set in Nigeria so if you use all of that as the background who would be nothing left to make the novel so at that point I realized it wouldn't work and so I went back to try another agents finally I was I was fortunate some somebody wrote to me and said I like this and she said to me I'm willing to take a risk on you of course I was thinking a risk because I was unknown and she also said to me you're not like anybody who's writing now if you were Indian it would be easier to sell you because we could say you're the new so-and-so because there are some Indian writers were being published at the time but you're African you're black you're not african-american you're not from Haiti you know from Jamaica we don't know what to do with you so at that point I then considered how I could change my nationality no I'm kidding but I I was I was very fortunate and I I didn't have any expectations for the centavo I was just I was grateful that somebody wanted to publish it and I remember thinking that maybe five people would buy it and four of them would be related to me and so it was amazing to me when this book was published that it took on a life of its own it didn't have it was published by a small publishing house there wasn't much of a budget for publicity of anything of the sort but there was something called hand selling which apparently is what many of the smaller book shops in the u.s. stage people would walk into their shops and the book from the bookshop owner would say read this I've read it and slowly Purple Hibiscus made its way into the world and I was amazed by that I wanted it to be available and affordable in Nigeria there were British editions been sold in Nigeria but if you converted the pounds to naira it was ridiculously expensive I wanted my book to be a book that students no sucker could afford to buy and so I went around looking for somebody who could publish it in Nigeria and that's how I met smokey Bukhari muntaba curry who had been a banker for many years but had also for many years loved literature and for many years had shared what I think is the same thing that Pina Vanda had the same kind of passion that the Balika horror has the same kind of passion that led to Pawnee and that led to for Athena as well which is this idea that we needed a new kind of flowering that we needed to tell our stories again as we used to and so mentor Bukhari wanted to leave his job in a bank and start a publishing house I remember we met in this we met in this restaurant in Lagos and we talked for four hours about literature but also about as Nigerians I want to do about the terrible government and we complained about everything but at the end of it we both understood that we shared the same vision we wanted literature to be available and affordable so Purple Hibiscus is the first book that fire FINA published in 2004 and for Athena in many ways opened the door in Nigeria it's a contemporary publishing of the future and there was also a fire in a magazine which published short stories it's it's it was short lived we're hoping to bring it back but for a feelin pani for me are similar in many ways and for me also a symbolic of many things of this growing sense of community of the shared belief in a certain kind of of pan-africanism in in the idea that our walls is worthy and beautiful and that we're not necessarily interested in in this idea of the positive story but that we want to tell the true story we want to tell our stories in all its complex we do not want to tell us stories of the polish they've been collaborations between the two so Billy has been to Nigeria so Billy has met his Nigerian brother okay and Nigerians have come here and I hope that there'll be many more collaborations between the two after my novel was published and I think in many ways inspired by being a burning down but also inspired by by what seems to me to be a very strange Messiah Complex that I have where I where apparently is from the time I was a child I felt that I had to teach people things they didn't want to be taught and so for example I'm told that when I was in nursery school I decided that my grandmother when she came to visit also when we went to the village to see how I decided she needed to learn how to speak English now my grandmother is this lovely patient kind woman who just indulge her grandchildren until those wonderful stories she all of my knowledge of people folklore came from my grandmother but I would sit her down and say mama and I would the language of instruction was evil but I was teaching her English so I don't know how many Bose speakers were here but I've said to her my mama poincare a and my poor grandmother Subin say hey I'm gonna so I was teaching my poor grandmother English and I think my parents were very amused by this but but this this desire to teach people what they don't know I would think what they don't necessarily want to know I think it's also what inspired me to want to start teaching writing workshops in Nigeria but also because I I believe very much in the idea that we don't walk the paths we walk alone but we shouldn't walk the paths we walk alone and so for eight years now I've been organizing writing workshop in Nigeria different parts of Nigeria Muslim League loss and and each of those years being evander has come to teach the workshop with me and he's also become the event has become a cult figure in Nigeria he walks on the street some people Liberia and we call him a force of nature and we're planning to give him a Nigerian possible but I don't know you should probably shouldn't travel with it I think it's easier to get a visa on a campus water but I mean but I started this workshop and it's something that's become very meaningful to me particularly because the the writers who've gone on from that workshop to do this marvelous things and that a community has been formed so eight years of his workshops suddenly there's a community of people who care about writing who read each other who edit each other who and most of all who again symbolize this idea of this new flowerings this new growth this this new self confidence in our ability to tell our own stories in be Ivanka's book want I'll write about this please there is a line that I love and it's it's he's writing about this person who had lost a parent and he Banga Banga had been asked to go tell this person about the parent who had died but the people who are asking him to go didn't really know him and he describes himself in their eyes as a Kenyan they did not know but an African they trust and for me this line is so beautiful because it captures that strange intangible idea what it means to be pan-african so for me I I feel very grateful and I feel very gratified and I still feel slightly incredulous actually that my books I read in in schools in Japan and Sweden because sometimes I'm I went to Japan and and I had a Hall of people who had read me and I remember standing there thinking really why but but and I feel very grateful for that but there's something different about knowing that my walk is read in a school in Zimbabwe there's something different about knowing that that many of you have read my walk and that it means something to you I think it's that feeling of you can go to people's homes and you're happy to be received but it's just something wonderful about being in your own home being received in your own home and it also reminds me of the novel nervous conditions and how when I read it many years ago I felt this sense of recognition and familiarity I've never been to Zimbabwe but because of nervous conditions I felt alive - Zimbabwe and so now when I think about those writers who were died about 15 years ago and McCreary and I think about the optimism of the 1960s I think there's something happening again today is something similar I don't imagine that many of us would gather to argue about what constitutes African literature I think we would argue about other things but there is something about my generation of African that represents a kind of optimism that I think existed in the 1960s there was also of course the pessimism of the 70s the 80s the 90s of IMF and World Bank and in Nigeria the wards SAP became the witch we made up from structural adjustment program so people would say how are you and somebody would say well I'm fine just that SAP is slapping me so when so when SAP was slapping us we didn't really do very much of cultural production and I think that now we are starting to shrugged away from that and and that where this new wave of optimism that pani fara FINA represents in some ways is quite similar to the optimism of the 1960s and those Africans who gathered at McCarran it's different for us today our anxieties about identity are less fraught and in many ways we have the luxury not only of easier travel and easier communication we also we also have the luxury of ambivalence we have the luxury of ambivalence in our in our politics and our right saying and identities and in many ways we have this luxury because of the people who came before us because they didn't have that luxury the good things happening on this continent I don't mean the Africa rising where we're supposed to be very happy that is something called growth happening in in our countries and something called GDP that we should care about which I suppose we should but for me the good things that are happening in Africa are more cultural so let me tell a little story about skyscrapers when I was in graduate school in the u.s. I took a class on African literature or something but it was a class in which Africans and Africa was being discussed and the two Africans in the class and an American said something like oh you know Africans are not really well the cities are not developed infrastructure is not very good they don't really have skyscrapers and this other Africa in the class got very angry and lashed out and said we have skyscrapers you just haven't seen them and I remember sitting there thinking there's something very wrong with this argument because why have we decided the skyscrapers at the basis on which we define our own Worth and and for me I think that in the larger sense and often economically we use other people's benchmarks to define ourselves so when we talk about things like growth and Africa rises in and what the World Bank tells us we should do and how this say you know don't pay for school because you have everything else we privatize and government should get out of the way on all of those things which I'm sure have some worth um but for me the question is who is deciding how we should measure ourselves are we deciding and it seems to me that it's in culture and particularly in literature that we're using our own benchmarks we're not using skyscrapers well using our own benchmarks we're telling our stories in the way we want to and for me this is something to feel very proud about and very hopeful about I'd like to end with a line that struck me when Phyllis Livonia was reading her lovely poetry and that line was the song of a new leaf and so for me here today is stunning in this wonderful wonderful University of Nairobi to celebrate quani at 10 for me Quan is not just a journal quani also symbolizes that new generation of African writers to which I belonged and I think that all of us happily gloriously with confusion and love and hope we are immersed in the song of a new leaf [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Kwani Trust

Views: 66,438

Rating: 4.8826404 out of 5

Keywords: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Author), #kwaniat10, Kwani?, Kwani Trust, Americanah, African Writers, Africa (Continent), Writer (Occupation), contemporary african writing, Chimamanda, Nigeria (Country), Kenya (Country)

Id: i0nnDkaT8aI

Length: 27min 46sec (1666 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 10 2014