What I liked about movie version of my book – Chimamanda

An earlier novel that deals with the civil war in the 1960s in her native Nigeria, Half of a Yellow Sun, has been made into a movie. At age 19, Adichie came to the U.S. where she studied communication and political science and began work on her first novel. She has a master’s degree in […]

An earlier novel that deals with the civil war in the 1960s in her native Nigeria, Half of a Yellow Sun, has been made into a movie. At age 19, Adichie came to the U.S. where she studied communication and political science and began work on her first novel. She has a master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and another in African Studies from Yale.

So how does it feel seeing your work on the big screen?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Not too bad. I like it. I wasn’t sure that I would because you never knew, but I like it. I like the art of it. I think that it captures Nigeria in a way that’s really beautiful. But I also think it’s different from – I think that film is a very different thing from a book, so I wasn’t expecting the film to be exactly the book. But I think it captures the spirit of the book.
What was it about the book that was essential for you to not be lost in the film?
Adichie: The sense that, when people are in a war – and, in this case, in Biafra – that they find ways to retain their humanity. I think, for me, I wanted the novel to really be a human story and I think the film does that. So it’s about war which I think is important, but it’s really about how people in the middle of war, people get married, people fall in love.
Given that you weren’t even born in ’67, what was it about that particular war that you wanted to bring to life in your novel?
Adichie: Well, I wasn’t alive, you’re right, but I feel as though I inherited the shadow of that period. My grandfathers died in the war. My parents lost everything they owned. I feel as though my family’s path was really affected by the war and I wanted to remember.
I think that Nigeria, and in general I think many countries in Africa, there’s a kind of willful forgetting. There’s a sense in which we don’t remember our recent past and I think it’s important to remember. So I think, in some way, what I wanted the film to do was tell a human story, but also become a kind of collective way of remembering what happened.
You said something a moment ago, applicable not just to the people of Nigeria or to Africa, but certainly true of Americans in many respects, this notion of willful forgetting. What do you think motivates that, particularly in your country?
Adichie: Well, I think that the people who – so the war is fairly recent when you really think about it and there are people who were active in the war who are still alive. So there are people for whom it is beneficial if we don’t remember.
And I think there’s this idea that everybody wants to be comfortable, so let’s just let things be because we all need to be comfortable, which I think applies to the U.S. in the way that there’s a sense in which America’s history, particularly America’s racial history. We’re all supposed to forget it because everybody’s supposed to be kept comfortable.
I think in Nigeria, because Biafra is still very much a contested part of our history, there’s still differing versions of what happened. People just really are contested. So because of that, it’s just more comfortable if we don’t talk about it.
But I think it’s important to remember because I think that consequences of not talking about what happened to us is actually much more dangerous than the consequences of talking about it.
And what do you regard – what do you see those consequences as today, the consequences of not talking about it?
Adichie: That we repeat history. I think many of the things that are happening in Nigeria today, if we go back to 1967, we can explain them. We have politicized ethnicity. We have people politicians who use ethnicity as a tool and it’s happening now. And I think that, if we’re very conscious of what happened 50 years ago, we’re less likely to repeat it. So I do think that it’s a serious possibility unless we remember actively.
“Americanah,” your latest is a national best seller, one of the 10 best books of the year, as I mentioned, as chosen by The New York Times. For those who haven’t read this, what’s the storyline here?
Adichie: It’s a love story, but it’s also social commentary. So it’s about this young woman who lives in Nigeria, comes to the U.S. to go to school and she has a man she loves who leaves Nigeria and goes to England. It’s about many things.
And one of the things I wanted to do, I wanted to write about race in the U.S. as an outsider, as a person who came to the U.S. and became Black because I didn’t think of myself as Black when I was in Nigeria. So race became this new identity for me when I came to the U.S. I wanted to write about that and how strange it can be.
But also, I wanted to write about a kind of immigration that is familiar to me. I think when we hear about Africans immigrating, we think about people who have run away from burned villages and war and poverty. And that story’s important to tell, but it’s not the story I know.
And I wanted to write about the Africa I knew which is the middle class educated people who are leaving not because their villages are burned, but because they want more choices in the way that, you know, throughout history, people have left their homes looking for more. So that’s what I hoped. Also, I think it’s quite funny, if I may say so myself. So I hoped that readers would laugh.
How have you held on to that essential African part of you?
Adichie: By refusing to have an American accent, eating Nigerian food and listening. Actually, when I came to the U.S., I did a very good American accent for a while. Can I have some water, please? And then I realized it takes so much energy. Also, I become a fake version of myself when I’m doing that. I think the thing about being a false version of yourself, you just never quite reach your potential.
But also, I think it’s having come here when I was 19. I was, I think, in some ways formed and being raised in the family where it was very clear. My parents are really lovely people. My father is a professor, but it was a sense in which it was clear that we are Igbo people and, you know, this is what we are.
How did writing become your vocation?
Adichie: You know, I don’t know when I didn’t know. I was the child who was always writing stories and that’s the one thing. That’s the one thing that constantly has made me truly happy. That’s the thing I love. You know, I’m happy to be published and read and it’s still a kind of wonder to me that people actually pay money to read what I wrote [laugh]. But the thing that I love is the writing and I’ve always loved it, always, always.
Courtesy: PBS.com