A Conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Transcribed by Maiah Massotti

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the award-winning author of several books, including the novel Americanah, named by The New York Times one of the Top 10 Books of the Year, the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Half of the Yellow Sun, and the bestselling manifesto We Should All Be Feminists. 

Adichie was born in Nigeria and came to the United States as a college student. She has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and an MA in African Studies from Yale University. She has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship, Hodder Fellowship, and MacArthur Fellowship, and her work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Adichie visited Hofstra University in October 2024 as a featured guest at the Great Writing, Great Readings series, where she was hosted by the English Department in collaboration with the Africana Studies Program, The Black Student Union, and the Black Leaders Advocating for Change. During the evening, the award-winning writer read from her work and sat for a conversation with two students and the Director of the Africana Studies Program, Dr. Veronica Lippincott, from the department of Global Studies and Geography. 

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and space. 

Hofstra: As a writer, you are incredibly well versed in world-building and character development. As societies progress and diversity becomes more of a forefront thought in the minds of authors, sometimes we see a heavy handedness of the Black character who is Black and that is their entire personality. For Black readers, this can be exhausting. The only time we see ourselves in stories is when we're being oppressed, and then, when we have a character arc, it's always despite where we came from or despite us being black. Do you think, as more Black characters are incorporated into stories, that it is important for us to recognize their experience of being Black despite the fear the stereotype presents to readers? Or rather, should the characters be given the opportunity to be Black and be part of the story without making their race the forefront of who they are?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Yes. Very strongly, yes. It's important that you raise this because it's not just in literature, but also in film and in TV series. Most of the time, the intention is well meant, but inclusion has to also be done well. We shouldn't just do inclusion for the sake of inclusion and throw in black people who are not people, but are in some ways, illustrations of social problems. 

There's a quote, and I'm going to mangle the quote, but it's W.E.B. Du Bois, where, in The Souls of Black Folks, he's writing about propaganda and how people say that, “Oh, art and propaganda are two very different things.” And he says, “Well, I disagree. Everything I do is propaganda.” My literature is propaganda, but it's propaganda for the rights of black people to live and love and laugh, something like that, which I just found really beautiful because that is what storytelling should be.

I think that when characters of color are thrown into stories to somehow show the problems, it's demeaning and it's dehumanizing. What literature should do is be a space for contradiction. It's a space for nuance. It's a space for surprise. The whole idea of storytelling is that we should be able to be surprised. 

Also, there's incredible diversity among black people. The fact is that as human beings, we're not all ideologically pure. Sometimes the writing about black characters and also the casting of black characters doesn't quite capture that. Maybe it's also about the people who make the decisions. Maybe we need more diversity not only in the cultural creativity, but also in the people who are making the decisions about what gets to be published and what gets to be shown. Because if there's more diversity on that level, hopefully, it means then that there's more sort of more nuanced, real diversity.

Hofstra: The effects of colonialism can be thought of as a phantom that has gone on to embed itself into the psyche of Africans continent wide, and we see this in some characters in your stories preferring to speak English over their native language. This is particularly pernicious because at its worst, it actively encourages African communities to stifle and harm themselves and regard the languages, customs, and cultures as meaningless. What's the best way to go about unshackling the mind-forged manacles, so to speak, of colonialism?

CNA: I think we need to acknowledge colonialism happened. Colonialism was brutal and inhumane, and there was no way we were going to come out of it better. I like to say that, for Nigeria, which is the country I know best on the continent, there was no way that we were going to emerge from colonialism which was a dictatorship of the worst kind and somehow magically evolve to democracy. When you think about it, it makes no sense. But somehow, African countries are looked at, and people say, ‘Oh, things are terrible. You don't have democracy.’ Yes, because our foundation was a dictatorship. It happened in different ways in different countries, but still fundamentally, that's what it was. It was a dehumanizing dictatorship. 

We can talk about unshackling. Maybe the first step is to acknowledge that it happened. It happened with real consequences. I don't sit down when I'm writing thinking, “I shall now illustrate colonialism.” I'm sitting down writing about human beings I know, human beings like me, human beings who lived and live. And this is the story; this is the reality. 

And on the one hand, the writer in me is kind of reacting to the idea of ‘how do we unshackle?’ Well, why the hell did they shackle in the first place? I don't know how we unshackle. I think we should all sign up for classes. 

I think the other reason is, I'm reluctant to think of ourselves and our reality as a kind of constant victimhood. Because, yes, we were colonized. Yes, it was a horrible dictatorship, but that's not all we are. And it’s a relatively small part of our history. Yet, it's so dominant in our present, because it's also recent. We forget very easily the different parts of Africa that had this lustrous, long, rich, political stories and political organizations. We forget that so easily because colonialism is a recent thing. 

When I spoke to students earlier today, we talked about my character Eugene in Purple Hibiscus, and somebody said to me, “What is wrong with him?” And it was just one of the best questions I’ve ever been asked about my character. I said, “I don't know what's wrong with him.” But part of what is wrong with him is colonialism. 

In some ways, Eugene illustrates colonialism, that it's not so much about the dramatic things. It's not about that in certain countries, you cannot walk on your own land if you don't have a pass. It's not that in Igboland, you destroy cultures so much that a great Ibo chief ends up sitting on the floor in a British prison simply because he has said ‘no’ to you taking his land. It's not that. It's that you now have this man who has been taught to hate himself. There's nothing worse that you can do to a person than self-hate. It's the worst thing. And so, for me, that’s the most insidious. 

But can we also acknowledge that many of us have unshackled ourselves? We're not all shackled. I'm not.

Hofstra: Last year, PEN America published an index on school book bans. And they said in the second half of 2023, there was an unprecedented surge in book bans. And your book, Half of the Yellow Sun, was banned on a reading list in Michigan, and Americanah was banned in the Clay County Florida School District. I would like for you to share your thoughts on this upsurge of book bans in the United States. I want to know how these bans harm you as a writer. 

CNA: What I would encourage people to do is find the list of banned books in your area and go read them. That's one thing to do, because it means they're good. Really, many of them. And it's such a disservice to children because, parents who haven't read the books, then go to these parent teacher meetings and complain about the books they have not read. I find it painful as a reader and as a writer deeply, but also, I think it's dangerous. I think it's very dangerous for young people to be closed off from ideas, but also for a society that seems to think that it's okay. It's almost what we're doing is we're depriving the minds of children. It's a very dangerous thing. 

You're dumbing down a society that, quite frankly, is already kind of dumbed down. It’s getting increasingly difficult, even in college, to assign home books to students. I was talking to some friends who now assign just sections of books. I'm thinking, ‘Wait, hold on. They can read whole books.’ But apparently, TikTok takes up all the time now. When I say that there's a society that's already dumbed down, there's a kind of rigor that is decreasing because what's taking its place is a kind of primacy of convenience. This increasing idea to make it easier. Yes, but make it human.

I think college students should read whole books because college students, over time, have read whole books and have been okay. A sliver of a book does not give you the whole thing. A book is a whole thing.