CANR
WORK TITLE: Dream Count
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.chimamanda.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: Nigeria
NATIONALITY: Nigerian
LAST VOLUME: LRC Jan 2023
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 15, 1977, in Abba, Nigeria (some sources say Enugu, Nigeria); immigrated to United States, c. 1996; daughter of James Nwoye and Ifeoma Aidichie; married Ivara Esege; children: a daughter.
EDUCATION:Attended University of Nigeria and Drexel University; graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University (summa cum laude), 2001; Johns Hopkins University, M.A. (creative writing), 2003; Yale University, M.A. (African studies), 2008.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Hodder Fellow, 2005-06; Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, visiting writer, 2008; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, instructor.
MEMBER:American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
AWARDS:Joint winner, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Short Story Competition, 2002, for “That Harmattan Morning”; David T. Wong International Short Story Prize, PEN Center, 2002, for “Half of a Yellow Sun”; O. Henry Award, 2003, for “American Embassy”; Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, both for Purple Hibiscus; Orange Broadband Prize for fiction, joint winner of Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and joint winner of PEN “Beyond Margins” Award, all 2007, Bailey’s women’s prize, 2015, and Winner of Winners Prize, Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2020, all for Half of a Yellow Sun; MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” 2008; Future Award, 2008; International Nonino Prize, 2009; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, Harvard University, 2011-12; National Book Critics Circle Award fiction prize, 2014, for Americanah; best of the best winner for fiction of the last decade, elected to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters as a Foreign Honorary Member, 2017; PEN Pinter Prize, 2018.
RELIGION: Catholic.WRITINGS
Contributor of short fiction to literary journals, including Iowa Review, Prism International, Calyx, and Wasafiri.
The film Half of a Yellow Sun, adapted from Adichie’s novel, was released by Monterey Media.
SIDELIGHTS
Purple Hibiscus, the debut novel of Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, was greeted with enthusiasm by many critics. This coming-of-age story, focusing on a Nigerian family torn between the orderly Western world forced on them by their father and the native Igbo culture of their heritage, was shortlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in Great Britain. Purple Hibiscus was compared by several critics to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The book’s “riveting opening paragraph,” as John Hartl described it in the New York Times, is perhaps the clearest homage to Achebe: “Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the etagere.”
The story is told through the eyes of fifteen-year-old Kambili Achike. She and her older brother, Jaja, live a strict, regimented life; their father has minutely detailed schedules for them, laying out their activities for every moment of the day. He enforces this schedule, as well as a strict, fundamentalist version of Catholicism and the use of English at home within the family, through tyrannical violence frequently bordering on torture. Kambili is so traumatized by fear that she has difficulty speaking. Yet to the rest of the world, Eugene Achike is a hero, one of the few men in Nigeria brave enough to speak out publicly against the soldiers who have successfully carried out a coup against the former government. Kambili and Jaja get their first taste of freedom when they are allowed to visit their Aunty Ifeoma. This aunt is a university professor, and her crowded apartment is a haven of free thinking for Kambili and Jaja. Under Ifeoma’s care, Kambili begins to blossom, just like the rare purple hibiscus in Ifeoma’s garden that blooms despite civil war and all the other difficulties of life.
Critical reaction to Purple Hibiscus was overwhelmingly positive. Although, as Heather Hewett noted in the Women’s Review of Books, Adichie’s coming-of-age narrative “feels familiar, in Adichie’s hands it is not formulaic. She captivates her reader with alternating moments of suspense and horror, surprising us with unexpected twists and fresh ways of looking at the world. In particular, her lush, vivid descriptions linger long after the novel is over.” Palm Beach Post reviewer Lauren Gold also praised Adichie’s “strong, lyrical voice,” commenting: “Every character has dimension; every description resonates like cello music.” This is an “impressively mature debut,” Lisa Gee declared on the Orange Prize for Fiction website, and “a superb coming-of-age novel wherein it really means something to come of age.”
Adichie explained to Eve Daniels in an interview posted on the Minnesota Public Radio website: “The ‘war and hunger’ kind of coverage Africa gets in the news distorts reality. Of course there are wars and there is hunger in many African countries, but there are also millions of normal people who are going about their lives, with gains and losses, love and pain, just like everyone else. I hope my fiction will enable Americans to see the human, and in many ways ordinary, lives of Nigerians.”
Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun furthered her literary reputation. Explaining the difference between her first and second novels, Adichie told an interviewer for the BBC: “ Half of a Yellow Sun is much more important in the sense that it doesn’t belong to me alone. It’s different because, amongst other things, it goes beyond any sense of personal accomplishment. Half of a Yellow Sun is a book that I felt I had to write, in way that I can’t even describe. I was happy to see it come out at last, because I know how difficult it was to write, what it took.” The story is told from several perspectives and is set during the bloody civil war that ravaged Nigeria during the 1960s. It traces the stories of a middle-class woman named Olanna whose family has been massacred, a boy who leaves his poor village to work as a servant to a university professor, and a foreigner who falls in love with Olanna’s sister.
In Booklist, Donna Seaman observed that “Adichie surpasses her award-winning debut … with a magnificent novel.” She added: “Adichie has masterminded a commanding, sensitive epic about a vicious civil war.” In African Business, a critic wrote that “this extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense,” about “moral responsibility” and “the end of colonialism.” The critic added: “Immensely powerful and with a sweeping pace, this will be one of the most talked-about books of the year.” Adichie, remarked Women’s Review of Books writer E. Frances White, “is skilled at drawing her readers into the daily terror and brutality wrought by war. We watch as the characters’ genteel world of academia disintegrates, tugging at our own senses of security.” White also pointed out: “Importantly, she writes into a rich tradition—virtually every major Nigerian writer has felt compelled to address this devastating civil war.” Half of a Yellow Sun was banned after a conservative push across all South Carolina public school libraries in 2025 due to “descriptions of sexual content.”
The Thing around Your Neck, Adichie’s first collection of short stories, was also greeted with critical praise. The book contains twelve short stories, all of which are set in either the United States or Nigeria. The stories portray characters on the verge of breakdown, from several who are haunted by ghosts to a rich college student who joins a gang. Another story features a woman who barely escapes a violent riot. Nigerian immigrants are portrayed as they struggle to adjust to life in the United States, and many find their new home boring and soulless.
Adichie is “a brilliant writer whose characters stay with you for a long time,” Leslie Patterson remarked in Library Journal. In the London Guardian, Aminatta Forna observed: “The least successful stories are those where the author’s desire to make a statement is too plainly felt, the most successful when she concentrates on character, situation or … how lives are changed in a single moment. Then the powerful themes close to Adichie’s heart shine through, but never overshadow writing of clarity and brilliance.” To Books & Culture writer Susan Vanzanten, Adichie’s collection “revolves around questions of identity in an era of globalization. We live in a world of ethnic neighborhoods with hazy geographic borders, a world of immigration, diasporas, and hybridization. The ‘things’ hanging around all of our necks are complicated strands of social, cultural, religious, and historical roots that gradually weave into the cord of one’s self.” Vanzanten added: “Faith is a central part of what it means to be a global citizen in today’s flat world, and Adichie’s potent fiction helps us to recognize the truths and the lies, the connections and the divisions, that characterize our time.”
The title of Adichie’s third novel, Americanah, is a Nigerian word used to disparage Nigerians who have been to the United States and come back with American affectations. Part love story, part examination of race, displacement, and political unrest, the novel focuses on Ifemelu and Obinze, Nigerians in Lagos who become friends in school but in time fall in love. Ifemelu, beautiful and naturally aristocratic, is fortunate to escape Nigeria during a period of military dictatorship by earning a scholarship to an American university. Obinze intends to join her, but young black men find it difficult to obtain visas to gain entry to post-9/11 America, so he immigrates to London, illegally. He has little choice but to take menial jobs that sap his self-esteem, and ultimately he is arrested and deported back to Nigeria. Meanwhile, Ifemelu faces privations and indignities in New York, then in Philadelphia. To earn money, she takes a job as a babysitter for a wealthy white family and begins to write a controversial blog titled “Raceteenth or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.” The blog, with its incisive and highly provocative observations about racism that reflect the author’s experience learning what it means to be black in America, earns her notoriety and a fellowship to Princeton University, where she embarks on romantic affairs first with a white man and later with an African American professor at Yale. In time, she decides to return to Nigeria, where Obinze has grown wealthy as a property developer despite the nation’s corruption and political turmoil.
Americanah was greeted with high critical praise. A contributor to Publishers Weekly called the novel “compelling,” “important” and “vibrant” and concluded that the author “illuminates the precarious tightrope existence of culturally and racially displaced immigrants.” Describing the novel as “a sensitive portrayal of distant love, broken affinities and culture clash,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor found it “elegantly written” and “emotionally believable.” In Library Journal, Sally Bissell remarked: “Witty, wry, and observant, Adichie is a marvelous storyteller who writes passionately about the difficulty of assimilation and the love that binds a man, a woman, and their homeland.” For Mike Peed, writing for the New York Times Book Review, the book is “witheringly trenchant and hugely empathetic, both worldly and geographically precise, a novel that holds the discomfiting realities of our times fearlessly before us. It never feels false.” Richard Warnica agreed, writing in Maclean’s that Americanah is “a work of uncommon depth and incisive observation.” Finally, Claire Lowdon commented in New Statesman: “Adichie’s observations are always sharp, intelligent, humorous and humane. They will challenge the way you think about race and show you a radically defamiliarised version of western society, as seen through African eyes.”
Adichie adapted a 2012 TEDx talk on feminism for her 2014 book, We Should All Be Feminists. She draws on her own experiences to argue for a feminism for the twenty-first century that is founded in awareness and inclusion. “Adichie has that great gift of distilling concepts that could otherwise be too academic, too heady, into what feels like a line your wise older sister just uttered while fixing her hair,” commented Julia Burke in the Progressive. Burke added: “To citizens of the world who haven’t embraced feminism: consider this book your formal invitation.” Similarly, Lauren Fornier, writing in Canadian Woman Studies, noted: “This book takes what seems obvious to Adichie—and other well-read feminists—and effectively breaks it down into the fundamentals for a wider readership.” Likewise, School Library Journal reviewer Shelley Diaz concluded: “An eloquent, stirring mustread for budding and reluctant feminists.”
In her 2021 work, Notes on Grief, Adichie adapts an article she wrote for the New Yorker on the death of her father in Nigeria from sudden kidney failure in the summer of 2020 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. She and her family, like millions around the globe, had to mourn that death without being physically together, arranging for the funeral over zoom calls. The author details how this death shook her, but she also profiles her father’s achievements in the work, from surviving the Biafran war to becoming a statistics professor. A Kirkus Reviews critic termed this an “affecting paean,” as well as an “elegant, moving contribution to the literature of death and dying.”
After the publication of Notes on Grief, Adichie contributed an essay to an anthology of writings by Nigerian authors called Of This Our Country: Acclaimed Nigerian Writers on the Home, Identity and Culture They Know. Edited by Nancy Adimora and Ore Agbaje-Williams, the collection features, as Eddie Hewitt put it in his review in Connected Cultures, the “stories, personal histories, anecdotes, thoughts and opinions” of twenty-four Nigerian authors who discuss a wide variety of topics, including food, weddings, education, religion, social class, and much more. Adichie’s essay “Still Becoming,” which was featured in Esquire magazine in 2019, is a reflection of the author’s life in Lagos, the biggest city in Nigeria. She spends most of the essay describing the city’s population, comprised of a mix of native citizens and immigrants, and discussing the disparities between social classes, the major religions practiced there, and the hustle and bustle of city life. At night, some areas of the city are cast in shadows due to power cuts, while other parts are “bright and glittering,” Adichie reminisces. She concludes “Still Becoming” with a meditation on the welcoming nature of the city, saying, “one sees the promise of this city: that you will find your kin, where you fit, that there is a space somewhere in Lagos for you.”
In his review, Hewitt lauded the collection as a whole. He noted that “[t]he collection presents great variety and unique perspectives” and “[a]ll the essays … come together in an impressive volume.” Before diving into the individual contributions, Hewitt expressed that he “enjoyed and learnt from all the chapters.” However, he was left wanting after reading “Still Becoming.” He admitted that the essay was “informative,” but he “was hoping for something a bit more captivating and visceral” considering her “supreme talent.”
Adichie once told CA: “I have been writing since I could spell. I did not have a conscious moment where something or someone got me interested in writing. What I think nurtured the innate desire to write was that I grew up surrounded by books in my parents’ house on a university campus.
“Chinua Achebe will always be the most important writer for me because his work influenced not so much my style as my writing philosophy: reading him emboldened me, gave me permission to write about things I knew well. I am influenced by everything I read. I read bad fiction and it influences me in such a way that I know what never to do. I read good fiction and it makes things flow for me, as it were. I generally prefer quiet, careful writing, story and style done well, literature that makes one think of that interesting word ‘art.’
“I write when it comes. I like lots of natural light or very bright artificial light. I do lots of revision and rewriting. I can spend days tweaking one sentence.
“ Purple Hibiscus, my first novel, is my favorite book I have written. It has no competitors at the moment.”
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Adichie, writing as Nwa Grace-James, published her first children’s book, Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, illustrated by Joelle Avelino and part of the “Adventures with Chino” series. In a story that celebrates family through everyday objects, little Chino loves the soft scarf her mother wears around her head when she sleeps. When mother takes the scarf off in the morning, she gives it to Chino as she goes off to work. Chino plays with the green fabric with big red circles and little blue circles, making a bed for her stuffed bunny, playing peekaboo with Papa, and having Grandma tie it around Chino’s head. “Bright, fantastical backgrounds with repeating circular patterns feature various shapes and colors while placing the focus on Chino’s relationships” with her family, noted a writer in Kirkus Reviews. In Publishers Weekly, a review commented that “appealing household details [like yellow bananas and green mangoes] contribute fresh sensorial observations.”
Labeled as one of the most anticipated books of 2025, and her first novel in more than a decade, Adichie’s 2025 Dream Count, is set before, during, and after the Covid-19 pandemic. The book follows four African women living in America, and their relationships with each other, lovers, and family. Middle-aged writer Chiamaka feels trapped during the pandemic in her Maryland apartment so she creates her Dream Count, a variation on body count, to remember her past disastrous relationships with men who were full of themselves and dull. Chiamaka’s best friend, ambitious lawyer Zikora in Washington, DC, dated a man distracted by his video games who ditches her after she gets pregnant. Chiamaka’s cousin, Omelogor, prefers non-commitment with boy toys, while she diverts funds from her corrupt investment banking company to small businesswomen in rural Nigeria. Meanwhile Chiamaka’s Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou, has endured an endless stream of misfortunes throughout her life and is seeking asylum in America.
In an interview with Michel Martin at Morning Edition, Adichie explained why she wrote Dream Count: “I wanted to write about women’s lives. And the reality of it is that for many women, the men in their lives in some ways, shape their lives… Women in general are more likely to have richer interior lives and are also socialized to just sort of embrace more complexity emotionally.”
“Adichie perceptively conveys the fear and bewilderment of those [pandemic] days… Adichie’s story unfolds through the lives, passions and heartbreaks of four deeply connected but very different African women,” noted New Statesman contributor Nicola Sturgeon. “By centring her protagonists’ personal lives, Adichie has sought to push back against a publishing culture that too often reduces the subjectivity of Black and ethnicminority characters to the narrow confines of political struggle,” according to Houman Barekat in Times Literary Supplement.
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
African Business, October 1, 2006, review of Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 65.
Africa News Service, October 13, 2008, “Chimamanda Adichie Bags $500,000 ‘Genius’ Fellowship.”
Birmingham Post (Birmingham, England), May 22, 2004, Reena Gopal, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 53.
Black Issues Book Review, September-October, 2003, Malcolm Venable, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 62; November, 2003, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 17; January 1, 2007, Marie-Elena John, review of Half of a Yellow Sun.
Booklist, September 15, 2003, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 208; August 1, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 39.
Books & Culture, July 1, 2009, Susan Vanzanten, “Heavy Laden.”
Bookseller, June 8, 2007, “Orange Glow for Adichie’s Yellow Sun,” p. 14.
Bookwatch, April, 2004, James A. Cox and Diane C. Donovan, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 3.
Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 31, no. 1-2, 2014, Lauren Fornier, review of We Should All Be Feminists, p. 143.
Capital Times (Madison, WI), November 21, 2003, Heather Lee Schroeder, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. A11.
Christian Science Monitor, July 31, 2009, Marjorie Kehe, review of The Thing around Your Neck, p. 25.
Commonweal, December 5, 2003, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 27.
Daily Post (Liverpool, England), May 21, 2004, Emyr Williams, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 8.
Daily Telegraph (London, England), March 6, 2004, Christopher Hope, review of Purple Hibiscus; April 27, 2004, Nigel Reynolds, “Young Nigerian Writer Eyes Top Fiction Award: The Orange Prize Shortlist Has a Few Surprises,” p. 11.
Europe Intelligence Wire, September 24, 2008, “Eastern Alumna Chimamanda Adichie Named 2008 MacArthur Fellow.”
Evening Standard (London, England), April 30, 2004, Alison Roberts, review of Purple Hibiscus and interview, p. 22.
Evening Times (Glasgow, Scotland), February 28, 2004, Sheila Hamilton, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 12.
Financial Times, April 25, 2009, Isobel Dixon, “Beyond the Yellow Sun; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Collection of Nigerian Lives,” p. 16.
Guardian (London, England), April 27, 2004, John Ezard, “Debut Novel from Nigeria Storms Orange Shortlist,” p. 9; May 16, 2009, Aminatta Forna, review of The Thing around Your Neck.
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2003, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 973; May 1, 2009, review of The Thing around Your Neck; April 15, 2013, review of Americanah; March 15, 2021, review of Notes on Grief.; July 15, 2023, review of Mama’s Sleeping Scarf.
Library Journal, August, 2003, Ellen R. Cohen, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 127; April 15, 2009, Leslie Patterson, review of The Thing around Your Neck, p. 88; May 1, 2013, Sally Bissell, review of Americanah, p. 67.
Maclean’s, June 24, 2013, Richard Warnica, review of Americanah, p. 68.
New Statesman, March 29, 2004, Michele Roberts, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 54; July 12, 2013, Claire Lowdon, “A Kind of Loving,” review of Americanah, p. 52; February 21, 2025, Nicola Sturgeon, review of Dream Count.
New York Times Book Review, November 23, 2003, John Hartl, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 24; August 30, 2009, “African/ American,” p. 16; June 9, 2013, Mike Peed, “Realities of Race,” review of Americanah, p. 12.
Observer (London, England), March 21, 2004, Hephzibah Anderson, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 17.
Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, FL), October 26, 2003, Lauren Gold, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. J7.
Progressive, April 4, 2015, Julia Burke, review of We Should All Be Feminists, p. 41.
Publishers Weekly, August 18, 2003, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 53; March 25, 2013, review of Americanah, p. 41; August 7, 2023, review of Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, p. 55.
San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 2003, Sandip Roy, review of Purple Hibiscus.
School Library Journal, December, 2003, Molly Connally, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 176; February, 2016, Shelley Diaz, review of We Should All Be Feminists, p. 110.
Sentinel Poetry, November, 2003, Ike Anya, “In the Footsteps of Chinua Achebe: Enter Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,” p. 11.
Socialist Review, July, 2004, Liv Lewitschnik, review of Purple Hibiscus.
Spectator, May 4, 2013, Anthony Cummins, “Exotic, Yet Familiar,” review of Americanah, p. 40.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 19, 2003, John Habich, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. E1.
Sunday Times (London, England), February 29, 2004, Lindsay Duguid, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 52.
Times (London, England), March 16, 2004, Jack Malvern, “First-Time Authors Lead Fresh Assault on Orange Prize,” p. 11.
Times Literary Supplement, April 9, 2004, Ranti Williams, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 23; April 4, 2025, Houman Barekat, review of Dream Count, p. 17.
Voice of Youth Advocates, February, 2004, Jamie S. Hansen, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 482.
Washington Post Book World, January 4, 2004, Bill Broun, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 8.
Women’s Review of Books, July, 2004, Heather Hewett, review of Purple Hibiscus, p. 9; May 1, 2007, E. Frances White, “While the World Watched.”
World Literature Today, March 1, 2006, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”; January 1, 2007, Alan Cheuse, review of Half of a Yellow Sun; November 1, 2008, “Chimamanda Adichie Awarded MacArthur Fellowship”; September 1, 2009, Emma Dawson, review of The Thing around Your Neck.
ONLINE
Advocate, https://www.advocate.com/ (December 2, 2022), Trudy Ring, “Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Goes Anti-Trans Again.”
BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ (July 26, 2010), author interview; (November 12, 2020), “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Voted Best Women’s Prize for Fiction Winner”; (November 30, 2022), “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Author Warns about ‘Epidemic of Self-censorship.’”
CEO, https://www.theceomagazine.com/ (March 4, 2020), “How Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Redefined 21st Century Feminism.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie website, http://chimamanda.com (January 30, 2023).
Connected Cultures, https://www.connected-cultures.com/ (November 6, 2021), Eddie Hewitt, review of Of This Our Country: Acclaimed Nigerian Writers on the Home, Identity and Culture They Know.
Curled Up with a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/ (November 3, 2004), review of Purple Hibiscus.
Elle, https://www.elle.com/ (March 29, 2022), Riza Cruz, “Shelf Life: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.”
Fantastic Fiction, https://www.google.com/ (April 17, 2021), “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.”
Guardian (London, England), https:// www.theguardian.com/ (February 11, 2021), Alison Flood, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Publish Memoir about Her Father’s Death”; (November 28, 2022), Zoe Williams, author interview.
Half of a Yellow Sun, http:// www.halfofayellowsun.com/ (July 26, 2010).
Image, https://imagejournal.org/ (January 23, 2023), Susan VanZanten, “A Conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.”
JSTOR Daily, https:// daily.jstor.org/ (August 29, 2018), Hope Reese, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I Became Black in America.”
L3: Liege Language and Literature, http:// www.l3.ulg.ac.be/ (February 18, 2011), author profile and interview.
London Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (February 15, 2025), “‘Cancel culture? We Should Stop It. End of story’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Backlash, Writer’s Block – and Her New Baby Twins.”
Minnesota Public Radio, http:// news.minnesota.publicradio.org/ (August 21, 2003), Eve Daniels, interview with Adichie; (October 21, 2003), Heather McElhatton, review of Purple Hibiscus.
Morning Edition, https://www.npr.org/ (March 4, 2025), Michel Martin, “Celebrated Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘I Have Always Longed to Be Known.’”
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (December 1, 2022), Laura May Todd, author interview.
Nigerians in America, http:// www.nigeriansinamerica.com/ (October 10, 2003), Ikechukwu Anya, “In the Footsteps of Achebe: Enter Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigeria’s Newest Literary Voice.”
Nigerian Village Square, http:// www.nigeriavillagesquare1.com/ (November 3, 2004), Wale Adebanwi, “Nigerian Identity Is Burdensome,” interview.
NPR’s Fresh Air from WHYY, http://www.npr.org/ (July 27, 2013), author interview.
Orange Prize for Fiction website, http:// www.orangeprize.co.uk/ (November 3, 2004), “Shortlisted Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”; Lisa Gee, review of Purple Hibiscus.
Random House website, http://www.randomhouse.com/ (November 3, 2004), “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.”
TED, https:// www.ted.com/ (April 17, 2021), “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.”
Times of India, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ (February 15, 2021), “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Opens Up about Loss and Grief in New Book.”
Vulture, https:// www.vulture.com/ (July 9, 2018), David Marchese, “In Conversation: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the Novelist on Being a “Feminist Icon,” Philip Roth’s Humanist Misogyny, and the Sadness in Melania Trump.”
Zoetrope, http:// www.all-story.com/ (November 3, 2004), “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1977. She grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where her father was a professor and her mother was the first female Registrar. She studied medicine for a year at Nsukka and then left for the US at the age of 19 to continue her education on a different path. She graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State University with a degree in Communication and Political Science.
She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Arts degree in African History from Yale University. She was awarded a Hodder fellowship at Princeton University for the 2005-2006 academic year, and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University for the 2011-2012 academic year. In 2008, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.
She has received honorary doctorate degrees from Eastern Connecticut State University, Johns Hopkins University, Haverford College, Williams College, the University of Edinburgh, Duke University, Amherst College, Bowdoin College, SOAS University of London, American University, Georgetown University, Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, Northwestern University, University of Pennsylvania, Skidmore College and University of Johannesburg.
Ms. Adichie’s work has been translated into over thirty languages.
Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), won the Orange Prize. Her 2013 novel Americanah won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013.
She has delivered two landmark TED talks: her 2009 TED Talk The Danger of A Single Story and her 2012 TEDx Euston talk We Should All Be Feminists, which started a worldwide conversation about feminism and was published as a book in 2014.
Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017.
Her most recent work, Notes On Grief, an essay about losing her father, was published in 2021.
She was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2015. In 2017, Fortune Magazine named her one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders. She is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ms. Adichie divides her time between the United States and Nigeria, where she leads an annual creative writing workshop.
For a detailed bibliography, please see the independent “The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Website” maintained by Daria Tunca.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie photographed last month. Photograph: Jared Soares/The Guardian
This article is more than 6 months old
‘Cancel culture? We should stop it. End of story’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on backlash, writer’s block – and her new baby twins
This article is more than 6 months old
It’s been 11 years since she published a novel. In that time, the author has lost both parents, seen Trump become president twice – and finally returned to fiction after a bruising reaction to her comments on gender
By Charlotte Edwardes
Sat 15 Feb 2025 02.00 EST
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Iarrive early to meet Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian-American writer, feminist, author of Americanah. Her home, just outside Baltimore, looks Scandinavian somehow amid the snow crust and woodland. Adichie is mid-photoshoot, but the stylist shows me through to the kitchen, telling me to help myself to roast chicken and rice. At a desk in the corner, Adichie’s nine-year-old daughter is wearing headphones and absorbed in what looks like homework. In the middle of the room, watched over by a nanny, are two smiling, 10-month-old boys, one sitting in an activity centre, shrieking with joy, the other gnawing a toy. I’d read a lot about Adichie’s life in the last few years: the sudden death of her father, Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, in 2020, the second shock of her mother’s death months later in 2021. I’d heard her on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in 2023 discussing how motherhood is a glorious gift that comes at a cost: “I could probably have written two novels had I not had my child.” Nowhere had I heard that she’d had twins.
“You’ve met my babies,” Adichie laughs when she appears in a vibrant orange dress. She sits to remove the hair extensions she has worn for the shoot. “I want to protect my children. I’m OK with having them mentioned, but I don’t want the piece to become about them.” Later, she tells me that for a long time people didn’t know she had a husband, either – she married Ivara Esege, a hospital physician, in 2009. “So, here’s the thing, Nigerians are … ” Nosy? “They want to know about your personal life. Because of that, I am resistant. I very rarely talk about it.”
There is no reason we should know everything about the lives of our public intellectuals, but I’m mildly surprised that someone as famous as Adichie has managed to keep two whole children quiet. It’s no mean feat that while navigating the bombshell that babies bring to any life, she is publishing her fourth novel, Dream Count – “at the grand old age of 47” (she checks this on her phone because, “I always forget how old I am. I’m not even joking”) – after a fiction hiatus of more than 10 years.
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Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, published when she was 26 and now a school set text, won her the best first book Commonwealth writers’ prize in 2005. A year later, she published Half of a Yellow Sun, set in the Biafran war, which won numerous awards including the Orange prize (now known as the Women’s prize for fiction). It was her passionate advocacy for women that brought her to the mainstream: We Should All be Feminists, her 2012 Tedx Talk, was sampled by Beyoncé in Flawless, and the words stamped on a T-shirt by Dior.
A writer friend of hers tells me that after the publication of Americanah in 2013, he visited her in Lagos and asked his driver how known she was in her country. The driver thought for a minute, then replied: “Number seven.” As in: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the seventh most famous person in Nigeria. She laughs when I relay this. “I wonder what he would say now, that driver. I’m actually quite pleased that I got up to seven, not being a musician.”
Dream Count features the interwoven stories of four women, written in Adichie’s vivid, bracing, highly entertaining style. Like Americanah, it is set in the US and Nigeria, and covers the immigrant experience, the sometimes tense dialogue between Africans and African Americans, the Americanisation of language and thought; as well as mother-daughter relationships, friendship, the pressure on women to marry and have children, and – aptly – late motherhood.
“I didn’t want to leave such a long gap between novels,” she says, as we settle in a quieter room. “When I got pregnant [with her daughter], something just happened. I had a number of years in which I was almost existentially frightened that I wouldn’t write again. It was unbearable.
When I got pregnant, something happened. I was almost existentially frightened that I wouldn’t write again. It was unbearable
“There are expressions like ‘writer’s block’ I don’t like to use because I’m superstitious. But I had many years in which I felt cast out from my creative self, cast out from the part of me that imagines and creates; I just could not reach it. I could write nonfiction, that was fine. But that’s not what my heart wanted.”
When her father died of kidney failure, she was in her fiction-not-being-available-to-me phase, but as she struggled for the language to write Notes on Grief (2021), she noticed that something had loosened. There was a willingness to let go, she says, to surrender control; a feeling similar to the way she’d felt writing fiction. She wasn’t doing anything different – not physically, at least. She was still “scrunched up” with her laptop on her ottoman in the corner of her bedroom. If anything was different, it was how much wiser she felt; how “hyper-aware of how fleeting life is. It makes you think about your own mortality, but also, ‘What do I care about? What matters?’”
Initially, she thought she didn’t possess the words to write about her mother. When she tried it head-on, “there was nothing”. So she started Dream Count, “and only when I was almost done did I realise, my God, it’s about my mother. It wasn’t intentional. I’m happy that it’s not a sad book. She wouldn’t want a sad book dedicated to her.”
Portrait of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with her hair piled on top of her head and wearing a burnt orange top and holding her hands in front of herself
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‘There’s a lot that has to do with having a female body that isn’t much talked about, and it’s consequential for women’s lives.’ Photograph: Jared Soares/The Guardian
Adichie speaks with a swinging, almost tidal rhythm to her sentences. Her disapproval, she registers with a vibrating “hmm”. Elsewhere, her voice surrenders wholly to emotion: deepening and broadening when sombre; silky in persuasion; erupting when amused. For instance, spying the photographer and his assistant tiptoeing out of her house, she breaks off to demand: “What? You did not have anything to eat? Come back. As an African, I am offended.” Then she dips into cajoling: “You’ll have to come back, no? Have some chicken. Go on. Please.” Obedient, they retrace their steps to the kitchen.
The book is set partly in lockdown, which Adichie saw as a time of accounting and nostalgia for lost selves. Her primary character is Chiamaka (Chia), a travel writer and dreamer, reflecting on her dead-end relationships. Chia is scolded by an aunt for leaving it dangerously late to have children: “Your only option now is IVF,” the aunt tells her. “I know somebody that just had twins at 45. But you have to hurry up if you want to use your own eggs.” Although Chia’s friends tease her about the “body count” of exes who have wasted her time – and years of peak fertility – the “dream count” of the title refers to all missed opportunities, Adichie says. “It’s that idea of a woman wanting a life on her own terms, and the things that get in the way of that.”
Incubating for some time at the back of her mind was the idea that she should write more about the “gritty reality” of women’s bodies and the obstacles to women’s lives caused by gynaecology. She saw it as demystifying the experience of, say, premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Or fibroids. Or the violence of the birthing experience. “There’s a lot that has to do with having a female body that isn’t much talked about,” she says, “and it’s consequential for women’s lives.” For a long time, she was reluctant to discuss these, fearing she – a renowned feminist – would fuel a tendency to treat things such as PMS as a joke. “Code for a woman being unreasonably irritable,” she says, darkly. But in addition to the “remarkably unpleasant experience” of having surgery for “a very big fibroid”, hormonal issues have plagued her entire life.
“If one is writing honestly about women’s lives, it seems self-evident that we have to talk about these issues in a very open way, because they affect everything. They affect how well a woman does. They affect your emotional wellbeing. They get in the way of your dreams. If you’re a woman whose dream is to have a family, for example, fibroids can get in the way.” She laughs that she is not trying to raise awareness in an NHS public service announcement sort of way, but because “I was trying to write about women’s lives in a way that feels truthful and wholesome and full for me”.
In a different way, arguments that raged around identity and women’s biology put Adichie in the headlines in 2017. In an interview with Channel 4 News to highlight the treatment of women, she was asked whether a transgender woman was “any less of a real woman”. She replied, “a trans woman is a trans woman”. She went on: “I think the whole problem of gender in the world is about our experiences. It’s not about how we wear our hair or whether we have a vagina or a penis. It’s about the way the world treats us, and I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.”
In the consequent backlash, Adichie wrote a blogpost expressing horror at the accusations of transphobia and reiterating her support for trans rights. But her desire for openness and frank debate (including with Zoe Williams of this paper, who interviewed her after her Reith Lecture on freedom of speech in 2022) put her at odds with those whose bottom line is: no debate.
There is no doubt her career was damaged. Interviews, prizes and talks were cancelled. And she cancelled interviews, too – those that suggested she might want to take the opportunity to apologise. It seemed for a while as if there were only two headlines available: “Chimamanda apologises” or “Chimamanda refuses to apologise”. “It’s a cannibalistic ethos,” she told her friend the writer Dave Eggers about sections of the progressive left at the time. “It swiftly, gleefully, brutally eats its own. There is such a quick assumption of ill will and an increasing sanctimony and humourlessness that can often seem inhumane.”
Time concertinaed, the circus refused to move on. I suggest the emotional toll must have been enormous. Adichie will not talk about it. Did it hamper her creatively? She refuses to say. The closest she comes to the subject is later: “What do I want to say about cancel culture? Cancel culture is bad. We should stop it. End of story.”
I ask instead about Donald Trump, about whom she has spoken and written before. She has said that Trump was as much America as Barack Obama, and that given the history of America, it was not surprising that he was popular: people felt threatened by diversity, by women having more power. Will she talk me through the highs and lows she felt during the election campaign? She opens her mouth to speak, but words quite literally fail her. She tries to rally. “In some ways, I feel the necessity of bearing witness, so … ” She pauses, then emits a sigh of defeat. “I can’t. Part of the reason I don’t want to talk about Trump is that he takes up too much space. This is what being a megalomaniac is about: taking up all the space. Sometimes, the best form of resistance is ignoring someone. More ignoring should have happened during the first term. Because even the mean girl teenager knows the best thing is not actually to say mean things to the other girl; it’s to ignore her.”
Democracy is in serious trouble. I’m surprised at how willing people are to discard integrity in the name of some kind of cult
I ask if she thinks democracy is in danger. From the age of about 10, she says, she had a “dark fascination” with the Nazis – “I don’t know what that says about my mental wellbeing” – and that for years she would watch films and read books and wonder in disbelief, how people could have been so swept up in such obvious hate. “Now, I see why. Sometimes it takes very little. So, do I think democracy is dead? No. Do I think it’s in serious trouble? Yes. Am I surprised? Yes. I’m surprised at how willing people are to discard integrity in the name of some kind of cult. And I think it is a cult. Cult-like loyalty.” She points to the numbers who “know better” but nonetheless stand there nodding as Trump promotes his unqualified lieutenants into positions of immense power and responsibility. “They are saying things that you know they don’t believe. It’s incredible.
Portrait of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in concertinaed top in autumnal colours and brown trousers, with her hands crossed in front of her hips
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Photograph: Jared Soares/The Guardian
“If I ever became president of a country – it sounds crazy – I think it’s possible to work slowly towards a place that is more like a utopia. It’s possible with good leadership. I’m not even like a rabid anti-capitalist, because I’m an Igbo woman. My people are traders. But the kind of capitalism we have now, we don’t need to have. What if we actually employed people, paid them well, thought about their healthcare? Gave people four-day weeks, because we know that human beings thrive better when they’re well rested?”
One thing she struggles with in her daily life is finding balance amid the rapid-fire breaking news (her phone pings on cue). She remembers Trump’s first term, how they lurched from day to day, aghast: “Oh, my God, what’s happened now?” How destructive it was to creative thought. There has to be a happy medium, she says, between blanking it completely and the necessary outrage over situations such as, “They’re sending immigration officers to public schools in Virginia. In America! It’s madness.” She adds: “America has to survive. I mean, it’d better.”
Adichie is eating grapes, cheese and crackers. Her daughter comes in to nuzzle her and pinch some food. I ask what her average day looks like, and Adichie says she gets up at 6am, goes for a two-mile run, then comes back and does 30 minutes of yoga. She throws me a teasing grin. But seriously, does she go to the gym? “Gym? That’s not for me, darling.” But as she can’t just sit and watch TV without, say, reading at the same time, what she will do is run on the treadmill while viewing a French or Scandi crime thriller with subtitles. She doesn’t like American TV. “People wake up with a full face of makeup.” Also, the sex is unrealistic. “People sweeping plates off across the table dramatically or hanging off the wall in a way that you think, ‘That looks very uncomfortable.’”
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Her writing does not follow a fixed routine. When it’s going well, it is – aside from being with the kids – all she wants to do. “There’s not a lot of patience for ordinary life. I cannot wait to get back to writing. Sometimes I don’t want to sleep because I’m terrified that if I wake up, I will have lost the flow.” So she writes in her room, her husband tiptoeing around her, in the public library and large chunks at her house in Lagos, where the family spend the school holidays. She is lucky to have help, she adds, especially in Lagos where staff leave her food outside her door, “because, God forbid, they’d knock and disturb my flow”.
Writing fiction is when she is happiest. “You should talk to my husband: he would say, ‘She becomes a different person.’ It’s like a high. I don’t do drugs, but I imagine that it is that absolute high. I’m struck by how much time passes and I don’t realise. Then when I am done – whatever it is, a character that I’ve finally got – the rest of the day is joyful floating. I’m so much fun to be around. And that is not always the case.”
She hears her husband in the kitchen and calls him in – “Dr Esege!” – and then introduces me. “This is the unfortunate man I married. He’s a doctor, so he has a proper job.” She asks him if he has napped this afternoon and he replies, “I had to. Your son.” “What did my son do?” she replies. In an aside to me she explains that her husband is doing nights with the boys while she deals with the carnival of book publicity. “At 3.30am, he started babbling on and on,” Esege says. “Next thing, he pulled my shirt up to bang my belly. He wouldn’t stop. He was – ” he makes a blowing noise with his lips – “I gave him milk and after about an hour he decided to go back to sleep.” Adichie laughs. “This child will not sleep through the night,” she says. I tell her my son didn’t sleep until he was 10. She waves her palm at me. “I don’t want to hear that, Charlotte, thank you.”
Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1977, the fifth of six children. Her father James was a mathematician, her mother Grace a sociology graduate who was the first female registrar of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Adichie was an outdoorsy kid, playing football and badminton with her two siblings who are closest in age, as well as bookish. She read “whatever I saw”: Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, Camara Laye, Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa. “I read books that I had no business reading. Histories of the Catholic church, because my father had those. I would have read my father’s statistics books but I didn’t know what the hell they meant.”
There are many times when I was short with my mother when I didn’t need to be. There’s a tendency for girls to do that. I wish we would stop
She says hers was a life “deeply shaped” by her parents, that their deaths have left her truly changed. In this way, Dream Count is a “departure”: “The person who wrote Purple Hibiscus was young, but still the person who wrote Half of a Yellow Sun. And in some ways also the person who wrote Americanah. But today I am alone. I’m a person who looks at the world differently.” She spoke to her mother the night before she died. “She was fine; she went to mass. The next morning – my father’s birthday – she was gone. If somebody wrote that in a fiction class I was teaching, I’d be like, ‘No, this is too much.’”
The time since has involved much self-reflection. There are “things I regret; positions I took”. Can she name any? She clicks her tongue. “Not even so much the position as the how.” She says she didn’t want to talk about this because she knew she would cry. “My mother and I were very close. But there are many times when I was short with her when I didn’t need to be. There’s a tendency for girls to do that with mothers. I wish we would stop. I want to tell all the girls in the world. I’m not saying, ‘Don’t express frustration.’ I’m just saying, take a step back and think, ‘Am I doing this with grace?’ Was this in her teenage years? “No, older. When I was a teenager, I was equal opportunities horrible: I felt I knew everything, that my parents knew nothing. Sometimes, I would not be patient with her. I would be patient with my father. She saw the world a lot more clearly, as women often do.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie photographed in a burnt-orange dress clasping her hands in front of her
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Stylist: Somi Nwandu of Nwanyi Oma Style Curating. Hair: Carla Pressley; Make up: Brittany Rogers. Photograph: Jared Soares/The Guardian
“Women go through a lot. I wish I could have done better.” She finds a tissue. “Lord, why did I start saying this?” She smiles. “My mother would not read everything I wrote, but she would tell everybody that it was wonderful.”
She was surprised by what a physical thing grief was, how she reacted in ways she could never have imagined – beating the ground; jumping on the spot. “If you had told me before that I would ever throw myself on the ground for anything, I would have rolled my eyes. I’m still thinking about how little I knew myself. That, I think, is really a big part of the novel: the question of, ‘Do we know ourselves? Do we know other people? Can we?’ I think for me, reasonably, the answer is ‘no’.”
One night in the weeks after her mother’s death, she took to her laptop at 3am and wrote a furious essay entitled It Is Obscene. It condemned “sanctimony” on social media, and saying some young people are “so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow”. She cited, but did not name, two writers she had mentored, who later spread “falsehoods”. Traffic jammed the page and her website crashed.
“I was full of rage,” she says now. I ask, given the timing, whether the piece was fuelled by grief. She stalls. “I would never have made this connection. Clearly. We buried my mother in May, I wrote this thing in June. I hate that word ‘triggered’ – but my nephew had just told me that people were saying online, ‘Oh, it’s a good thing [Adichie’s] parents died because she’s transphobic.’”
Adichie says in the utopia of her dreams there will be no social media, no cancel culture. In addition to “every woman being happy and fulfilled” she’d want African Americans and Africans to have a closer connection. “I’m interested in intra-black dialogues and differences. There’s a lot of tension. And it seems to me that it’s often from not knowing enough of one another.”
Many of these ideas are fleshed out in her novel, a manifesto of sorts. One character creates “Robyn Hood grants” [sic] for women to start small businesses by funnelling funds from her financially corrupt Nigerian employer. I ask if this is a fantasy and she says yes. “I’m hoping somebody will be inspired.” Elsewhere, her character writes hilarious “Dear Men, I am on your side” letters on a For Men Only advice site. Adichie says she has been known to take men to one side for a quiet word. When friends confide about their relationships, often she’ll think, “‘Do you know what? I’m going to call that man. We need to set him straight.’ No, really. And I’m not going to lie, I’ve done it a few times. Sometimes my friends are like, ‘Please don’t, because you will make things worse.’”
The section of the book she describes as “very precious” is where she fictionalises the story of Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel maid from Guinea who alleged in 2011 that former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn had attempted to rape her. The case collapsed at trial after it emerged that Diallo had lied to the authorities and a grand jury about her background. Adichie wrote at the time: “I know women like Nafissatou Diallo. Women who, like me, are West African but, unlike me, do not have the privilege of education or a middle-class upbringing. On television, she was familiar: the skin tone that suggested cheap bleaching creams, the ambitious hair weave, the melodrama … Diallo comes from a place where melodrama is not unusual, and often suggests truth as much as lies.”
The case, she says, never left her imagination. “I was so upset by it. I just felt that it was wrong, not just morally, but in what it said about America. The message it was sending to women claiming they have been sexually abused is: you’d better be perfect. You’d better be utterly sinless. You’d better be an angel if you expect to get justice. It’s not just about that character. It’s also about all the women who, because of the circumstances of their lives, are powerless.” She did not meet Diallo to write her character Kadiatou, but “I did a lot of research.”
I ask how she feels on the cusp of publication, and she says she was glad of a warm email from Zadie Smith, who has read the book. “It was just what I needed. Zadie is a clear thinker, an honest person.” Adichie wrote back, “You made my day.” “But it made more than my day,” she says now.
She continues: “I’m so grateful that I’m back to what I love most – which is writing fiction. But there’s also anxiety. It’s my book, and I’m sending this thing out into the world. I already had sleeping issues. But the night is also when my mind roams. Invariably, it roams to terror. That terror has to be part of the creative process. I’ve always had it. But this time it just feels more finely milled.”
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published on 4 March by Fourth Estate at £20. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
A Conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Susan VanZanten | Issue 65
Born in Nigeria in 1977, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in the university town of Nsukka, living for a time in a house once occupied by Chinua Achebe. After briefly studying medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, Adichie moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and in African studies from Yale. A 2005-06 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, Adichie has been widely heralded as one of the new global voices in African literature. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (Algonquin), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and her second, Half of a Yellow Sun (Fourth Estate), won the Orange Prize for Fiction, one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious annual literary awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Adichie’s work has been translated into thirty languages, and her short stories have been published in journals such as the New Yorker, Granta, Iowa Review, and Zoetrope. She received the O. Henry Prize in 2003 for her short story “American Embassy,” which appears in the recent collection, The Thing Around Your Neck (Fourth Estate). After receiving a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Adichie now divides her time between the United States and Nigeria. She was interviewed by Susan VanZanten.
Image: You’ve said, “I didn’t choose writing, writing chose me.” How did this happen? How did you discern this calling to become a writer? Would you identify it as a vocation?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I have writer friends with elaborate and exciting stories about how they came to writing, but I just don’t have that. I wrote from when I was six. Even then I knew that this was something that truly mattered to me. When I was ten, though I had a lot of friends, I remember looking forward to when I could go up to my father’s study and be alone and write. It was considered something odd for me to want to do when it was sunny outside. Now, as an adult, I realize it’s what I care about. It gives me a sense that this is what I am meant to be doing.
Image: Would you use the word vocation to talk about that?
CNA: I think so. I’ve often said that even if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to be published I would be writing. I love that I am published, and it was a choice that I made to try and get published. But publishing is very different from writing.
Of course one wants to be published. Otherwise I would just write in my diary and put it in a drawer. But publishing is public, which is why I feel a sense of distance from my books after they come out. I get stupidly emotional about my own work when I am with it alone. I don’t show people what I am doing until I am done, until I feel comfortable enough to let it out. The writing part is very private and gives me that marvelous high when it’s going well, but when I finally send something out to my editor, that’s when I have to put on my practical glasses and think about the work in a less intuitive and more pragmatic way. My editor will say, “I don’t think this character would say that.” And I will think, “Well, in my head she did, but all right.”
Image: Initially you wrote poetry and plays, but you seem to have found your voice and your genre in fiction. What is it about fiction in particular that attracts you? Why are you a storyteller?
CNA: Why indeed. Because poetry’s too hard to do well. Also, my process isn’t an entirely conscious thing. I just do. But I will say that fiction is true. This is something my friends who write nonfiction and I argue about all the time. I feel that fiction is much more honest than nonfiction. I know from my limited experience in writing nonfiction, particularly memoir, that in the process of writing I am constantly negotiating different levels of self-censorship and self-protection, and protection of people I love, and sometimes protection of people I don’t necessarily care about but I worry that the reader might have biased feelings about. When I write fiction, I don’t think about any of that. Radical honesty is possible in fiction. With fictional characters, I don’t have to think about protecting anybody.
Image: So you don’t worry about people you know seeing themselves in your fiction?
CNA: They do, invariably, but no, I don’t worry about that. The funny thing is that often when I do base characters on people, they don’t know, and when I don’t, they’re convinced that I have.
Image: Many western readers in a post-secular culture don’t understand the pervasive role that religion plays in African life. Your fiction vividly depicts the presence and weight of religion, with its accounts of traditional Catholicism, African Pentecostalism, Islam, a more liberal Catholicism, and indigenous beliefs. What was it like to grow up as a Catholic in Nigeria in such a spiritually teeming world?
CNA: It was indeed spiritually teeming. But is America actually a post-secular society? I’m not sure. I think it’s quite religious as well, but it manifests itself in a different way. It’s less direct. I even think that in many ways the anti-religion movement is in itself a religion—and sometimes it is more strident than any religious movement.
What’s interesting about Nigeria, and much of sub-Saharan Africa, is how there’s a geographical element to religion. In Igboland where I come from, in southeastern Nigeria, the Presbyterian missionaries came from one side and the Irish-Catholics came from another, and they reached an agreement in the late 1880s or 1890s to respect one another’s turf (though I recently read that one of the Protestant ministers accused the Irish Catholics of encroaching on their territory and going to convert people). My grandfather converted to Catholicism in the 1920s, and my father was born in 1932, so he was baptized Catholic as a baby, and so was my mother. My family, like many families around us, were moderate Catholics. Everybody around me was religious. People went to church. It was something you didn’t question.
When I go back to Nigeria it strikes me how on Sunday people will say, “Have you been to church?” It’s expected, and they say it matter-of-factly. They’re saying it because they want to make sure. They’ll ask, “Will you come out to dinner with us? Have you gone to church, by the way?” Because if you haven’t gone to church then you can’t come to dinner because it means you’re going to evening mass. The option of not going to church doesn’t occur to people, and it doesn’t matter what denomination.
As I was growing up, we went to church every Sunday. I was drawn to religion, but I was the kid who just wouldn’t shut up. I had questions. Everybody else went to church and came home. I wanted to go to the sacristy and talk to the priest about why he said that, I’m sure much to my father’s irritation. But my parents were very, very patient people, and they continue to be. I was drawn to the drama of the Catholic Church. I would cry at Paschal Mass when we raised the candles. They would turn out all the lights and people would hold candles. When it was time to renew your vows and they would light the candles, I would burst into tears because I was so moved. I loved the smell of incense and I loved the Latin. I keep meaning to write about it. I was a happily Catholic child.
I also got into a lot of fights with Anglican friends. There was a Catholic-Protestant divide on campus, and it did affect a lot of things. Looking back now, it’s hilarious. An Anglican would say, “All you Catholics worship Mary and it means you’re going to hell.” I was very enthusiastic about those fights. I could quote the bits of the Bible that were supposed to conform to Catholic tradition, like the letter of Saint James about confession, and of course we had been taught that bits of the Revelation were about the blessed Virgin, and I would quote that as well.
Image: What about indigenous religions when you were growing up? Were they a presence?
CNA: I was among people who viewed indigenous religion with disdain mostly. I became interested in traditional Igbo religion when we would go to our ancestral hometown, and I remain interested. Like most Igbo people, we would go back for Christmases and Easters. Cousins would gather. I noticed that most of my family was Catholic but a few members of the extended family weren’t, and I remember my grandmother saying, “You can’t eat in their home because they worship idols.” Somehow the food they had was tainted. I think that’s when I started to question. I come from a culture where whenever you go into somebody’s home, they give you food; they don’t ask you if you want any, they just give it, and you’re expected to eat it. And so it was an awkward thing to go into those homes. But often those relatives didn’t give us food, because they knew. I was aware of a general Christian attitude of looking down on traditional religious adherence, an assumption that it was somehow bad. The Catholic-Protestant rivalry didn’t really have that element, because of course we had Jesus in common. People would fight about the blessed Virgin Mary and about the Rosary, but you didn’t get a sense of disdain. With traditional religion, there was.
Image: Do you think Catholicism is a western religion? How do you respond to those critics who see the growing presence of Christianity in Africa as a triumph of colonialism?
CNA: I feel ambivalent. I started to question early on, and when I got older I disliked in a visceral way the way that religion was so intertwined with western images: Jesus had to have blue eyes and blond hair, and the blessed Virgin was a beautiful blonde. Once at school during a nativity play somebody suggested that Jesus be dark, be black, and people were horrified. I remember thinking, “Well, we actually don’t know what he looked like.” People have said that Africans have made of Christianity what they will, that they have Africanized Christianity, but I am not always sure. I think they have to an extent. African Christianity has an immediacy that cuts across denominations. I go to mass in the U.S. and it seems tepid by comparison. In Africa, people are very aware of the presence of spirits. There’s the idea that we coexist with other beings in a way that’s very present.
Christianity includes ideas that are cultural rather than religious, and these ideas have been absorbed into African Christianity. This is changing, of course, but even the idea of singing Christian songs in local languages offends some people. I recently heard about a woman who was horrified because she didn’t want Igbo carols at Christmas. Only the English ones were real Christmas carols to her. But even so, the idea of Christianity as a triumph of colonialism might be too simplistic.
Image: I know you recently were doing an African Studies master’s at Yale, where Lamin Sanneh has done a lot with the spread of Christianity in Africa.
CNA: Yes, though I would listen to some of his lectures in disbelief, because his Africa wasn’t my Africa. He’s brilliant and speaks wonderfully, and his grand vision of African Christianity is wonderfully optimistic; he sees everything for the good, but I’m not so sure. In one lecture, he spoke about a Nigerian man who got sick and didn’t go to the hospital but prayed, because he felt that this was the way to cure himself. For Professor Sanneh, this was proof of the active faith people had, but I think we need to talk about the state of the healthcare system. When I was growing up in the eighties, people went to church, people were religious, but you didn’t see this kind of attitude. You see it a lot now. What’s happened in that time? Things have become worse economically. The medical center isn’t as it used to be. Before, you would go there and get free health care, good doctors; you’d get your malaria shot; you’d be fine. Now it doesn’t happen. Now it’s expensive. And so now you have a lot more people praying themselves into health. I remember pointing that out in class, and I don’t think he was pleased. I don’t want to discount faith, but I think that to talk about this thing honestly we need to talk about what’s happened to the healthcare system, and what’s happened in general in Nigeria, where our middle class is disappearing.
Image: The American memoirist Mary Karr calls herself a “cafeteria Catholic,” embracing some aspects of Catholicism and rejecting others. Do you still identify yourself as a Catholic? If so, would you be comfortable calling yourself a cafeteria Catholic? How do you make your choices?
CNA: It’s an interesting expression. There are times when I’m happy to be a cafeteria Catholic. I’m certainly not the child I was. I used to think the pope had all the answers. It really changes, and it depends on where I am, what’s happened recently in my life. I find that I am interested in the idea of faith, but I don’t know if I have faith. There are times when I am certain that I will never believe in anything, and there are other times when I find this odd longing and I think there has to be something. A friend of mine who is a priest, one of my closest friends, actually, who by the way is the reason that I haven’t entirely given up on the Catholic Church, said to me once that to seek was to find. He said to seek God is to find God. He said to me, “You’re never going to catch God and put God in a bottle. That’s what you want to do, but it’s never going to happen because of the nature of God.” And I thought, “Why does it have to be so complicated? Why can’t I capture God in a bottle?”
I suppose to an extent I am a cafeteria Catholic. The good thing—actually, it’s not a good thing—the remarkable thing about growing up Catholic is that you can never get rid of it. It’s in you. Catholics will leave the church, but it’s still there. I don’t know that I can ever run away from it.
Image: Do you still go to mass?
CNA: I do go to mass sometimes, but I’ve also been known to get up and stalk out when I felt the priest was being ridiculous. My last heated argument with a priest was in Nigeria about a year ago. After mass I went to speak to him about what I felt was his misogyny, because his entire mass was about attacking women for what they wore. He wouldn’t let you into the church if you arrived in short sleeves. “You’re showing your arms. You want to tempt men,” he would say. So I went to talk to him, and it wasn’t pleasant. I was furious. I remember feeling that this was the problem I had with religion as a whole, that this man had been given so much power. An immense power comes with being a priest, and particularly in an area like Nigeria, where there’s an automatic hero worship of religious figures and an unwillingness to criticize them.
I remember thinking, “I’m going to speak out, and I know people will support me.” I wrote a piece about it in a local newspaper, and the backlash was incredible. The editor said they had never received as many letters about anything. It was ninety-five percent against me and five percent for me. It was, “Shut up. Just because you’re a writer doesn’t mean you have a right to criticize the priest. You must listen to the priest, and, yes, women tempt men.” It was incredible, and really demoralizing for me. I haven’t been back in that church since, and I don’t know that I ever will. It was the church where I grew up. It just happens to have new management. So it’s a very complicated relationship that I have with the church.
Image: In your first novel, Purple Hibiscus, the character Eugene is a strict, authoritative and domineering father who is a devout traditional Catholic. Some reviewers view him as a thoroughly evil character and the novel as a condemnation of Catholicism, but this seems overly simplistic. How do you see Eugene, and what is the importance of the kind of Catholicism lived out by his sister, Aunty Ifeoma?
CNA: I didn’t intend for Purple Hibiscus to be an anti-Catholic book, and I think that there are alternatives to Eugene in the book. Aunty Ifeoma is the character I most admired. I am a very keen believer in the middle ground and the possibility of coexistence, and I am suspicious of extremes of either side. Eugene was not a character who I wanted to come across as a monster. I disliked what he did and didn’t like him, really, but I also felt that he somehow demanded our sympathy—a complicated sympathy, but still. And I had observed people like him. My father would tell me stories. In Igboland there was always the figure of the mean catechist, half-educated, again invested with the power of the church. They didn’t have many priests, so the catechists did a lot. They didn’t really understand this new faith, and so they would cover their ignorance with silly violence and things that are not humane. My father talked about how the catechists would beat them for being two minutes late to mass. Actually, in my hometown, at mass you still have women—mean-looking women with big sticks—walking around and hitting kids who look like they might be falling asleep.
Image: Just like the Puritans in the U.S. in the seventeenth century.
CNA: Sometimes I read about earlier forms of Christianity, and I think, “Yes, exactly. This is contemporary African Christianity.” And that’s the problem. A lot has remained static as things were passed down. In churches in Nigeria there’s a big fuss made about covering your hair. They won’t let you into the church otherwise. I just think, my God, it’s so irrelevant. Eugene, for me, was a character who made people suffer, but who also had suffered and who, in a strange way, thinks he’s doing the right thing. I find this interesting: “I’m going to beat you, but it’s for your own good. I’m going to beat goodness into you.” And, of course, he had experienced that himself. His sister, on the other hand, represents the possibility of a middle ground. She is ostensibly a happy Catholic, but she still respects her culture and doesn’t see it as a zero sum game. There’s room for everything for her.
Image: I loved both the lyricism and psychological penetration of Purple Hibiscus, but Half of a Yellow Sun is an equally stunning though very different book, chronicling the Nigerian-Biafran War of 1967 to 1971. What was it like to move to writing a historical epic, Dickensian in its sprawl and detail? Did it take a lot of research? Was it difficult to manage the changes in point of view?
CNA: It nearly killed me. I don’t know if I will ever go through something like that again. Though I should never say never. It was difficult technically, because I was turning research into fiction, which I had never done before, but also emotionally, because my grandfathers died in the war and I constantly thought about them as I was writing, particularly my paternal grandfather. I would read about something that had happened and start crying. Was it like that for him, I would wonder? What did he think while he was in the refugee camp? This was a proud Igbo man who for his entire adult life had provided for his family and done the right thing, and to have to flee from his home to a refugee camp, to lose his dignity before he died—all this was heartbreaking for me. And to think about my parents was heartbreaking as well, because they lost their innocence. Like many middle-class, educated Nigerians, they were full of an enthusiastic hope. Nigeria was nearly independent. They were going to build this great giant of Africa. My father went to Berkeley for his PhD. He was offered a job to stay on, and he didn’t consider it for a minute. “We have a country to build,” he thought. He went back to Nigeria with my mother and my two sisters, and a few months later the war started. My father and many people like him really believed in the cause, believed that injustices had been done and that the way to get justice was to have an independent nation. When the war ended, for them it was a loss of innocence. They lost hope in ideas in some ways.
Image: After Nigeria achieved independence, a series of military coups and tribal violence prompted the predominantly Igbo southeastern region to secede and become the Republic of Biafra. The resulting civil war lasted for three years before Nigeria was reunited. Is Half of a Yellow Sun a Nigerian novel or a Biafran novel, or does it make a difference?
CNA: I don’t think about it like that, but if I had to say, I’d say it’s Nigerian. I am Nigerian. We have a difficult and embittered history, and there are things we haven’t addressed, but I’m Nigerian and I have never felt that Biafra should come back or anything of the sort.
Image: You’ve been called an African writer, a Nigerian writer, a feminist writer, and a postcolonial writer. I haven’t seen any description of you as a Catholic writer, which is surprising. What do you think about these kinds of labels? I noticed that in the short story “Jumping Monkey Hill,” most of the people attending the “African Writers Workshop” are ironically named only by their national and gender identity: “the Kenyan man,” “the Senegalese woman.” That story does a wonderful job of mocking the expectations that African writers sometimes face to write a particular kind of fiction. To what extent does your historical situatedness affect your writing?
CNA: Being called a Catholic writer raises the question: what is a Catholic writer? I think it was Graham Greene who said that he was a writer who happened to be Catholic. I went through a phase of being completely anti-labeling and saying, “I won’t be called anything. I’m a writer. I tell stories.” I want us to live in a world in which labels don’t matter, but we don’t, at least not yet. When I won the Orange Prize, for example, I actually became quite irritated with all the talk about being the “first African” to win. I thought, you people are making it seem as though I scaled this enormous hurdle when I’m not sure that’s exactly true. I don’t know how many Africans have been shortlisted in the past. But I got so many emails from Africans, and not just Africans but Caribbean people as well, for whom my win became something personal. A Jamaican woman who lives in London wrote to tell me how she had saved the clippings because she wanted to show them to her daughter when her daughter was older. In that case, having people see me as a black African woman was a moving moment for me, and a moment of pride.
But then other times labels can have so much baggage. It depends on the context. Sometimes someone will say “feminist writer,” and you can hear a sneer in their voice. At other times someone will use the same words and you know they’re describing your awareness of gender and justice, and they don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s the same when someone says “African writer.” Sometimes you know they consider it a slightly less worthy sub-genre of real literature, and then it becomes offensive. But at other times you realize they’re just describing what you do.
Image: With the exception of “Ghosts,” the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck depict the lives of women in contemporary Nigeria and the United States, revolving around the complications of identity in today’s global world. Ethnic neighborhoods have vague geographic borders as a result of immigration, education, and jet travel. What do you think are the constants, the grounding center, in such a life, either for you or for your characters?
CNA: Family. I do think I’m quite different from many of the characters I write about, that in many ways I am more fortunate. I don’t see myself as an immigrant. I am Nigerian. I have a Nigerian passport, but I spend a lot of time in the U.S. I consider the U.S. my second home of convenience, and it’s close to my heart, but Nigeria is still home. Nigeria is where I feel most emotionally invested. The eyes with which I look at the world are Nigerian. Sometimes here in the U.S. I see things that make me shake my head and say, “Only in America.”
Image: How does gender affect these questions of identity? Are these questions more pressing or do they take unique forms for women?
CNA: I was asked recently why my male characters seem to react to immigration differently, about how they seem either overly enthusiastic or clueless. I don’t intend for them to be. Men also struggle. But I’m primarily interested in exploring women’s experiences, I think because that’s what I know. It’s not just my story. It’s my sister’s and her friends’ and my cousins’ and their friends’. I suppose identity is central to one’s work in how it shifts depending on where one is. I have often said that I didn’t know I was black until I came to the U.S. It had never occurred to me. I’d read Roots and I was very moved by Kunta Kinte, but I never thought of myself as black. I remember in Brooklyn, after I had been in the U.S. maybe a month, an African-American man referred to me as “sister,” and I thought, “How offensive! I don’t want it.” I had watched TV and I knew that to be black was not a good thing, so I thought, “No, don’t include me in your group. I am not part of you.” It took reading and asking questions and understanding African American history, which I didn’t have much of a sense of, to accept that identity, which I am completely happy with now.
I think that immigration into places like the U.S. for Africans is always about shifting identities. When I go back to Nigeria, one of the things I like to joke about with my friends is that I get off the plane, and the heat is crazy, but I drop my race baggage. Race just doesn’t occur to me in Nigeria. You become something else, though there are still labels. There I am an Igbo woman, and there’s the stereotype of the Igbo as a penny-pinching people, so if I’m with a group of friends from different ethnic groups in Lagos and I say something like, “Oh, that’s really expensive,” they’ll say, “Oh, you Igbo woman.” And then in my hometown, I don’t have that because most people around me are Igbo. So identity shifts. I’m particularly interested in how it changes when you leave home. In the U.S. you discover race, but gender dynamics also change. I know a number of Nigerian women who have discovered that they could do things in the U.S. that in Nigeria they didn’t think they could. With your family and friends around you, you have the weight of tradition, of “how things are done.” But then you move to a new place and you think, why the heck not? That affects gender, and particularly dynamics between couples.
Image: My favorite story in The Thing Around Your Neck is “The Shivering,” which depicts the unlikely friendship of a female Nigerian graduate student at Princeton with a less-educated Nigerian man whose visa has expired and who is facing deportation. They meet when a plane crashes in Nigeria and the man, Chinedu, comes to Ukumaka’s apartment to ask her to pray with him. To what extent is this story about faith? What kind of faith does each of these characters have?
CNA: It’s the most recent story in the collection, and also in some ways my favorite. I think it came from the part of me that longs to capture God in a bottle. When I lived in Princeton, once while I was away and my brother was staying in my apartment, a plane crashed in Nigeria and the Nigerian first lady died. Somebody knocked on the door, and my brother opened it. It was a strange man, a Nigerian. He said, “I’ve come to pray about what is happening in Nigeria.” He had seen my name on the mailbox and knew someone from Nigeria lived there.
My brother said that this was a man who in Nigeria we would never be friends with. Class is very present in the way our lives work there. Even as a child, you only needed to hear the way somebody spoke English to know that they didn’t go to a good school. It meant that people were divided, so you couldn’t be friends with the kind of person who didn’t speak English well.
My brother says that he and the man prayed, and then the man left. I asked my brother how he felt afterwards, and he said, “You know, I thought it was quite nice that he came by.” We laughed about it, but I was very moved by this story. On the one hand, one could think, “How dare he invade my personal space? For all he knows, I might be a Buddhist.” But on the other hand, it made me think about how being away from home makes you want these strange bonds.
That’s how the story started. It’s about an unlikely friendship, but also about the possibility of faith, of finding the kind of faith that works for you. The woman character grew up Catholic, very much like me, and went through the establishment religion and its routines, and I think that can be quite comforting to some people, but eventually it didn’t work for her. The story becomes about how it is possible for her to find some kind of faith, a version of faith with which she can make peace.
Image: How strong is the Pentecostal movement in Nigeria? You make references to it frequently, and I sense that the character Chinedu was Pentecostal.
CNA: Pentecostalism is huge in Nigeria—and in much of sub-Saharan Africa, from what I have seen and heard and read. I have to say I dislike the version of Pentecostalism that’s sweeping across Nigeria. Not only because it’s a strange fundamentalist brand, but also because I find it un-Christian. It’s very inward-looking. I don’t find it charitable. I don’t find it to be a brand of Christianity that’s aware of the other. I suppose it makes sense: things have become quite difficult in the past twenty years in Nigeria. As I said, people could get healthcare relatively easily in the 1980s, and they no longer can. Now you have pastors who will say, “Bring all your money to the altar, and God will give you back a Mercedes.” It’s no longer about being kind to the person who lives next to you; it’s about God giving you the Mercedes. This kind of thinking has seeped into the social fabric. You go to a cocktail party or a dinner and someone will say very casually, “I am waiting on God. I have sowed my seeds and God will give me my something.”
There’s so much wrong with Pentecostalism as it is in Nigeria, though there are a few exceptions. I’ve been to quite a number of those churches, mostly because I’m curious. There’s intense drama, people being asked to kick the devil. But I feel that it exploits poor people. The most dramatic moments in these churches are when it’s time for giving money. “Sowing your seeds,” they call it. The pastor has a private jet and wears designer suits, and he’ll prance around in front of the congregation and tell them, “God gave me this.” And I think, “Well, no, actually it’s these poor people who paid for your bloody private jet.”
Pentecostalism is spreading, and a lot of the ideas have influenced the more orthodox traditional denominations. In Catholic and Anglican and Methodist services, there’s a lot more prosperity preaching.
Something else about Pentecostalism is that it sees everything remotely associated with traditional religion as bad in a no-holds-barred way. In my hometown, a number of Pentecostal groups have been burning shrines and cutting down trees, because they believe the devil lives in them, and harassing people who aren’t Christian. This is not the way to win people to your God. You do not go and burn somebody’s shrine and think that they will find your God attractive.
Image: You’ve spoken of the influence on you of Chinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart, who is often called the father of African literature. Purple Hibiscus opens with an echo of that famous novel, and the final story in The Thing Around Your Neck essentially presents an alternative feminist rendition of the final chapter of Things Fall Apart. What is it about Achebe that inspires you? In what ways are you attempting to build on but also to move beyond his example?
CNA: I respect and love Chinua Achebe’s work, but I don’t want to be a second Chinua Achebe, or a third. I just want to be Chimamanda Adichie.
Achebe is a man of immense integrity. I believe him. There are some writers whose work you read and you think, “This is a performance. I don’t think you believe this.” And for me, fiction should be truth. There are times when I’ve thought, “I’m going to write this story because I want to show that I can.” But then I’ll think, “No, it’s a lie,” and I won’t, because life is short and I want to do what I care about. Chinua Achebe’s work is full of integrity. He does what he believes in. Growing up an Igbo child, I was fortunate to be educated, but my education didn’t teach me anything about my past. But when I read Things Fall Apart, it became my great-grandfather’s life. It became more than literature for me. It became my story. I am quite protective of Achebe’s novels in a way that I don’t think I am with any other book that I love.
Image: Who else has been important to you? What other books or writers do you love?
CNA: I fall in love and out of love quite often. I went through an Edith Wharton phase where I wanted to read everything she’d ever done, and then at some point I thought, if I read one more thing of hers, I will die.
I like Philip Roth quite a bit, much to the annoyance of my feminist friends. I like his technique, and the way he refuses to hide. I admire a writer who has the courage—and it does take courage—to look social realities in the face. It’s easy in the name of fiction to hide behind art, because you’re afraid somebody will say you’re a little too political, or that politics is not the job of fiction. But Roth is fearless, and I respect that.
Image: Is there anyone who stands on the same level as Achebe for you?
CNA: No, Chinua Achebe has the misfortune of standing alone. I grew up reading mostly English and Russian novels, and I liked them quite a bit, mostly the English ones, but until Achebe, I hadn’t read a book and felt it was mine. The other book I felt that way about was The African Child, a very slim novel by Camara Laye. I read it when I was in grade five, about the time I first read Things Fall Apart, and I remember there was something magical about it. It was about his childhood in Guinea, and there were things that were quite unfamiliar. There was a level of exoticism in it, but also a level of incredible familiarity. I remember falling in love with the book, with the beautiful melancholy of it. I keep meaning to go back and read it again and see.
Image: What effect has the MacArthur Genius Grant had on your life? What will it allow you to do as far as writing goes? Do you have a sense of where you will head in your writing from here?
CNA: I remember being absolutely thrilled and then, later, going into slight panic because I thought, “That’s it. I have no excuse.” My family started teasing me, “Oh, the genius,” but I loved the pride in my father’s voice when I told him. I have been traveling for quite a while. I was in Nigeria, organizing creative writing workshops. I like teaching, particularly in nontraditional environments. But I haven’t had silence and space in a long time, and I think that when I’m done with my book-hawking travels, we’ll see whether the grant is a blessing or not.
Image: You mention that you teach creative writing workshops. What do you tell young, aspiring creative writers?
CNA: To read and read and read. I’m a believer in reading, to see the wide range of what’s been written. I’m also a believer in reading what you dislike at least once, just to know. I often say to my students, “I’m going to have you read something I don’t like.” I don’t like cold fiction. I don’t like fiction that is an experiment. I find that often it’s the boys in the class who love the fiction I don’t like. I say to them, “I’ll tell you why I don’t like it. And, then, if you like it, I want you to tell me why.” Most of all I believe in reading for what you can learn in terms of not just craft and technique but worldview. It’s important to think about sentences and how one develops character and all of that, but also to think about what the story is as a big thing. Most of all, we have fun in the workshops. For me, it’s important that we find reasons to laugh. And we mostly do.
Celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'I have always longed to be known'
March 4, 20255:00 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
By
Michel Martin
,
Adriana Gallardo
,
Majd Al-Waheidi
,
Lindsay Totty
6-Minute Listen
Transcript
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the themes of her new novel, Dream Count: "I wanted to write about women's lives. And the reality of it is that for many women, the men in their lives in some ways, shape their lives."
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the themes of her new novel, Dream Count: "I wanted to write about women's lives. And the reality of it is that for many women, the men in their lives in some ways, shape their lives."
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Coming To 'Americanah': Two Tales Of Immigrant Experience
Book Reviews
Coming To 'Americanah': Two Tales Of Immigrant Experience
Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first three novels won prizes and critical acclaim. Two were optioned for movies, and one, Americanah, sold more than a million copies in the U.S. alone. But then, the words stopped.
"I went through what people like to call writer's block, which is an expression I do not like because I'm very superstitious," Adichie told Morning Edition host Michel Martin.
Eventually, she wrote speeches and essays on feminism, human rights and grief, even a children's book. But another novel eluded her until now.
"Writing fiction is the love of my life. It's the thing that I think gives me meaning. And it's quite different. I mean, the entire process is very different from writing nonfiction with fiction. It's magical."
Sponsor Message
Her new novel, Dream Count, her first since 2013, tells the interconnected stories of four women: three with ties to Nigeria, the fourth to Guinea. Their names are Chiamaka, Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou. But even before the characters came to her, she says, a phrase had lodged in her mind, waiting to be put to use. It became the first sentence of her book.
"I have always longed to be known, truly known by another human being," Adichie writes, reciting the set of words that had been floating in her head for years. "I knew I would write something with that as kind of the kernel of the story," she said.
Despite considering herself fortunate to be known by the people in her life, the passing of her father in 2020 made Adichie question how well she truly knew herself and others.
"When I heard the news of my father's death, I threw myself down on the ground and I was pounding the floor. And I did not realize I was doing this. And afterwards I was shocked by it because I think if you'd asked me how I would react to losing my father, I think I would have said that I would just go numb and completely cold," Adichie said.
Sponsor Message
Dream Count, largely set in the Washington D.C., area during the pandemic, explores the desires of its four protagonists — and how they come to understand the other through their experiences with friends, family and lovers.
Adichie explains it's not so much that women are unknowable: "Women in general are more likely to have richer interior lives and are also socialized to just sort of embrace more complexity emotionally," she said of her characters. "It may be that if men were raised differently in general, they might also have that kind of rich interiority, but I think women in general have more of it."
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity and includes excerpts from the conversation that did not air in the broadcast.
Feminism Is Fashionable For Nigerian Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Author Interviews
Feminism Is Fashionable For Nigerian Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Michel Martin: We first spoke after Americanah, you've been in the public eye for many years now. What's it like to publish a novel now versus at the beginning of your career?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Well, I feel older and hopefully wiser. There's something more intense about it because I haven't written a novel in so many years. This is my first novel in 11 years… And so having finally finished a novel feels as though I am reunited with myself. Because when I couldn't write, I felt that I was shut out from myself.
Martin: Tell us about the four women around whom you organized the book.
Adichie: Chiamaka is a Nigerian woman who lives in the U.S. She's a travel writer who wishes that she were a better writer than she is. And she's very privileged. She comes from a very wealthy family. Her best friend, Zikora, who lives in Washington, D.C. and is a lawyer, is quite different from her. Omelogor is very practical. She's Chiamaka's cousin and lives in Nigeria. She's a very successful banker. She's brilliant and also very unconventional. And the fourth character, this is a character that's most precious to me, is Kadiatou. She's from Guinea. And she is an immigrant in the U.S.,and she experiences this very painful thing.
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Martin: She's [Kadiatou] based on something that happened with Nafissatou Diallo, a hotel worker who accused the then head of the IMF and also (French) presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn or so-called "DSK," she accused him of sexual assault in 2011. She was a hotel cleaner and she went into his room and said that he assaulted her. He was, in fact, arrested but then the charges were dropped because all these things emerged about how her journey and so forth, at least in the eyes of the prosecution, made her an unreliable witness… But this is before the MeToo movement. Tell us why this was so dear to you.
Adichie: When I first heard the story of this woman who had accused this very powerful man of assault, I followed it very closely. I felt connected to her for obvious reasons. She's quite different from me. She's from Guinea; I'm from Nigeria. She's Muslim; I'm Christian. She's working class; I'm not. But she felt to me quite familiar and knowable, and I felt protective of her. But it wasn't until the case was dropped that I just felt something like rage. It became, for me, not just about her. . So this character that I've written, I've actually really invented the character. The character is not her. I mean, apart from the tiny kernel of the story of the assault.
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Martin: Yes, you're very clear about that.
Adichie: I think for me, that character is not just about Nafissatou Diallo, it's also about all the women. There are so many women like her across the world who, because they are powerless, are not given a certain kind of human dignity. I really felt enraged by how she was covered in the press, how she was treated, and how she was very easily labeled a liar. And that label then became a kind of encompassing thing as all she was was a liar.
Martin: We've had a very serious conversation here, but I do have to say the book is very funny. The men don't come off particularly well in this book… Some of these men are just trash, I'm sorry.
Adichie: But you know what? I wanted to write about women's lives. And the reality of it is that for many women, the men in their lives in some ways shape their lives. Generally women are socialized to be the ones who compromise more, who hold back their dreams for people they love, that kind of thing. I'm also often fascinated by women who are in relationships that, looking in from the outside, you can tell is just deeply unhealthy for her. But somehow she finds ways to justify to herself.
Martin: I'm going to ask, are any of these women you?
Adichie: All of them. I mean, Michel, all of them.
The Story of My First Love
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Photography by Annie Leibovitz
February 13, 2025
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WRITERS ROOM
Adichie at her home outside Baltimore, wearing a Dior suit and Dior High Jewelry necklace. Behind her hangs a photo she took of her family compound in Abba, Nigeria. Tiffany & Co. ring. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Sittings Editor: Eric McNeal. Vogue, March 2025.
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My father was a professor, and we lived on the University of Nigeria campus in a house full of books; bougainvillea plants lined our driveway in splashes of purple. This was the small, gated world of my childhood: I went to the university primary school, the university children’s library, the university chapel for Sunday Mass. Everyone was similar—safe and sedate academic people—our lives circumscribed by the tended campus hedges.
In my teenage years, I walked two streets to the university secondary school, whose reputation attracted people from out of town, especially the children of wealthy traders from Onitsha, the location of the largest market in West Africa, that bastion of unsophisticated chaos. For the first time I knew people who were not like us. Bush was the word we used for their gaudy style, their mixed-up English tenses, their imported school sandals.
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Echezona’s sandals were orangey brown with wedge heels, and he walked in a comical strut. He was popular and brash, a ringleader of boys; he often missed school and got into trouble with teachers and loitered during class hours. I was utterly uninterested in Onitsha boys like him until one day, I was so aware of Echezona the air pulsed if he passed by. How strange that a feeling can grow unprompted, from nothing, surprising even your own heart. I began combing my short Afro more carefully, looking in the mirror to see not myself but myself as seen by him. I was 14 and he was 16. I was an academic star and he had abysmal grades. I wasn’t sure he liked me—I was his junior after all—until his friends came to me to say, “Echezona wants to talk to you.”
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“Then he should come himself,” I replied, falsely cool.
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The first time he walked me home, he was quiet, almost solemn, his eyes trained ahead or downward, never once turning to me. I thought he was being superior until I realized with surprise that he was shy. To sense his shyness was to feel the intimacy of discovery, of seeing a different version of a person, suddenly known only to you. He took to walking me home. “I want us to be boyfriend and girlfriend,” he would say, and I would reply, “I have to think about it,” even though I wanted nothing more. One day I said yes. And so began a cracking open of my sheltered world. A rush of new bewildering air. My unlikely first boyfriend. His was an exquisite attentiveness, open and faltering, reaching but not quite holding my hand. Often, his skin brushed against mine. He treated me with care and a kind of fear, as though I might fall and break into pieces. (I thought of him when I overheard an aunt say in Igbo, “A man must hold you like an egg.”) I was not to be rushed, and so it was months before the trembling deliciousness of my life’s first kiss, standing near the quarters in our backyard where our house help lived.
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“You are the finest and most intelligent girl I’ve ever seen,” he told me.
I was held bound by his animation, his exaggerations. He believed in ghosts and blood betrothals. He wanted us to swear that no matter what happened we would wait for each other and get married. He said he would throw himself in the path of a car if I ever stopped talking to him. He made me laugh and laugh; he was serious but difficult to take seriously. He told obvious lies. He would miss school and, while walking normally, say he had broken his leg the day before. I was unimpressed with his indifference to school, but fascinated, nonetheless. He never read anything. In his sparse notebooks, his childish, unformed handwriting was endearing to me. The first time he gave me a love letter, I knew he had not written it himself; his friend had. The same friend who came to my class one morning during the harmattan season and held out Echezona’s red sweater. “Echezona said you look cold.” I slipped my arms, myself, into that woolen softness, and long after the morning cool had given way to a fierce sun, I still wore his sweater.
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“What do you even talk about?” my university campus friends asked, their faces stricken, as if I had gone mad, and in their eyes the unspoken words bush boy, rough boy, unsuitable boy.
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IN THE STACKS
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at Maryland’s Howard County library, where parts of Dream Count were written. Dries Van Noten coat.
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I don’t remember, and what I remember I don’t always trust. Memory fades but it also self-selects. Our memories try to protect us, and often what slips from our remembering is what is best left behind. I barely remember that I heard Echezona stole money from his father and tried to bribe a teacher for test questions. I remember how his face lit up each time he saw me, his grin impish and boyish and eager to please. I remember the ease of being with him, how sullen I was when he missed school, how bereft during vacations when I spent hours on the phone in my father’s study trying to get through the crackling Onitsha lines. On my birthday he gave me a scented satin rose. The perfumy scent became overpowering if you shook the tall case in which it came. I hid it in a cupboard because I feared my mother would ask me to return such an expensive, inappropriate gift. It was shortly after my birthday that he told me he was leaving, his father was sending him to a tough boarding school, but we would remain together no matter what. I cried, as if I sensed how quickly we would lose touch, our letters and phone calls trailing away, and how soon I would have a new boyfriend from my world, a professor’s son.
Echezona died in my first year of university. A friend walked up to me as a lecture hall emptied out to say that Echezona had been shot at a bank in Lagos; he was driving in to deposit a check when armed robbers ran in and started shooting. I stared blankly. I was used to stories of robbers who climbed through unlocked windows at night to steal televisions from campus homes. The extreme, random violence felt so far away as to be surreal. It couldn’t be. I couldn’t cry. For months I carried this news without looking at it until, in a horrific coincidence, I went to a newspaper office in Lagos for my first-ever interview as a writer after publishing a book of poems, and the journalist showed me a wall of award-winning photographs that stilled my body in shock. The journalist asked what was wrong, and I pointed at a photograph.
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“You knew him? I’m sorry. It was a terrible robbery at the bank nearby.”
Echezona’s head was slumped against the car seat; his blood a deep gray in the black-and-white photo.
I will always remember the existential sagging of my spirit, as if something I longed for would now never be. And something I wished untrue was now forever true.
I kept trying to erase that image from my mind, to replace it with his walk, his laughter, his easy switch from shy to outrageous and back again. That photo forced an acceptance on me: He really was gone. I had not heard from him in three years, we were old enough to be separated by our interests, and I knew when he left my school that we were unlikely ever to be together again. Yet I mourned the future that would now never be. With the pain and sadness came a strange sensation of having been cheated. He was my first love, but in dying, he became an idealized future that I could have had. Maybe this is why my new novel, Dream Count, is haunted by the idea of the one who could have been, the one made perfect by loss. After I left the newspaper office, I began desperately searching through a pile of old things for the card he brought me when I was sick with malaria, the only piece of his handwriting I had. Inside the card, written in his uniquely shaky hand were the words: To my one love Ngozi, from your own Echezona.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
HOLDING PATTERN
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Tiffany & Co. ring.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count will be published on March 4.
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Dream Count: A Novel
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DREAM COUNT
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
416pp. Fourth Estate. 20 [pounds sterling].
Chiamaka, a middle-aged Nigerian writer living in Maryland, is cooped up at home during the Covid lockdown, with only her memories for company. She looks back over her hapless love life, starting with her university boyfriend, an emotionally withholding know-it-all called Darnell. He "loved Paris because of James Baldwin; Heaven forbid he should love it for any of the conventional reasons"; they broke up after she embarrassed him by ordering a mimosa at the Montalembert hotel. Chuka was decent and dependable, but he didn't set her heart aflutter ("I did not want what I wanted to want"). Several others also fell short; the one guy who made the grade turned out to be married, and disinclined to leave his wife. Chiamaka calls this roster of exes her "dream count"--a sentimental variation on the crude term "body count"--and wallows in self-pity. She is rich, beautiful and educated--how did it come to this?
Dream Count, the fourth novel by the Nigerian-born author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, comprises four loosely interconnected narratives telling the stories of four women: Chiamaka; her best friend, Zikora, a lawyer; her go-getting banker cousin Omelogor; and her Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou. Terrible men are a recurring theme, and the tales of romantic woe are enjoyably salty. Zikora's boyfriend, Kwame, likes to spend time in her flat because it has bigger windows than his, and "all that natural light made his video games look better on the screen". His agreeable manners and "boyish nice-guy voice" belie a cowardly inadequacy: he does a runner after getting Zikora pregnant, and she reflects bitterly on "that vile scam of a man's public goodness".
Omelogor is an inveterate singleton whose romantic entanglements rarely last longer than a fortnight. ("It is a full life, and a life I own ... To be alone is not always to be lonely.") Disillusioned with her job at a corrupt Nigerian investment bank, she enrols as a postgraduate student in the cultural studies department of an American university. Shortly before quitting the bank, she goes rogue and illicitly funnels funds to deserving small businesswomen in rural Nigeria. She waxes sentimental about the innate savvy of Igbo people: "These village-raised women who barely finished primary school, querulous and wise and sharp-tongued; they guarded their money and spent with good sense, and never missed a thing".
The prevailing timbre is of wistful regret. Adichie sometimes uses ponderous metaphors to convey emotional pain or dread: Zikora has to "bear the beast of her loneliness", then finds herself "jousting with the monster of shame"; grumblings of discontent at Omelogor's workplace are as "nebulous as clouds". The storytelling feels more assured in the passages of wry social observation, often involving the culture clash between American lassitude and the intense seriousness of the aspirational African diaspora, as when Chiamaka's mother bemoans the unloveliness of American colloquialisms--"How can you be grabbing your lunch?"--or Omelogor ruminates on the "infantile heart" of US mass entertainment.
The writer, lawyer and banker are drawn from a world familiar to Adichie, and she is more or less in her element with these characters. But the housekeeper, Kadiatou, is a condescending cutout, her existence defined largely by a series of catastrophes so unremittingly bleak that they border on the absurd. Her father, a miner, is killed in a rock slide. Her sister dies from complications following an operation for cancer. She marries an alcoholic, suffers a miscarriage, then gets pregnant again, only for the child to die in infancy. Her husband dies. She is raped by an employer and then, after claiming asylum in the US, is sexually assaulted by a high-status guest at the New York hotel where she works as a cleaner; the perpetrator is charged, but the prosecution collapses when the defence dredges up concerns around the veracity of Kadiatou's asylum application. (This story line, the author explains in her postscript, was inspired by the case of Nafissatou Diallo, whose case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011 for alleged assault was similarly dismissed.)
Presumably the author felt obligated to remind readers about what real hardship looks like, by way of counterpoint to the relatively privileged lives of the other three protagonists. However, by heaping such a catalogue of miseries on a single character, she lapses into poverty porn: the only working-class member of her quartet reads less like a human being than a case study, as if an NGO report had been fed through artificial intelligence.
An almost compulsive sociological completism weighs down Dream Count as Adichie strains to ensure that every plot point speaks to the cultural zeitgeist. A younger female character seems to have been introduced primarily so she can develop body-image issues as a result of consuming dubious material on Instagram, prompting Omelogor to lament that the young "know irony and hyperbole and sass, but self-love is strange to them". Omelogor is concerned about how online pornography is reshaping male sexual behaviour, and writes an anonymous blog in order to help men better understand what women want. Other culturally contentious practices explored include female genital mutilation, skin-bleaching and butt lifts.
Adichie has pursued a prominent sideline in social activism ever since she came to attention for her debut, Purple Hibiscus was longlisted for the Booker prize in 2004, when she was just twenty-seven. Her two TED Talks on feminism and cultural authenticity have clocked up a combined 44 million views; in the years since her last novel, Americanah (2013), she has published a bestselling nonfiction book, We Should All Be Feminists (2014), and a collection of short stories, Dear Ijeawele (2017), subtitled A feminist manifesto in fifteen suggestions. Dream Count is very much a continuation of this work.
It is perhaps surprising, then, that the novel features several satirical digs at bien pensant liberals in the worlds of publishing and academia. Chiamaka recalls an awkward phone call with an editor at a big publishing house concerning her proposal for a whimsical travel memoir. The editor is keen to work with her, but feels that the memoir idea lacks "relevance" and suggests that Chiamaka write instead about sexual violence in Africa--"a book on Congo and the struggles of the people there would really resonate right now ... Somalia or Sudan could work too". "As soon as she said 'struggles', the word lengthened piously, enunciated earnestly, I knew she saw me as an interpreter of struggles."
Omelogor feels similarly uncomfortable in the leftie postgrad milieu, where she encounters a feminist scholar who "didn't like women. She liked only the idea of women", and a female student with "the pinched, humorless face of a person who thrived on grievances". After sharing the story of her uncle's murder at the hands of Muslim extremists in Nigeria, she is scolded for encouraging Islamophobia. She concludes: "They don't know how to love, these pious people ... Even the way they help each other is so cheerless and earnest".
The suggestion is that the uninterrogated prejudices of these groups are of a piece with the broader suite of social problems discussed in the novel. And perhaps they are. By centring her protagonists' personal lives, Adichie has sought to push back against a publishing culture that too often reduces the subjectivity of Black and ethnicminority characters to the narrow confines of political struggle. Yet she contrives, time and again, to fall back on sociological handwringing.
While Dream Count's fragmentary formal structure and unsatisfying plot arc represent something of a commercial risk (like many a pandemic novel, it ultimately goes nowhere), the author's regurgitation of topical talking points has already proven to be catnip to the cultural commentariat, producing a powerful feedback loop of editorializing solemnity. At a time when the boundary between theme-heavy "book club" fiction and what passes for serious literature seems to be more porous than ever, it would be no great surprise if this novel were to end up on the Booker longlist--not in spite of its flaws, but because of them.
Houman Barekat is co-editor, with Robert Barry and David Winters, of The Digital Critic: Literary culture online, 2017
Caption: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at lit.Cologne, Germany, March 18, 2025
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Barekat, Houman. "Writer, lawyer, banker, cleaner: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's tale of four women--and many social ills." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6366, 4 Apr. 2025, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A834052283/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f2ac3934. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
The arrival of Dream Count, the first novel in more than a decade by the acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a literary moment brimming with anticipation though I suspect I will not be the only one of her admirers to have opened it with a tremor of apprehension too. Two of Adichie's previous novels--Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013)--are among my all-time favourites. I also had the privilege of interviewing Adichie at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2017, and encountered then the force of nature that she is. Her exhilarating mix of intellect, insight, wit and irreverence had the audience- -and me--enraptured. As we parted company that night, I asked her when her next novel might appear. Her answer gave me the impression that it wouldn't be imminent, but I would have been sad to know another eight years would pass before it arrived.
As I sat down to read Adichie's fourth novel, Dream Count, I wasn't sure it could live up to her past achievements. Thankfully, it took me just a couple of pages to feel quietly confident that it might--and it absolutely does. This is a complex, multi-layered beauty of a book. It is deeply and richly feminist. It probes at the nuances of life and laments how reductive modern discourse can be: "ideology blocks different ways of seeing", as Adichie observes in her author's note. It explores big themes--misogyny, masculinity, race, colonialism, cultural relativism, the abuse of power, both personal and institutional--but it does so subtly, almost imperceptibly. The book's lessons on life and the world we inhabit are not thrust didactically at the reader but considered through the profoundly human experiences of her characters.
The novel opens in early 2020, in the shadow of the Covid pandemic. The story moves backwards and (slightly) forwards in time, but it's the experience of lockdown--the looming prospect of it and then its disorientating reality--that anchors the narrative. It is testament to the strength of Adichie's writing that she transports us back into the atmosphere of that time, recreating how it felt. As one of the novel's central characters, Chia, puts it: "In the middle of lockdown, I felt trapped in my house, with the sensation of my days being erased, not lived through, not experienced."
Adichie perceptively conveys the fear and bewilderment of those days. We grappled with questions to which there were either no answers or wildly contradictory ones. We followed advice (dished out by people like me) as if our lives depended on it, while simultaneously wondering how behaviours so trivial could ever protect us from such a contagious virus: "What did 'don't touch your face' and 'wash your hands' mean," Adichie asks, "when nobody knew how this had started, when it would end, or what even it was?" We doubted that life would ever be the same again.
Adichie's story unfolds through the lives, passions and heartbreaks of four deeply connected but very different African women. Chiamaka (Chia)--the lynchpin who connects the others--is a Nigerian living in America. At first glance she seems feckless. A not very successful travel writer, she wanders the globe to see--and write about--interesting places through African eyes. The resulting articles are rarely published, but her family's wealth allows her to live the high life and pursue her dream of writing a book. Chia, however, is a fascinating character: kind, strong and unashamed to pursue the life she wants. Under pressure from her family and African culture to marry and have children, she holds out for true love. The opening sentence of the novel encapsulates what she yearns for: "I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being."
Stuck in her Maryland apartment during lockdown, she reflects on her past relationships. This is the dream count of the novel's title. Each of the men she loved sparked the hope of a happy future, only to let her down or fail to live up to her ideal. The moral of Chia's story is, at heart, an inspiring one: in this one life we have, don't succumb to the pressure (societal or internalised) to settle for second best. Take the risk of holding out for better. "I did not want what I wanted to want," she tells us.
Zikora, also Nigerian, and a hotshot corporate lawyer in Washington DC, is Chia's best friend. She is the least likeable character, but she wasn't always the slightly bitter, humourless, grudging woman that she becomes over the course of the book. She suffers betrayal, of a truly heartbreaking nature, by a man she loves. Her experience reminds us of the multitude of ways--active and passive--in which men let women down: "Every woman has a story like this, where a man has lied to her or betrayed her and left her with consequences." Bitter? Perhaps. True? Almost certainly.
That Zikora is the character who comes closest to embracing victimhood (the book is much more about women's strengths) is extraordinary in the light of Kadiatou's story. Kadiatou (Kadi) is from Guinea, an asylum seeker to America. She is employed as a maid in a hotel, and also works for Chia. She is determined that her daughter, Binta, will get to live the American dream. Just as Kadi is finding her way, forging a future, she steps into the path of a man who brutally abuses his power. In her author's note, Adichie tells us that Kadi's story is based on real-life events. To say more would reveal too much. Suffice to say that, through Kadi, Adichie examines another theme: the power of literature, not just to create fictional stories that illuminate the world, but to tell true stories that society would rather have us forget. As Chia wonders: "Why was a novel a metaphor for [the] unrealistic... novels had always felt to me truer to what was real."
Omelogor, Chia's cousin, whom she adores, is perhaps the most interesting character. A successful banker in Nigeria, she has made her fortune by helping the rich and powerful launder money--facilitating the corruption bleeding her country dry. She is eventually repelled by her own actions but doesn't stop. Instead, she siphons her own portion of stolen wealth into a company--Robyn Hood--that gives micro-grants to women running or trying to start businesses. Through Omelogor, Adichie probes the complex ethics of these transactions, and examines toxic masculinity. Convinced that pornography is the root of fraught gender dynamics, Omelogor starts an anonymous blog called "For Men Only", encouraging male readers to confront their behaviour. She even takes a career break in America to study a masters' in pornography. But here she encounters a clash of cultures between an America she comes to loathe and pride in her African identity--even those parts of it she is expected to denigrate: "I am proud of it because it is African and I am African. can you understand that love and pride complicate? They can implicate as well but first you must see how they complicate."
Romantically, Omelogor travels through life from one short-term relationship to another--or as Chia calls them, "short passion attacks". Hovering in the background, though, is a relationship with a woman. There is a sense that, even if it is buried in her own subconscious, Omelogor is a lesbian.
Wrapped around the novel, almost in an embrace, is the figure of the mother. Adichie implies a woman's relationship with her mother, for good and ill, is the defining relationship of her life. Adichie lost her own mother in February 2021, and a sense of personal loss pervades the book.
Dream Count is an extraordinary novel. Please let it not be another decade until Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returns once more.
Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fourth Estate, 416pp, 20 [pounds sterling]
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Sturgeon, Nicola. "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's triumphant return: Dream Count, the Nigerian writer's first novel in more than a decade, is a powerful exploration of misogyny, masculinity and race." New Statesman, vol. 153, no. 5802, 21 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A834839239/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6c3d83e2. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
Dream Count. By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Knopf; 416 pages; $32. Fourth Estate; £20
Can you be a good polemicist and a good novelist? To judge by the accolades offered to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , you can. Her novels have been lavished with awards and praise: "Americanah", her third novel , won a National Book Critics Circle award in 2013 and was named one of the New York Times's 100 best books of the century. Meanwhile, her polemics have been acclaimed by readers and, better yet, by Beyoncé (the singer used lines from a speech by Ms Adichie in a song, "Flawless").
Some of this hoopla is justified. As a polemicist Ms Adichie is brilliant: funny, eloquent, prescient and brave. In 2012 she gave a TED talk, "We should all be femin ists ", which has since been viewed nearly 14m times. In 2017, years before people had started to debate whether trans women really were women—and wonder whether it was permissible to say if they thought not—she argued that "Trans women are trans women."
In 2021, just as the world was waking up to "woke ", she wrote a scathing essay on social-media "sanctimony": "We are no longer human beings" but "angels jostling to out-angel one another…God help us." It was so popular it crashed her website. Ms Adichie does not merely articulate a new orthodoxy, she argues it into being.
But being a great polemicist does not necessarily make you a great novelist. Few writers manage both (George Orwell , Leo Tolstoy and Emile Zola are rare exceptions). To the outside eye, this seems odd: the skills look so similar. Both novelists and polemicists sit on their bottoms and put words onto a page. But in truth the skills are almost entirely opposite. A polemic must tell you what to think; a novel never should. A polemic is explicit; a novel implicit. The problem with "Dream Count" is that it attempts to be both—and so succeeds as neither.
The book's structure is simple: it moves between the interlocking lives of four women as they themselves move between places such as America, Britain and Nigeria. Along the way they endure genital mutilation , forced marriage, sexual assault and the bloodier assault of childbirth, with its "vulgar helplessness". The possibility for polemic is clear: women's lives are filled with struggles and pain.
Of the four characters the main one, Chia, a writer, is the best-drawn and most likeable. She goes to drab academic parties at a glittering American university where people say things like "problematic" a lot. She reads books on Denmark's slave trade to attract a hunky academic. "I wasn't interested in Denmark's slave trade but I wanted him to think I was; it was a sombre subject, and weighty enough."
Unfortunately each section is written in that character's voice, and the novel shifts to a less well-drawn friend, to Kadi (Chia's maid) and then to a cousin. Kadi is not much like Chia: she does not think acutely clever things about academic pretension. Instead she scrubs floors on her knees and does not complain. Kadi's speech is rendered simply: as a girl we learn "She liked to shoo the chickens." As a wife "She knew she should surrender." She thinks a lot of sentences that start with "she". Rarely is she given very complicated ones.
Kadi also has a tiresome fondness for the homespun simile: one man has a heart "full of dead leaves", and a sister is "a winged angel made of sun rays", a description so sickly that when she dies a few pages later it feels less like a tragedy than a lucky escape from any more adjectives.
Things get worse when Kadi moves to America and is assaulted in the hotel where she works by "this VIP, this naked White man" who is head of the "Multilateral Nations". What quickly becomes clear, from that ineffectually anonymising "Multilateral Nations", and even more so from the "author's note" that follows, is that Kadi is less a person than a parable.
In 2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn , then head of the International Monetary Fund, was accused of sexual assault by a maid at his swanky New York hotel. She, in turn, was accused by his lawyer of being "evil or pathetic or both". Fascinated and appalled, Ms Adichie decided to try "to 'write' a wrong" and retell this story as a novel.
It is all very noble. What it is not is very novelistic. This book does not work. This is not because of appropriation. All artists are thieves. Any event, to a writer, offers not merely emotion but material to plunder. "There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer," Graham Greene, an English novelist, said. This is not necessarily nice—but it is normal.
What a "novel" concept
The problem in "Dream Count" is a lack of artistry. This book has too many characters, and too many are poorly drawn. There are not just the four leads; there are also their families, cooks, cleaners, drivers and their many lovers. There is Darnell and Chuka and Luuk and then, just when you think it is all over, on page 382 Chia remembers her lover Johan. "Why had I forgotten Johan?" she wonders. Why indeed? And, given that she had, why must she remind the poor reader of him so soon before the book ends?
But the worst section is Kadi's. It feels utterly unconvincing; worse, you feel lectured. And most readers do not want to be educated. They want to be entertained. A polemical novel can do the former. But it must make sure that it does the latter first. This one fails to, and so fails.
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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: novelist or polemicist?" The Economist, 6 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829807928/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=29179b40. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi MAMA'S SLEEPING SCARF Knopf (Children's None) $18.99 9, 5 ISBN: 978-0-593-53557-8
A young Black child plays with her mama's sleeping scarf while Mama is gone.
In her children's book debut, Adichie (writing as Nwa Grace-James) presents a story of a girl named Chino who admires her mother's soft, silky scarf. When Mama has to go to work, she offers Chino her sleeping scarf to play with until she returns. The green fabric with "big red circles" and "little blue circles" can be a blanket for her stuffed bunny, a curtain for peekaboo, and a scarf for Chino, which she wears at dinner when Mama comes home. Finally the scarf returns to Mama at bedtime. Throughout the day, spent playing games, eating snacks, and exercising with Papa, Grandpa, Grandma, and Bunny, the scarf connects Chino to Mama. Avelino's playful illustrations depict a family with a range of skin tones and hair colors, a refreshing reflection of the true diversity of the Black community. Bright, fantastical backgrounds with repeating circular patterns feature various shapes and colors while placing the focus on Chino's relationships with her loved ones. The straightforward text lingers on each scene, inviting readers to dwell in Chino's world. This is a cozy read-aloud to help little ones wind down before a nap or bed. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Solidly reassuring. (Picture book. 3-6)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: MAMA'S SLEEPING SCARF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A756871943/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=efa5b4a2. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
Mama's Sleeping Scarf
Nwa Grace-James, illus. by Joelle Avelino. Knopf, $18.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-593-53557-8
A mother's scarf helps a child navigate a day's beats in this reiterative garment-focused picture book from Grace-James (Americanah, for adults, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) and illustrator Avelino, both making U.S. picture book debuts. Green with "big red circles and little blue circles," Mama's silky sleeping scarf helps "to keep her hair all soft and nice." When Mama has to leave for the day, she offers up the scarf as a plaything, an action that catalyzes further connection with the child's other family members. Bright, pattern-forward domestic spreads depict Chino as wrapping stuffed companion Bunny in the scarf while playing doctor, using the scarf to play peekaboo with Papa, waving it around on a walk with Grandpa, and having it tied around Chino's own head by Grandma. When dinner is served, the textile even inspires Chino to eat vegetables that mimic its pattern. Conversations between Chino and Bunny sometimes echo narrative lines, leading to a feeling of repetitiveness, while appealing household details ("fresh fruits all sweet and nice. Yellow bananas and green mangoes") contribute fresh sensorial observations. This straightforward yet lively telling illustrates how a simple object used to maintain and accessorize hair supports both a child's sense of autonomy and a Black family's powerful bond. Ages 3-7. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
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"Mama's Sleeping Scarf." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 32, 7 Aug. 2023, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A762480802/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7ab041cf. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
Wainaina, Binyavanga HOW TO WRITE ABOUT AFRICA One World/Random House (NonFiction None) $27.00 6, 6 ISBN: 9780812989656
A generous collection of writing by the Kenyan journalist and essayist.
Originally from Nakuru, of Kikuyu descent, Wainaina (1971-2019) spent his young adult years in South Africa, where he attended university as the country was on the verge of apartheid. In Cape Town, he worked as a food and travel writer. Back in Nairobi, he won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002 for his essay "Discovering Home"--"When I left, I was relieved that I had escaped the burdens and guilts of being in Kenya, of facing my roots, and repudiating them. Here I am, looking for them again"--and he founded the influential Kwani? ("So what?") literary magazine. The author writes extensively about the changing nature of Kenya and the new elite who prefer to send their children to English schools as well as the pull of the old traditional ways. As a young gay writer, he was burdened by the responsibility to represent his young country and its many tribes: "I can't be, nor do I want to be, Mr. AllPanAfrica when I write." In the titular, satirical piece, which was published in Granta in 2005 and became widely reissued, he explores the many entrenched stereotypes about the African continent. "In your text," he writes, "treat Africa as if it was one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, nine hundred million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book." His own provocative work, in contrast, aims to be as specific as possible. The book includes an introduction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
A lively selection of work that well represents the scope of this fine author.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Wainaina, Binyavanga: HOW TO WRITE ABOUT AFRICA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A748974168/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4ea05ae9. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.