• 2 years ago
"This is what it means to be Black in this country. It's constantly to have people lower their expectations of you."

Brut sat down with Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who spoke candidly about immigrant anxiety, discovering what it means to be Black in America, and cancel culture.
Transcript
00:00There's a part in Americana where I kind of base it on a story,
00:03something that happened to me, where somebody had said to me on the phone,
00:07where are you from? And I said, Nigeria. And they said, wait, but you didn't grow up there.
00:11And I said, I did. And they said, oh, you sound so American. And I said, thank you.
00:18And I think of that moment with such shame, because why am I thanking somebody for telling me
00:25that I have somehow succeeded in not being my authentic self, you know?
00:29I think that's when I started to think, you know, I'm not going to do this anymore. And my joke is,
00:33what language are you, what tone and what accent will you use if there's a fire,
00:38and you have to warn somebody that there's a fire? Am I going to say, oh my God, there's a fire?
00:43Or am I going to say, there's a fire, there's a fire? I'm like, you know, I would do the second.
00:47And in Americana, you so deftly explore discovering what race is as someone who was
00:54born and raised in Africa. So for you arriving in the U.S., not as your character, but for you,
01:00as Chimamanda, arriving in the U.S. at 19, what was that awakening like for you?
01:04Well, first thing, I remember being disappointed when we drove out of the airport, and it just,
01:11it wasn't very shiny. I mean, I just, I needed America to be shiny, and it wasn't.
01:18And then I remember once, it was, it was probably the first week when we drove past
01:23this building, and this young man was standing by the wall, peeing. And I thought, that's not
01:29supposed to happen in America. I remember also in Brooklyn, this young man who said to me, hey,
01:35sister, he called me sister. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, you know, don't call me your sister.
01:40I'm not your sister. And when I think about it now, I realize that even then, I think I had started
01:44to internalize all of the negative stereotypes that are attached to blackness. And so I felt
01:50that the way to kind of remove myself from that was to say, I'm not black. I'm a Nigerian,
01:57I'm an Igbo woman, I'm African, which now I think about it came from a place of
02:05anxiety. You know, I think that there is a strong feeling of immigrant anxiety. You want to succeed.
02:10And sometimes you think that you have to make choices that are about succeeding and nothing
02:18else, you know. And then a few months later, when I started school in Philadelphia, I think that's
02:24when things started to really change. I started to read. And then of course, there was the one class
02:28where the professor was just surprised that I wrote the best essay. And I will never forget
02:33his expression. It was a very subtle fleeting thing, but he looked surprised. And that for me
02:39is when I realized this is what it means to be black in this country. It's constantly to have
02:44people lower their expectations of you. It's constantly to have people shrink what you're
02:49capable of doing and being. And I think at that moment, I think that's when I realized I'm not
02:56going to take this, you know. I'm not. And I think also that's when I started to say I'm black.
03:03And I like to kind of half joke and say that I want to go back to Brooklyn and find that guy
03:07who called me sister. I say, I'm so sorry. I was just an idiot.
03:12And what do you think to you makes a good writer?
03:15What do I think makes a good writer? Truth. I think, and I think truth can mean many things
03:20in different ways. But I think that idea that one, the kind of sort of what I like to call a
03:26radical honesty, I think it's so important in writing. So I think one of the things about
03:31telling stories, particularly today, when the social media and you're thinking about
03:36how you're going to be received is that tendency to censor yourself, to stifle yourself.
03:45And I think that destroys art. I think that destroys creativity. So I think truth telling,
03:50a radical honesty, a kind of artistic courage where you know that maybe some people will not
03:56like what you're doing, but it's important for you to keep to the truth of your character,
04:01your story, your vision, whatever that is. So truth, I would say truth telling.
04:08And it's a kind of thing that's very difficult to define, but you know it when you see it.
04:12Talk to me about your writing process. Does an idea kind of come to you and then
04:17just keep nagging at you until you feel the need to detangle all the knots that it's going to take
04:25to fully flush it out? Or do you start with the characters, the plot, or a theme?
04:32No, I don't think I ever start with a theme. Because in general, when I think about writing
04:36and creativity, I don't think in those terms. I think that for a creative person,
04:42I don't know that theme is a very helpful way to think about work. It isn't for me.
04:47What is a helpful way to think about it?
04:50Mood, tone, character, voice. So with my novel Half of a Yellow Sun,
05:00that whole period of Nigerian history during the Nigerian Biafran War
05:06in some ways haunted me from the time that I was... When did I start hearing about Biafra
05:12from my father? I'm going to say when I was maybe eight. And it felt almost like this kind of,
05:18almost like a sacred burden. I had to do it, but I was delaying because I wasn't sure I was ready.
05:26With Americana, my most recent novel, I didn't feel any haunting. Americana was me just wanting
05:40to write about this place that had become my second home, and this place that was full of
05:46contradictions. And most of all, I wanted to write about this new identity that had been
05:52given to me in America. In a lot of your writing, the characters are so complex,
05:57and a lot of times we fall in love with them, and then they do something awful, right? Do you feel
06:03that you can relate to some of your characters in that way? I mean, you remain an icon for so many,
06:08right? But you were so glorified. And then once you said something that people didn't like,
06:13all of a sudden it's like twisted. Has that affected the way that you write as well?
06:19That's a really good question. And I think the honest answer is no, it hasn't. And it's also
06:25because, you know, I am, you know, I'm the daughter of James and Grace Adichie. I'm the
06:30granddaughter of Regina and Agnes. I'm the great-granddaughter of Omeni. I can take it,
06:35you know, I'm not going to change myself. I'm just not. And also this idea of, I'm very moved
06:43that my work means something to people, you know, across the world. But I've never wanted to be put
06:48on a pedestal because it worries me that if you're put up so high, the only other thing you can do is
06:54fall. And so when I made the comment about trans women being trans women, and people just sort of,
07:00I was just so surprised by the, there was a kind of hostility I didn't expect, especially from
07:05people I felt who knew me, and who knew that, I mean, not to sound too precious, but who knew
07:10that my heart was in the right place. But what it taught me is that your social position,
07:17you cannot control. And really, you should not put much faith in it. You can't wake up every
07:24morning and say, I'm an icon, and I mean a lot to people, and that defines me. You can't,
07:28because you don't control that.