Dubai: The experience of having to grapple with what it means to be black in America is one of the things that forces one to discover a new identity, said Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian author of many award-winning books who spoke about her book, Americanah, in one of the sessions at the Emirate Airline Festival of Literature.
The latest award-winning novel tackles the issue through the story of a young girl in love called Ifemelu, who heads to America and faces the same situation, “but I’m not Ifemelu, and my life is not as interesting as hers,” Adichie giggled.
“There was a meaning of being black in America, and I seemed to be rejecting that. In Nigeria, I never thought of myself as black, and what didn’t make sense to me was that people had to change their identity and become another version of themselves just because of different stereotypes in the US,” she said.
“When I moved to the US, I found it upsetting that I had come from a place people knew nothing about.”
Discussing her novel, which revolves around race, love, and identity, she said “I don’t know what was written intentionally in Americanah and what was not, but the novel is about a friend of my sister, and that’s where it came from.”
She continued by saying that as she grew up reading many romantic fiction stories published by the UK publisher Mills & Boon, she became more inspired to write about love. “I wanted to kind of rewrite an old-fashioned love story in this particular novel. I think it’s important to write about love because it’s the most important thing about being human.”
When asked about the subject of race in the story, she said: “I started with discomfort as intent in the story. The underlying idea around the discourse of race is that everybody has to be comfortable, and it seems to me that there’s something about it that’s fundamentally dishonest. There’s a way to talk about race in the US and I didn’t want it to be like that.”
She said subjects like these matter because it’s always been about the system of injustice.
Adichie said she was also keen to show that there are distinctions within blackness when writing the novel. “There’s this other idea in the US, which also puzzled me, and it is the idea that blackness is a single thing. It was important to show blackness as something diverse.”
