How Do You Write a Love Story With Teeth?

How do you write a political history that doesn’t curdle into polemic? How do you write a love story with teeth? Ask Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: In the space of just three books, she’s established herself as a writer who knows how to do both. Just don’t ask her how to write an authentic African story—she’s skeptical that such a thing exists.

Her latest book, The Thing Around Your Neck [2], is a collection of short stories, many of them about Nigerian women making their uneasy way in America. (Adichie, 31, has split her time between the two countries since 1997.) And though the settings—a writers’ workshop, a grad-student apartment in Princeton, an affluent house on Philadelphia’s Main Line—are often more mundane than in her novels, the personal and the political are just as tightly entwined. In a way, these are stories about how people are “read” by others—as women, as Nigerians, as immigrants. It’s a concern that Adichie shares with her characters.

She spoke to Double X’s Nina Shen Rastogi while on book tour in New York, where she offered her opinions on having to “play the African” and folks who sneer at women’s literary prizes.

Is there a common thread or theme in The Thing Around Your Neck [2]?

Not really. But I remember reading somewhere that writers constantly rewrite the same story.

Do you have a sense of what story you’re always writing?

It’s clearly a story of woman-ness. I’m very aware of gender, and the question of what home is, and what belonging is—all of that. These are things I think about quite a bit.

There’s an assumption that one is completely aware of why one does what one does, and what one’s “themes” are. And maybe some writers are like that, but I’m really not. I’m a very political being, but I’m also an observer of human beings and humanity. If I wrote according to “theme,” then, for example, all my woman characters would be fantastic, and there would be complete equality in the world. But that’s not how the world is. I know there are women who are horrible beings, as there are men.

One of the things that struck me about your second book, Half of a Yellow Sun [3], was that it wasn’t a political novel, and it wasn’t a romantic novel, but a hybrid. It is set against the backdrop of the Biafran conflict of the late ’60s, but the story is focused on the domestic lives of the characters. Does this hybrid method seem to you the way one must talk about history, or must talk about politics?

Yes. In the end, why does it matter that the U.S. is in Iraq? It matters because there are ordinary lives being affected. It matters because there are people who are 19 who are dying. It matters because there’s a mother who suddenly has to deal with an empty bedroom in her home.

There’s the political novel that is obviously a political novel: It’s like medicine, and it’s good for you, but you struggle to finish it. Which is why when people say, “You write political fiction,” I say, “No, no, no, don’t say that!” Because “political fiction” is an idea that I have in my head, where events drive the narrative, and often there’s a “point” being made.

At the same time, there are some books where the writers hide behind art. It’s too easy sometimes to ignore hard political realities or be precious. So you set a book in a place where war is raging, and people are dying, and hunger is killing them, but then you have 20 pages on the beautiful color of a flower. I don’t like that. I like books that don’t shy away from the unpleasant politics, but in the end are about human beings.

You once spoke about wanting to acknowledge and write about violent acts without letting them become “pornographic.” How do you do that? And when does a violent act belong in a story?

It depends. In Half of a Yellow Sun [3], one of the most difficult scenes for me to write was the rape scene [in which one of the main characters joins his fellow soldiers in gang-raping a bar girl]. But I was also determined to write it. I had been really horrified by the stories of the rape of Biafran women by Biafran soldiers. I was so aware of the fact that this really happened to someone real. I remember writing that scene endlessly, sometimes thinking, “All right, it’s too much, you’re trying too hard to shock; this is disrespectful.” But then I kept thinking about that young woman. It’s hard to explain, but I knew I was at peace with the scene when I thought, yeah, I can live with this.

The Thing Around Your Neck [2] is not only your first collection of short fiction, but also your first book about America. You came to the U.S. to study at Drexel University when you were 19. What’s your relationship with America like?

I ... I don’t know what my relationship is. Nigeria is still home. I have a Nigerian passport. I’m still in the process of getting my green card, so I still do visas.

Is that somehow comforting, to still be on visas?

It was a choice. My friends have said to me, “You’re really stupid. You should have done this a long time ago. It makes things easier, so why are you so sentimental about it?” But for a long time I simply refused to even start the process of getting a green card, because I thought it was important: “I’m Nigerian, I want to hold onto this single passport; I don’t want to have green card privileges.” I felt that to be Nigerian meant to go through the humiliation of foreign embassies. And now I’m completely over that. (laughs) I go back and forth, and I think I always will. I like that America gives you space. Apart from the physical space—you know, the roads are huge—there’s a sense of mental space. If I had gone to the U.K., it would have been quite different. The U.K. is too close; it’s too familiar, and there’s the colonial baggage. Being in America, I felt that I could reinvent myself. And I didn’t necessarily want that, but I liked knowing that I had that choice.

And things that annoyed me very much in the beginning became comforting later: the fact that nobody knew where I had come from. In college I knew people who had no idea not just of Nigeria, but of this vague thing called “Africa”—no conception, none.

Being a writer, I’ve always been—not an outsider, in the alienated sense, but a watcher. I’ve always felt one step removed.

You told the Believer that you don’t think of yourself as an immigrant. In another interview, someone asked you if you were a feminist and you said, “Well, I’m a happy feminist.That’s a thread I sense in your work: a drive to define oneself by terms that aren’t the ones that other people would come up with.

I think that’s actually quite true, about searching for a defining thing that is mine, that is made up by me. But I don’t think I’ll ever find one, that’s the thing. I think what I’m trying to come to terms with is the idea of many labels. You know, there are times when I’m quite happy to embrace the idea that I’m a feminist writer, an Igbo writer, a Nigerian writer, a black writer, blah blah blah. But there are times when that context is patronizing. And that’s when you get really defensive and you think, “I don’t bloody want that, don’t call me that.”

One of my favorite stories in the new book is “On Monday of Last Week,” in which a young Nigerian woman works as a nanny to a wealthy, biracial family in Philadelphia. What are your thoughts on modern American parenting?

I think it’s full of these incredible anxieties that I don’t always understand. I babysat when I was an undergrad for a really lovely family. It was fantastic for me—if I hadn’t done it, it would have taken me much longer to understand America. It was so good for me not only to be immersed in this family for a year and a half, but to get to pick up the kids from school, take them to play-dates, and watch the parents of their friends, sort of upper-middle-class, affluent people. I remember just not understanding—there was so much anxiety, so much anxiety in this cocoon of hyper-safety. It’s the kind of thing that makes you start to expect catastrophe when you shouldn’t. “Oh, the kids, you have to watch the kids at every minute—the kids can’t cross the road alone.” I mean, this kid is eight. I came from Nigeria—I was walking to school when I was in grade one.

Do you think that you’d want to raise your kids in America?

If my partner and I had children, I’d like for them to grow up in Nigeria and then come back to America when they were 17 or 18. Because I do think there are many wonderful things about this country. But raising a black child here—I don’t want my child to know about ... I want my child to not have the kind of baggage I sometimes see in kids of color in the U.S.

This is not to idealize Nigeria—there are also a lot of issues with raising a kid there. A woman said to me at a party the last time I was there, “I teach in a new private school, we teach the British curriculum.” And I thought, “Well, why? Why do you teach the British curriculum, why don’t you teach Nigerian?” And she said, “Oh, you know, the British curriculum, you’re preparing the children for the best.” And I thought, “Oh God, so you’re teaching them to feel inferior; you’re using examples that aren’t familiar in their world.” I think it’s a disaster. My child would never go to a school that teaches “the British curriculum” in Nigeria.

You made a surprising move after you’d written Half of a Yellow Sun [3]—you decided to go to a master’s program in African studies at Yale. What drove you to do that?

My lack of knowledge. On one hand, there’s a bit of irony—“You’re African, you’re going to study Africa in America, ha ha ha.” But I think, well, the best archives of African writing are in America, in the schools with the money. Yale has a fantastic archive of African collections that I would never find anywhere in Nigeria. Our education in Nigeria, it doesn’t prepare you for knowing enough about your own history. And I had so many questions about how we got to where we are, and all of that—I wanted to read those colonial diaries; I wanted to know.

What about getting the outsider perspective that comes with studying Nigeria from the outside? Was that helpful, or was that confusing?

It was confusing, and strange. But what happened at Yale, for me, was that I just realized academia wasn’t for me. The academic approach to studying place is often quite theoretical. It’s “Let’s apply this theory to the case study of Uganda,” and it wasn’t what I was looking for.

Do you think there’s something specific that people are looking for in an “African” story?

I think there is. And I think it’s not just Africans. But you find that in the U.S. and the U.K., the idea of authenticity only happens with writers who are not white, and who are from somewhere else. Well, not necessarily from somewhere else—I think it probably happens with African-American writers, this idea of being authentic and representing properly. There are things that are supposed to be there. And if they’re not, then you’re a bit suspect.

Are there aspects in your books that fulfill those expectations?

I hope not. I don’t know. When I started, before [my first novel] Purple Hibiscus [4], I was very keen to be published. And I noticed that the thing to do was the immigrant story. There was the Vietnamese immigrant story, there was the Indian, so I just did the Nigerian version. I threw in characters. And I thought, instead of having curry, they’ll have garri [5] [cassava]. And it was really bad. I remember sending out the first chapter and getting all these rejections, and at some point realizing—it’s a lie. It’s a lie for you to do this. It’s a lie for you to even try. And I’m so fortunate and happy that nobody published that thing, because it was a disaster.

I was still very keen to be published, but I thought: I’m just going to write what I care about. And in the end, if it’s five people who read it, that’s it. But I will sleep well at night.

I won’t play the African to please people. When I went to Denmark and I was doing an event, a man said to me, “Oh, why didn’t you wear your African clothes? They’re so beautiful.” And I thought, “Yeah, I have some, but I also quite like my jeans, thank you. I think that’s beautiful as well.”

At Double X, we’ve spent a lot of time talking [6] about literary prizes for women. You won the Orange Prize, an award given to female authors writing in English, a few years ago—what role do you think women’s prizes serve?

Well, it served a role for me! I have readers I would never have had if I hadn’t won the Orange. When people say, “Do we really need it?” I think, “Are we being dishonest?” Because it seems we do. You look at the so-called “mainstream” prizes, and there are women who are completely ignored—and they’re not by the Orange.

I mean, gender matters in how we read—maybe not in how we write, but in how we are read. Kate Mosse, who organizes the Orange Prize, she talked about Roddy Doyle, the Irish writer, and his book The Woman Who Walked into Doors [7]. He wrote about a woman who was in an abusive relationship. And he said that he knew that if a woman had written that book, the reception would have been entirely different. It would have become, you know, a “nice” book about domestic abuse and “women’s issues.” But because he wrote it, and he’s a man, it was taken so much more seriously.

Because women have also been absorbed into this method of reading, we sometimes read that way as well—a way that’s somehow slightly inferior to the way that they read men. Anything that gets more books out, that gets writers readers, I think that’s a good thing.

Photograph of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie by Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images.