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African "Authenticity" and the Biafran Experience Author(s): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Source: Transition , 2008, No. 99 (2008), pp. 42-53 Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20204260 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Indiana University Press and are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transition This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms African "Authenticity" and the Biafran Experience Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie I grew up in Nsukka, a small university town in southeastern Nigeria, and started reading when I was perhaps four years old. I read a lot of British children's literature, and I was particularly enamored of Enid Blyton. I thought that all books had to have white people in them, by their very nature, and so when I started to write, as soon as I was old enough to spell, I wrote the kinds of stories that I was reading. All my characters were white and had blue eyes and played in the snow and ate apples and had dogs called Socks. This, by the way, at a time when I had not been to England and had never seen snow and was more familiar with mangoes than apples. My characters drank ginger beer, a staple of Enid Blyton's characters. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. For many years afterward, I would have a desperate fascination for ginger beer, but that is another story. Then, when I was perhaps eight or nine, I read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). It was a glorious shock of discovery. Here were characters who had Igbo names and ate yams and inhabited a world similar to mine. Okonkwo and Ezinma and Ikemefuna taught me that my world was worthy of literature, that books could also have people like me in them. It was about the same time that I read C?mara Laye's novel The Dark Child (1953), a beauti ful, elegiac, and in some ways wonderfully defensive book that also played a role in making me see my African world as a worthy subject of literature. I like to think of Achebe as the writer whose work gave me permission to write my own stories. But, although Achebe's characters were familiar to me in many ways, their world was also incredibly exotic because they lived without the things that I saw as the norm in my life: they did not have cars and electricity and telephones. They did not eat fried rice. They lived a life that my great-grandfather might have lived, which brings me to a second Things Fall Apart story. I came to the United States about ten years ago to go to college because I was fleeing the study of medicine in Nigeria. As is the case in many places, when you do well in school in Nigeria, you are expected to become a doctor or to pursue some other exalted science. I had been in the science track in secondary school and matriculated at the University of Nigeria to study medicine, but after a year I realized I would be a very unhappy doctor. To 42 Transition 99 This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms prevent the future inadvertent deaths of patients, I fled. Before I arrived in Philadelphia, my friend Ada, who had been in the United States for some years, found a four-bedroom apartment which I would share with three American students. Because Ada had made all the arrangements, my future roommates did not see me until I arrived at the door. I remember them opening the door and looking at me in shock. There was also some disap pointment on their faces: I was not what they had expected. "You are wear ing American clothes," they said (about the jeans I had bought in the Nsukka market). "Where did you learn to speak English so well?" They were surprised that I knew who Mariah Carey was; they had assumed that I listened to what they called "tribal music." I remember looking at them and being surprised that twenty-year-olds knew so little about the world. And then I realized that perhaps Things Fall Apart had played a role in this. These students, like many Americans, had read Achebe's novel in high school, but I suspect that their teacher forgot to explain to them that it was a book set in the Nigeria of a hundred years ago. Later, one of my new roommates told me that I just didn't seem African. Clearly, they had expected that I would step out of the pages of Things Fall Apart. My Things Fall Apart experience was a point of departure for reflections on authenticity, for the idea that there is a single definition o? African and, related to that, for thinking about stereotypes. There is a lot of talk about stereotypes as being automatically bad, and I am not sure that I agree. I think that some stereotypes can be interesting and useful. The problem with stereotypes, however, particularly in literature, is that one story can become the only story: stereotypes straitjacket our ability to think in com plex ways. I have a friend from Korea who complains about being thought of as intelligent by Americans just because she is Asian, and I often tell her that I wish I had that problem. While I'd rather not have any stereotypes attached to me at all, if I had to choose, I would prefer a more benign one. Unfortunately, however, the stereotypes in the West about Black Africa are anything but benign. Africa has a long history of being maligned. Racism, the idea of the black race as inferior to the white race, and even the con struction of race itself as a biological and social reality, was of course used by Western Europeans to justify slavery and later to justify colonialism. The brilliant Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera describes colonial ism as "that great principle which put anyone who was not white in the wrong." It was an economic enterprise, sustained by superior arms, but it was one that depended on racism for its survival. The ideology of racism was derived from ancient and medieval ideas, biblical references, linguistic connections to the idea of blackness, all of which said, in the end: Black is Adichie African "Authenticity" This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 43 not as good as white. And it therefore became morally acceptable to engage in unfair trade with Black Africans, to take their agricultural resources, to take their land, to "civilize" them. These dangerous stereotypes that origi nated from the need to justify the economic enterprises of slavery and colonialism meant that the inhabitants of Black Africa were no longer looked at with the mere curiosity that one may have for somebody who is different; instead, they were regarded with contempt. And these stereotypes found their way into the popular imagination and literature. Some of the books I read as a child?such as those by Rider Haggard dehumanized Africans. All the Africans in those books were spectacularly simple, if not stupid. The adults were like children who needed a Westerner to teach them everything; they were uncivilized; or they were dark and inscru table and dangerous in the way that wild animals are. I loved many of those books. I simply didn't get that they were supposed to be about me. I did not, of course, identify with any of these African characters. Even the more serious books which I read later, those with well-meaning intentions, such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902)?essentially about the evils of colonialism?did not have a single African character portrayed as fully human. A more recent anti-imperial book which castigates European evils in Africa, Sven Lindqvist's "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (1995) still manages not to depict a single human African. There are many other examples. Africans become dispensable; Africans don't matter, not even in narratives ostensibly about Africa. The old stereotypes are repeated, feeding on one another and self-perpetuating in the many other books that have been written about Africa since. A different manifestation of stereotypes is the present sexiness and hipness of Africa in the Western media. Africa has for the past two years or so been very fashionable in the United States and Europe, and this new "afro fashion" is based in part on the stereotype of the poor starving African in need of salvation by the West. So we have celebrities not only adopting babies but recommending that baby adoption is the way to save Africa. And we have tons of people who go to Africa to show us how much they care and who take pictures with starving African babies, and that sort of thing. Now, I don't want to appear facile about this issue. I recognize that there are huge problems in my continent, and I certainly want them fixed, and I believe that aid can be useful?although I do have trouble with the idea of adoption or distributing bags of grain as the solution. I would rather that we look at aid in ways that do not create dependency, that we start to think of aid not merely as bags of grain but as infrastructure and trade. However, the ways in which Africa is being portrayed today?from CNN 44 Transition 99 This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Photo by Amo Augustus Kubeyinje to the New York Times?reduce Africa to a simple story and often neglect African actors. So we see Africans receiving, we see Africans who are limp with gratitude or limp with hunger, but we do not see Africans who act, although there are many who do. If I were not African, and if all I knew of Africa came from the U.S. media, I would think that all Africans were incomprehensible people perpetually fighting wars that make no sense, drinking muddy water from rivers, almost all dying of AIDS and incredibly poor. This kind of portrayal makes it difficult for outsiders to see an African as equally human, prompting the Westerner to ask, even if secretly, "Is something innately wrong with these people?" Adichie African "Authenticity" This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 45 And this is perhaps the central point of what I want to say: I believe that it is important that we recognize the equal humanity of the people with whom we inhabit this earth. There is no doubt that we are all equally human, but the course of history has made it possible for some people to question the humanity of others, which has grave consequences for all of us. And so, we need to combat and challenge and complicate stereotypes. We need to conceive of a world in which the idea of difference is just that: difference, rather than something necessarily better or worse. I am obviously biased, but I think that literature is one of the best ways to come closer to the idea of a common humanity, to see that we may be kind and unkind in different ways, but that we are all capable of kindness and unkindness. I remember reading Balzac's P?re Goriot (1835) many years ago and being a bit alarmed because the behavior of these nineteenth-century women in Paris was exactly like the behavior of twentieth-century women in Lagos? for example, they both lied about how much they had paid for domestic services so that they could fleece money from their wealthy husbands. Of course, their clothes and food and mannerisms were different, as well they should be. What they had in common was being of a certain class with its attendant expectations and hypocrisies. While I do feel strongly about literature being the best way to combat stereotypes, I am wary of the idea of literature as anthropology. It is not with out its problems, one of which is generalizing from the particular. At an Oklahoma university where I spoke not too long ago, a well-meaning student expressed sadness that most Nigerian men were like the physically abusive 46 Transition 99 This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms father in my novel Purple Hibiscus (2003). I replied that I had just read Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991) and that perhaps all American twenty something-year-olds were serial murderers. A short story of mine published in the New Yorker in 2007 is about Nigerian university student gangs, which are called cults. I received an email from an American woman who said she was horrified by what happened in the story, although she guessed I was used to it, having grown up in Nigeria. I was not used to it. I wrote about it because in many ways I found it just as horrifying as she did. And of course a part of me wanted to ask her to go to any U.S. inner city if she wanted to encounter something similar to Nigerian university cults. The films and books I had consumed about America before I first visited did not prepare me for West Philadelphia. I knew there was poverty in the United States, but my conception of it was more like that of people living off the land, in conflict with nature, brave and dignified, even if poor, But the first time I drove in worlds like Willa Cather's. But through the inner city of West the first time I drove through the inner city of West Philadelphia, I was shocked. It was not mere pov erty. It was the sense that these Philadelphia, I was shocked. It was not mere poverty. It was the sense that these were a people were a people who had been for who had been forgotten. gotten. But, to return to the woman who wrote to me about the story, if we had an African Aljazeera that broadcast worldwide, if we had diverse African stories told by Africans available all over the world, she would perhaps not have assumed that I was immune to horror, and there would be no need to say any of this. Knowing that so little is known about Africa, however, does make me wary in writing truthfully about what interests me. When I write about war, I think: Will this only perpetuate stereotypes of Africa as a place of war? I have so far kept away from making artistic choices based on this concern, but I do think about it, and there is a certain discomfort that it brings. My vision of the world is largely a dark one, and I sometimes wonder whether being African means that I must always indulge in fragile negotiations in order to fully explore my artistic vision. Literature as one way of combating stereotypes brings me back to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. There are many ways to read this book, but I think most people will agree that it challenges the idea of an Africa without a past, as well as the idea of an Africa with one unchanging past. And so, even if it did not ultimately prepare my roommates for the strange and disappointing vision that I presented at the door, Things Fall Apart Adichie African "Authenticity" 47 This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms certainly disabused many of those who felt that the Igbo?as only one example of Africa's diverse peoples?lived in anarchic darkness before their contact with Europeans. The allusions that Achebe's work makes to customs that have changed, to what people did but no longer do, remind us that human history is a collection of stories, of people borrowing from one another, and African cultures, too, have always been dynamic. The Igbo culture changed over and over again, even before the missionaries came. To be an African in precolonial Africa was not one single thing. After my first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published, a professor at Johns Hopkins informed me that it was not authentically African. My characters were educated and middle class. They drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore, they were not authentically African. My characters were It made me wonder why I had never heard any educated and middle body speak of "authentically American" charac class.They drove cars. ters. Is F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, with his love of money and position, any more or less They were not starving. authentic than John Steinbeck's altogether dis Therefore, they were not similar characters? Both Fitzgerald and Steinbeck authentically African. are American writers, and their stories are American. I do not accept the idea of monolithic authenticity. To insist that there is one thing that is authentically African is to diminish the African experience. That kind professor wanted to see in my work what he had come to expect from Africa, having consumed the long literary tradition of the Africa of Joseph Conrad and Karen Blixen. Somewhat related to what that professor had to say (and related to the distinction between universal and parochial writers underscored by Ali Mazrui), I am often told by Western journalists that my work is "universal." Sometimes this is said with some surprise, as if by setting a book in a small Nigerian town one risks losing the ability to be universal. I feel very strongly that it is from the specific that universalism arises, that it is through anchoring one's narrative in so-called parochial details that universalism becomes possible, and that it is therefore counterintuitive to make a distinction between universalism and particularity. When William Faulkner, whose work I admire, writes about life in small, closed, and very specific communities in the U.S. South, his universalism is never in doubt. Nor did the specific Russian realities described in the novels by Dostoevsky and Gogol, which I read and loved as a teenager, make it dif ficult for me to see that the characters were human like me?even if I had no idea what a samovar was. One can ask of Christopher Okigbo: Was he Nigerian, a poet, or an Igbo first? I find it reductive that the different identity labels we carry must somehow 48 Transition 99 This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms be arranged in some sort of ascending or descending order. I am Igbo because I grew up speaking Igbo and was raised with Igbo cultural norms?I did not quite grasp some of the subtle differences until my Yoruba sister-in-law spent time with us and kept shaking her head in bemused wonder at some of the things we did, such as saying "thank you" to every adult after we had a meal. I am Nigerian because of the passport I carry and the football team I root for in the World Cup. I am African because I find similar concerns, similar ways of looking at the world, in a lot of African people and literature and history. And I am all of these and more at the same time. Apropos of nothing, I read books about bagels as a child. I thought they sounded very elegant, very chic, this thing I pronounced as bah-gel that characters ate. I desperately wanted to have a bah-gel. My family visited New York for the first time when I was nine. At the airport I told my mother that we had to get a bah-gel. Finally. You can imagine my intense disappointment when I discovered that this bah-gel, this glorious bah-gel from the books, was only just a dense doughnut. I have often been asked why I chose to write about Biafra, and I like to say that I did not choose Biafra, it chose me. I cannot honestly intellectualize my interest in the war. It is a subject I have known for very long that I would write about. I was born seven years after the Nigeria-Biafra war ended, and Adichie African "Authenticity" 49 This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Photo by Amo Augustus Kubeyinje yet the war is not mere history for me, it is also memory, for I grew up in the shadow of Biafra. I knew vaguely about the war as a child?that my grandfathers had died, that my parents had lost everything they owned. Long before my parents began to talk, under my keen questioning, about their specific experiences, I was aware of how this war haunted my family, how it colored the paths our lives had taken. My paternal grandfather died more than a year before the war ended, and because he was in Biafraj and my father in Biafra2, which were divided by an occupied road, my father could not go to bury his father, and did not see where his father was buried until a year later, when the war ended and somebody showed him an unmarked area of graves. My father, the most undramatic and stoic of men, tells me that he bent down there and took a handful of sand that he has kept ever since. My mother has never spoken very much about losing her father in a refugee camp in Uke. She has, however, often spoken of the things she lost: her wig, the china she had brought back from the United States, how she went from making toast and scrambled eggs for her two little daughters to standing in line and fighting for dried egg yolk from the relief center. I am still known to cry stupidly about some stories, about some tiny losses that so many people endured, about this trail of physical and metaphysical losses. If anything, learning of the war left me with great respect for a genera I tion of people who had the courage to believe so fervently in something, something I find sadly lacking in the Nigeria of today. But I wanted to write a novel. I had no interest in writing a polemic. I wanted to avoid making was aware that the book would in the end reflect Biafra a utopia-in-retrospect, my world view?it would be a book concerned which would have been with the ordinary person, a book with unapolo getic Biafran sympathies, but also a book that disingenuous?it wouldwould absolutely refuse to romanticize the war. have sullied the memories I was very aware, as I wrote, of the problem that of all those who died. often comes with being a defeated people?and the Igbo are in many ways a defeated people. It is not only that you learn to bear a collective shame, but that you sometimes go to extremes of reaction. The survivors' sense of defeat and injustice can result in their making a utopia of Biafra, when it may very well have become yet another state of tyranny. I wanted to avoid making Biafra a utopia-in-retro spect, which would have been disingenuous?it would have sullied the memories of all those who died. What illuminated my choices as I wrote was remember ing and reliving through books and oral accounts remarkable stories of the courage of ordinary people. Chinua Achebe, in his story collection Girls at War (1972), writes of Biafran heroism often happening "in out-of-the-way refu gee camps, in the damp tatters, in the hungry and bare-handed courage of the first line of fire." I was also determined to make my novel about what I like to think of as the grittiness of being human?a book about relationships, about people who have sex and eat food and laugh, about people who are 50 Transition 99 This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms fierce consumers of life. The only major aesthetic I had, if one can call it that, was the idea of writing "the kind of book that I like to read." I was concerned with certain questions about what it means to be human. When you are deprived of the comforts of the life you know, when you go from eating sandwiches to eating lizards, how does this change your relation ship, your sense of self, your idea of self-confidence, your relationship with the people you love? How does it change the things you value? I was particularly interested in class and race and gender, which I think affect everything about life in every part of the world?in some ways, the amount of humanity and dignity the world allows depends on what race and class and gender you are. I wanted to have a number of characters so that I could come close to having a portrait of the dynamics of race and class and gender and, even more impor tantly, how the war complicated these dynamics. It was an emotionally exhausting book to write, and I often stopped just to cry. One of the books that was important in my research into Biafra was Wole Soyinka's The Man Died (1972), a magnificent memoir about his time in prison during the war. It is a brilliant, funny, honest, and courageous book, and, apart from being useful and interesting, it also gave me the image of Christopher Okigbo, which ultimately inspired the character of Okeoma in my own Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). In The Man Died, Soyinka writes of seeing Okigbo shortly after the secession of Biafra. He tells Soyinka, "You know, I learnt to use a gun right in the field. I had never fired even an air-rifle in my life. But this thing [the Biafra War], I am going to stay with till the end." I read that line over and over, in awe, in wonder, and I imagined this immensely talented poet and thinker, this wonderfully complex man who had dared to believe, and who consumed life so fiercely. And I fear that it is on this terribly roman ticized image of Okigbo that the character of Okeoma was based. I wanted to pay tribute to Okigbo, who exemplifies the monumental loss of human capital that Biafra represented, but I used only an essence of the real Okigbo. My character Okeoma, for example, does not comb his hair, though I suspect that Christopher Okigbo did comb his hair. I also wanted to find ways to celebrate the poet's work, as a part of this tribute. I am one of those prose writers for whom most poetry is mysterious and esoteric, and I struggled through Okigbo's Labyrinths (1971). Still, I gathered the courage to play with one of the poems by doing a very crude and very simple word substitution with an excerpt from his poem "Water Maid," which reads: Bright with the armpit dazzle of a lioness, she answers, wearing white light about her; and the waves escort her, my lioness, crowned with moonlight. Adichie African "Authenticity" This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 51 My crude word substitution verse, attributed to Okeoma, reads: Brown With the fish-glow sheen of a mermaid, She appears, Bearing silver dawn; And the sun attends her, The mermaid Who will never be mine. I also wrote my own original poem, "Were You Silent When We Died?" which is attributed to the character Ugwu, and I like to think that it was Christopher Okigbo's sparkling, intrepid, and unforgettable spirit that guided me as I wrote: Were You Silent When We Died? Did you see photos in '68 Of children with their hair changing to rust? Sickly patches nestled on those small heads Then falling off, like rotten leaves on dust Imagine children with arms like toothpicks With footballs for bellies and skin stretched thin It was kwashiorkor?difficult word, A word that was not quite ugly enough, a sin You needn't imagine. There were photos Displayed in gloss-filled pages of your "Life" Did you see? Did you feel sorry briefly Then turn round to hold your lover or wife? Their skin had turned the tawny of weak tea, And showed cobwebs of vein and brittle bone Naked children laughing, as if the man Would not take his photos, then leave alone 52 Transition 99 This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Half of a Ufe Wole SoYiNKA writes in The Man Died ?HI that "there is something shabby about all unequal conflicts," and he is right. The war was in many ways shabby, painfully shabby. And yet, it was also a time when my brother was born, when people discovered strength and talent and courage, when people got married and found reasons to laugh, when people came together in differ YELLOW ? Sun WINNER OF THE ORANGE BROADBAND PRIZE ent ways. Another Soyinka quote from The Man Died reads: "It will be a long long long time, possibly generations, before passions die out over the Nigerian civil war." Again, I think Soyinka is right. I think, however, that sometimes that passion comes from not know ing. Nobody taught me about the war in school. It is a part of our history that we like to pretend never existed, that we hide, as if hiding it will make it go away, which of course it doesn't. As if hiding it will make the legacies any easier. One of my hopes was that my novel about the Biafran experi ence would make Nigerians, particularly Nigerians of my generation, aware of their history and ask questions of that history, that talking and knowing about it would, if not make passions die out, then at least make it possible for us to collectively acknowledge what happened. In the end, though, Half of a Yellow Sun is for me more a love story than a war story; it is a book about love, about the human complexity of our flawed and rich African world, t For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. -James Baldwin This essay was adapted from a presentation at the Christopher Okigbo International Conference at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 22, 2007. Adichie African "Authenticity" This content downloaded from 73.96.71.212 on Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:51:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 53
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