Ethnic enough

Purple Hibiscus
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie





Nearly all writers have stories about the publishers and agents who rejected them, but there is a particular bitterness to those told by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Of course, she has since been extravagantly vindicated: her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize last year, longlisted for the Man Booker and this week won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book.
Her story of a girl growing up in Nigeria with a strictly religious father has drawn comparisons with that other stellar debut, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and been praised by the likes of J.M. Coetzee. So Adichie can smile when she recalls the American agent who read her manuscript and said: "I really like your book. I like your writing. But I can't sell you because you're black, but you're not African-American. And I can't sell you as ethnic, because right now, ethnic is Indian."

She can laugh, too, about another agent who suggested she set the book in the United States and turn the African material, that is the entire story, into background. And about the (white) agent who said her book didn't feel "authentically African" because the characters drove cars and watched television: "They're not eating human flesh and jumping around a fire so, hey, it can't be the real Africa," Adichie recalls.

But even through the laughter, she remembers how profoundly dispiriting this was at the time. Sometimes she would be reduced to not writing for a couple of weeks, and just reading. "I think actually it's difficult for everyone, but for me maybe it was slightly more difficult because I was writing about a place that nobody knew about. So to get that call from a woman who said, 'I think I'll take you on,' I was just ..." She searches for words. "I thought, there's hope."

Adichie, 27, was born in the southern, Christian, part of Nigeria, to a family vastly different from the one she depicts in her novel. The father she writes about is a fanatical Christian who's a pillar of the community but a tyrant at home, beating his wife and children. Adichie's father is a "very calm" academic, while her mother is "exuberant and warm and laughing". She is unstinting in her praise of them, and her two sisters and three brothers. "Unfortunately, I don't have stories of family dysfunction, which I think most writers trade on."

In Australia to attend writers' festivals in Perth and Melbourne, Adichie is warm but measured, and it's only after a while you notice her unassuming confidence. She is not at all gregarious and remembers that when she was a teenager and her friends weren't allowed to go to parties, her mother conversely encouraged her to do so. Not that she was a loner, she quickly adds.

"I was quite popular in school. I love people. But I'm not particularly social. I don't like to hang out. I don't do bars. I don't particularly like parties and clubs." She spends almost all her time writing and reading. "I really am hopelessly boring."

At 19, after a year studying medicine in Nigeria, she quit and went to the US to study communications on a scholarship. She was the very image of the enthusiastic young writer, lugging her first novel (not Purple Hibiscus) around in five tightly written exercise books.

When she discovered it was easier to get people to look at it if she'd had short stories published, she decided to write a few of those too. There was no one around to read them before she sent them off, so the rejections were particularly crushing. "I would sit in bed and think, 'Oh my God, they hate my work."'

But she was encouraged to keep going when she found some writers' websites, on which she posted her work and got constructive feedback. (She became particularly good friends with Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, whom she later met when they were both shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. He won). Slowly, her stories were accepted, the first by the prestigious The Iowa Review, and at last she found the encouragement to keep going. "It was like, somebody is noticing."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Books/Eth...302222970.html

Ahh She is a gem....love her!niceone.gif

Read it in the summer and thought that it was a brilliant first novel......i'll recomend it.......its lovely writen and her style is very much African literature at its best.....although it will get better as she progresess......

Well done BS for bringing this upclp)

She is in London in April doing some signing and talks....the details can be obtained from BBC news...... African page.