Adichie, Achebe, and A Country

(By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) - Chinua Achebe at 82: “We Remember Differently” 

I have met Chinua Achebe only three times. The first, at the National Arts Club in Manhattan, I joined the admiring circle around him. A gentle-faced man in a wheelchair.

“Good evening, sir. I’m Chimamanda Adichie,” I said, and he replied, mildly,  “I thought you were running away from me.”

I mumbled, nervous, grateful for the crush of people around us. I had been running away from him. After my first novel was published, I received an email from his son. My dad has just read your novel and liked it very much. He wants you to call him at this number. I read it over and over, breathless with excitement. But I never called. A few years later, my editor sent Achebe a manuscript of my second novel. She did not tell me, because she wanted to shield me from the possibility of disappointment. One afternoon, she called.  “Chimamanda, are you sitting down? I have wonderful news.” She read me the blurb Achebe had just sent her. We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. Adichie knows what is at stake, and what to do about it. She is fearless or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria’s civil war. Adichie came almost fully made. Afterwards, I held on to the phone and wept. I have memorized those words. In my mind, they glimmer still, the validation of a writer whose work had validated me.

Discovering Things Fall Apart

Source: reading.cornel.edu

(Chinua Achebe)--"Soon after [an] encounter with my future father-in-law I moved to Lagos to interview for a new position at the headquarters of what was now called the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). The Talks Department hired me to maul over scripts and prepare them for broadcast. A tedious job, it nevertheless honed my skill for writing realistic dialogue, a gift I gratefully tapped into when writing my novels.

In my second or third year at University College, Ibadan, I had offered two short stories, 'Polar Understanding' and 'Marriage is a Private Affair,' to the University Herald, the campus magazine. They were accepted and published. I published other stories during that time, including 'The Old Order in Conflict with the New' and 'Dead Men's Path.' In my third year I was invited to join the editorial committee of the journal. A bit later I became the magazine's editor.

At the University College, Ibadan, I was in contact with instructors of literature, of religion, and of history who had spent several years teaching in England. Studying religion was new to me and interesting because the focus went beyond Christian theology to encompass wider scholarship--West African religions.

Celebrating Achebe: The Man, His Work, & His World

The Magical Years

On November 16, 1930, in Nnobi, near my hometown of Ogidi, providence ushered me into a world at a cultural crossroads. By then, a longstanding clash of Western and African civilizations had generated deep conversations and struggles between their respective languages, religions, and cultures.

Crossroads possess a certain dangerous potency. Anyone born there must wrestle with their multiheaded spirits and return to his or her people with the boon of prophetic vision; or accept, as I have, life’s interminable mysteries.

My initiation into the complicated world of Ndi Igbo was at the hands of my mother and my older sister, Zinobia, who furnished me with a number of wonderful stories from our ancient Igbo tradition. The tales were steeped in intrigue, spiced with oral acrobatics and song, but always resolute in their moral message. My favorite stories starred the tortoise mbe, and celebrated his mischievous escapades. As a child, sitting quietly, mesmerized, story time took on a whole new world of meaning and importance. I realize, reminiscing about these events, that it is little wonder I decided to become a storyteller. Later in my literary career I traveled back to the magic of the storytelling of my youth to write my children’s books: How the Leopard Got His Claws, Chike and the River, The Drum, and The Flute: A Children’s Story (Tortoise books).