Thread by @englishpen

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie accepts the #PENPinter Prize from Dame Antonia Fraser. “I feel deeply appreciated by people I accept and admire.” #PENPinter

“Are you an African writer?” Adichie says she gets asked this question a lot, by other Africans. #PENPinter

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie begins her #PENPinter address with an anecdote. At an event in Lagos, an audience member raised his hand to ask “Are you an African Writer”...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “When my writings going well, it gives me what I like to describe as extravagant joy. And when it is not going well, there is no greater source of expressive anxiety.” #PENPinter

Adichie says that if she was not published and read, she would still be sat somewhere, writing. “I cannot remember a time when I was not drawn to stories.” #PENPinter

Adichie: When I was short-listed for the Orange Prize but did not win, a stranger in an airport in Nigeria said “Congratulations, *we* will win next time.” This spoke to a larger collective triumph in my work. A ‘we-ness’ among all Nigerians.

Adichie: Becoming a representative of Nigerian literature brings a ‘shadow of expectations’. The artist has 2 selves: the public & the private.

She recalls the character Ezeulu in Achebe’s ‘Arrow of God’ who becomes a different person when performing priestly duties. #PENPinter

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “It is in some ways true that art is a thing apart, because unlike politics it functions in grey spaces, it humanises, it goes below the surface.” #PENPinter

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “To travel with a Nigerian passport is to constantly confront the sneering disbelief of immigration officers when I say I am a writer... it is to feel that you are guilty of something.” #PENPinter

Adichie: Citizenship, for a person like me, is not just a sensibility but a condition. What I like to call “inhabitants of the periphery”. The phenomenon of being outside the centre in ways more subtle than politics... inheriting an accumulation of uncertainties. #PENPinter

I am not sure I could ever be truly American because I cannot comprehend the game of baseball, says Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. #PENPinter

In Nigeria, complaining about our problems is an art form. But if foreigners say the same litany of complaints we become defensive, angry.
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie #PENPinter

Adichie: I have always been curious about this brand of defensiveness. It seems to me that the ‘complaining Nigerian’ is aware of human complexity, the ingenuity of people... and we suspect that the foreigner does not know these other stories.
#PENPinter

Adichie: We worry we are being defined solely by what we do not have. And so our defensiveness emerges. #PENPinter

Adichie: Our education conditions us to look to ‘The West’ for validation. #PENPinter

Adichie: To be a Nigerian writer published in ‘the West’ is to be a repository of pride an suspicion. It is to be scrutinised for the *right kind* of African representation. ‘You no longer belong to yourself’ said a Senegalese friend. #PENpinter

‘Are you an African writer?’ A question not of geography, but of loyalty.

I said ‘no’ because I have been increasingly troubled by the subtle and not so subtle constraints that the question implies.
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie #PENPinter

Adichie says that in Lagos, she was criticised for ‘talking about the feminism issue and the gay issue’ as if those things were incompatible with being Nigerian; a disregard for African culture. #PENPinter

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks of the Nigerian law that criminalises homosexuality: “A law I find not only deeply immoral but politically cynical”.
#PENPinter

“I am struck by how often this speaking out is met, in Nigeria, not with genuine engagement, whether to agree or disagree, but with the desire to silence me.”
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie #PENPinter

Adichie: Art can illuminate and humanise politics, but sometimes politics must be engaged with as politics. Especially as many western polities are now “Awash with a vast tapestry of lies on which we feed. We must know what is true and call a lie a lie.” #PENPinter

On criticism of her political statements: “A journalist once helpfully summed it up for me: people don’t like it when you talk about feminism, they want you to shut up and write.”
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#PENPinter

Adichie: Some years ago I began to call myself an African feminist in response to the idea that African and feminism are mutually exclusive.Later I began to call myself ‘a Happy Feminist’ when someone said that feminists were just angry women who can’t find husbands... #PENPinter

Adichie tells amusing story about visiting her hometown and listening to the ‘proverb rich’ igbo of her family. She saw a young girl trip and exclaim “Fuck! Fuck!” Adichie notes the ‘jolly coarseness’ of everyday life, but also that scene would be branded inauthentic by critics!

Adichie: African literature so often read first as a political allegory rather than, simply, a story about human beings. The father character in PURPLE HIBISCUS was not written as an metaphor, even if he was interpreted as such. #PENPinter