With Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & Michael Ondaatje



ADICHIE: When I was told that I was going to do this conversation with you, of course I was terribly excited, and I was worried that I would pass out in a faint. In case I do, please understand it’s because I’m very much in awe of your work. I think particularly of the beauty of your language. When I read as a writer, I try to imagine how it’s done. How did he come up with this? It’s the effortlessness of your prose. It’s almost as if it just flows out. I wanted to know how you do it. I wanted to know if you work in drafts. Do you, for example, write the story first and then go back to turn it into art, so to speak?



ONDAATJE: First of all, there’s nothing effortless. I find that my first drafts are deadly. I write a first draft without any kind of plan at all. If I’m working on a novel, I don’t have a sense of what the novel is about. I’m not sure who all the characters will be. I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I begin with the germ of an incident perhaps.



ADICHIE: What was the germ in Anil’s Ghost?



ONDAATJE: That was a tough one because I wanted to write about the situation in Sri Lanka and I knew that everyone I talked to had a different point of view. In the end, I decided I had to write it as a double-barreled narration, so I had to have Anil and Sarath joined at the hip and arguing as they went through the whole novel. It was the idea of two people in a car traveling and not fully agreeing with each other. It was like a road movie in some ways. Gradually, more and more people entered the book. I also thought that if Anil had been brought up in Sri Lanka and educated in the West and then gone back there on a political mission of sorts, she would discover that she didn’t really know the country she was from—that idea of the insider who had become an outsider because of living in the West. But that was less of a germ than a usual thing, which is an image of somebody talking to somebody else at night, as in The English Patient: a patient in a bed talking to a nurse.



ADICHIE: So that was the germ for The English Patient?



ONDAATJE: That was one of the germs—germs anyway, not gems. But what happens for me is I go back and rewrite many, many times. As I rewrite, everything gets honed down and seems casual as well as not being repetitive. It’s not a very easy thing for me to write at a leisurely pace.



ADICHIE: So the rewritings then are sort of general? You don’t have rewritings where you focus on the language?



ONDAATJE: No, I don’t think about the language at all. I worry more about what’s going to happen next. When I’m actually writing the scene, I let the language take care of itself. I’m more interested in discovering what’s occurring in the two or three characters I’m writing about. The main energy for me when I’m writing is to discover character as opposed to writing well. When I’m editing, I cut out all the repetitions and so forth.



When you were growing up, did you read a lot of books from the West?



ADICHIE: I grew up reading a lot of British children’s books.



ONDAATJE: Enid Blyton?



ADICHIE: She was my favorite for a long time. I think it has a lot to do with the British colonial exercise that we all had Enid Blyton. I just adored her work, and when I started to write as a child, I was writing the sorts of stories that I was reading. There were white people eating apples and playing in the snow, although I had never seen snow at the time. There weren’t many books by African writers at the time, and I didn’t read any until I was about ten.



ONDAATJE: That’s not bad—a lot of people don’t read books by people in their own country until they’re about thirty.



ADICHIE: I was lucky. I lived on a university campus so I had access to books. The writer who has ended up being most important to me, Chinua Achebe, happened to live on the university campus as well. Generally, I would have been a bit older before I got to read books that had people like me in them.



ONDAATJE: I’ve noticed when I go back to Sri Lanka that I’m really from an oral tradition as opposed to a written tradition. Do you find that?



ADICHIE: Absolutely. I’m often struck by a sense of loss, really, because our traditions are oral and because I think the advent of colonialism and Westernization was a break. The oral traditions are almost dying and we don’t have a bridge between the two. People are writing now, but the oral traditions aren’t being recorded. Sometimes I try to write stories that have that oral flavor to them and I don’t know if I get it right. There’s something sad about it for me.



ONDAATJE: I know you’re working on a novel right now. When you are researching or writing, are you talking to people, listening to people about a certain period of time?



ADICHIE: The novel in progress is relatively historical; it’s set in the ’60s during a very difficult time in Nigerian history—in Biafra just before and during the war. People who lived through it—my parents and their friends and my uncles and cousins particularly—have incredible stories about what they went through, about really tiny things that I find so moving. I can’t help but think about how these stories will be lost because I can’t use all of them. I’m overwhelmed by the things I’ve discovered. There’s something humbling about it. So yes, I am talking to lots of people and struck by how we have a tradition of passing stories down that’s dying because it’s not being used.



ONDAATJE: When I was researching Running in the Family, I tried to find books about the ’30s and ’40s, and there was nothing. I think I found one diary; one uncle had a diary—he was the only one who’d put pen to paper. The real tradition of storytelling came at dinner. That was when people talked and lied and lied more strongly.



A quote of yours: “Nigeria is truly crumbling and I don’t know if it will come back together.” Do you remember saying this?



ADICHIE: No, but I think it’s true. Nigeria is crumbling. I worry about the future of Nigeria because we haven’t quite decided on what basis we are a country. There’s talk about a national conference so that people from all sorts of ethnic groups and religions will sit down and talk. It’s not happening, and ethnic nationalism is on the rise. For example, I see myself first as an Igbo woman rather than a Nigerian. Many people who are Yoruba see themselves first as Yoruba. There are cracks, and I hope that the country won’t implode. I worry about Nigeria’s future.



ONDAATJE: Purple Hibiscus focuses mostly on a family and is narrated by the daughter, and yet the story is told in a very distinct political time and the family’s drama is mirrored by the political drama outside, even though in no way is the book heavily symbolic or metaphorical. Can you talk a little about the political situation of that specific time of the novel? 



ADICHIE: What I did was merge two of the regimes. It’s set in the early ’90s, but I’ve also merged the regime that was there in the late ’80s. In the late ’80s, we had Babangida, then later we had Abacha. For many Nigerians, this was a time of silence, when you couldn’t speak out; you had to be very careful what you said. I used a number of things that actually did happen in Purple Hibiscus: the newspaper editor who is killed—that happened in ’85. Newspapers were shut down; people were afraid.



In the small university town where I grew up, lecturers would come together to talk and they were fiercely pro-freedom, anti-military, but it was all said in a hush-hush way: “Nothing should go past this room because we don’t want to be arrested.” It was an unpleasant time in our history. I wanted to write about it because there is fictional potential in that kind of setting, but also because I think it’s central to what Nigeria is. The fact that we have had a series of military regimes is central to the way we are today. Now we have, ostensibly, a democracy, but our president used to be head of state in the ’70s and we still have a military way of thinking. We haven’t quite understood that we are the ones who own Nigeria. We still think our president owns Nigeria and that he gets to decide for us. We’ve been brainwashed by having so many military regimes. I was very keen to give a sense of what it was like.



>> Back to PEN America 7: World Voices

The transcript of this conversation is available in its entirety in PEN America 7: World Voices.



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