She was once told her characters weren't African enough. But Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie's writing has struck a chord at home in Nigeria and around the world, earning her an Orange Prize nomination along the way. She tells Louise East why her second novel is about the most difficult period in her country's - and her family's - recent history
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a lesson in not listening to your teachers. When she presented her American creative-writing professor with a manuscript set in her native Nigeria, he returned it to her with the admonition that her characters were far too familiar. "In other words," she says with a very appealing snort, "they weren't African enough. They weren't mysterious and mystical, and they seemed to have the same needs and wants as he did. Maybe he wanted people naked and drumming and eating each other."
After several rejections by agents and publishers, the manuscript found a home and became Purple Hibiscus, a novel that sold more than 60,000 copies in the UK alone, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and now appears on several
university syllabuses.
In 2003, the year it was published, Adichie was just 26. Now, at the grand old age of 29, she has delivered the notoriously difficult second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, and it's far from a pale remake of Purple Hibiscus.
By widening her focus extraordinarily, Adichie has produced a compendious and engaging saga that takes on the most controversial period in her country's recent history: the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70. "This is the book I had to write," she says. "When I started work on Purple Hibiscus I knew I was going to write this book, but I just wasn't ready." Half of a Yellow Sun refracts the bloody history of the war - during which southeastern Nigeria, a predominantly Igbo region,
proclaimed itself the independent state of Biafra - through three characters: Olanna, the middle-class daughter of a tribal chief; Ugwu, her houseboy; and Richard, an English writer in love with Olanna's twin sister.
As in Purple Hibiscus, Adichie pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of dealing with complex emotions and politics in a novel that is an easy, page-turning read. "I want people who have lived through this war to read it and think, 'Yes, I remember.' But I also want people who know nothing about it to think, 'This is a good
book,' " says Adichie.
For her, the test will be not the book's publication in the US, where she now lives for much of the year, but its reception in her homeland. "I'm looking forward to this book coming out in Nigeria next month, because I know the response will be interesting, to say the least," she says with the deep chuckle that punctuates
much of her conversation. "My publisher is very excited, because he thinks we're going to sell lots of copies, but I'm also hoping that, for younger people, this book will be a way of starting to look at our history and ask questions."
This, in part, was the reason Adichie wrote the book. "Nobody talks about the war," she says quietly. "Growing up, I was never, ever taught about it. It was not on our curriculum. I think a part of us feels that if we open it too much we might go back to that time. It's like what happens when a brother and sister fight. Sometimes
it never really ends."
Adichie's life has been measured out in university towns. Her father was a professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria campus in Nsukka, her mother the first female registrar. After studying a couple of years of medicine in Nigeria, Adichie headed to the United States, where she studied first communications,
then, for a master's degree, creative writing. Adichie was writing stories as soon as she could spell. Her first fictional forays were inspired by her reading matter - Enid Blyton - and consisted of "really bad stories featuring white English children". Reading the work of the elder statesman of Nigerian literature, Chinua Achebe, at the precocious age of 10 opened her eyes. "It wasn't a book that explained my world, it simply showed my world. People ate the things I knew. People spoke in a way that was familiar to me."
The result was a play, For the Love of Biafra, written when she was 16, and a volume of poetry, published as she left school. She wrote Purple Hibiscus while studying for her finals, prompted largely by homesickness. "I wanted to write a book about the things I think about: religion, politics, family and the dynamic of
loving someone when you have no reason to."
Things came full circle when Achebe sent word that he had greatly enjoyed Purple Hibiscus. Along with the literary heavyweights Edmund White, Margaret Forster and Joyce Carol Oates, he has contributed an enthusiastic blurb for her new book,
confiding in her editor that he could not quite believe it was written by someone born seven years after the war's end.
Adichie is the first to volunteer that the book was "so much work". It took her four years to complete, the first two of which she spent on research, including "some really dull books" and, more poignantly, a lot of discussion with her family.
"This book is very, very personal for me. I lost both grandfathers in the war, and my parents had lost everything they owned," she says. "My father, poor dear man, got most of the questions. He's very reserved, a typical academic who spends all
his time in the study. The only time I saw him with tears in his eyes, apart from when my grandmother died, was when he talked to me for the first time about his father's death during the war.
"In Igbo culture the first son is a big deal, and if your father dies in a strange land that's also a huge deal. He was so keen to bury his father that he left and tried to cross occupied roads, but he was turned back, and it just broke him.
"My mother's father died in a refugee camp. She thinks it was probably malnutrition, something very simple that could be treated. But my mother has never talked of it, and I don't push."
This week, just as her new novel launches across the US and in Nigeria, Adichie will enrol for a two-year master's degree in the history of Africa at Yale University. "I don't know whether that's a smart decision," she says with a grin and a shrug. "But I feel that I have a responsibility, because I'm writing about a place that has been maligned for so long. It's been written about in a stereotypical way, as a land of gazelles and elephants or as an Africa of starving children. Because I know it's a
lot more complex, I want to empower myself with as much knowledge as I can."
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published by Fourth
Estate, £14.99 in the UK