There's something in her voice that urges you to create worlds out of a few sentences. That turns on the senses and turns the head. Rainy season, the smell of dampness and huge cockroaches, which at that time, purely by chance, they called American cockroaches. The visit of the python in the family's garden and the grandmother, who appealed to the snake's reason: she should please withdraw, the children were afraid of her. Which she did. Later, the moment of surprise came when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, already a writer, heard about magical realism, because for her it was not a literary device, but everyday life.
Elena Witzeck
Editor in the feuilleton.
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With what pleasure she talks about reading as a child, about life on campus, where her father was a professor and the world was a different one. Where there was everything like in a small town, especially retreats for the imagination. Then the sudden end of this world. The happiness of childhood that you only understand in retrospect.
Adichie was briefly in Stuttgart on Thursday, where she curated the first International Literature Festival curated by Lena Gorelik and opened by the Stuttgarter Literaturhaus under the direction of Stefanie Stegmann within a year. "Writing when the world happens" is the motto of these days until 21 May, and it was very likely, if not foreseeable, that the Nigerian writer and feminist, who was greeted with standing ovations at the Liederhalle Culture and Congress Centre, with cheers and whistles, would use this motto for a small excursion into the customs of political writing and the situation of her country. "No text is created in a vacuum." In other words, all writing is political per se.
And vice versa: the simplest Western approach to modern literature on the African continent is to read its texts as political manifestos rather than as stories between people. Adichie states this without judgement, in case you want to think about the reasons later. And reminds us how the tyrannical father from her first novel "Blue Hibiscus" was repeatedly interpreted as a metaphor for a violent state.
Open letter to Joe Biden
Which brings us to the middle of politics. The elections in Nigeria took place in February, and since Germany is now more concerned with damage limitation in the return of the Benin Bronzes, the consequences of electoral fraud are hardly worth mentioning in our country. Adichie, however, wrote an open letter to Joe Biden after he congratulated the former governor of Lagos state and new president Bola Tinubu, one of the richest men in the country and representative of the political establishment, on his election victory. In this letter, she describes how the promise of a fair and free election on February 25 lured Nigerians to the polling stations, hoping to be able to rely on the democratic process this time because of the Electoral Act, the legal basis for an electronic electoral roll, which was passed a year ago, with the help of which votes were to be transmitted directly online.
But then everything went differently. Poll workers were late, reports of shots being fired at a polling station were circulating, members of an ethnic group were intimidated, and angry voters who demanded to be present when their votes were uploaded were put off. And when the results came in a few days later, it was clear at first glance that it had been manipulated. The Nigerians, Adichie writes to Biden, felt insulted in their intelligence. It is all the more surprising that the US State Department congratulated Tinubu on his victory on March 1 and his representatives raved about a new era for Nigerian democracy.
Adichie reads this in Stuttgart without even raising her wonderful voice. She reads from her letter and leaves it in the hall, saying that this is how it always goes: "I write because I have to write." Because it's necessary. And the more open letters you have to write, the less time there is for all the important, hidden stories, the literary diversity, that's why she's always in such a hurry, her to-write list is long, and it's a sign of great optimism when you can organize such elaborate literary festivals in one country. And all the excited people in the hall, they listen to themselves for a moment.