Sola Osofisan
07-16-2007, 04:17 PM
LITERATURE: Young writers leave their mark
By Michael Peel
The night before Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won Britain’s prestigious Orange Broadband Prize for fiction, her civil war novel Half of a Yellow Sun was the talk of a group of middle-aged Nigerians thousands of miles away in Arusha, Tanzania.
At the gathering, a Yoruba man from western Nigeria described how the book had moved his wife to talk to him for the first time about her traumatic experiences four decades ago on the other side of the front line, in the eastern secessionist republic of Biafra.
“[He] said that it was only after she read the novel that she told him what her family had gone through,” Ms Adichie says in an e-mail. “They have been married for more than 10 years.”
The Arushan debate shows the ever-deepening imprint being left by a young generation of Nigerian writers, among their fellow citizens and beyond. In a neat coincidence, Ms Adichie’s Orange Prize success on June 6 came just a week before the Man Booker International Prize was awarded to Chinua Achebe, Nigeria’s most famous and widely-read novelist.
Now Ms Adichie – who at 29 is almost half a century younger than Mr Achebe – is the highest-profile member of a group of authors of Nigerian descent who are tackling subjects ranging from child soldiers to the role of west African troops in helping win the second world war for the Allies. The breadth of material is a sign that the writers – who include Biyi Bandele, Helon Habila, Uzodinma Iweala and Helen Oyeyemi – are drawing on roots and experiences from many parts of Nigeria and elsewhere. Ms Adichie’s Half of Yellow Sun has its genesis partly in the experiences of her own family: both her grandparents were killed during the civil war, while her father, Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, provided her with many memories of it.
These authors also reflect the great literary potential that has emerged from Nigeria’s long oral tradition. The modern nation has had the stories thrown up by political turbulence, a large educated elite and a diaspora running into millions who are shaping and being shaped by the wider world.
The growing international recognition for Nigerian authors comes after a period during which they had often to self-publish, distribute literature samizdat to avoid the attention of dictators, or else scrabble around to find a good printing and marketing deal amid economic collapse. Ms Adichie recalls how, when her play For Love of Biafra came out in Nigerian in 1998, she was given no publicity and was even required to pay half the cost of publication. What has changed, she says, is that there are now people interested in treating fiction properly, such as her publisher, Farafina, which has even tried selling books in Lagos’ epic traffic jams.
There is, inevitably, still a way to go before the new Nigerian novels change the literary landscape of an impoverished country where bookshops are still relatively few and where the vigour and rigour of daily life provides plenty else to preoccupy body and mind. Airport and street bookstands are – like their counterparts elsewhere in the world – no better than they should be, selling a good clutch of works offering religious salvation or a quick route to riches. Ms Adichie also detects an emerging resentment – again, hardly unique to Nigeria – among some less globally-celebrated authors who feel “too much is made of our ‘western-validated’ writers”.
On the international front, Ms Adichie still sees a certain immaturity in many western views of Nigerian authors. Asked if there is still a tendency – at best careless, at worst patronising – to pigeonhole “African” writing rather than simply judge every book on its merits, she replies: “Of course there still is,” noting that Half of a Yellow Sun was described for the popular British television programme Richard & Judy as an “Africa-themed” book.
“‘Africa as a theme’ is interesting,” she says. “I just read and loved On Chesil Beach [by Ian McEwan] and I don’t know that it is a Europe-themed book.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/622b42b8-2fa1-11dc-a68f-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=f4e3f106-245f-11dc-8ee2-000b5df10621.html
By Michael Peel
The night before Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won Britain’s prestigious Orange Broadband Prize for fiction, her civil war novel Half of a Yellow Sun was the talk of a group of middle-aged Nigerians thousands of miles away in Arusha, Tanzania.
At the gathering, a Yoruba man from western Nigeria described how the book had moved his wife to talk to him for the first time about her traumatic experiences four decades ago on the other side of the front line, in the eastern secessionist republic of Biafra.
“[He] said that it was only after she read the novel that she told him what her family had gone through,” Ms Adichie says in an e-mail. “They have been married for more than 10 years.”
The Arushan debate shows the ever-deepening imprint being left by a young generation of Nigerian writers, among their fellow citizens and beyond. In a neat coincidence, Ms Adichie’s Orange Prize success on June 6 came just a week before the Man Booker International Prize was awarded to Chinua Achebe, Nigeria’s most famous and widely-read novelist.
Now Ms Adichie – who at 29 is almost half a century younger than Mr Achebe – is the highest-profile member of a group of authors of Nigerian descent who are tackling subjects ranging from child soldiers to the role of west African troops in helping win the second world war for the Allies. The breadth of material is a sign that the writers – who include Biyi Bandele, Helon Habila, Uzodinma Iweala and Helen Oyeyemi – are drawing on roots and experiences from many parts of Nigeria and elsewhere. Ms Adichie’s Half of Yellow Sun has its genesis partly in the experiences of her own family: both her grandparents were killed during the civil war, while her father, Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, provided her with many memories of it.
These authors also reflect the great literary potential that has emerged from Nigeria’s long oral tradition. The modern nation has had the stories thrown up by political turbulence, a large educated elite and a diaspora running into millions who are shaping and being shaped by the wider world.
The growing international recognition for Nigerian authors comes after a period during which they had often to self-publish, distribute literature samizdat to avoid the attention of dictators, or else scrabble around to find a good printing and marketing deal amid economic collapse. Ms Adichie recalls how, when her play For Love of Biafra came out in Nigerian in 1998, she was given no publicity and was even required to pay half the cost of publication. What has changed, she says, is that there are now people interested in treating fiction properly, such as her publisher, Farafina, which has even tried selling books in Lagos’ epic traffic jams.
There is, inevitably, still a way to go before the new Nigerian novels change the literary landscape of an impoverished country where bookshops are still relatively few and where the vigour and rigour of daily life provides plenty else to preoccupy body and mind. Airport and street bookstands are – like their counterparts elsewhere in the world – no better than they should be, selling a good clutch of works offering religious salvation or a quick route to riches. Ms Adichie also detects an emerging resentment – again, hardly unique to Nigeria – among some less globally-celebrated authors who feel “too much is made of our ‘western-validated’ writers”.
On the international front, Ms Adichie still sees a certain immaturity in many western views of Nigerian authors. Asked if there is still a tendency – at best careless, at worst patronising – to pigeonhole “African” writing rather than simply judge every book on its merits, she replies: “Of course there still is,” noting that Half of a Yellow Sun was described for the popular British television programme Richard & Judy as an “Africa-themed” book.
“‘Africa as a theme’ is interesting,” she says. “I just read and loved On Chesil Beach [by Ian McEwan] and I don’t know that it is a Europe-themed book.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/622b42b8-2fa1-11dc-a68f-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=f4e3f106-245f-11dc-8ee2-000b5df10621.html