Da is something in her voice that urges you to create worlds out of a few sentences. That fires up the senses and turns heads. Rainy season, the smell of the damp and the giant cockroaches, which they just happened to call American cockroaches at the time. The visit of the python in the family garden and the grandmother, who appealed to the snake’s reason: she should please withdraw, the children were afraid of her. Which she then did. Later came the moment of surprise when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who was already a writer, heard about magical realism because for her it was not a literary medium, but everyday life.
With what pleasure she talks about reading as a child, about life on campus, where her father was a professor and the world was different. 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, which one only understands in retrospect.
Adichie was briefly in Stuttgart on Thursday, where she opened the first International Literature Festival curated by Lena Gorelik and planned by the Stuttgart Literature House under the direction of Stefanie Stegmann within a year. “Write when the world happens” is the motto of these days until May 21st, and it was very likely, if unforeseeable, that the Nigerian writer and feminist, who was greeted with a standing ovation at the Culture and Congress Center Liederhalle, with cheers and whistles, would use this motto for a small digression into the conventions of political writing and the situation in their country. “No text is created in a vacuum.” Means: 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 stories between people. Adichie states this without judgement, in case you want to think about the reasons later. And recalls 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 heart of politics. The elections in Nigeria were in February, and with Germany now more concerned with damage limitation in the return of the Benin bronzes, the consequences of electoral fraud are hardly worth mentioning here. But Adichie wrote an open letter to Joe Biden after he congratulated former Lagos state governor and new president Bola Tinubu, one of the country’s richest men and a member of the political establishment, on his election victory. In this letter, she describes how the promise of a fair and free election on February 25th lured Nigerians to the polls, hoping to be able to trust the democratic process this time because of the Electoral Act passed a year ago, the legal basis for a electronic electoral register, with the help of which the votes should be transmitted directly online.
But then everything went differently. Poll workers were late, reports of gunfire at a polling station circulated, members of an ethnic group were intimidated, angry voters who demanded to see their vote uploaded were put off. And when the results were there a few days later, it was clear at first glance that they had been manipulated. Nigerians, Adichie writes to Biden, felt their intelligence was offended. All the more surprising that on March 1st the US State Department congratulated Tinubu on his victory and his representatives raved about a new era for Nigerian democracy.
Adichie reads that in Stuttgart without even raising her wonderful voice. She reads from her letter and leaves it in the hall and says, that’s how it always works: “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 variety, that’s why she’s always in a hurry, her to-write list is long, and it’s a sign of great optimism , if one could organize such elaborate literary festivals in one country. And all the excited people in the hall, they listen to themselves for a moment.
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