A young medical doctor who attended one of Chimamanda Adichie’s workshops has revealed some of the things learnt about the award-winning author during their time together. According to Imaseun who spoke with The New Yorker, he became interested in Adichie back in 2005 after his mother showed him the picture of a “girl” in a magazine. “So I go online and I read about Chimamanda, the girl in the magazine who got me insulted by my mother. Eventually, I traveled to Lagos and bought her novel ‘Purple Hibiscus’.” Imaseun said he met Adichie at her writing workshop in Lagos which lasted 10 days and from his interactions with her, he gathered some information about her.
On marrying a writer…
Adichie said she would not tolerate a writer for a husband nor live in a place surrounded by writers, Imasuen said.
”She thought if she were married to a writer, one day she’d wake up and strangle him.”
She could never live somewhere like New York, where you were tripping over writers every time you turned around, writers in restaurants, writers in the supermarket, writers on the subway.?
??????But back then the thought of a roomful of writers discussing craft appealed to her.
Imasuen added that Adichie thought she would marry someone “flamboyantly unfamiliar but the man she ended up marrying, in 2009, was almost comically suitable”.
Adichie was quoted saying after having a child;
One of the perils of a feminist marriage is that the man actually wants to be there. He is so present and he does every damn thing! And the child adores him. I swear to God, sometimes I look at her and say, I carried you for nine months, my breasts went down because of you, my belly is slack because of you, and now Papa comes home and you run off and ignore me. Really?
On her battle with depression;
I was a popular child who had tons of friends and did well in school, but then I would have moments where I didn’t want to see anybody, didn’t want to talk to anybody, cried for no reason, felt that I was bad and terrible, isolated myself, Chimamanda said.
On post-partum depression;
“I can’t even read. It’s a horrible, horrible thing. I can’t see my life, I’m blind. I feel myself sinking—that’s the word I use with my family and friends. Well, actually, I don’t talk about it with my family much, as lovely as they are, because they don’t really understand depression. They expect a reason, but I don’t have a reason.”
Imosuen said when Adichie is depressed, “she sits for hours and watches films about the Holocaust. Her family tries to discourage her from doing this—it seems to them unlikely to be helpful—but she does it anyway”.
On curing herself of depression;
I think I’m addicted to a certain kind of nostalgia, Adichie said.
I watch these films and I find myself in a state of mourning for all the things that could have been. They just make me cry and cry. I don’t know. All I know is that I will continue to watch them. I go on Netflix all the time to check, to see.
On wanting to be a priest, Imasuen narrated that;
Nigerian Catholicism is almost feudal, and the priest is God, Adichie was quoted to have said.
The priest would sweep in in his long soutane, and you cleared the way because Father was coming. I wanted that! I wanted the power. But it was a beautiful kind of power, because I felt I would instruct people on… I had dangerous ideas as a child.
On her love for originality, freedom aself-expressionion, irrespective of the twists in one’s life.
He said:
She wanted people to feel that they could be who they actually were. She particularly wanted gay writers to feel at home, because it was so hard to be gay elsewhere in Nigeria, and in fact two people in her workshop came out there for the first time. On the other hand, she also wanted people who had what she considered to be the wrong beliefs to say what they were thinking, as long as they didn’t do so in a nasty way. It wasn’t that she felt that all beliefs were acceptable; in fact, she considered one goal of the workshop to be social engineering.
