Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Archive
The Burning Home in Purple Hibiscus
Living under a dictatorship means watching your homeland, your home, catch fire. You can leave and hope that all your loved ones make it out too, or you can stay and fight, hoping you don’t die from the burns—under a dictatorship, no one gets away.
Reading the Body in Second Person
The works of Daisy Johnson and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demand a close look at the inherent sense of intimacy within the second-person perspective, forcing us to consider how we read the body in this mode of storytelling.
Why Culture Cops Are Bad for Writers of Color
The biggest fear of most professional writers I know is drawing the ire of the internet. This is especially true among writers of color I know. Our literary communities are no exception to the dark allures of destructive, righteous outrage.
Reluctantly Reading a Colonial-Era White Male Writer in Mexico
In this literary chain, we have two old white men surveying Mexico, followed by me, a young, Indian woman, whom most strangers in Oaxaca assumed was Mexican.
The Resistance Will Also Be Literary
November has been a heavy month. The results of the U.S. elections came in; Leonard Cohen passed away; and on Sunday 13th, France commemorated the 1-year anniversary of the Paris attacks.
What are Words For?
“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” I’ve always bristled at Nietsche’s many remarks on language. Here’s another: “All words are prejudices.”
Round-Up: Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Cormac McCarthy, and Neil Gaiman
From Cormac McCarthy's death hoax to the new Neil Gaiman book, here's this week's biggest literary news:
Language Could Kill You: Adichie, Code-Switching & the Biafran War
Language plays a crucial role throughout Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels, but nowhere is it more decisive than in the author’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Written against the backdrop of the Biafran War, two wealthy sisters return from England to a nation on the cusp of