Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘I’ve always been willing to take the consequences of speaking my mind’
“The writer in me is very curious to see how this will end,” says Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We are at her home in Maryland. She is wearing what looks like a pair of vibrant silk pyjamas and we are sharing a bar of very rich dark chocolate; inevitably we have arrived at the subject of American politics. In the next room, her brother Okey – here from Lagos for a few days – is keeping half an eye on her 10-month-old twin boys who are marauding around in a makeshift soft prison constructed from cushions and chairs. Her best friend is here from New Jersey, and the house is filled with laughter and light.
We are talking Trump. “I think we use words like ‘unbelievable’ very easily,” she says, “but if there’s any point in human history where that word is truly apt, it is now. It really is. There is an aura of disbelief when I wake up every day and read the news. It’s not just that he’s come back, it’s the manner of return. There is a kind of utter recklessness that is both confusing and also frightening. You cannot love a country and treat it so recklessly – love demands a certain carefulness. All this talk of ‘America First’ – there is no love there, there really isn’t.”
She is surprised, she says, at how muted the response from the opposition has been. Surprised and shocked. “Anyone who has even a basic understanding of egomania knows that the Trump/Musk alliance will not last, but there’s this entertainment factor that Trump brings which I think is why he won the first time, and even the second time. But we need to remember that lives are at risk.
“People who voted for him are going to suffer with all these lay-offs. I have a friend who works in early childhood education and it’s really sad listening to her – she says every day she gets to work and there’s a new memo, and she’s been told the next academic year won’t be renewed – this is for children whose parents can’t afford to buy them crayons.
“I thought Nigeria could do ridiculous things politically, but this is worse than Nigeria.”
Adichie is 47, but looks about 20 years younger. She grew up in Nsukka, in south-east Nigeria but moved to America to go to university and live with her sister, who is a doctor here, and she now splits her time between Maryland and Lagos. Her husband, Ivara, who she calls IV, is a physician, who recently took early retirement to be a stay-at-home dad and help with the twins. They have a nine-year-old daughter, who is currently at school.
Dream Count is Adichie’s highly anticipated new book. It is 11 years since her last novel, Americanah, which sold more than two million copies, and won several awards. Her highly acclaimed debut, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003, followed by Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the Biafran War, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
She has always said that fiction is the love of her life, but she is more than just a novelist; she was awarded the MacArthur fellowship in 2008, and delivered two wildly successful Ted Talks, We Should All Be Feminists and The Danger of a Single Story. She has written a children’s book, a collection of short stories, and her work has been translated into 55 languages. Her essay Notes on Grief, written after her father died, was a moving elegy of human yearning. Her words have been sampled by Beyoncé and she has delivered a Reith Lecture – which gives a pretty good idea of the diversity of her reach.
So here we are in her lovely open-plan colonial-style house near Ellicott City, with lots of art on the walls, a piano, and bookcases filled with desirable editions of desirable books. The kitchen island is covered in snacks, and Adichie is getting ready to put on a new dress for the photo shoot (”and the vanity that lives healthily in my soul is concerned about that dress fitting – because I don’t really have any backup”. ) The house is entirely surrounded by trees, bared by the season. It’s a woody outpost away from the endless highways of Maryland.
This is a friendly neighbourhood, Adichie says, almost like a caricature of a liberal diverse community. “It’s as if we’re in a little progressive bubble – there’s us Nigerians, then a white American couple, a Bangladeshi Muslim couple, an Asian couple, an African-American woman and her white husband – and they’re all really lovely.”
She doesn’t want to waste any more time on talking about Trump, and we move on to her novel, which she doesn’t much like talking about either. “I never did like talking about my books and I particularly don’t now. I feel very fragile about this one. I feel almost new to it. It has been a while – the landscape has changed, publishing has changed – it feels all new and not always in a good way. Of course I have been writing during that time – but not fiction. This one is almost precious; I hope people will connect with it.”
The book is not short, around 400 pages, but it skips along. “I told myself that after Americanah, the next book would be short, so that the readers of the social media generation would be able to finish it, but I guess I don’t know how to write short books.”
Set between Nigeria and the US, Dream Count tells the interlinked story of four women, and their ambitions and desires, their boyfriends, their social lives, and quite a lot about the food they eat. There is Zikora, a lawyer with an overbearing mother determined to marry her off; Chiamaka, an aspiring travel writer who is spoilt but inherently likeable; Omelogor, a banker who finds a way to redistribute ill-gotten wealth to enterprising village women (“I had fun writing that”); and Kadiatou, an open-hearted, dignified Muslim who grows up in Guinea and works for Chiamaka.
The reason that Adichie’s fiction is so compelling is the way she inhabits her characters completely; they have lived in her head for a long while and she talks about them as if they were real people, friends of hers. Zikora had already appeared in one of her short stories. “And I knew I was going to write about Chiamaka because I’ve always imagined this very dreamy, privileged woman who, as her friends would say to her, but very lovingly ‘you’re such a soft and spoiled person’. There’s something I admire about being able to move through the world with a kind of resistance to practicality.
“For a long time I’ve wanted to write about the reality of women’s lives in a very straightforward way – because this is how I approach my fiction, I don’t like to hide. I wanted to write about childbirth, female cutting, premenstrual dysphoric disorder – because I care about them.”
What makes the book so absorbing is the amount of detail threaded into the characters’ lives; their flaws, thought processes and dialogue are so believable. She is a big eavesdropper, she says. “I am, I am! Whenever people are talking – I’m listening, of course, but what I’m thinking about is material. What is usable. And even when I wasn’t writing fiction, I was still very alert to the world, listening and eavesdropping and asking people inappropriate questions. I’m amazed sometimes about what people will tell you.”
There is a bit of her in each of the women, and inevitably, several bits of her friends, too. But, she says “they’re often wrong about which bits”. One character who is outside her experience is Kadiatou, who grows up in a small village in Guinea, experiences heartbreaking family bereavement and horrendous FGM, and moves to America to join her husband, Amadou.
Adichie, who has never been to Guinea, describes life there so vividly that it’s like watching a film. There is a lot about cooking; Adichie is big on food – okra, ndappa, poulet yassa, fouti, latchiri – evocative words that make your mouth water. “I cannot tell you how much time I spent watching women from Guinea cooking on YouTube! And my Nigerian friends were horrified – they said look at what they’re doing! They’re doing it wrong! Nigerians always think their cooking is superior.”
What happens to Kadiatou is inspired by – “inspired by” being the important phrase here, not “based upon” – the case of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant who was working as a housekeeper in a hotel in New York and who claimed that she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former director of the IMF, who was arrested very publicly when he was on the plane about to return to France. He pleaded not guilty and in the end the charges were dropped, which was down to “credibility issues” on the part of Diallo. “They dropped the case because she had lied on her asylum application,” says Adichie. “So the message is – if you’re assaulted, you’d better be perfect. You’d better be utterly sinless.”
The case lodged in Adichie’s mind, but Kadiatou’s story is different from Diallo’s – except for the extremely harrowing account of the assault itself, which Adichie felt was sacrosanct. I knew about the Strauss-Kahn case but had not made the connection while reading the book until Adichie’s author’s note at the end. It is a beautifully written addendum about a person who “became, in my imagination, a symbol, a person failed by a country she trusted” – but Adichie did not want to do it.
“I did not want to write the author’s note. I was pretty much made to by my [American] publishers. Publishing has become – when I’m in a good mood I say ‘overcautious’; when I’m in a bad mood I say ‘cowardly’. There’s a pre-emptive defensiveness. They kept on at me to make all these stupid changes, and even asked me if I could find a way to put in the story that Strauss-Kahn denied all the charges. There’s a reason that it’s a novel! It’s fiction!
“I tried to make it as personal as possible, but it has a kind of defensiveness that I don’t like, and which is not me.”
She feels strongly that “art requires a completely free imagination to go wherever we want. I firmly believe that art can and should take from real life and we can enhance it; asking me to change these things is stifling my ability to imagine.”
Dream Count is dedicated to her mother, Grace, who died in 2021; her father, James, had died the year before, in June, when Adichie was stuck in America, unable to get there because of Covid. When she was told about her father’s death, she became unhinged, “utterly unravelling, screaming and pounding the floor,” she wrote in Notes on Grief.
“My grieving surprised me,” she says now. “I would never have imagined myself as a person who reacted by throwing myself down – my response was so physical, so dramatic. Normally there’s a coldness to the way I deal with pain – I would have thought I would just freeze and go numb, but instead it was an exercise in melodrama.
“He was such a good man. His wisdom, his dry humour – such a good man. I think my father dying I have in some ways made peace with now, but my mother’s death I have not.”
Adichie was in Lagos. Her mother was in Abba, at the family home, 500km away. Her mother had been feeling unwell one Sunday, and was admitted to hospital, but had seemed to recover, and was eating. She was moved to a different hospital because the small private hospital she had been in did not have the right protective equipment (to cope with the Covid requirements) but died shortly after.
Adichie is visibly emotional when she talks about her. “She went so quickly, and there is a lot of confusion, and a lot of regret. There are times when I worry that I took my mother for granted; and my mother was a fantastic mother, we were close, but… I worry that sometimes I didn’t extend as much grace to her as I did with my father, I judged her more.
“After my father died I asked her to come and live with me here, but I understood that it was important for her to stay [in Nigeria] near where my father is buried. My parents were very close, and when my father died the light just left her. I had thought she had at least 10 years left – she was 78 – and I remember thinking, I’m going to find every possible way to bring the joy back into her life. I can make up for all the times I was a stupid teenage know-it-all. And so I almost felt cheated when she went so fast.”
She has five siblings: two in Nigeria, two in America and one in England. “It really shook us and splintered us – we’re all kind of flailing, I think, because we were so close. And that was because of my parents. I had not realised that until they were gone.”
The grief still rears its head. “That is the nature of things, and I think it’s a consequence of love. I try to hide it from the people around me because I think there’s a limit to people’s empathy, especially Nigerians. Nigerians are horrible about it: ‘Oh it’s happened – move on.’”
Her daughter reminds her of Grace, and she sees her father in the face of one of the twins – “scholarly and curious”; the other twin, she says, reminds her of IV’s father. “I’m so grateful for them, and my daughter, they’ve helped me so much to cope.”
What was your reaction when you found out you were having twins? “Shock! I still sometimes look at them and think, who are these two tiny people in my house?”
For several years, Adichie used to hold a vibrant writers’ workshop in Lagos. It ran into controversy when a young writer, one of her students whom she had befriended and helped, accused her of transphobia, despite the fact that Adichie has always stood up for LGBTQ rights in Nigeria and supported trans women.
This was because she had said, in a 2017 interview, that “trans women are trans women”, and an essay she wrote in response to the ensuing backlash. She is bored of talking about this now; apart from anything else, it was eight years ago. But she hasn’t run the workshop in several years. Is that why? I ask her.
“I think that must have played a role, yes,” she says, though life – and death – got in the way. First Covid happened, then her parents died, and she was writing the book, and all the while trying to get pregnant.
“But maybe the reason I kept saying I’m busy is because there’s a part of me that just felt I didn’t want to be confronted by a bunch of ungrateful twats.” She laughs. “Honestly, with this generation there is just an incredible amount of entitlement, and I don’t have time for it, you know? But I will do it again – I was supposed to do it last year but then…” she trails off, and waves her hands toward the boys.
“I don’t want people’s negative energy to dictate how I behave, because that would be giving them too much power. But I’m still human. So I will do that damn workshop again – maybe this summer.
“I believe in fundamental things like gratitude and loyalty – I think those things matter. And we live in a time now where it’s very easy to dismiss them – it’s also a time of the self-absorbed; it’s a generation that claims to be progressive but it’s also quite neo-liberal; it’s actually quite conservative.”
Freedom of speech, and the power of words, was the subject of her Reith Lecture in November 2022, and is something she feels very strongly about. “We must insist not only on truth, but also on nuance,” she said in the lecture, condemning the fact that young people now are afraid to ask questions, in case they are the wrong questions, and that the biggest threat to free speech today is fear of social censure.
Is there anything she herself regrets saying? I don’t mean the opinion she expressed, but the saying of it?
She looks at me. “You mean because of the quote unquote backlash? No, no, no. I said what I believe. Nope. I had thought I shouldn’t talk about certain things, but then this is who I am. I don’t know how to be a person who’s not saying what she thinks.
“I’ve always been willing to take the consequences of speaking my mind. And there are consequences, and they’re hurtful – but, nope. Don’t regret it.”
“Social media has reshaped the traditional power dynamic by giving some access to the powerless, it has also made it easy to mistake the loudest voices for the truest,” Adichie said in her lecture. She blames social media for everything. It’s to do with language. “The meaning of language has been distorted,” she says now, “and it’s so crazy. I really think that social media has robbed this generation of young people of the ability to see human beings as messy and complex. It has made everything so black and white; it has really flattened things – we cannot have conversations where we talk about complexity, or where we acknowledge that the other side might have a point – and it’s bad for the way the world works.”
Her daughter is only nine so it’s not yet an issue, but when she’s around her cousins, Adichie makes them turn off TikTok. “I think it’s poison, I really do.”
But what can be done? “I’ve been thinking about that a lot – what if you put sensible women in charge of the tech companies? I think the goals would change. I do wonder if there’s a way that social media could be made gentler. What if we changed the algorithms? What if you had to use your real name to use X?”
Needless to say, she’s not on X or any similar platforms, but she is on Instagram, which she describes as “a celebration of vanity”. Adichie loves dressing up. In May, she is co-hosting New York’s ultra-fashionable, high-end Met Gala, which has the theme of Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. “I’m more excited about that than my novel!” she laughs. She has been assigned a designer, she won’t say who, but they’ll work together, though one thing she will insist on, she says, is “whatever the dress, I still need to wear proper underwear! Because these days when they make dresses I feel that they just find the most ridiculous places to cut out things, and I just think, why?
“So that’s my demand – proper underwear and a bra, thank you very much.”
She was taken aback to be asked, she says, but she’s looking forward to it. “I like fashion and there’s an element of art and craziness too: fashion, art and craziness, I love them all.”
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published on 4 March (4th Estate, ￡20)
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