hibiscus pourpre chimamanda ngozi adichie

I wanted to write of an American perspective that I had not seen elsewhere, about Blackness and about Black women’s hair, about immigration and about longing. I wanted an imaginative liberation, to be free of the conventional rules of fiction. By the time I finally felt ready to write it, something was brewing in me, a literary rebellion of sorts. Black American writing instructed and delighted me, and I must have at some unconscious level wanted to contribute to that tradition, but obliquely, as someone standing outside American culture, a Black person without America’s blighted history.Īmericanah was not the first novel that I wrote in America-I’d published two earlier novels, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun-but it was, I think, the first whose seed was sown there. It also brought the rare wealth of discovering African American literature, those stories full of such graceful grit. To be Black was to feel, in different circumstances, frustration, anger, irritation, and wry amusement. To be Black was to realize that it was impossible for people to approach one another with the simple wonder of being human, without the specter of race lying somewhere in the shadows. To be Black in America was to feel bulldozed by the weight of history and stereotypes, to know that race was always a possible reason, or cause, or explanation for the big and small interactions that make up our fragile lives. In Nigeria, I was Igbo and Roman Catholic, and even then, growing up on a genteel university campus, neither had a significant bearing on the way I moved through the world. Had I been raised in eastern or southern Africa, with their own insidious inheritances of history, perhaps I might have thought of myself in terms of skin color.

I had never before thought of myself as “Black” I did not need to, because while British colonialism in Nigeria left many cursed legacies in its wake, racial identity was not one of them. It was not a choice-my chocolate-colored skin saw to that-but a revelation.

This article is adapted from the introduction to the forthcoming tenth-anniversary edition of Americanah.

Hibiscus pourpre chimamanda ngozi adichie