BOOKPATHS

Nigeria; United States

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about her new short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck.

Adichie delves into the details of Nigeria, America and the immigrant experience in her new collection of short stories, 'The Thing Around Your Neck'. She tells host Guy Raz that she wanted the collection to peel apart the 'layers of losses and gains' that immigrants face. – from NPR Website

Nigeria; United States

Katy Guest interviews acclaimed novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

As a young Nigerian writer, Adichie is expected to venerate Achebe (and she does); but her current idol is a woman [Michelle Obama] from her adopted home. She moved to America as an undergraduate and lives in Maryland with her partner, a doctor ('Because of a man!' she says, with a show of embarrassment) but splits her time between the US and Nigeria now. It is important to be able to go home, but also to get away. 'When I wrote Purple Hibiscus I romanticised home because I had been in America for four years... and I was just desperately homesick. The book is a very nostalgic, romantic, emotional.' She sniffs theatrically. 'I was remembering the hibiscus flower in our yard'. -- from "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: How the Acclaimed Novelist is Becoming a Role-Model and Mentor," by Katy Guest, The Independent

Nigeria

Listen to Ed Kashi on NPR’s Weekend Edition.  He talks with interviewer Liane Hansen about Curse of the Black Gold, a book he co-authored, that “examines the relationship between oil, the environment and the community in Nigeria in the 50 years since oil was discovered there.”

Because the United States imports a sizable amount of oil from Nigeria, he says, all Americans are consumers of Nigerian energy.

'It's important that we understand that connection,' Kashi says. 'I feel the days are gone in this world when we can just blithely ignore these kinds of connections because what I see from traveling around the world … is that it's unsustainable. What's happening in the world today is unsustainable.' – from NPR website

Nigeria

Scott Timberg explores why Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, “looks immortal.”

“The book eventually released, Things Fall Apart, became a critical hit in Britain as well as the first African novel to break through to the English-speaking world. Not only did it sell -- nearly 10 million copies, in 50 languages -- this slim, understated volume became the one African novel to break, unambiguously, into the often impenetrable Western canon. The book continues to live: High school kids and college students read it for class, while African novelists read it to pursue its ideas and themes.” – from “At 50, Achebe Novel Looks Immortal,” by Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times

Nigeria

Caine prize-winner Helon Habila investigates why Nigerian authors are finding such literary success.

“It is not hard to see that the themes of place and identity will grow in the new Nigerian writing, because as these authors are forced to make their homes in the West due to their continuing success, they seek to imaginatively reclaim their country, and to rationalise their anger at their country for being unable to keep them, to fructify their aspirations.” – from “Is This the Year of the Nigerian Writer,” by Helon Habila, The Times

Nigeria

Chinua Achebe talks with Ed Pilkington “about inventing a new language, his years in exile from his beloved Nigeria – and why he changed his name from Albert.”

“Someone asked him recently, he says, to write about his favourite place. It got him thinking about why he loves Ogidi so much when it has no great mountain or cathedral and even the River Niger is miles away. So what is it that explains this deep longing?

His voice rallies just a little as he replies: ‘I can't really explain it. But for me this place, this village, is significant. It is where I formed my identity’.” – from “A Long Way from Home,” by Ed Pilkington, The Guardian

Nigeria; United States

Michelle Pauli talks with Uzodinma Iweala, “the youngest of Granta's latest Best Young Novelists selection.”

“Nigerian-born Iweala was brought up in the US but now splits his time between Washington and Lagos, where his mother is currently Nigeria's finance minister. He seems to straddle two very different worlds with ease.” – from “’I Don’t Ever Want to Sit Back,’” by Michelle Pauli, The Guardian

Katy Guest talks with Helon Habila whose fiction “has taken him from Nigeria to Norwich and Washington.”

“Books and writing have been the core of Helon Habila's life, whether in Nigeria, Norwich or Washington. ‘I always lived in my imagination,’ he says, recalling his childhood in a small town in northern Nigeria. ‘I remember staying in my room all day just reading and dreaming and making up things. Living in a small town, you begin to create other places to escape.’ He had written two novels by the time he was 17 - now forgotten in a drawer - but had never been abroad and never dreamed that he would ever be published. That wasn't something that happened in Nigeria, especially to writers who dared to write about the politics of their troubled homeland.” – from “Helon Habila: In Search of Africa’s Angels, by Katy Guest, The Independent

Today's Bookpath

Nigeria

Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (various editions)

In his 1958 classic, Nigerian born Chinua Achebe offers a complex portrait of Ibo culture before and after the white man’s arrival. Through the story of Okonkwo’s rise and fall, Achebe realistically presents traditional village life in part one and how “things fall apart” under colonialism in part two.

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“Okonkwo’s return to his native land was not as memorable as he had wished. It was true his two beautiful daughters aroused great interest among suitors and marriage negotiations were soon in progress, but, beyond that, Umuofia did not appear to have taken any special notice of the warrior’s return. The clan had undergone such profound change during hhis exile that it was barely recognizable. The new religion and government and the trading stores were very much in the people’s eyes and minds. There were still many who saw these new institutions as evil, but even they talked and thought about little else, and certainly not about Okonkwo’s return.” – from Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe

Nigeria

Christina Patterson talks with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who “has attracted widespread acclaim for her fiction about her native Nigeria.”

“It was only when she started reading African writers - Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Camara Laye's The African Child - that she realised that black Africans ‘could actually exist’ in books. ‘It changed everything,’ she says. ‘As a child you're not brave enough to change things - until something makes you realise that you can actually write your own story.’" – from “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie : Fortunes of War and Peace,” by Christina Patterson, The Independent