Latest news with #ChimamandaNgoziAdichie
CBC
29-05-2025
- Health
- CBC
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dead at 87
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country's history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died on Wednesday (May 28) at 87. U.S. publisher The New Press confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Ngũgĩ's son said he died in Georgia. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngũgĩ was receiving kidney dialysis treatments. Whether through novels such as The Wizard of the Crow and Petals of Blood, memoirs such as Birth of a Dream Weaver or the landmark critique Decolonizing the Mind, Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist's calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after. "Resistance is the best way of keeping alive," he told the Guardian in 2018. "It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you're right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive." He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ's ability to tell "a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships." Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Through Ngũgĩ's life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusionment with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn't respond to British soldiers' demands that he stop moving. In a given book, Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, The Upright Revolution, updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story The Ghost of Michael Jackson features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngũgĩ's tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in The Wizard of the Crow, in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies. "Rumour has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy," he wrote. "When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist." Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country's divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country's liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native. One of five children born to the third of his father's four wives. Ngũgĩ grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong'o. A gifted listener, he once shaped the stories he heard from family members and neighbors into a class assignment about an imagined elder council meeting, so impressing one of his teachers that the work was read before a school assembly. His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Uganda, he encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word. "It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one's destiny," Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. "Ngũgĩ wrote a story, it was published." He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel Things Fall Apart, had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Ngũgĩ approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, Weep Not, Child and The River Between, both of which were released in the next three years. Ngũgĩ was praised as a new talent, but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement. "He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world," Ngũgĩ later wrote. "And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence." By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with A Grain of Wheat. Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. He had been teaching at Nairobi University since 1967, but resigned at one point in protest of government interference. Upon returning, in 1973, he advocated for a restructuring of the literary curriculum. "Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?" Ngũgĩ and colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba wrote. In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, I Will Marry When I Want, was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, Petals of Blood, the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him. "The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things," he wrote in Wrestling With the Devil, a memoir published in 2018. "It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above." He didn't only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read "I am stupid" or "I am a donkey." Starting with Devil On the Cross, written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past. Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In Decolonizing the Mind, published in 1986, Ngũgĩ contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors. "The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America," he wrote. "But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?" He would, however, spend much of his latter years in English-speaking countries. Ngũgĩ lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the U.S. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was founding director of the school's International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships. Even after leaving Kenya, Ngũgĩ survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence. Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country. "When, in 2015, the current President, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. 'Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,'" Ngũgĩ later told The Penn Review. "Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story."
The Independent
28-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country's history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died Wednesday at 87. Derek Warker, publicist for Ngũgĩ's U.S. publisher The New Press, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngũgĩ was receiving kidney dialysis treatments. Whether through novels such as 'The Wizard of the Crow' and 'Petals of Blood,' memoirs such as 'Birth of a Dream Weaver' or the landmark critique 'Decolonizing the Mind,' Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist's calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after. 'Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,' he told the Guardian in 2018. 'It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you're right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.' He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ's ability to tell 'a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.' Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Through Ngũgĩ's life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusion with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn't respond to British soldiers' demands that he stop moving. In a given book, Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, 'The Upright Revolution,' updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story 'The Ghost of Michael Jackson' features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngũgĩ's tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in 'The Wizard of the Crow,' in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies. 'Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy,' he wrote. 'When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist.' Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country's divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country's liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native. One of five children born to the third of his father's four wives. Ngũgĩ grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong'o. A gifted listener, he once shaped the stories he heard from family members and neighbors into a class assignment about an imagined elder council meeting, so impressing one of his teachers that the work was read before a school assembly. His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, he encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word. 'It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one's destiny,' Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. 'Ngũgĩ wrote a story, it was published.' He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel 'Things Fall Apart,' had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Ngũgĩ approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, 'Weep Not, Child' and 'The River Between,' both of which were released in the next three years. Ngũgĩ was praised as a new talent, but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement. 'He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world,' Ngũgĩ later wrote. 'And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence.' By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with 'A Grain of Wheat.' Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. He had been teaching at Nairobi University since 1967, but resigned at one point in protest of government interference. Upon returning, in 1973, he advocated for a restructuring of the literary curriculum. 'Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?' Ngũgĩ and colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba wrote. In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, 'I Will Marry When I Want,' was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, 'Petals of Blood,' the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him. 'The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things,' he wrote in 'Wrestling With the Devil,' a memoir published in 2018. 'It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above.' He didn't only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read 'I am stupid' or 'I am a donkey.' Starting with 'Devil On the Cross,' written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past. Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In 'Decolonizing the Mind,' published in 1986, Ngũgĩ contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors. 'The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America,' he wrote. 'But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?' He would, however, spend much of his latter years in English-speaking countries. Ngũgĩ lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the U.S. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was founding director of the school's International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships. Even after leaving Kenya, Ngũgĩ survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence. Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country. 'When, in 2015, the current President, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. 'Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,'' Ngũgĩ later told The Penn Review. 'Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story.'
Associated Press
28-05-2025
- General
- Associated Press
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87
NEW YORK (AP) — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country's history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, has died at 87. Derek Warker, publicist for Ngũgĩ's U.S. publisher The New Press, confirmed the death to The Associated Press on Wednesday. Further details were not immediately available. Whether through novels such as 'The Wizard of the Crow' and 'Petals of Blood,' memoirs such as 'Birth of a Dream Weaver' or the landmark critique 'Decolonizing the Mind,' Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist's calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after. 'Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,' he told the Guardian in 2018. 'It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you're right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.' He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ's ability to tell 'a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.' Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Through Ngũgĩ's life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusion with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn't respond to British soldiers' demands that he stop moving. In a given book, Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, 'The Upright Revolution,' updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story 'The Ghost of Michael Jackson' features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngũgĩ's tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in 'The Wizard of the Crow,' in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies. 'Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy,' he wrote. 'When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist.' Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country's divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country's liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native.
CBC
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie subverts expectations of traditional Nigerian women
WARNING: This article and audio interview may affect those who have experienced sexual violence or know someone affected by it. The wait is over for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's hugely anticipated return to fiction. Known for her detailed representation of Nigerian women and culture, Dream Count follows four women who live large on the page and resonated deeply with two Canada Reads alumni, Kudakwashe Rutendo and Mirian Njoh. Adichie is the bestselling author of novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of A Yellow Sun and Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2013. Since then, Adichie has turned to nonfiction, writing powerful essays that became Ted Talks and short books, including We Should All Be Feminists, which was sampled in Beyoncé's song Flawless and inspired a T-shirt from Dior. Dream Count is Adichie's return to fiction after 12 years and it weaves the perspectives of four women, moving between Nigeria, Guinea and the United States. Rutendo and Njoh reunited on The Next Chapter with Antonio Michael Downing to discuss the complex feelings and reflections the women of Adichie's fiction brought up. For those that have been living under a literary rock, what can you tell us about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? Kudakwashe Rutendo: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a polarizing Nigerian American writer. Her breakout Americanah made huge waves in the literary world and then it was felt like Americanah, Half of the Yellow Sun, her prose is singular and she manages to invoke so much of being Nigerian American, or just being Nigerian into her writing and showing the culture and viewing it in an honest way where you're not coddling it — you're showing its best parts, you're critiquing it. I think that's the honest way to love if you're showing the deficits and the whole parts all in one and she manages to illuminate that in her prose and in her work. And in a subtle way as well where the culture is the writing. She's been on the scene forever and we've been waiting for this book forever. She manages to invoke so much of being Nigerian American into her writing ... in an honest way. Mirian, there are four women in this book. I've heard it described as four interlocking novellas. Each section is about one of these women. First up, we meet Chiamaka and as the title suggests, she's tallying up her dream count, the men that she's loved and lost. What kind of entry did she give you into this novel? Mirian Njoh: I think she was a great opener because I think was the strongest voice to me. Her story stuck with me the greatest and it's interesting 'cause each of them has different themes that stood out very strongly and hers always seemed to me to be the idea of pursuit. On a superficial level, she's a travel writer, so there's just a level of pursuit and going to different places and exploring and capturing and documenting. But she also has that same fervor for seeking and pursuit in her personal life and in the loves that she's seeking. And it's interesting how she flips the notion of a body count, which is something that's often weaponized against women, particularly, and she turns it into a dream count when she recalls the past loves of her life and the love that she's been seeking in these people. Three of the main characters move between Nigeria and America as Chimamanda Adichie does herself. The three women are connected by friendship and family and they're all struggling to some extent with this same stuff. They're all trying to find something, some degree of being seen and almost always by men because they see each other really well. What brings those three characters together in terms of what they're seeking? MN: What you're saying is they're seeking to be, to love, to be loved and to be seen. And I think that is kind of the beauty of the way that their stories are interwoven and I think that their stories are truly dependent on each other, they each sustain each other. Because when you look outside of the bubble of these three women and the safety, the love, the vulnerability and just the rawness that exists between them, they are truly themselves with each other. But then you look at their chosen family dynamic and then you look at their biological family dynamics or even their cultural dynamics and you see how they can't fit. Some of them are actively avoiding their parents and siblings, actively avoiding their aunts. Even with one of the characters who leaves Nigeria and she seeks respite in the U.S., ironically enough, she doesn't find it. They're seeking to be, to love, to be loved and to be seen. - Mirian Njoh There's a clash here because they are essentially very non-traditional women who are trying to do a very traditional thing, which is fall in love, get married, have a baby, things like things around that. KR: I also wonder if this might be a new traditional way to be a woman because I'd also say that a lot of their values were distinct from just clear cut Western values. It was interesting. One of my cousins got traditionally married so it was funny for me weighing the values of that. There is a difference. I feel like these women go against the traditional grain in many ways and I think they also subvert the Western grain as well because they're Nigerian. There's a class thing happening here … but there's also a gender thing going on here, right? KR: I don't think we can talk about being a traditional Igbo culture, but also any African culture without getting into gender politics because they're so ingrained in gendered roles and gendered expectations and even in this book, it's a huge aspect. And I think it's often what the women are rebelling against or sometimes falling into because it's their safety. It's what you understand. I think it's often what the women are rebelling against or sometimes falling into because it's their safety. MN: It's interesting if we look at our outlier Kadiatou and we think about gender because on one hand, I would say she is, in the most extreme sense, subject to gender practices because she undergoes female genital mutilation. But then that also ends up being part of the key that gets her to this next phase of her life, this thing that in a way is like her American Dream. But then the ironic thing is that once again, that whole dynamic of her gender comes into play when she ends up embroiled in a sexual assault scandal. Her identity and character is assassinated and she is called so many things, a con artist, a prostitute. And we see the system really ring her out. Do you also seek a "merging of souls", as Chiamaka says? KR: I think that everyone should seek fulfillment and I say this knowing that I don't believe that… Also, I don't think it was the message of the book. What really got to me is this idea of a dream count. I was like, it's just not disqualifying the affections that we felt. I think oftentimes you're focused on ends like it had to have been a relationship or it had to have been fulfilling, or we have to have dated or just all these things that are so inconsequential. For me, it was like all the things that make you tender, you should honour them. All the people who have given you any tenderness. WATCH | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Bookends with Mattea Roach: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Age
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Mum's the word: four book picks for Mother's Day
This story is part of the April 26 edition of Good Weekend. See all 10 stories. Dream Count, by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a celebration of female friendship in the face of toxic masculinity. It tells the interconnected stories of four African women migrants to the US: a travel writer, a lawyer, a banker turned grad student and a housekeeper. Adichie weaves questions about race and gender through a powerful story of lost love, betrayal and regret. In May 2019, Australian writer Geraldine Brooks received a brusque call telling her that her husband of 35 years, American writer Tony Horwitz, had died. Her memoir, Memorial Days, describes how, in February 2023, she retreated to Flinders Island (in Bass Strait) to process her grief and reflect on the enormity of her loss. An exquisite tribute to a beloved spouse. In Gretchen Shirm's Out of the Woods, an Australian woman flees her troubled past to work at an international criminal tribunal. Her job is to take notes at the trial of a former military man. Based on real events – the trial of a Serbian commander responsible for the deaths of thousands in Srebrenica in 1995 – the novel is punctuated by extracts taken from the testimony of actual survivors. A reminder of the importance of bearing witness. French writer Colombe Schneck's semi-autobiographical The Paris Trilogy is her first English-language translation. In Seventeen, the female protagonist, Colombe, feels betrayed by her body when she falls pregnant; her decision to have an abortion will haunt her. In Friendship, two lifelong friends follow similar paths in study, work and family until one dies in her 50s. In Swimming: A Love Story, 50-something Colombe discovers a passion for swimming while in the throes of a new love affair. Will appeal to lovers of Elena Ferrante. Nicole Abadee LISTEN / Problem solver Reply All regularly turns up on lists of the greatest podcasts ever made, but since it ended in 2022, co-host Alex Goldman has been quiet. Until now. He pitches his new podcast, Hyperfixed, as 'the help desk for life's most intractable problems'. The problems seem banal – Gwen is trying to get over her terror of driving in New York; Eva, who's English, wants to figure out why US recipes use cups instead of weights; Casey needs to know what on Earth is the origin of a badge that reads 'Ask Me About Our New Diarrhoea-Inducing Chili Cheese Fries'. Goldman, who describes himself as an 'over-confident idiot', is endlessly inquisitive as he tries to get answers to each question, but, as always, it's more about the journey than the destination. Barry Divola
