Farafina Magazine's Visual Arts and Literature Event

For more information about the Farafina magazine event and biographies of the featured artists, visit their blog

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I still have the newspaper clippings from the July 11, 2004 Sunday Edition of the Nigerian Guardian that I cut out when I first saw Adichie's interview for her debut novel "Purple Hibiscus". I finally got to read "Purple Hibiscus" in 2007 and I finished reading it on the University of Nigeria Shuttle bus headed back to the Nsukka campus from Enugu. I sat in that bus quietly after I had finished reading it, deeply moved by everything I had read and in awe of Adichie. In 2008, my friends (Onyeka Nwelue & Eromo Egbejule) and I walked around the University of Nigeria Nsukka campus searching for the house she and Chinua Achebe once lived in. We found it and we all wrote about our experience individually (for my version of the trip search this blog for "305 Marguerite Cartwright Avenue, University of Nigeria Nsukka"). Adichie represents many things to me. She's incredibly gifted and tremendously inspiring. [Photo: Kachifo Limited]

Some of My Favorite Author Quotes...

"Also, [Nigerians] have a different mentality. Once someone deviates from the 'Go to School - Get a Job - Get a Family' model, he is seen as a delusional fool who is certain to fail and is discouraged at every turn. How is one supposed to make art under such conditions?" - Onyeka Nwelue
"I don't speak to provoke. I speak because I think our time on earth is short and each moment that we are not our truest selves, each moment we pretend to be what we are not, each moment we say what we do not mean because we imagine that is what somebody wants us to say, then we are wasting our time on earth." - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"It is precisely because there are so few novels by African writers in global circulation that we ask those novels to do too much. No one novelist can bear the burden of representing a continent and no one novel should have to." - Taiye Selasi

December 05, 2008