Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Credit: Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK, May 12 2015 (IPS)

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, co-curator of a spectacular World Voices week with over 100 African writers, closed the May 4-10 event with an admonition.

Referencing “codes of silence” that govern American life, Adichi urged her audience at the Great Hall of the Cooper Union University in New York City “to reject silence.”

“There is a general tendency in the United States to define problems of censorship as essentially foreign problems,” she was quoted to say by reporter Nicole Lee, writing for the Guardian UK publication.

Americans like to be comfortable and this comfort has brought a “dangerous silencing” into American public conversation, Adichie observed. “The fear of causing offense, the fear of ruffling the careful layers of comfort, becomes a fetish,” she said. As such, the goal of many public conversations in the United States “is not truth … [it] is comfort”.

According to Adichie, social media is a contemporary “tool of silencing”. The Twitter campaign to Bring Back Our Girls focused on the abduction of 200 girls in Nigeria, for example, and it appeared as if Boko Haram only targeted girls.

While that image recalled the actions of the Taliban in denying rights to women and girls, in fact, the terrorist group kidnapped almost as many young boys, making them into child soldiers. Boko Haram, she reminded the audience, is opposed to Western-style education for both girls and boys.

“It is censorship to force a story to fit into something that already pre-exists,” she said.

Breaking silences, Adichie cautioned, is not always welcomed. “I have often been told that I cannot speak on certain issues because I am young, and female or, to use the disparaging ‘Nigerian speak,’ because I am a ‘small girl’ … I have also been told that I should not speak because I am a fiction writer … But I am as much a citizen as I am a writer.”

It was as a citizen and writer that Adichie spoke out against the recent criminalisation of homosexuality in her home country, a law that not only put the safety of many innocent civilians at risk, but also many of her friends, as the Guardian writer pointed out.

Chimamanda Adichie has been called “the most prominent” of a “procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors attracting a new generation of readers to African literature”. The author of Purple Hibiscus,” a coming-of-age novel set in post-colonial Nigeria, and two more critically-acclaimed novels, “Half of a Yellow Sun” (2006) and “Americanah” (2013), as well as a collection of short stories, she won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2008.

The country’s elections in March have made Adichie more optimistic about Nigeria’s prospects. “It was proof that democracy…is making progress,” she says.

The event was hosted by the Freedom to Write group PEN American Center.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Prize-winning writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is hoping to break down some stereotypes at the upcoming World Voices Festival sponsored by the PEN America free expression group.

Chimamanda is the co-curator in the festival which starts from May 4. The author of Purple Hisbiscus, her first book, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013), she warns of the “danger of a single story” – the idea that people living in certain areas of the world all have one kind of experience.

In the hopes of winning a wider audience for African writers, she’s chosen Nigerian-American author Teju Cole, author of The White Savior Industrial Complex, and Cameroonian writer Achille Mbembe, among others.

“It was important to get people who actually live on the continent, along with those who have left,” she told the Wall Street Journal from her part-time home in Columbia, Maryland.

A roster of 100 writers from 30 countries will take part in this year’s Africa programme. Other authors at this year’s festival themed “On Africa” include Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes, Senegalese screenwriter Boubacar Boris Diop, and South African visual activist Zanele Muholi.

World Voices was launched 11 years ago in the wake of 9/11 to combat “American cultural isolationism.” The annual literary extravaganza adopted a new curatorial approach for its 2015 edition which is taking place under the theme “On Africa.”

This year’s event spotlights the new and old schools of creative writing arising from across the continent with a lineup of workshops, readings, and conversations focusing on migration, memory and imagination, the importance of bearing witness, the role of literature in Africa’s gay rights movement and the future of queer creative communities across Africa and its diaspora.

“Focusing on the African continent is an ambitious undertaking,” said Laszlo Jakab Orsós, festival director. “We cannot, in one week-long Festival, even come close to presenting the entirety of the riveting literary landscapes throughout Africa, but we’re excited to present a select group of writers and artists who, I believe, will inspire New York audiences with their uncompromising and brilliant work.

“It’s our privilege to put the spotlight on these writers, and it is my hope that they will challenge all of us to create art that is bravely subversive and relevant to our time.”

The 11th annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature will take place in various locations throughout New York City  from May 4-10. Visit the official PEN World Voices Festival website for more information on the schedule of events and the full list of festival participants.

Edited by Kitty Stapp