Adichie: Building a Stairway to the Stars

My favorite keynote at the Calvin Festival of Faith andWriting started twenty minutes late by American time, but within the usual parameters of African time. That seemed fitting, as the speaker was Nigerian-born Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her topic: The Magic and Craft ofFiction.

Often described as one of Nigeria's most famous writers, Ms.Adiche was born to Roman Catholic parents and raised in an environment she describes as happy. After studying medicine, she came to the states and earned a B.A. from Eastern Connecticut State University. She went on to receive an M.A. in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins. And to land a fellowship at Princeton. And to do a little stint at Yale. And pursue advanced study at Harvard. Looks like Stanford needs to hurry up and get on her resume.

In both of my encounters with Ms. Adichie at the Festival, she asked me a question. That says a lot….

Oprah chose her work Purple Hibiscus (2003) as a Book Club pick, and Ms. Adichie’s later work,

Half a Yellow Sun (2006) took one of theUK’s most prestigious awards for fiction, the Orange Broadband Prize. She has also written The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), a compilation of short stories. Ms. Adichie began by saying how nice it was to be in a placewhere people talk about faith without being dismissed. And she proceeded to read a section from her own memoir. As she read, I noticed she took care to include the sounds, smells, and sights from her childhood, right down to the smell of the dust in the house. “Our art is shaped by where we come from,” she said.

When she finished reading, she transitioned to talking about writing. “I’ve been writing since I was old enough to spell,” she told us. Andher statement yanked me back to my own childhood where I pictured 4541 Fifteenth Avenue North in Salem, Oregon, where I wrote my first word, “h-o-w,” in red crayon on my window sill. I was so excited that my combination of letters finally spelled something that I wrote it everywhere. A writer was born.

When the writing is going well, Ms. Adichie said, she feels extravagant joy. But when it’s going badly, she feels anxiety and self-doubt.To rid herself of writer’s block she shops online (especially sites with free returns); reads pages from books she loves; watches Youtube; eats Cherry Garciaice cream; searches through old folders and revises old pieces; and plays with her iPhone app for poetry— “spin” and a new poem pops up.

She described writing as “magic” because of the joy it brings. “I write because I love the solitude,” she said. “And creating characters who sometimes speak to me. I love the possibility of touching another human being with my work…. Fiction has the ability to create meaning and create a radical truth.” Even if she were not published, she said, she would still write, despite the steely determination required to sit for hoursto turn in words, to “scrape and scrape.”

 “When I should write,I wander around the house.” Part of the craft is wandering to get to the creative space, she said, before quoting Don DeDillo: “A writer takes earnest measure to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”

 The question “Where do you get inspiration as a writer?” she considers a lazy one. (Apparently there actually

are some bad questions.) “Anything can be inspiration.”

She carries an iPhone and writes what she observes, wherever she goes, from the color of someone’s lipstick to a conversation she overhears in the airport. She enters her world paying attention to detail, and the result is that she reminds herself and others what it means to be human.

When she set out to write Purple Hibiscus, she recalls, “I was keen simply to tell a human story.” She insists that all stories have been told. What’s left to tell is nuance and newness. These are what make a story worth reading. “Humans are incredibly different and incredibly alike.” And reading fiction makes us more capable of empathy.

Among the many American authors who have influenced her are Philip Roth, Willa Cather, and Toni Morrison. But she uses a different, more reverent, tone when mentioning the work of Chinua Achebe, the most widely read African writer and author of

Things Fall Apart. Nelson Mandela once described him as "the writer in whose presence prison walls fell down."

“Fiction does matter,” she said. It can make literal prison walls fall down, but it can also sustain prisoners where they are. Adichie described an American woman sentenced to a long-term jail sentence inPeru for aiding the military there. Listening to the news one night, Adichie saw an interview with the girl's mother, whom the newscaster asked how her daughter was doing. She replied that she was having a difficult time, but that she had been greatly strengthened by a book written by a woman named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie titled Half a Yellow Sun.  

Fiction matters.

Ms. Adichie closed with this quote from Bessie Head, considered bymost to be Botswana’s most influential writer: “

I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take all of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.”