Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘I Worry That What We’re Looking at Is the End of Curiosity’
The author of Americanah explains why freedom of expression is crucial to writers.
The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie isn’t afraid to speak her mind. Her most well-known novel, Americanah, explores race, love, and migration through the story of a young Nigerian woman who moves to the U.S.; in 2013, she gave a TEDx talk titled “We Should All Be Feminists,” which Beyoncé sampled on her song “Flawless,” bringing Adichie to instant international attention. In recent years, she’s been discussing what she sees as an unhealthy level of cultural self-censorship. She sat down with Atlantic senior editor Gal Beckerman at The Atlantic Festival to discuss the role of storytellers, the right to express oneself, and the importance of intellectual freedom.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Gal Beckerman: Recently, I rewatched your viral 2009 TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” in which you describe the way that the people can sort of limit one another with very constricting narratives about who they are. I wanted to ask you about the state of the single story right now, with a slight twist. When I watched that TED talk, it seemed to me that you were talking about how people impose a single story on one another. But I also see that we’re in a moment where people are imposing single stories on themselves, whether it be race or gender or political affiliation. When you gave that talk, did you have that aspect in mind?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: No, I didn’t. It’s interesting what you said about the single story no longer being just about an outside imposition, but almost in some ways a self-imposition. I think there’s a problem with the way that we’re living now. I think we now kind of live in these ideological tribes that have imposed on us an adherence to orthodoxy. And Ayad Akhtar, who’s this writer I really admire, says that there’s a moral stridency in the way that we respond to speech, and that there’s something punitive about it. I think it’s true. I think people are afraid and self-censor. The single story—they then impose it on themselves. You have people who now increasingly think that you cannot write about experiences that you have not personally had. And I think that’s terrible for literature and for the idea of an imagination that is allowed to grow and soar. I don’t think that there’s any human endeavor that requires freedom as much as creativity does. I worry that what we’re looking at is the end of curiosity, the end of creativity, the end of learning, even.
Beckerman: You recently wrote an essay on the 10-year anniversary of the publication of Americanah, and we excerpted it in The Atlantic. And you had a lot of interesting things in there about the genesis of the book, including what you’re talking about right now. There was one line and one particular word that stood out to me. You said, “Of all the complicated emotions that animated the conception of this novel, bewilderment was the most present.” I wanted to ask you: What bewilders you today about America?
Adichie: Oh, good Lord. Well, I don’t know that we have enough time, but I have to try. First of all, I genuinely do not understand the appeal of Donald Trump. We’re talking about Who’s going to win the elections in this country? And it seems to me that there is a kind of almost willful disregard of the fact that there’s a person, who I think is dangerous for this country, who has enormous support in certain parts of this country. And I think we should ask why: I want to understand it, and I don’t, so that bewilders me.
I think also of the tribal orthodoxies: If somebody on the right agrees with something, then many people on the left feel compelled to immediately disagree with it and not think about the content of it. And I think also that the reverse is the case. And I find that bewildering on so many levels, because what it means is that we can’t even talk about the content of things. I want to be able to decide for myself whether something is good or bad and not have it be linked to whether my tribe approves of it. But America is also my second home, and there’s a way that you worry when you see something you care about starting to crumble. That’s the feeling I have about the U.S. right now.
Beckerman: On social media: You wrote another essay, in 2021, in which you did not mince words. You said, “We have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.” You frequently work with younger writers. What do you see as the greater impact on creativity from the dynamic that you’re describing here?
Adichie: It seems to me that there is a massive decline today in compassion and in moral courage. And I think that, in some ways, both are connected. On social media, there’s an expectation that you will not get compassion: You tweet something, and then people are coming at you, even your friends. I think it makes people hold back. And then, of course, the moral-courage part of it is that there are people who could speak up, and they don’t. I think what’s happening now—the books that are not being published; you open the newspapers and often there’s someone who’s been dropped from something—it’s often not because those in positions of authority really believe that what has been said was bad. It’s because they’re afraid of themselves being attacked.
With this kind of social censure hanging over people, it’s so much more difficult, I think, to create, to write. And you can see that even in the small space of a workshop—I constantly have to say to people, It’s okay. You can actually write that. Because you can see that they’re very worried about what the people in the workshop are going to think. I wish people would read more, and particularly read more imaginative writing. I think maybe it would make us a bit more compassionate.
[Read: Chimamanda Adichie’s open letter to President Biden]
Beckerman: Now that you have made this point a few times publicly, how does it feel to be the one who is sort of at risk of looking like a scold to your own side, so to speak?
Adichie: That doesn’t bother me. I wish I didn’t have to—I mean, I really want to just stay home and read poetry and try and write fiction. But even as a child, I was sort of the one who felt compelled to speak out about things I thought were unjust. We can talk about the right and the kind of crazy book banning.
Beckerman: I was going to ask you, because your own book was apparently banned.
Adichie: I thought, Such august company. I mean, look at all the wonderful books that are banned. But you’re depriving children of knowledge and of pleasure. I find just personally abhorrent this decision to hide the truth of history. You know, I think that African American history is essential. It is American history. And this idea that you want to protect children from not feeling bad about the truth is absurd.
On the left, it’s easy for us to criticize people who are banning books. But what are we saying to ourselves about the self-censorship that we are promoting? There’s a sense in which on the left, it’s so easy to fall short of expectations. You’re supposed to know everything, right? And you’re supposed to know the right language to use. You’re not expected to ask questions. I think if more of us decided that we were going to, for example, be less vicious, a bit more compassionate, you know, maybe be more charitable when somebody says something, then maybe the tone on social media would change a bit. Maybe the literature we produce will be a bit less narrow. You know, I don’t really find contemporary fiction very interesting.
Beckerman: I was going to ask you about that. Is there some consistent thing that you’re bumping up against as a reader?
Adichie: You know, I’m constantly buying books, and I do that because I’m thinking about when I started and how terrified I was that nobody would buy my books. So I’m always trying to buy, especially first novels. But I almost never finish them. I remember recently reading this book, and I thought, My God, everybody is good in this book. And that’s a lie. Literature should show us all sides of ourselves. And I read this book, and everyone was ideologically correct. Everyone had all the right opinions.
I mean, I love this expression from H. G. Wells, that literature should be about the jolly coarseness of life. And to that, I like to say it doesn’t have to be jolly; just the coarseness of life will do. We live in a world now where people talk about sensitivity readers. So imagine if you were a writer: You don’t want your publisher to have to get a sensitivity reader for your book, so you’re going to do the sensitivity writing yourself.
[Watch: Chimamanda Adichie on what Americans get wrong about Africa ]
Beckerman: One of the other victims, to me, of this sort of censoring attitude is humor. When I was an editor at The New York Times Book Review in 2016—this was before the election—you wrote a short story in which you entered the mind of Melania Trump. It was funny. And it was humor that had the effect of some empathy. You actually tried to get into her head, tried to really understand.
Adichie: I did a lot of research. I went and I read about this woman, about her family, the little town where she came from. And I have to say that at the time, I felt much sympathy for her, because I thought, This is not what she signed up for. I do have to say, because I believe in being truthful, that my views about her—my sympathy has decreased substantially. And here’s the other thing about the progressive left, my tribe: We’ve lost the ability to laugh. And it’s a shame. I mean, we all sort of wake up in the morning and we put on our cloaks of sanctimony.
Beckerman: You know, somebody else might not have felt able to write inside of Melania Trump’s head, for fear of looking like they were sympathizing with her.
Adichie: Yes. But the role of a storyteller is to imagine what a human being is thinking and feeling. If we don’t have our storytellers feeling free, we’re losing something. And then the generations who will come after us, I think they’re going to just be startled. You know, we look back and we read—we read Dickens, and I read Balzac, and I get a sense of what life was like then. I wonder if people reading contemporary writing today will get a true sense of what our lives are like.
And I’ll tell you this without naming names. I wrote my first children’s book, and I had been asked to do an interview with a very respected media outfit in America. And a few days before the interview, my publisher tells me, Oh, I’m so sorry. They just said they cannot go forward with the interview. And I said, Oh, why? And they said, Well, because they think that they cannot interview you if you’re not willing to address the comments you made in 2017 about trans women. And I was so stunned by that. I thought, Well, I wrote a children’s book. And I think what stunned me even more was the willingness of this media organization to be open about the reason that they were canceling the interview. And I have to say, I was kind of hurt. But also, it made me start to understand how certain people can choose not to speak out. I did an interview in 2017 in which I said, I think a trans woman is a trans woman. And I think that because I think it’s so important for us to make distinctions, because I, as a person who was born with a body designed to create a certain size of gametes, that has completely shaped my life. You know, actually, before I was born, my father’s family said to my mother, We hope it’s a boy. To which my mother said, Well, you know, I’ll have whatever I have. My mother was wonderful. But I grew up in a culture in which, because I’m a woman, I cannot inherit property, all of those things. So it’s shaped so much of my life. And I said that not at all thinking that I was causing offense at all, not intending to cause offense. But I also understand that it’s possible to cause offense without meaning to. And so afterwards, I was so taken aback. I mean, it was just really horrible. I took to my bed for two weeks. I don’t like to talk about it, because I don’t like to cast myself as a victim. It’s almost impossible to talk about this with nuance without being accused either of Oh, you’re making yourself the victim or Oh, you’re so insensitive. And that, in some ways, maybe is why I’m saying this, because I want to make a case for more nuance. And also a case for maybe more holistic thinking, because I remember thinking, Well, why would anybody think that I meant harm? Because people said, Well, you’re creating a hierarchy. People said, You’re a murderer. And I thought, My whole life has been about the celebration and the embrace of diversity, and I love the idea that we are different in the world.
Beckerman: Last question: I have to ask this, because the fans out there are going to want to know. It’s been 10 years since Americanah. Can we expect another novel at some point?
Adichie: [Laughs] I’m working on a novel. I’m trying to—well, you write books, so you know what that feeling is. And especially when you frame it as Well, it’s been 10 years, immediately I go into a panic: My God, it’s been 10 years! I am working on a novel, and I’m hoping.