Conversations with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, By Daria Tunca

Abstract

Reviewed by: Conversations with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie by Daria Tunca Olajide Salawu Conversations with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie BY DARIA TUNCA UP of Mississippi, 2020. xxii + 211 pp. ISBN 9781496829313 e-book. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie remains one of the most controversial literary figures who has garnered and continues to garner immense attention from journalists, critics, and other writers. She is one of the renaissance faces of third-generation writers (see Adesanmi and Dunton), and her views are constantly sought on matters of social, political, and historical significance that inform her fiction and nonfiction and other profound issues in society. In Conversations with Chimamanda Adichie, Daria Tunca curates an impressive volume that leads to the heart of the matter of Chimamanda Adichie's personhood as a public intellectual, literary maestro, and global gender activist who parades an army of readers and followers in contemporary African literature, whether in a formal circle of literary enthusiasts/critics/pundits or informal spaces such as social media. In this cutting-edge effort, Tunca selects and collects Adichie's compelling interviews into a more appreciable and handier compendium. If interviews can therefore be argued as a genre on their own or archival site that can lend strength to scholarship, it is also cogent to surmise that they can be seen as a creative process where the interviewer and interviewee act as two characters and are involved in inter-agential dialectics. The dialogic space of interviews is dominated by politics of its own, with both participating protagonists seeking their agency constantly through their expressions, attitudes, and tones of exchanges. Tunca enumerates four categories to aid our understanding and appraisal of her collection. One is the axis of reading the book with attention to the inquisitive and provocative power of the interviewer. The second parameter is the responsive and sometimes defensive reactionary stance of the subject. The third is the way in which the volume builds a story on Adichie's works, especially embedded structures and literary influences in her narratives. The last of these frameworks shifts attention to the reader, whose assessment can offer insights into the dynamics of Adichie's positionality on issues that pervade her works and other facts that surround her life as a writer. The volume does not make an encyclopedic claim, as there are numerous interviews that Adichie has granted over the years, and an attempt to consider this as a weakness is swept off through this admission by the editor in the introduction. The volume takes a linear and traditional approach and shows a timeline of progression that follows the gritty and assertive personality of [End Page 246] Adichie from her nascency to her formidable status as one of the literary forces of the twenty-first century. Starting from Eve Daniel's 2003 interview, which focuses on her groundbreaking novel Purple Hibiscus, the book compiles sixteen interviews that end with Tunca's conversation with her on the "Novelist as a Therapist"—an appropriated titular dub that further consolidates Adichebean discourse (Tunca; see also Daniel Spencer in the edited collection under review). In self-absolving the book of other failings, since interviews are sometimes regurgitative, the editor charges the reader not to blame the "interviewers for any possible lack of imagination" (xii). Most of the discussions are viscerally linked and are interwoven around themes and issues such as the Biafran Civil War, race, immigration, love, religion, Nigeria's nationhood, family, childhood, gender; inclusive are familial stories, sociocultural, and political imaginaries that are stakes of her writing. However, the last quarter of the dialogues, starting from Mazi Nwonu, center around controversies that surround her life as a luminary, whose statements are often considered inflammable, and as an extra-literary figure who is a teacher, fashionista, and a celebrity—a descriptor she resists. Despite the hackneyed structure and repetitive tenor of these conversations, each of these interviews is useful in its own right and sometimes expands the reader's perception of earlier positions taken by the writer. For instance, when she contests the therapeutic power of writing as an offering restricted for self-healing alone in her first interview with Wale Adebanwi (13), she expounds her ambivalent position in the last chapter of the book...