Beyoncé's Favourite Feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Speaks with Vogue UK on Being Black & More

She's a feminist, an award winning novelist and a TED Talk sensation and has had a wealth of experience in women equality, oppression, race and more, which she expresses through characters like Olanna, Ifemelu & more in her stellar books.

But in her interview with Erica Wagner of Vogue UK for the April 2015 issue of Vogue, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie doesn’t just talk about her passions, she also discusses her venture into a more personal style, her thoughts on Beyoncé as a force for good, her dislike for garri, the Selma movie and more.

Continue to read her interview with Vogue UK.

 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was 26 when she published her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. The books that followed, Half of a Yellow Sun - set during the Biafran conflict in Nigeria, a decade before she was born - and Americanah, a modern love story set between America and Nigeria, have also been garlanded with international prizes and critical praise. Salman Rushdie remembers meeting her at a PEN literary festival in New York, not long after Purple Hibiscus was published: "She did a one-on-one conversation with Michael Ondaatje in a packed auditorium at Hunter College. At that time she was just out of the egg, so to speak, and it was plain that she hugely admired Ondaatje, but what was so striking was her own confidence and authority. She very much held her own, and spoke fluently and powerfully, and all of us there that day could see that someone very remarkable had just arrived. A star is born, I remember thinking, and so it was."

 

 

Indeed it was, and her stellar qualities would go on to find her an extraordinarily wide and diverse audience. Her 2009 TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story", has had - wait for it - more than eight million views; it is a sophisticated yet charming and accessible essay on how we might see the world through another's eyes. But that viral explosion is nothing compared with what happened to the talk Adichie gave in 2013 at TEDxEuston, a series of talks in London focusing on African affairs. Entitled "We Should All Be Feminists", the speech, which addressed a feminism beyond race or class, took on a very different life. Before she had realised the impact her words were having, she got a call from Beyoncé, who eventually sampled the talk in "Flawless", a song on the eponymous album she released, to the world's surprise, on iTunes that December: it reached the top of the iTunes charts in 104 countries and sold nearly 850,000 copies in three days. Beyoncé first discovered Chimamanda when she came across her talk online. "I was immediately drawn to her," says Beyoncé. "She was elegant and her words were powerful and honest. Her definition of a feminist described my own feeling: equality of the sexes as it pertains to human rights, equal pay and sexuality. She called the men in her family feminists, too, because they acknowledged the need for equality."

 

 

Adichie insists - and I believe her - that she was taken aback by the success of both of those talks which, it could be argued, changed her from a successful author into a celebrity, although "celebrity" is a concept she clearly distrusts. "The things I think will do really well are not the things that do really well," she says, laughing. You might guess from looking at photographs of her that she is a very serious person, but her laughter comes easily and often. She said yes to the 2013 TED invitation mainly because it was organised by her brother, Chuks, who works in information technology and development, and she wanted to help him out. "But I thought, I don't have anything to talk about. I'm not the kind of person who can manufacture things when I don't care deeply about them. But my brother said, well, there is this one thing you give us endless lectures about…" A mock-serious look crosses her face. "Because it's known in my family, you don't want to demean women in my presence! And I knew this wasn't a comfortable subject, particularly for the people I was addressing, an African audience.

 

"I was still writing it when I went up to speak, and afterwards, clearly people had listened, clearly people felt strongly about it - but I let it go. So they put it online, and only then I heard about people using it in their classes, about people arguing about it at work and school." But the approach from Beyoncé was unexpected. The collaboration is not something Adichie has discussed much, wary that too much talk of pop music would shift the focus away from what she cares about. "I am a person who writes and tells stories. That's what I want to talk about. There's an obsession with celebrity that I have never had. But the one thing I will say is that I really do think Beyoncé is a force for good, as much as celebrity things go. I know there has been lot of talk in the past year about how feminism is 'cool' now, but I think if we are honest, it's not a subject that's easy. She didn't have to do this, she could have taken on, I don't know, world peace. Or nothing at all. And I realise that so many young people in our celebrity-obsessed world, well, suddenly they are thinking about this. And that's a wonderful thing. So I don't have any reservations about having said yes." 

 

Feminism - gender equality - is a cause she cares about passionately. You don't have to spend long in Nigeria to witness the deeply patriarchal nature of the culture, where men are always greeted as "sir" and women are lucky to be greeted at all. But Adichie was brought up in a progressive household. Born in 1977 in eastern Nigeria, she grew up in Nsukka, a university town. That part of the country is still, she says, the place where her soul is most at home; she dreams of having a farm there one day. Her father, James, was professor of statistics and, later, vice-chancellor at the University of Nigeria; Grace, her mother, was the university's first female registrar - no small achievement. As it happens, her parents were staying with her when we met, in
the beautiful stone-floored house she built about a year ago. Married 51 years, they have a pride in their daughter that shines in their faces, as does her love for them. Right from the beginning, her books were distinguished by strong female voices: Kambili in Purple Hibiscus, Olanna in Half of a Yellow Sun, Ifemelu in Americanah.

 

The oppression of women, she says, "Makes me angry.  I can't not be angry. I don't know how you can just be calm. My family says to me, 'Oh, you're such a man!' - you know, very lovingly… But of course I'm not, I just don't see why I shouldn't speak my mind." She got into trouble for speaking her mind in Nigeria: when an interviewer addressed her as Mrs Chimamanda Adichie, she corrected him, saying she wished to be known as "Ms", which the journalist reported as "Miss". Her insistence on her own family name was all over the news here last spring. She should be happy to be addressed as "Mrs", she was told, since she was, after all, married. She laughs now, but it's clear the story still disturbs her. "It was the lack of gratitude on my part for having a husband. And yet I didn't want to proclaim it: I wanted to claim my own name."

 

 

Credit:VogueUK