Olisa.tv: I have been requesting this interview for about a year now and you finally agreed to it. Thank you.
Chimamanda Adichie: I decided I wanted to address certain things and you were the one person I wanted to talk to. So thank YOU.
A few weeks ago, the UK Guardian published an article online that you wrote about depression. Then a day later the article was removed. Many people were confused about this. There was much speculation. Some people even suggested that you might not have been the author of the article. I’d like for you to talk about depression and the story surrounding that article; why was it removed?
I was certainly the author. I have actually always been quite open about having depression. By depression, I don’t mean being sad. I mean a health condition that comes from time to time and has different symptoms and is very debilitating. I’ve mentioned it publicly in the past, but I have always wanted to write about it. I was meeting many people who I could tell were also depressive, and I was noticing how hush-hush it all was, how there was often a veil of silence over it, and I think the terrible consequence of silence is shame.
Depression is difficult. It is difficult to experience, difficult to write about, difficult to be open about. But I wanted to do it. For myself, in a way, because it forced me to tell myself my own story, which can be helpful. But also for other possible sufferers, especially fellow Africans, because there is something very powerful about knowing that you are not alone, and that what happens to you also happens to other people.
Depression is something I have recognized since I was a child. It is something I have accepted. It is something I will have to find ways to manage for the rest of my life. Many creative people have depression. I wonder if I would be so drawn to storytelling if I were not also a person who suffers from depression.
But I am very interested in de-mystifying it. Young creative people, especially on our continent, have enough to deal with without thinking – as I did for so long – that something is fundamentally wrong with feeling this strange thing from time to time. Our African societies are not very knowledgeable or open or supportive about depression. People who don’t have depression have a lot of difficulty understanding it, but people who have it are also often befuddled by it.
I wanted to make sure I was emotionally ready to write the piece. I don’t usually write about myself and certainly not very personally. I wanted it to be honest and true. The only way to write about a subject like that is to be honest.
Last year, a major magazine that I admire asked me to write a personal piece for them. I decided to use that as a prodding to finally write about depression. They liked the piece and were keen to publish it. They suggested some edits, and at some point I began to feel that the article was being made to follow a script, and that its integrity was being compromised. So I withdrew the piece. This was the most personal thing I have ever written and I felt it had to be in the form that felt most true. My agent then said that the UK Guardian was launching a new section that was supposed to publish long, serious pieces. She sent it to them and they were interested. But I had already begun to re-think the piece itself. I was no longer sure I was ready for it to be published. I thought about changing the structure. To make it two essays, one about women’s premenstrual issues and one about depression, so as to be more effective as a kind of advocacy memoir. Most of all, I decided I was not emotionally ready to have the piece out in the world. I wanted first to finish the new writing and research I was doing. So a day after my agent told me that the UK Guardian wanted it, I told her to please withdraw the piece completely. That I no longer wanted it to be published. The Guardian told her they were sorry I was withdrawing, but they understood. I didn’t think about it after that. My plan was – put it away, go back to it in a year, and see how I feel and revise and edit it.
This happened in September 2014. Then a few weeks ago, I was travelling and I get off a plane, turn on my phone, and see messages from acquaintances telling me how ‘brave’ I was. I was astonished. I had just written a piece for THE NEW YORK TIMES about my issues with light in Lagos and so I thought ‘haba, since when is writing about light brave?’
I read that article about light in THE NEW YORK TIMES and loved how you wrote about something all of us Nigerians can identity with and all of us complain about but you turned it into a poem and a political statement at the same time.
Thank you. A friend of mine was teasing me about how diesel is Big Man Problem, and how she deals only with petrol for her generator. Which I thought was funny, and true. But also interesting is how the light situation stunts everyone, how the privileged – except maybe for diesel importers – are not immune. Anyway I soon realized that the messages I was getting were not about the article on light. Somebody specifically mentioned the Guardian. So I immediately went to the Guardian website.
Do you remember what your first reaction was when you saw that an article you decided not to publish had suddenly appeared in public?
I felt violated. It felt like a horrible violation. This was the most personal piece I had written and the only person who deserved to decide when it would be read publicly was me.
Even their choice of words felt like a violation. They wrote that it was about my ‘struggling’ with depression. I would never have agreed to that caption. I do not think of the article as being about my ‘struggle’ with depression, but about my journey to accepting something I have had since I was born, and my choosing to ‘come out’ about it. I also hated that the sentence they highlighted from the whole piece was about how ‘the nights are dark…’ etc. It felt sensationalizing and cheap.
I was angry with the Guardian. Especially as their first apology was ‘we are obviously sorry.’ Any apology that contains the word ‘obviously’ is not an apology. They took it down and replaced it with an explanation about a ‘technical error,’ which even a child would have reason to doubt. It’s probably naïve of me but I had expected that they would be quick to admit their fault and make amends. There is something predatory about Big Journalism. Big Journalism doesn’t care about the humanity of it subjects. Big Journalism cares about ‘good copy’ and about not being sued. It took longer than it should have, but at least they subsequently published a proper explanation and apology, with the prodding of lawyers.
(Editor’s note: Read Guardian’s clarifications here)
What did you make of The Guardian’s explanation that they had produced a ‘mock-up’ of the piece and then forgot to delete it in their system after you withdrew it and then it was automatically launched on their site? Also after it was taken down, many websites had already copied it and posted it, especially here in Nigeria.
I don’t understand how something stays on the website of a major, widely read newspaper for a whole day, something you have no right to publish, and nobody in your organization notices. As for the Nigerian websites, I think any website that puts it up is using what does not belong to them, which is called stealing. But this is the Internet age and of course I can’t really control any of that.
Well, I know for a fact that that article has been very widely-read and the consensus was that you were brave to write it and many people praised you. So I think it had positive impact.
I really hope other people who have depression found strength in it. My agent got many moving emails from people who were grateful that I had written about depression because they too had trouble even accepting that they had depression. I got responses from some distant friends and most were thoughtful and full of empathy and I was struck by how many said the piece made them feel better about acknowledging their own depression.
I also got a few responses that troubled me. Because I was generally quite upset by The Guardian, those responses further upset me.
William Styron who wrote the great novel Sophies Choice also wrote a memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, where he writes about being enraged by people patronising him and simplifying his depression to platitudes. I got a patronising email, for example, from an acquaintance which was full of passive-aggressive comments and then ended with ‘you are loved.’ And I thought: but that is obvious from the piece. I have a small solid circle of family and friends and I feel very loved and very grateful. But the piece is about the paradox of depression, that it is often a kind of sorrow without a cause. That being depressed makes even the sufferer feel bad and guilty because you are thinking of all these people you love and who love you and who you now feel strangely disconnected from. Another patronizing person told me ‘don’t worry, I won’t judge you.’ Which infuriated me beyond belief. Judge me? I didn’t know judgement was an option. Shame is not an option for me and never will be. Writing this piece was a choice I made. Being open about my vulnerability was a choice I made, and I don’t regret making it. There was also the usual Nigerian response of ‘just pray about it.’ I realized that many people who contacted my manager had either not understood the piece or had just read The Guardian’s choice caption of ‘nights are dark and I cry often’ and then decided to send me solutions ranging from bible quotes to various churches.
Did any of the responses really affect you?
I feel strongly, on principle, about the right to tell my own story. By publishing something I was not ready to publish, The Guardian violated that right, and I was very much affected by that. One particular response really saddened me. Someone asked my manager whether this was just a publicity stunt. I thought – have we become so soullessly cynical? Somebody actually thinks that if I wanted to pull a publicity stunt, I would write the most personal essay I have ever written about my own life?
Well, if you were looking for publicity, I would say you have the best source – Beyonce. One of the most famous pop musicians in the world used a part of your speech WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS in her song ‘Flawless.’ Many people say that you helped her shore up (or even create) her feminist credentials. What are your thoughts about that and on having given permission for Beyonce to sample your TEDxEuston Talk?
I think Beyonce is a cultural force for good, in general. It’s a shame that we live in a world so blindly obsessed by
celebrity – an actor or musician talking about a social issue should not be a reason for the press to pay attention to that issue, because they should pay attention to it anyway – but sadly it is what it is. Ours is an age in which celebrities have enormous influence. Beyonce could easily have chosen to embrace something easy and vanilla like ‘world peace.’ Or she could have embraced nothing at all because she is, after all, immensely successful and talented and she can actually sing – we all know that not all famous musicians can sing. Feminism is not a subject that will win you universal admiration as an entertainer and to make the choice she did is admirable. I was happy to give my permission.
But people have questioned her right to identify as feminist because of the sexual nature of some of her performances?
This is actually the question I kept being asked, and I found it tedious. There is a moralistic and troubling strain of feminism that equates all forms of female sexuality with shame. What matters is that Beyonce controls her own image. Female sexuality is a feminist issue only when there is a power imbalance. Actually Beyonce’s brand of sexuality is mainstream-conservative, with the whole idea of ‘put a ring on it’ and the title of ‘MRS’ as an honorific and so on. It seems to me that people who criticize her for being sexual should also acknowledge that underlying her version of sexuality is quite an old-fashioned wholesomeness. If the fear of a subversive depiction of female sexuality is the problem, then they really should leave her alone.
You seem to be more in the camp of subversion.
I am indeed. I do not believe that female sexuality needs to be clothed in ‘respectability.’ Male sexuality certainly doesn’t need ‘respectability’ to be valid and the same should be true of female sexuality.
A friend of mine said I should ask you why you are falling her hand. She said you are too humble about this Beyonce thing. She said if she were you she would be giving interviews about Beyonce everyday and putting things on Instagram about your collaboration. She said she felt very proud to hear your voice at the VMA awards but that you didn’t even give any interview about it. Her words were ‘Chimamanda has never made noise about this Beyonce thing.’ I hear you turned down every interview that wanted to focus on Beyonce.
Yes, when the song came out I turned down all interview requests. I was also a bit taken aback because I had expected some interest but I was startled that even the so-called serious news sources wanted to talk about it and in a kind of frenzied and goading sort of way. It all just seemed like too much noise. I realized it was something I would not be able to speak about with any nuance because whatever I said would be reduced to one line and become yet another source of noise. So I turned everything down. I was also working on some writing and wanted to be able to focus.
Later, when I was on book tour, there were people who wanted to talk about Beyonce and when I responded by saying I was happy to give her my permission and happy that so many young people would now become aware of gender issues and happy that my nieces and nephews now thought Aunty was cool – which was how I truly felt- people kept pushing and prodding as though they wanted me to say something I was not saying. Or people who were eager to tell me how excited they were about Beyonce using my speech, but oh, they hadn’t read my book. A serious literary person introduced me as ‘Beyonce’s favourite writer,’ even though my novel had just won a well-respected prize. Another person said to me – tell me how excited and honoured you were when she called you! – and I thought: what an inane question and what a limited choice of options. I very quickly became tired of such questions. The point is that I am a writer. I gave a talk about a subject I feel passionate about. When I gave the talk, I had no idea that anybody would even be really interested in it. It ended up that a
music star watched it and was inspired by it and wanted to use it. I was happy to give my permission. But I refuse to have that define me in any way. If I am doing an interview, I should be talking about my work, not being asked to speculate on the authenticity of somebody else’s feminist motivation. By the way, please tell your friend to forgive me for ‘falling her hand!’
So do you think the Beyonce song increased the sales of your novel AMERICANAH?
I’m not sure, but I doubt it. Mostly because many people who were excited about Beyonce having used my talk in her song didn’t go off to buy my novel, but instead watched the TEDxEuston Talk that she had sampled – which I was quite happy about. What actually happened is that at around the same time as the ‘Flawless’ song release, AMERICANAH was chosen as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times and won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award. Those certainly had a major impact on the sales, especially the former.
This is a good way to switch to literature. The general rule is that books that are well reviewed do not sell and that books that sell are not well reviewed. Very few writers have both. I can think of Ian McEwan for example. AMERICANAH was a New York Times bestseller and I hear it is still a bestseller in many independent bookshops in America. It has just been published in France and is a bestseller there. It has also done well in Germany, Sweden and other countries. It is a bestseller here in Nigeria. What is it like to have both critical and commercial success?
Even if I did not have the good fortune of being widely-read, I would still be somewhere writing, because writing is my life’s passion. When you write a book, you just never know if it will do well or not. And so I feel this immense gratitude to be widely-read and I haven’t lost my sense of wonder – each time I hear about what the book means to somebody, I am newly moved. In the case of AMERICANAH in particular, a nove in which Mazi Nwonwu seeks answers to questions many would not dare ask. He writes to inform and tends to escape, when reality doesn’t answer fast enough, into the world of speculative fiction.
SOURCE-BLOGAZINE
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