I stumbled upon Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie via pure serendipity. The close proximity of her Americanah novel title to Bhu Srinivasan’s brilliant Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism did the trick. I was hunting for more essays on the last few centuries of socio-economic development and ended bitten by the Nigerian-American author’s captivating fiction.
In Americanah’s pages characters come to life, do so poetically, and even afford to teach us readers a lesson or two. Take Obinze, the leading male character, who in his travails navigating through passion-of-old for Ifemelu and present-day marriage to Kosi, asks the following heartfelt question: “how can we live a shared life if the questions we ask of it are completely different?”
Now a big fan, the last thing I have read penned by Ngozi Adichie is Notes on Grief. A short biographical piece on handling the loss of her most cherished father. It is one of those books that slides just perfectly in its very own section, paternal grief in this case. Right next to, for example, Héctor Abad Faciolince’s The Oblivion We Shall Be –‘El Olvido que Seremos’, in its Spanish original–. Not shying away from pain but performing a sincerest rendition of their fatherly figures too.
As the Columbian novelist before, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie succeeded at conveying true, unadulterated emotion. The loss of a person around whom authors’ lives had largely been built as the motive for word-based art. The unfillable void. The eternal gratitude. All together as the two sides of a single, indestructible coin. We shall be thankful for their inspiration and courage.
