A Web Exclusive Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 0 comments

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian novelist and short-story writer and recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book is a story collection, The Thing around Your Neck (Granta). A longer version of this interview, conducted by Susan VanZanten, appears in Image's International Issue (#65).

 Image: Many western readers in a post-secular culture don’t understand the pervasive role that religion plays in African life. Your fiction vividly depicts the presence and weight of religion, with its accounts of traditional Catholicism, African Pentecostalism, Islam, a more liberal Catholicism, and indigenous beliefs. What was it like to grow up as a Catholic in Nigeria in such a spiritually teeming world?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: It was indeed spiritually teeming. But is America actually a post-secular society? I’m not sure. I think it’s quite religious as well, but it manifests itself in a different way. It’s less direct. I even think that in many ways the anti-religion movement is in itself a religion—and sometimes it is more strident than any religious movement.
       What’s interesting about Nigeria, and much of sub-Saharan Africa, is how there’s a geographical element to religion. In Igboland where I come from, in southeastern Nigeria, the Presbyterian missionaries came from one side and the Irish-Catholics came from another, and they reached an agreement in the late 1880s or 1890s to respect one another’s turf (though I recently read that one of the Protestant ministers accused the Irish Catholics of encroaching on their territory and going to convert people). My grandfather converted to Catholicism in the 1920s, and my father was born in 1932, so he was baptized Catholic as a baby, and so was my mother. My family, like many families around us, were moderate Catholics. Everybody around me was religious. People went to church. It was something you didn’t question.
      When I go back to Nigeria it strikes me how on Sunday people will say, “Have you been to church?” It’s expected, and they say it matter-of-factly. They’re saying it because they want to make sure. They’ll ask, “Will you come out to dinner with us? Have you gone to church, by the way?” Because if you haven’t gone to church then you can’t come to dinner because it means you’re going to evening mass. The option of not going to church doesn’t occur to people, and it doesn’t matter what denomination.
      As I was growing up, we went to church every Sunday. I was drawn to religion, but I was the kid who just wouldn’t shut up. I had questions. Everybody else went to church and came home. I wanted to go to the sacristy and talk to the priest about why he said that, I’m sure much to my father’s irritation. But my parents were very, very patient people, and they continue to be. I was drawn to the drama of the Catholic Church. I would cry at Paschal Mass when we raised the candles. They would turn out all the lights and people would hold candles. When it was time to renew your vows and they would light the candles, I would burst into tears because I was so moved. I loved the smell of incense and I loved the Latin. I keep meaning to write about it. I was a happily Catholic child.
       I also got into a lot of fights with Anglican friends. There was a Catholic-Protestant divide on campus, and it did affect a lot of things. Looking back now, it’s hilarious. An Anglican would say, “All you Catholics worship Mary and it means you’re going to hell.” I was very enthusiastic about those fights. I could quote the bits of the Bible that were supposed to conform to Catholic tradition, like the letter of Saint James about confession, and of course we had been taught that bits of the Revelation were about the blessed Virgin, and I would quote that as well.

Image: What about indigenous religions when you were growing up? Were they a presence?

CNA: I was among people who viewed indigenous religion with disdain mostly. I became interested in traditional Igbo religion when we would go to our ancestral hometown, and I remain interested. Like most Igbo people, we would go back for Christmases and Easters. Cousins would gather. I noticed that most of my family was Catholic but a few members of the extended family weren’t, and I remember my grandmother saying, “You can’t eat in their home because they worship idols.” Somehow the food they had was tainted. I think that’s when I started to question. I come from a culture where whenever you go into somebody’s home, they give you food; they don’t ask you if you want any, they just give it, and you’re expected to eat it. And so it was an awkward thing to go into those homes. But often those relatives didn’t give us food, because they knew. I was aware of a general Christian attitude of looking down on traditional religious adherence, an assumption that it was somehow bad. The Catholic-Protestant rivalry didn’t really have that element, because of course we had Jesus in common. People would fight about the blessed Virgin Mary and about the Rosary, but you didn’t get a sense of disdain. With traditional religion, there was.

Image: Do you think Catholicism is a western religion? How do you respond to those critics who see the growing presence of Christianity in Africa as a triumph of colonialism?

CNA: I feel ambivalent. I started to question early on, and when I got older I disliked in a visceral way the way that religion was so intertwined with western images: Jesus had to have blue eyes and blond hair, and the blessed Virgin was a beautiful blonde. Once at school during a nativity play somebody suggested that Jesus be dark, be black, and people were horrified. I remember thinking, “Well, we actually don’t know what he looked like.” People have said that Africans have made of Christianity what they will, that they have Africanized Christianity, but I am not always sure. I think they have to an extent. African Christianity has an immediacy that cuts across denominations. I go to mass in the U.S. and it seems tepid by comparison. In Africa, people are very aware of the presence of spirits. There’s the idea that we coexist with other beings in a way that’s very present.
       Christianity includes ideas that are cultural rather than religious, and these ideas have been absorbed into African Christianity. This is changing, of course, but even the idea of singing Christian songs in local languages offends some people. I recently heard about a woman who was horrified because she didn’t want Igbo carols at Christmas. Only the English ones were real Christmas carols to her. But even so, the idea of Christianity as a triumph of colonialism might be too simplistic.

To read the full interview, purchase IMAGE issue #65 here.