Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is considered one of the greatest writers of her generation and is a prominent voice in contemporary African literature.
Among her publications are Purple Hibiscus, published in 2003; Half of a Yellow Sun, published in 2006, won the Orange Prize in the fiction category in 2007. In 2013, she published her third novel, Americanah.
Her story begins in Nigeria. Her father, James Nwoye Adichie, was a professor of statistics at the university. And her mother, Grace Ifeoma, was the first woman to work as an administrator in the same place. In an interview, she reports that her mother encouraged her to be interested in both things considered “girly” and other non-stereotypical things.
Her grandparents participated in the separatist movement that culminated in the Biafra War. The family lost almost everything at that time.
Chimamanda studied medicine and pharmacy for a year and a half at the University of Nigeria. During this period, she served as editor of the magazine “The Compass”, run by the medical students of the Catholic university.
Chimamanda migrated to the United States at the age of 19, thanks to a scholarship to study Communication at Drexel University, in Pennsylvania.
Regarding her experience in the USA, she says she felt “deeply irritated” by how Americans saw Africa as a monolithic place, and by the mixture of ignorance and arrogance towards people who came from there.
Chimamanda transferred to the University of Connecticut to be close to her sister. In 2003, she completed her master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and in 2008, she received a certificate as a master of arts in African studies from Yale University.
In 2012, she spoke about being a feminist for TEDxEuston with her speech “We should all be feminists” which started a global conversation on the topic and was published as a book in 2014, which sold millions of copies around the world and was sampled for music “Flawless” by Beyoncé.
For her, “when we reject a single story, when we realize that there is never just one story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”
In her texts and books, Chimamanda Adichie investigates details of Nigeria, America and the experience of immigrants, but beyond that, she addresses the issue of gender and comments that women deal with immigration differently, and opens the discussion about the abuse suffered and the loneliness of an immigrant woman.
Just as she suggests in her TEDx Talks “The danger of a single story”, the images we make of people from other places are constructed by the stories we hear.
So, the suggestion I leave here, also as a migrant woman, is: the more diverse narratives we know, the more complete our understanding will be on a given subject.
And the question that remains for reflection this month is: which female narratives about migration can we learn about to expand our vision on the subject?