Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Adichie, talks motherhood, racism in interview with FT
Multiple award-winning Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, has revealed she recently had a baby girl.
In the interview over lunch at a Lagos restaurant, with the Financial Times’ African Editor, David Pilling, the Orange Prize winner told her interviewer that the reason she ordered for chapman – a crimson -coloured fruit-flavour sugary Nigerian drink, – instead of wine was because she was breastfeeding.
“This is just very sugary, very sweet. I would probably have a glass of wine, but I’m breastfeeding, I’m happy to announce,” the “Half of a Yellow Sun” writer told the surprised journalist.
“This is the first time I’m saying it publicly. I have a lovely little girl so I feel like I haven’t slept . . . but it’s also just really lovely and strange,” she added.
She explained that she wanted her pregnancy and her child to be as “personal as possible” so she kept it from some of her friends.
“I have some friends who probably don’t know I was pregnant or that I had a baby. I just feel like we live in an age when women are supposed to perform pregnancy. We don’t expect fathers to perform fatherhood. I went into hiding. I wanted it to be as personal as possible.
“In this country of mine that I love,” she goes on, sliding to a halt on the word “love”, “people think that you’re incomplete unless you’re married.”
In the enthralling interview, where she spoke about her relation with some of the characters in her books, racism, Biafra and American politics, she exuded a rare-to-come-by optimism about the present and future prospects of Nigeria.
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