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Chimamanda discovers the word never

2021-08-01T02:19:50.217Z


The Nigerian writer publishes in Spanish the wild and urgent notes caused by the unexpected loss of her father in June 2020


Writer Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie.KIKE FOR

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Abba, Nigeria, 43 years old) spoke with her father, James Nwoye Adichie, on June 9, 2020 by video call and for the last time.

The next day he was dead.

The famous writer collapsed.

He tore off his clothes, threw himself on the ground, felt disbelief, anger and pain.

End of childhood.

More information

  • 'Silence is a luxury we cannot afford'

  • Chimamanda, inside and outside the walls

  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "It was not in my plans to be a feminist icon"

About grief

is a small text written with urgency and amazement, when reason falters because it cannot articulate a speech that facilitates the digestion of loss. From school we know that life is finite, but we ignore the infinite dimension of pain that it will cause to prove it. Chimamanda finds herself insecure and immature. He had never faced such a close and colossal amputation (at the height of the writing of his notes, he does not know that in less than a year he will suffer another of similar impact, losing his mother, Grace Ifeoma Adichie). He revolts against a world that goes on, oblivious to its devastation, and is frightened by the nihilism that he glimpses at the root of his grief. He also blames himself for what he did not do, thinking that he could have changed the course of things, one of the many traps that despair sets.

James Nwoye Adichie was Nigeria's first Professor of Statistics. His children now live all over the world (Nigeria, United Kingdom, United States) and do summits every Sunday for Zoom. In 2015, a group of men in league with his driver kidnapped him. For three days he was locked in the trunk of a car in the forest and was only released when one of his sons deposited a bag of money under a tree. The kidnapping had been cooked in the heat of the fame of Chimamanda, who had been chaining successes and literary awards for years with works such as

Americanah

,

Medio sol amarillo

or

La florpura

. After his release, James Nwoye told his daughter that the captors mispronounced his name, "so I had to correct them." Those days of 2015 lowered the writer to the precipice of loss, but the episode had a happy resolution. In June 2020, when neither of the children feared for their father's life, kidney failure caused his death in hospital.

Chimamanda's text was originally published in

The New Yorker

in September 2020, just three months after her death. They are notes almost like a flying pen on the most disturbing and hegemonic sensations of the duel. Each mourning is unrepeatable, but almost always, also in this one, progressive phases are repeated that begin in disbelief and end in acceptance. The desire to please those who are no longer to be pleased takes hold of the combative woman, who became an almost obligatory reading of feminism after a TED talk. Surrender comes when it is no longer of any use to externalize love. If there is literature on loss, that of the Nigerian is made with the throbbing of the viscera.

The writer sinks into the word never.

There are tics, expressions or postures linked to individuals.

With death, signs of an identity associated with it also disappear.

Chimamanda had a particular laugh when she was with her father, which came out even when he said not funny things.

“A laugh that I will never laugh again.

It has never come to stay ”.

About the duel 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 


Literature Random House, 2021


112 pages.

6.56 euros

Buy for € 6.55 on Amazon


Look for it in your bookstore


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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-08-01

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