Popular Nigerian author and activist Chimamanda Adichie has opened up about her decision to keep the birth of her twin sons private.
In an interview with The Guardian UK on Saturday, the 47-year-old revealed that she welcomed the babies in April 2024.
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Ms Adichie is very private; her marriage to Ivara Esege, a Nigerian-American doctor, is not widely known.
The award-winning author married Mr Esege in 2009, and seven years later, in 2016, they welcomed their daughter, now nine years old.
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Explaining her decision to keep the twins out of the public eye, she said, “You’ve met my babies. I want to protect my children. I’m okay with mentioning them, but I don’t like the piece to become about them. So, here’s the thing: Nigerians are …
“They want to know about your personal life. Because of that, I am resistant. I very rarely talk about it. There is no reason we should know everything about the lives of our public intellectuals.”
Fourth novel
Furthermore, the Enugu-born author announced that she would publish her fourth novel, Dream Count, after a more than 10-year fiction hiatus.
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Dream Count features the interwoven stories of four women, written in her vivid, bracing, and highly entertaining style.
Set in the US and Nigeria, the novel explores the immigrant experience.
It captures the tense dialogue between Africans and African Americans, the Americanization of language and thought, and themes of mother-daughter relationships, friendship, societal pressure on women to marry and have children, and—aptly—late motherhood.
“I didn’t want to leave such a long gap between novels. When I got pregnant [with her daughter], something just happened. I had several years in which I was almost existentially frightened that I wouldn’t write again. It was unbearable. When I got pregnant, something happened. I was almost entirely frightened that I wouldn’t write again.
“It was unbearable. There are expressions like ‘writer’s block’ I don’t like to use because I’m superstitious. But I had many years in which I felt cast out from my creative self, cast out from the part of me that imagines and creates; I just could not reach it. I could write nonfiction, and that was fine. But that’s not what my heart wanted”, said the Half of a Yellow Sun author.
The novel is set partly during lockdown, a period Adichie viewed as a time for reflection and nostalgia for lost identities.
Her protagonist, Chiamaka (Chia), a travel writer and dreamer, reminisces about her unfulfilling relationships.
Chia’s aunt chastises her for waiting perilously long to have children.
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Background
Ms Adichie, who studied medicine and pharmacology for a year and a half at the University of Nigeria, made headlines when she called for more African stories to help preserve the continent’s heritage, history, and development.
Ms Adichie, who published ‘Decisions’, a poetry collection, in 1997, said that stories are integral to development as they encompass the essence of a people and their worldview.
The author, who left Nigeria for the United States at the age of 19 to study at Drexel University and later attended three other institutions—Eastern Connecticut State University, Johns Hopkins University, and Yale University—said that stories have a positive impact on psychology, education, politics, and more.
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