Reading and writing used to be an escape for me, a place I can hide but I think I now go to find, to create, to make. I’m no longer running (most of the time anyway). Now, when I write, I drift into a new world, one where anything is absolutely possible. A world where I can build people up to do exactly what I want them to do, to make my readers think, feel, imagine. There is no greater power.
Reading Purple Hibiscus as a sixteen-year-old in a missionary secondary school in Anambra State was like having a part of my thoughts come alive in a book, no book has felt more personal. Before Purple Hibiscus I had read a lot of books by Buchi Emecheta, Ola Rotimi, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, my mum, and other great Nigerian writers who told the Nigerian story with honesty and perfection. I still think about Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame. Such a classic. However, none of these books, in my opinion, had the unique kind of bravery, familiarity, style of writing and raw honesty that was Purple Hibiscus.
So, I hope you can understand just how much I love Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (CNA) and how I must have felt when I finally met her.
It was raining on a Friday evening when I received the email. I was supposed to meet my sister at a previously agreed location that evening but she flaked leaving me alone under the rain. I took cover in a nearby restaurant while thinking of all the ways I could kill her without going to jail (This should not be taken literally).
There is a list of women I have always wanted to meet and among the top 10 on my list (in no particular order) are; Chimamanda Adichie, Michelle Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey, Shonda Rhimes, Ava Duvernay, Hillary Clinton, Beyoncé Knowles, etc. I was going to meet one person on my list, no one prepares you for that moment so I wondered if I was in a trance. Chioma had told me stories about how people could drift into a trance that looked a lot like real life, only to wake up and realize that it wasn’t. I always thought that if I ever had one, I would like to find myself vacationing in Bali or flying a glider over the Lempuyang Gates of Heaven with my own Christian Grey -without the kinky fuckrey.
Meeting CNA felt like a more satisfying trance, so I called my sister. I don’t believe we had a very coherent conversation because we screamed long enough for the strangers in the restaurant to question my sanity. Honestly, it’s not as if Nigerians are too good at minding their own damn business, imagine when you make your business their business. Every eye in the restaurant was on me asking one question- is she mad? I knew there was no way I could prove that I had not completely lost it. Therefore, I owned my insanity and shamelessly walked out of the restaurant and into the rain without an umbrella, a decision I would regret while drying my six thousand Naira expression braid later that night.
I imagined one of the sales girls at the restaurant telling a customer the next day,
“One girl run mad for inside this shop yesterday o. She bin sit for this your chair con begin scream, she con run comot for shop”
and because Nigerians love stories that have no logical explanation, the ones that eventually make it to our parent’s WhatsApp groups as broadcast messages, stories that defy all forms of human reasoning, she will add,
“And na fine girl o, dey go don use am do yahoo yahoo”
She will also say other things that didn’t actually happen for the sake of dramatization. I imagined the poor customer swapping seats afterward, just in case the seat had something to do with the madness.
I walked a few kilometers to the nearest bus stop, soaking myself in the good news before boarding a keke at the junction. I called Marvie and Alexis, just to scream some more. I highly recommend an intentional walk under the rain, at least once in your adult life. Very freeing.
On the day I saw CNA for the first time, I was a nervous wreck. I changed five times searching for an outfit that said, ‘Thank you for Purple Hibiscus’. I even thought of wearing purple at some point, my friends (Go ahead and laugh). I had never been that nervous my whole life, except for when Ndidi, my classmate in Primary school threatened to report me to my father for calling her a Hippopotamus. I was not afraid of Ndidi, she was a mean girl that deserved all the ‘hippopotamus’ she could get. It was my father and the cane in his room with my name boldly written on it that I was more worried about.
I got to the venue wearing a black flay trouser and a monochrome blouse. Coincidentally, my blouse matched with the palazzo pants of one of the girls present. Both of us would later bond over Lagos stress and our excitement as card-carrying members of the Daughters of Chimamanda Youth Club P.S: The club is not a real thing but it should be.
The nervousness slowly disappeared until everyone was drinking, laughing and swapping individual Chimamanda stan stories, stories I will tell another day.
Chimamanda arrived about an hour later dressed in a bright purple Amede batik blouse and pant (I should have gone with purple, my guy). She walked in and something changed in our space, like an arrangement, like everything was suddenly taking its true position and the universe was in sync. She moved towards us, smiling as though she didn’t notice that the earth had just shifted for her. I felt sweat form in my right palm, so I rubbed it against my trousers. I pressed my feet firmly to the ground because it is one of those ‘odiegwu’ moments when people fall for no good reason at all. She greeted us one after the other smelling like a blessing, like something from a prayer. I wanted to hug her tightly enough for some of her excellence to stay on my skin but that was not a day to be weird, so I held it together. I wondered what she would say if she knew I was dancing atilogwu in my head, somersaulting like a frog on meth, drowning in a big pond of her excellence while smiling like everything was okay. Within hours, it was over, we took some pictures with her and everyone went home.
As I reluctantly bathed that night, I perfectly understood for the first time, why Kambili didn’t want to wash the hand that Father Amadi had held briefly in the garden.
If you don’t understand the above line, you haven’t read Purple Hibiscus and all I have to say to that is:
I’m off to watch ‘Bob Hearts Abishola’. It’s a great sitcom and I think you should watch it too.
Thank you for reading and see you next week!