new all-story
The new Zoetrope All-Story is up online and it has a story by the amazingly talented Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie. The issue has tons of good stuff, so just read it all or better yet, buy the magazine.
Laila Lalami
One Response to “new all-story”
May 19th, 2003 at 10:36 am
Thank you for pointing out this story. Amanda Adichie is amazing for someone 26 years old, and I think she really has the potential to be the next Chinua Achebe. (She can be more than that, actually; if her poetry is any guide, she won’t confine herself to writing about the Igbo, especially as she gains maturity and confidence.)
The story was very compelling. I’ve known a few people who were personally affected by the Biafran war, and they reminded me very much of Holocaust survivors – one of them, a member of the Ijaw minority, spent the war in a concentration camp and saw many members of his family get killed. To the Igbo, the Biafran conflict was more than a war – it was a catastrophe that occupies a place in their identity similar to the place that the Holocaust occupies for many Jews. I can understand why someone of Adichie’s age, who was born seven years after the end of the war, would still write about it so often, just as some 20-year-old Jews still write Holocaust poems. That’s probably why I was holding back tears by the end of the story – all the emotions seemed very, very familiar.