News

In The Guardian Comment blog, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a post about her love for Nigeria, despite of, or perhaps because of, all the problems she sees:

The road is full of huge potholes and I get a little jumpy, and wonder what it takes to fill them up. This is why religion is a thriving business: people travel from a town to another without a mishap and it becomes a miracle, a testimony in church, another reason to give money to the pastor.

We stop to buy a newspaper. The major headline is of another man who has been arrested by the anti-corruption body, EFCC. We wonder what he has done to offend the president; everybody knows the EFCC investigates people with who, as we say, the president has a quarrel.

On the back page, there is the fiery face of the leader of the Nigerian Labour Congress, a man I much admire, who quaintly calls himself “comrade”. The federal government has decided to sack 33,000 workers, a “right-sizing” they say, rather than a downsizing. There is a resigned bitterness in my parents’ tone when we talk about this. They are retired university staff, both owed years of pensions. Now they are paid 60% of their pensions each month. Last month, they went for a verification exercise, where poor and unpaid pensioners were made to travel to Enugu and stand in the sun for hours to be counted, to prove that they were not “ghost” pensioners. Two men died after that. One was a lecturer, the other was an electrician at the university who had often done the electrical work in our house. Yet as our car swerves to avoid the potholes on the road, I think how I love being home. I love this flawed place. I love that this is where my belonging is least contested; this is where I care the deepest.

Adichie’s new novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, comes out in the U.S. in the fall.

When I was in London last month, I was interviewed by Paul Blezard of OneWord Radio about my Caine Prize shortlisted story, “The Fanatic.” Now it looks like the conversation is available online.

I also did an interview with Polly de Blank for BBC World Service. You can listen to all the shortlisted writers on the same page, which is pretty cool.

Peter Orner’s debut novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, is reviewed over at the Star Tribune.

Peter Orner’s “The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo” is a departure in two ways. First, anyone who read his exquisite debut collection, “Esther Stories,” will be flat-out flabbergasted that he has leapfrogged from urban Jewish Chicago to the veld of Namibia in 1991.

Moreover, this is not a story about Americanness — or the complicated ways in which a particular kind of white American posture of helping clashes with African ways. Rather, it’s a kind of “Winesburg, Ohio” that just happens to be set in the shadow of the Erongo Mountains.

Intrigued? More here.

Germaine Greer takes to the ‘Comment‘ blog of The Guardian, trying to defend her earlier statements about Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. This is so three minutes ago.

Speaking of Ilan Stavans, here is an essay he wrote for this weekend’s San Francisco Chronicle, in which he wonders why, in a 1,000-page, two-volume work on civil rights in America, there is no mention of Latinos–not even César Chávez.

The set first appeared in 2003, and reviews in the New York Times, the New Yorker, even The Chronicle failed to point out the omission. The anthology, which covers events from 1941 to 1973, showcases “eyewitness accounts of over 150 writers [offering] a panoramic perspective on the struggle to bring an end to segregation in the United States.” The authors range from John Steinbeck to Murray Kempton and James Baldwin, from Joan Didion and Howard Zinn to Alice Walker. It includes Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” accounts on busing, attacks on President Dwight Eisenhower and the effectiveness of sit-in movements. The advisory board responsible for the books is composed of a senior editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. papers, a distinguished faculty member at Emory University, the chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and a professor at Indiana University. In other words, a conscientious bunch.

Conscientious, but amnesic.

Read it all here. And then weep.