# 4 Grabbed

Must be living right: as I remarked to a long-time correspondent recently, I was well and truly grabbed last week by two, good-looking, black women. What I meant was that their work impressed me, and that I liked their respective dust jacket and New Yorker magazine portraits, but my correspondent can conclude what he likes.

The first one’s name is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She’s a Nigerian writer – great fan of Chinua Achebe – whose stirring novel, Purple Hibiscus, I’ve just completed reading. It was her first. I plan to read all the rest and any others as they are published.

As is, I suppose, proper for a first novel, the autobiographical thread all through this one is quite prominent. Purple Hibiscus tells the story, briefly, of an adolescent girl’s emotional, political, religious and intellectual awakening during a period of unrest in Nigeria. To make more telling the contrast between what she was at the start of the narrative and what she’s become by the end, Adichie casts the girl as
the younger of two children in a family tyrannised by a father who is, to put it mildly, a most sternly authoritarian Christian.

One of the great merits of Adichie’s first novel, for me, is that the characters, as do real people, have three dimensions. That father is no stereotype: his awful, deadening, violent Christianity is, we soon see, one aspect of his life-long striving to repress his inherited culture and become like a white man. A Catholic following the protestant ethic, he’s worked hard and succeeded, materially at least. At the same time, one of the pies he has his fingers in is a newspaper critical of the present regime so, while we can deplore his religious practices, his defence of his editor is altogether laudable. Such realities are vital lessons for adolescents to witness and ponder. He dispenses largesse to needy family and friends, yet he has cut off his own father who will not abandon the traditional ways and gods.

There are other fascinating influences in the girl’s life: her aunt, a teacher at the local university; the young priest on whom she conceives a profound crush; her less articulate brother with his own demons and his way of talking to her with his eyes. In the writing, among the recurring, telling detail of foods, plant life and weather, Adichie makes few concessions to those ignorant of her patois. The prose is sprinkled with native words, usually terms of address or affection, not always translated. If what she feels about this is that the contemporary anglophone reader needs help to make an effort of the imagination, I’m on her side.

Final praiseworthy detail: this novel remains, in the face of sadistic violence from family and army, a feminine novel. What I mean to say is that the ‘take’ on people and events, while unflinching, is also sympathetic, subtle and inclusive. There is a quiet wisdom beneath the goings on that I found very impressive.

My other grabber could, in many respects, be scarcely less like Adichie. A US artist, also young and black and good-looking, she seems, by contrast, assertively bold. All I know of her is what I encountered in a recent New Yorker magazine biography by Hilton Als, “The Shadow Act, a Kara Walker retrospective”. But I immediately liked what I read and saw.

Maybe it’s because she works in silhouettes, black paper cut-outs on a white surface, that the impact of her work is so abrupt and stark. Like the Nigerian writer, a strong theme of Kara Walker’s is the history and place of black people in a white-dominated world. In Walker’s case, however, there will be no fooling with convention. Her vision is a take-it-or-leave-it embracing of essences: eating, shitting, fucking, killing, birthing, toiling. Voilà. And who can deny it?

Not I.