The Sad & Amusing State Of Race In America

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The African author of "Half of a Yellow Sun" discusses a new short story and permutations of race in America...

"She held him from the back, wrapped her arms around him, felt the warmth through his sweatshirt, but even before he eased away, murmuring that the rice would get too soft, she knew they were failing at this; she turned to look out of the window, at the grey grandeur of Yale campus, and saw the first snow flurry swirling through the late evening air."

This line is from a short story I started in 2003. It was first set at Johns Hopkins, then at Princeton, and now at Yale where I am doing graduate work in the African Studies program. In the story, a Nigerian student cheats on her African-American boyfriend and then tries to save the relationship. She invites him over to eat coconut rice, a reconciliation meal, which is also symbolic because the relationship started a year before when he came over to study and she was cooking coconut rice. Her apartment smelled of spices, there were bottles of cheap red wine, and Femi Kuti was playing on her stereo. The beng-beng-beng song that is unabashedly sexual, ridiculous, and effective at guiding people across the bridge from friends to lovers. I've gone back to this story often but I'm always stuck at the scene where they're cooking rice for the reconciliation meal. A few days ago, because of an entirely unrelated incident at the Yale library, I felt inspired to write this sentence, the first new one added to the story in months. It's given me hope that the story might be finished sometime this year.

I often go to the library to get books whose dense, incomprehensible academics I struggle to read. One of the security guards at the exit, an older black man, often smiles and says hello as he checks my books before I leave. I read in the student paper that his friend, another black man, came by one evening and the two stood outside the library. He gave his friend his car keys (apparently, the friend wanted to borrow his car). The friend gave him some money (apparently, the friend had borrowed the money earlier). A white library employee was watching them. This employee assumed that the two black men were dealing drugs and called a supervisor. The supervisor called the police. The police came and led the black man away to be questioned. Later, the university librarian insisted that the incident was a simple mistake and had nothing at all to do with race.

I found this incident both sad and amusing... not being an American but being black, I look with intense curiosity at the permutations of race in America. It made me think about how something of this sort can affect something else that isn't obviously related, and inspired me to go back to the story and make the library incident play a role in the make-up or break-up of the couple (although, I don’t yet know how it will). Maybe the couple will talk about the incident, observe it, read about it, or join the Black Student Union protest. Maybe the story will change.

“Big things” like race inspire me but, I am interested in writing about them in the smallest, most oblique way. I'm happily old-fashioned in my literary tastes, very keen on social realism, on fiction that is strong on character and place and has something to say about real things and real people without being preachy. Some of my favorite stories about race, by authors Brock Clarke and James Alan McPherson, are serious, funny, and sure but not self-righteous. I hope this will end up being similar.

Footnote: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work has appeared in various literary publications, including Zoetrope and the Iowa Review. Her first novel, "Purple Hibiscus", was short-listed for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and long-listed for the Booker Prize. "Half of a Yellow Sun" won the 2007 Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.

[This article was obtained from Esquire.com, as told to Anya Yurchyshyn.]

I can certainly relate to Chimamanda's feelings about "the library incident". Too many times in the past, I have been "profiled"... stopped and frisked by the police when I was in a part of town or the suburbs where I "didn't look like I belonged" or when a crime had just been committed and I fit the suspect's description (Black, six feet, and thin). Yeah, I'm the only one that fits that description! Further, I can't tell you how incensed I would become when I couldn't get my white colleagues to understand how that made me and other Blacks feel. They just don't have a frame of reference for it but, I know that Latinos experience it as well and I'm betting that Arab-Americans can relate to the feeling now too.

Kudos to this author for calling attention to "the library incident" and finding a way to include it her short story. I look forward to its completion and reading it!