Chimamanda Adichie on Tuesday 14th June took to her website to pen a bombshell essay addressing some slandering she’s received from younger writers in the literary community.The essay took the internet by storm causing her website to crash due to the volume of traffic it received after it was published.

In it, she described the social media generation as one people “who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion”. She said that they were “so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow”

In the essay, titled “It’s Obscene” the celebrated writer flayed two young novelists who she supported but they turned around to attack her.

She went on to highlight two unnamed writers who attended her book function in Lagos and later went on to slander her on social media over her comments on transgender people and feminism. In a 2017 interview, Adichie had said, “trans women are not women”.

She had however recanted at the time, saying; “Of course they are women but in talking about feminism and gender and all of that, it’s important for us to acknowledge the differences in experience of gender.”

Adichie in her essay while quoting from emails said she asked one of the writers to remove her from their work. She also detailed more attacks she received from the novelist, sharing how “this person began a narrative that I had sabotaged their career”.

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Why Akwaeke Emezi claimed the sub

In 2020, non-binary novelist Akwaeke Emezi, author of the book “Freshwater” tweeted that two days after their book was published, “[Adichie] asked that her name be removed from my bio everywhere because of my tweets online. Most were about her transphobia.”

Adichie in the essay adds that she took the novelist into her wing because she believed that “we need a diverse range of African stories”.

“Asking that my name be removed from your biography is not sabotaging your career. It is about protecting my boundaries of what I consider acceptable in civil human behaviour,”

Emezi responding to Adichie took to their Instagram story in a video to say;

“I am not going to read what home girl wrote and do like a blow-by-blow rebuttal of it, because I am not even going to read it. Because it doesn’t affect my life,” they said. “I am just going to poke my head in. Remind us that we matter, that we are important, that our worlds are fcuking bigger than anything that these people can ever imagine. And that we don’t ever have to be legible to them. We don’t have to be validated by them.”

Adichie also spoke about another writer who she mentored and “welcomed” into her circle. However, the said writer went to “publicly” insult her on social media.

Adichie adds that “certain young people today are like these two from my writing workshop”.

She described the attitude as “obscene” saying their “passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship”.

“We have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions. That they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow,” Adichie wrote. “I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and reread their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.”

 

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