Quote Me If You Dare: Chimamanda Isn’t All That

I read my first Chimamanda book a couple months ago. After struggling with Americana for two weeks, I finally went through the 470 pages and wrote about it. Only in this writing I concentrated on how much I procrastinated reading the novel. About nineteen for every twenty people that read my blog post praised Chimamanda and said she was brilliant. They also said I should read more of her and I will come to love her, in fact, one of my friends went ahead to get me a copy of ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ and declared that soon I would be a Chimamanda groupie.

No one ever asked why I struggled reading Americanah and when I took three weeks to read Half of A Yellow Sun, my group of book loving friends decided that I took that long because I was writing my exams. Unfortunately, that is not true. I took as long as I did reading Chimamandas books because I did not love them. Chimamanda is not the literary goddess that everyone claims she is.

Yes, writing is engaging work and the fact that she has managed to churn out the amount of literature that she has is a great thing. That however, in my opinion, is where the greatness ends. We need to stop baptizing people with greatness just because we are afraid to form an individual opinions.

I mentioned my initial reluctance to read Chimamanda, I think I need to explain it. When I finally laid my hands on a copy of ‘Americanah’, most of the people I know had read it and gone ahead to rave about it on their Facebook. Magunga had written a book review, he had a lot of good things to say about Chimamanda and a lot of people agreed with him. So I questioned, once I read ‘Americanah’, would I love Chimamanda? If I loved her would it be because my friends were Chimamanda groupies and had already declared that Chimamanda is to be loved? What if I read Americanah and didn’t love Chimamanda? Would my feelings be as an act of defiance towards the Chimamanda groupies or would it be because I really wasn’t feeling her vibe?

Now that I have read ‘Americanah’ and ‘Half Of A Yellow Sun’, I feel I can speak on my position on Chimamanda with a bit more clarity. I do not love her, I do not hate her either. I do not think she is a literary goddess, I think she is an average writer.

My problem with Chimamanda was digression, I felt like she went on and on about a scene long past the point had already been made. For instance, in the first chapter of Americanah when Ifem goes to the salon, God that went on forever! Then there were times when I needed Chimamanda to get real ugly with the details and that didn’t happen and I was majorly disappointed. When Olanna escaping Kano and saw a dead baby’s head in a calabash, that scene was not ugly enough for me at this point I needed for Chimamanda to digress more than usual but that did not happen.

Of course, even in my belief that Chimamanda is an average writer, I have to agree that she has done some good. Chimamanda’s Half of A Yellow Sun made me garner an interest in the Biafra war and for that, if nothing else, I am grateful. Meanwhile, I will get my hands on a copy of ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ and see if my thoughts on Chimamanda change, I will let you know how that goes.