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Only years later, looking back, did I realize what a huge mental shift the discovery of Things Fall Apart was for me.

And they had foufou for breakfast: I considered foufou too heavy, inappropriate for breakfast. These characters did not have cars or telephones, things I took for granted. Yet despite its familiarity, the book was also exotic. I grew up bilingual, speaking Ibo and English at the same time, often speaking Ibo and English in the same sentence-and here was a book whose aesthetics so accurately captured my bilingual world. “When a man says yes, his chi says yes, also,” the book read-and I knew the Ibo version. Here was a book that had expressions I found familiar. Here was a book with characters who had familiar names like Okonkwo and Ezinma. For me, it was a glorious shock of discovery. I had assumed that books, by their very nature, had to have English people in them. I didn’t know that people like me could exist in books. This despite the fact that we lived in a town in eastern Nigeria where it rained instead of snowed and where we ate mangoes and cashews instead of apples. All my characters were white and blue-eyed and played in the snow and ate apples and had dogs called Socks.

I was also an early writer and wrote stories in exercise books and illustrated them with crayons. At first, I read mostly British children’s books, in which all the characters were white and ate apples and played in the snow and had dogs called Socks. My mother says I started to read at age two four is probably closer to the truth. My father was a professor, my mother was an administrator. I grew up in Nsukka, on the campus of the University of Nigeria. It appears in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, along with other excerpts from the event. 2023 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremonyīy: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie April 3, 2013Ĭhimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered the following speech at PEN’s 2008 Tribute to Chinua Achebe.