At the just concluded PEN World Voices festival of International Literature, held at the The Great Hall at The Cooper Union in New York on Sunday, May 10, 2015, ace writer, Chimamanda Adichie delivered the closing lecture.
During the festival, she had acted alongside it’s director Laszlo Jakab Orsos, as co-curator and had also delivered the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture.
While speaking, the writer mentioned Nigerians as a people who expect ‘pain’ in life without specifically mention her father’s recent abduction and release. She told the audience that “to choose to write is to reject silence.”
She also spoke about the difficulty of breaking silences, the criminalisation of homosexuality in her home country, Nigeria, is one subject the writer failed to keep quiet about and to this end had written quite an article on the matter in 2014.
She said; “I have often been told that I cannot speak on certain issues because I am young, and female, or, to use the disparaging Nigerian speak, because I am a ‘small girl’ … I have also been told that I should not speak because I am a fiction writer … But I am as much a citizen as I am a writer.”
Adichie was interviewed by PEN president, Andrew Solomon, during the question and answer session. In the course of the interview, he thanked her “as a gay American” for speaking out against the anti-gay law in Nigeria. The interview also covered quite a range of topics which included race and gender.
Her presentation was greeted with repeated applause by the audience in the sold-out venue.
