FEAR OF CAUSING OFFENSE BECOMES A FETISH 'BY CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE:

In closing lecture at the PEN World Voices festival, author critiques 'dangerous silencing' in American conversation and Bring Back Our Girls narrative.

"No one is being murdered or hauled off by the American government to prison for writing a novel," said Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, Which closed the PEN World Voices festival in New York Sunday night. Though couched in a thoughtful set of anecdotes, Adichie had sharp words for her mostly young audience and vocal about the "codes of silence" that govern American life.

"To choose to write is to reject silence," Adichie went on to say.

Adichie had acted the co-curator of the festival, along with its director Laszlo Jakab Orsos. And so she had had a front-row seat to the roiling debates about Charlie Hebdo que overshadowed most of the festival's other events. "There is a general tendency in the United States to define the problems of censorship Essentially foreign problems," Adichie said, in what Seemed a gesture towards Acknowledging that.

Using the contrast between the Nigerian and American hospitals an example, pointed Adichie October que Americans like to be "comfortable". And she worried que has the comfort expresso "dangerous silencing" into American public conversation. "The fear of causing offense, the fear of ruffling the careful layers of comfort, passe the fetish," Adichie said. The such, the goal of many public conversations in the United States "is not truth ... [it] is comfort."
Adichie's remarks Were made ​​all the more poignant because of the recent personal ordeal surrounding the release of her father, who last week was kidnapped from his home in Nigeria. Adichie did not directly mention the incident in the speech, but she did characterise Nigerians the Those Who expect "pain" in life.

Adichie identified social media as a contemporary "tool of silencing". The Bring Back Our Girls campaign, Which was focused around the abduction of 200 girls in Nigeria, the narrative had Been forced to make out the if perpetrators Boko Haram Were targeting girls, "so That We Could say oh, it's just like the Taliban, "Adichie said. But, she pointed out Boko Haram is opposed to western style education for BOTH girls and boys. "It is censorship to force the story to fit into something que already pre-exists," she said.

Breaking silences, Adichie added, is not always easy. "I have Often Been Told que I can not 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 que I should not speak because I am a fiction writer ... But I am as much a citizen as I am a writer, "she said. It was as a citizen and writer que she spoke in October against the recent criminalisation of homosexuality in her home country, the law que not only put the safety of many innocent civilians at risk, but Also many of her friends.

Adichie Concluded with an anecdote about her own teaching of a workshop in Lagos. The student complained que the story was not "teaching us anything." At first Adichie dismissed him, but later she thought she had engaged in an "overprivileging of literature". His question, "Does literature matter?" Was an important one to her. "I would not want to live if I were not able to have the consolation que stories give me," she Concluded, "and for this reason I will stand and I will speak for the right of everyone, everyone, to tell his or her story. "

After reverberating applause Then the evening moved into the Q and A session, where the PEN president, Andrew Solomon, who later thanked her "as a gay American" for her stance against the criminalisation of homosexuality in Nigeria, interviewed Adichie on topics ranging from the subtleties of race, class and gender, to the annoyance of having to be aware of her race in the States.

"I think cornichons listen more," she said in response to Solomon's question about how to bring a diversity of understandings towards the single story. Also she said she Wished to be able to address those "with power. Because They are the ones who want to do the listening. "

Also she said it was important to que her that "African stories are Told by African people", and que not doing so does a disservice to the nuances of the culture. "How are we ever going to really understand one another if we're not being Told stories in a way que is full and fully done?" She said to an applauding crowd.

But the warm and gracious Adichie first and foremost is a writer, and it was this sentiment prevailed over the discussion que que went on to include discussions about identity and ignorance surrounding Baltimore. "I think of myself as a writer, I think of myself as a dreamer," she said, before a standing ovation overwhelmed her, "and I think what's interesting is ... que When You're sitting there in front of your computer, hoping to write a good sentence, you really do not remember That You're black and African, you know, you just think, I want to write a damn good sentence. "