The award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, and other books, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, has responded to targeted attacks on her person.
In a personal essay shared on her website last Tuesday, the author wrote about her initial growing interest in two budding writers, who allegedly spearheaded the online onslaught she has received in the past four years as a result of her interview with Channel 4 News in March 2017, where she stated that “transwomen are trans women.”
Adichie said she felt betrayed that to ‘these people’, she had been a “support-giver, counsellor, and comforter,” but they joined an online mob to attack her with so much vitriol and threats.
Chimamanda wrote: “It is a simple story-you got close to a famous person, you publicly insulted the famous person to aggrandise yourself, the famous person cut you off, you sent emails and texts that were ignored, and you then decided to go on social media to peddle falsehoods.
“To be famous is to be assumed to have power, which is true, but in the analysis of fame, people often ignore the vulnerability that comes with fame, and they are unable to see how others who have nothing to lose can lie and connive in order to take advantage of that fame, while not giving a single thought to the feelings and humanity of the famous person.”
What seems to hurt Chimamanda, according to report, is that, after the interview, instead of raising concerns on where they had divergent views with her seeing as they know her personally and have access to her offline, and “these individuals took to social media to tag the writer a murderer. They also went ahead to call for people in the literary circle to ‘de-platform’ her.”
Although Chimamanda did not name them in her website post, the writers in question have been allegedly identified by social media users as alumni of Chimamanda’s literary workshop.
“After the workshop, I decided to select the best stories, edit them, pay the writers a fee, and publish them in an e-magazine. The first story I chose was this person’s. I wrote a glowing introduction, which the story truly deserved,” Chimamanda allegedly wrote in her post of the alumni who identifies as non-binary, and prefers to use the pronouns they/them.
“I knew this person had called me a murderer, I knew they were actively campaigning to ‘cancel’ me, and tweeting about how I should no longer be invited to speak at events. But this I felt I could not ignore,” Adichie wrote in her response.
It is reported that over time, one of the writers in question has created a community in the social media space of people who share a common dislike for Chimamanda, and reportedly celebrated her parent’s death as punishment for her alleged transphobia and seemed to rejoice in her pain.
The author website post reads: “This person has created a space in which social media followers have (which I find unforgiveable) trivialised my parents’ death, claiming that the sudden and the devastating loss of my parents within months of each other during this pandemic, was ‘punishment’ for my ‘transphobia’.”
Chimamanda indicated that she had refused to react before now as she was against tarnishing an uprising writer’s career and did not want to grant attention to who didn’t deserve it. But at this point, she had no other choice but to push back on what she saw as a dangerous narrative.
“In this age of social media, where a story travels the world in minutes, silence sometimes means that other people can hijack your story, and soon, their false version becomes the defining story about you,” it was reported
In the final part of her piece, Chimamanda touched on the silencing of the views of people on social media because they dare to have different opinions.
She noted that many withdraw from expressing their thoughts on social media for fear of being embarrassed.
The award-winning writer also made mention of how many claim to be of good spirit on Twitter but are responsible for making many regretfully retreat their words.
“And so 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, to learn, and to grow. 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,” she noted in her post.
