Chimamanda's Americanah hit French book stands this month

Our girl Chimamanda doing what she does best in Paris.

To promote the publication of “Americanah” in France, Chimamanda took part in a discussion about the novel, as well as the subject of identity in literature, at the Maison de la Poésie in Paris on Wednesday 21st, January 2015. 

Listed as one of the New York Time’s Ten Best Books of the Year and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the novel has already sold 500,000 copies in the US and has been translated into 25 different languages.

Fans stood patiently in line for a signed copy of Americanah at the Maison de la Poésie in Paris.

“I think she deals with really real issues,” one woman said. “I think I relate to the characters she writes about. Them being female, black. I think her protagonists are really realistic and really likeable.”

After the event, Adichie headed to the offices of her French publisher, Gallimard. There she said that like Ifemelu, the main character in “Americanah,” she first discovered the issue of race after moving to the United States as a young woman.

“I wasn’t black until I went to America. I became black in America,” Adichie told FRANCE 24. “In Nigeria I didn’t think of myself as black. I think in Nigeria my identity markers were religion and ethnicity.


“It’s discovering that being black means something, and those things that blackness means are not often very positive things.”

Watch Chimamanda's interview on FRANCE 24.

Source: France24.com