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ABSTRACT
This article considers the uses of multilingualism in Adichie's body of creative work. As against Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's stipulation that authentic African literature must be written in indigenous languages, Adichie adopts a primarily English narrative medium, while at the same time interpolating a wealth of Igbo content. In this respect her practice coincides with that of a number of other Nigerian writers ranging from Achebe to Nwaubani, but reaches beyond theirs in its variety and artistry of effect. Although this "mixing" might invite charges of market-targeted exoticism, it actually succeeds in transmitting to readers a familiarizing, rather than estranging, sense of character and conduct. Adichie's self-consciousness regarding language springs from, and rewardingly honors, the complexities of the Nigerian linguistic matrix that has fostered her talent.
Near the close of Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's second novel, the professorial Odenigbo alludes glumly to "the success of the white man's mission in Africa." He goes on to explain what he means by "success": "I think in English" (402). Although Nigeria, the country to which Odenigbo reluctantly belongs, has gained independence, immersion in the white intruder's language signifies, for him, that his mind remains colonized. Were it not, he would presumably think in Igbo, the language of his home region, which, under the name Biafra, has been struggling to gain its own autonomy. Plainly, he believes that the contest between the "white man's" language and his own ancestral tongue amounts to a zero-sum game. Such an attitude may seem rigid, but it is not uncommon.
Although Adichie's fictional narrative is set in the 1960s, one might almost suppose that her character had been reading Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's 1986 treatise Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. According to the Kenyan writer, a people's culture is coterminous with its language: "Culture is almost indistinguishable from the language that makes possible its genesis, growth, banking, articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next" (15). When, under colonial rule, a community is deprived of its language and forced to adopt that of the colonizer, the outcome is traumatic cultural alienation. For Ngũgĩ, such an act of willed substitution is integral to the imperial project: "The domination of a people's...