The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Nigeria’s Adichie says bestseller helped recall painful past Posted: 13 Oct 2013 12:44 AM PDT A month after the film based on "Half of a Yellow Sun" premiered, Adichie, 36, reflected on the impact of the book about Nigeria's 1967-1970 Biafra War, which left more than one million people dead after the writer's home southeastern region tried to secede. "I have heard from many people who have read 'Half of a Yellow Sun' and said that the novel for them was an entry point into their history," Adichie told AFP at the Lagos office of her Nigerian publisher. She said her generation of Igbos, the majority ethnic group in the southeast, "grew up knowing that this terrible thing had happened and deeply affected our families," but those who lived through the war did not talk about it. "My mother would say 'I used to have this before the war' or my father talked a lot about his father, my grandfather, whom I never met because he died in 1969 in a refugee camp." "The war was always there. I knew agha. Agha is war (in Igbo). There was always 'agha.' But I didn't know the details," she said. "I think this is what happens for a generation that experiences trauma, that usually, it's the next generation who can start to talk about it," she continued. "I don't think I could have written this book if I had lived in Biafra." The novel has sold 800,000 copies in English and has been translated into 35 other languages. As for the film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, Adichie said she needed to stay away from the production "to preserve (her) sanity." "It's a book I am very proud of but it's also a book that has a lot of emotional meaning for me... Every page of that book matters to me," she said. "The thought that I would have to somehow oversee the chopping up and taking out large chunks of something that I had spent six years of my life slaving on, I thought it would be very difficult." 'Different ways of being black in the US' Adichie's latest novel, "Americanah," published in May, partly explores the nuances of African American culture from the perspective of an African woman who is new to America. It focuses on the character Ifemelu, a Nigerian university student in the US. The title is a word Nigerians use to chide people who go "to the US and come back Americanised," Adichie said. "They affect an American accent or they affect American manners... So it's a very playful way of saying "oh look how you've changed just because you went to America". Her hair covered in an embroidered gold ankara and wearing a sleeveless blue suit, Adichie, who studied in the US and still lives there part-time, said the novel explores the dynamic of a black person in America who does not "have the history of black Americans". "The expectation on you (is) that you are supposed to get it... And you don't, you really don't!" she said. "I was expected to understand that a joke about watermelon was racist, and a joke about fried chicken was racist," she said, referring to stereotypes about African American cuisine which have been used in US popular culture to denigrate black people. "And I was just confused, I thought: 'I don't see what's wrong with watermelon and chicken!'" "When I started to read and ask questions, I started to understand these things intellectually, but there's still things that you can't reach emotionally because it's not your history," she said. This, she added, is her "way to say that there are different ways of being black in the US". 'This is mine! I am home!' Her parents were lecturers at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in the southeast, the country's first indigenous university founded shortly after independence from Britain in 1960. Adichie went to the US for university and described her first visit home after four years abroad, surveying the "jumble" of rusty roofs visible from the window as the plane descended, a jarring contrast from the orderly planning of many American cities. "There was just an unplannedness about it all that made me so happy," she said. "I just thought: this is mine! I am home!" Soon the romance of arriving in Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa's largest city, started to fade and the young post-graduate grew increasingly irritated by the city's less appealing traits, including terrible sanitation and far, far too many cars on the road. "The traffic was crazy. I was so scared... And then I had my family members laughing at me." – AFP, October 13, 2013. |
| Kashmir rappers battle to be heard Posted: 13 Oct 2013 12:24 AM PDT The 23-year-old lives in Srinagar, the main city of Indian-administered Kashmir which has suffered 20 years of separatist insurgency and decades as a focus of fighting between India and Pakistan. Like many local Muslims, he chafes under restrictions imposed by an estimated 700,000 Indian security forces, with heavy-handed policing, human rights abuses and disappearances feeding his resentment. After his first song I Protest" went viral in 2010, a year of huge and deadly demonstrations against Indian rule that saw 120 people shot dead, MC Kash saw the studio where he recorded it raided by police. He says he learned the lesson. "I have been shifting from this underground studio to that underground studio... After we finish recording we delete everything from the studio owner's computer. The studio owners know that if you record this guy the state's wrath will be upon you," he told AFP. Performing isn't easy either. There are no public venues where performances can be independently staged and the ones owned by the government are tightly regulated by the authorities. "No matter what, they could raid my studio, they could raid my house, as long as I'm doing right to my people and my country, as long as my conscience is satisfied, I'm glad and I'll keep doing it," Kash, whose real name is Roushan Illahi, told AFP. His popularity has inspired others to join in, like Shayan Nabi, a 23-year-old student whose gentle and calm personality gives way to anger when he gets in front of a mic. He grew up during the darkest days of the armed rebellion against Indian rule that began in 1989 but has petered out in recent years, with violence now at a two-decade low. He says he was a bystander until 2010 when he witnessed hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris take to the streets in the anti-India protests of that summer, which saw security forces firing live ammunition at crowds. "As news of youth dying came in everyday I started reading history and writing songs to protest against what had been happening to my people," Shayan said. "If two people outside Kashmir get to know about my music, what's happening here, they can connect to this place, they can at least raise their voices like I do," says Shayan. Many Kashmiri rappers revealed to AFP that plain-clothes police officers visited their homes on several occasions making "intimidating" enquiries about them and asking them to report to police stations. Though modern-day rap has its roots in the United States, Kashmir has a long tradition of protest through poetry and music. Before 1947 when the former princely state was divided between India and Pakistan as the two countries won freedom from Britain, Kashmiri Muslim artists used rhyming spoken word called Laddi Shah to ridicule their Hindu rulers. Inspector general of police, Abdul Gani Mir, denies that his officers are trying to muzzle dissent by keeping tabs on local rappers. "A lot of things do happen in the society and it is our mandate to verify things. If policemen visited their homes and tried to verify, there's no harm in that and it doesn't amount to harassment," Mir told AFP. Khurram Pervez, a prominent human rights defender, says young Kashmiris are trying to fill a "resistance space" after Indian forces succeeded in largely crushing the armed rebellion in recent years. That young people are channelling their frustration into music instead of violence is a positive development, but Pervez is critical of "repressive tactics" being used to silence artistic dissent. "The government is afraid of any such thing that brings people together here. Anything that binds people, whether it is music, art or writing," says Pervez. "The government is scared that they will get the international community to attend to the violations here." Last month in Srinagar, music was back in the headlines for the wrong reasons after the German embassy in New Delhi organised a performance by the 70-member Bavarian Orchestra conducted by Indian-born maestro Zubin Mehta. The "peace concert," intended to showcase the picturesque Kashmir's tourism potential, was attended by about 2,000 invitees but became embroiled in controversy after local separatists accused Germany of endorsing Indian sovereignty in Kashmir. It gave MC Kash a new subject and inspired his angry protest number Orchestra of War (Beethoven Remix). "you selling peace? you stupid? in a land that's still disputed your vision's all polluted if you can't see the persecuted.... you selling peace we ain't buying it this is Orchestra of War." - AFP, October 20, 2013. |
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