Chimamanda Adichie and Zadie Smith are perhaps the two most important forces diversifying popular literature in the West at the moment. Adichie is managing to do this, quite remarkably, with work that defiantly and purposefully looks toward (and is often centered on) the West African country of Nigeria. Smith and Adichie have gotten the publishing establishment to listen to characters and voices that reject stereotypes in a most definitive way. In many cases, these voices achieve this masterfully because they are delightfully oblivious of the fact that these stereotypes even exist.
The authors, of course, are well aware of these tired tropes, but they play with space, time, context, and location to unseat our preconceived notions with their delicately created characters. Smith and Adichie excel at this, I suspect, because they are members of the global citizenry of the Twenty-First Century, as are some of their characters, all of whom comprise a narrative that is largely untold. Continue reading
Tara Lake 