Cell One

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses violence.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born in 1977) is an influential Nigerian author whose works have received global critical acclaim. Born to an Igbo (Nigerian ethnic group) family with five siblings, her father was a statistics professor and Adichie was raised on the University of Nigeria’s Nsukka campus. Adichie pursued her tertiary education in the United States and continues to split her time between Nigeria and America. This multicultural experience has inspired some of her most notable works, including Americanah (2013).

Adichie has noted that some of the central ideas behind her work, namely feminism and advocacy for gay rights, are less tolerated in Nigeria than they are in the United States; a 2018 New Yorker article asserts that “[w]hen she talks about feminism or gay rights in Nigeria, she knows what she’s getting into, and she does it on purpose” (MacFarquhar, Larissa. “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Comes to Terms with Global Fame.” New Yorker, 2018). Despite this political tension, Nigerian experience—particularly Igbo experience—has been the focal point of her most prominent works, especially during the earliest periods of her career. The resulting effect is a body of work that celebrates and builds upon the Igbo literary tradition while pushing the political bounds of acceptable representation. She has been hailed by several critics as a successor to Nigeria’s most revered author, Chinua Achebe, who was himself Igbo. Adichie cites Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958) as one of her biggest inspirations, and her closeness to Achebe can be traced back to her childhood in Nsukka, where she lived in Achebe’s former home on campus (MacFarquhar).

Adichie’s Igbo identity has played an essential role in her writing and is yet another point of connection to Achebe’s oeuvre. The 2018 New Yorker profile outlines her decision to focus on Igbo characters in her writing as a response to their negative reputation with other Nigerian ethnic groups: “She finds it hard to say what it is about Igbo-ness that means so much to her […]. It’s not that Igbo culture is better—it’s just that it’s hers” (Mc). This pride of heritage motivated her to write her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), which tells the story of the Biafran War in 1967-1970. The Biafran independence movement occurred in response to increasing hostility and violence against Igbo people in Nigeria’s early postcolonial period and resulted in the brief formation of a Biafran Republic before it was reabsorbed by Nigeria at the end of the war. Adichie’s decision to address this topic is part of a larger movement in Nigerian art that some have called a “Biafran renaissance” (Murray, Senan. “The New Face of Nigerian Literature?” BBC, 2007).

“Cell One,” published in The Thing Around Your Neck during the latter years of this early period in Adichie’s career, builds upon the themes of postcolonial political violence explored in her first two novels on a microcosmic scale. Nnamabia’s journey through the prison system is discrete and brief, and yet his struggles evoke those of history more broadly. Igbo identity is also central to the story, though not explicitly clarified for non-Nigerian readers. For instance, Igbo language and food both appear throughout the text as part of its cultural landscape. In “Cell One,” therefore, Adichie portrays the spirit of the Biafran renaissance alive and well, expressed in the story of a post-Biafran Igbo family reckoning with systems of violence and corruption that haunt their homeland.