*Tells why she doesn’t want her photograph in media
BY CHIKA ABANOBI
It’s no longer news that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning and world-acclaimed author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of A Yellow Sun and Americanah, was recently delivered of a beautiful baby girl, some seven years after her marriage to a USA-based Nigerian medical doctor, Ivara Alistair Esega. Sorry if you did not get to read about it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or WhatsApp. And, please, don’t expect to see her baby’s photograph anytime soon on any social media platforms, in the newspapers and in the electronic media, anywhere in the world.
This is because Adichie, who recently let out the secret in an interview with the London Financial Times, has vowed in another interview session with British TV, Channel Four, not to allow the baby’s photograph to appear in any news medium, social, print or electronic.
“Now that I have a baby it is very important to me,” she told her interviewer on Channel Four who wanted to know why she decided to keep both her pregnancy and the birth of the baby from public view. “I want her to be normal and ordinary. I didn’t think it is normal to have her pictures in newspapers because it is not. Just because her mother happens to write and finds her pictures splashed all over the newspapers doesn’t mean the baby should also share in that. So, it is important to me that I start very early to protect her.”
Right from her wedding that took place in far-away Maryland, USA, years ago, to her life with her husband, to her pregnancy and now the birth of her baby, Adichie had always insisted on keeping her family matter a private affair, to which she does not want the news media, local or foreign, to pry.
Until she was spotted around Lagos with what local media gossip columns described as a ‘baby bump,’ sometime in July, during the annual Farafina Trust literary evening, organised by Farafina, her Nigeria’s publisher, for budding Nigerian writers, nobody knew she was pregnant. Nobody knew she was expecting a baby.
And, when the baby eventually arrived, she did everything she could to keep the news away from the public, and she almost succeeded until she inadvertently let the cat out of the bag in the interview with London Times.
But the secret was leaked when she was offered a drink during the interview and she complained about “the syrupy nature.”
“This is just very sugary, very sweet,” Adichie told her interviewer. “I would probably have a glass of wine, but I’m breastfeeding, I’m happy to announce.”
Completely taken aback, her interviewer in the “Lunch with the FT (Financial Times)” wanted to know more about the baby, her name and all that. But Adichie could not say more than she had already let him in on the matter.
“Can I ask the baby’s name?” he politely and coyly requested.
“No, I won’t say,” she calmly, but firmly declined with a beguiling smile.
Pressed for further comment on her period of pregnancy, she enthused: “I have some friends who probably didn’t know I was pregnant, or that I had a baby. I just feel like we live in an age when women are supposed to perform pregnancy. We don’t expect fathers to perform fatherhood. I went into hiding. I wanted it to be as personal as possible.”
Explaining more on her reason for the secrecy, she told her Channel Four interviewer: “I wanted my pregnancy to be something I shared with the people I love and people who know me. There’s a sense in which it is a kind of trendingness, in which people see pregnancy as a trendy thing. I just feel very uncomfortable with that and I deeply dislike expressions like “baby bump.” I don’t know. I just find it a little bit irritating and I didn’t want to be part of that. You know, you are supposed to take pictures and show off your “baby bump.” To me, it was a deeply introspective time, thinking about how my life is going to change forever. I just saw the enormousness of bringing human being into the world. It was a sacred time for me and I just wanted to share it with the people I love.”
Adichie who once described marriage as a ‘dangerous’ institution for women’ is happily married to Dr. Esega, a gynaecologist, a native of Itigidi, in Cross River State. She once protested in an interview with this reporter that she did not like being addressed as Mrs. but as Ms or simply Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Adichie was home in Aba, Anambra State, sometime ago to celebrate the golden jubilee of the marriage of her parents- James Nwoye Adichie, Nigeria’s first Professor of Statistics, and later, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), and her mother, Mrs. Grace Adichie, first female registrar, UNN.
Before the arrival of Adichie’s beautiful baby girl, her parents, who both now reside with her in United States, following the ugly kidnap incident of her aging father, were blessed with six children (three boys and three girls), three sons-in-law, two daughters-in-law, and seven grandchildren.
With an addition of one more grandchild through Chimamanda, they now have eight grandchildren.