A Special Wednesday….

Bookish Stuff / Thursday, January 22nd, 2015

Most of my Wednesdays are always the same.  I wake up early and get ready for work.  I work all morning and through lunch.  I then usually spend my afternoon preparing for my classes on the following day.  However, yesterday was special.  Instead of spending my afternoon planning lessons.  I went with a friend to Paris to La Maison de la Poésie to attend a talk with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

This was my first visit to La Maison de la Poésie and I’m sure it won’t be my last.  It’s cozy and the main theatre is comfortable and the stage is visible to all attending, not to mention they invite interesting authors regularly.  Tickets were sold on the internet, only 6€ to attend.  We arrived just before 6pm and fortunately the doors were already opened.  I don’t think we could have stood outside in the -1°C cold.  As time moved on more and more people started to show.  I met a blogger friend IMG_1277Marina from Young Gifted and Black, for the first time, as well as some other interesting bloggers.  It was thanks to her that I learned about the event.  Even though it was our first time meeting, we sat and had some passionate discussions about books and movies, while waiting to enter the theatre.  It was as if we’d been friends for years.  I hope to see he soon at some future events.

Seven pm struck, the doors to the theatre opened and the crowd started to get excited moving quickly through to try to get the best seats.  It was a full house.  My friend Amy and I were seated in the middle, towards the back with a great central view of the stage.  We sat in the dimly lit theatre for about 15 minutes, anticipation building, the time for the audience to get seated.  Finally, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stepped on stage, the room went dark and the stage lit up, and alongside her were here interpreter, the interviewer, and the second guest, Belgian French author, Marie Darrieussecq.  Darrieussecq published Il Faut Beaucoup Aimer des Hommes in 2013 and won the  Prix Médicis the same year.  I’ll definitely be picking her book up at some point.  Its storyline was very intriguing.

The talk seemed to fly by.  We sat through about one hour and a half of questions and answers between both brilliant authors.  It was remarkable to see how the themes touched on were similar in both of their books.  Adichie made some very bold, honest statements that received overall applause, like when she said racism is not just a problem in the United States but also in France.  She also spoke about how readers seem to always expect female characters to be likable, pretty, and acceptable.  She said that shouldn’t be and that it’s rarely required of male characters.  She said what would be the point of women just trying to be likable all the time.  I couldn’t agree more.  She said she wrote Ifemelu to be a character that had plenty of faults but that she thought readers would find interesting.  And interesting, she was.  Adichie also talked about feminism and mentioned how she couldn’t understand why everybody couldn’t be a feminist, since feminism is basically fighting for equality among the sexes.  Another high point of the evening was the interpreters capacity and rapidity in translating Adichie, as well as all the others on stage.  She was surprisingly quick and accurate.

IMG_1269The only disappointing thing about the evening was that Adichie didn’t read from Americanah.  The interviewer read an excerpt in French.  I felt that was really missing, for the interviewer wasn’t capable of putting the correct tone on the words.  Even though on a much brighter note, I had the pleasure of speaking with Adichie and taking a picture with her after waiting for about a half an hour in a pseudo queue. I say pseudo because there was a long line from one side and then there was a half circle surrounding Adichie that never seemed to dissipate.  Frankly, If I were her I would have felt a little claustrophobic.

In the end, I was able to get all three of my books signed, Purple Hibiscus, The thing Around Your Neck, and Americanah.  Adichie was stunning and very poised.  Most of all what amazed me was how she reacted to the crowd.  She was genuinely friendly, listening, and happy to speak with us.  She complimented my hair(that definitely made me smile) and said how much she loved the hairstyles she saw there, being that she’s a lover of natural hair.  All in all it was a very special night that I won’t forget anytime soon…

28 Replies to “A Special Wednesday….”

  7. Hi Didi! I keep thinking about the review you wrote of Americanah last year and you saying”Chimimanda! Chimamanda!”—or something like that-lol! What an excellent author event with which to begin 2015. Nice re-cap.

  9. Hello my dear !
    We met during this special Wednesday, during the Chimamanda’s event at la Maison de la Poésie. I still got sparkles in my eyes lool ! This meeting will unforgettable. Marina introduced us and you’ve entered your blog’s address over my phone.
    As I told u, I’m also blogging (since six years now), but in french.
    You can go and check my little bubble just here : http://www.cequejaidanslatete.wordpress.com
    Your blog is amazing, and by now, I can tell you that I’ll follow it ^^
    Keep it up
    Xoxo
    Fatou

    1. Hey Fatou! It was nice meeting you at that spectacular event! I forgot to tell you how beautiful your earrings were. I am going to check your blog right now. Hope we will meet up at future events. Thanks for coming over and checking me out! thanks for the compliments too! 🙂

      1. The pleasure was miiiiine ☺☺
        Thanxxxx for the earrings, they are from my dear Senegal ^^
        We shall meet again very soon, so we will talk about our love for vlogging for example hahahaah ^^
        Kiss

  10. It is amazing how listening, reading good quality music or talks seem to make you head feel fuller (I mean physically). It must be the intense emotional activity of many neurons activated at once sharing some electric messages. I had this feeling reading Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos”. Hope you have more wednesdays like this !!

  11. I was lucky to see her speaking at a literary event in Wales last year and found her mesmerising. She did read from Americanah at that time, bringing Ifemelu so much to life it was as if she was in the room. But I never got anywhere near the head of the queue to get my booked signed. Lucky you to snaffle a picture too