NIGERIAN AUTHOR Akwaeke Emezi said that fellow Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pulled support for their book, after coming across their tweets online.
The non-binary writer has also shared disappointment about transphobia in the wider African writing community.
The author’s comments on Twitter came after Adichie’s interview in The Guardian .
Emezi said: “This is not the first time Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has dismissed people’s condemnation of transphobia as ‘noise’”
A former student
Emezi says they graduated from Adichie’s writing workshop.
Then, it seems they retweeted critique of Adichie’s views.
The writer claims that two days after her debut novel Freshwater was released, Adichie then asked “that her name be removed from my bio everywhere because of my tweets online.”
She added: “Most were about transphobia.”
Adichie had edited and written an introduction to their work Freshwater, according to the writer.
They say Adichie let them decide whether or not to keep her name in their books’ acknowledgements and they chose to do so.
A heartbreaking decision
Emezi added that they had been nervous to call Adichie out, because she holds such weight in the African writing community.
On Twitter, they added: “ I speak for those of us who genuinely loved and looked up to her, that broke our hearts.”
They went on to say: “It’s performative allyship with trans people when Black trans women are murdered, but contempt and mockery when we hold your faves accountable for the transphobia that harms them in real life and *contributes* to those murders. Y’all are truly the weakest link, my God.
Towards the end of their Twitter thread, the non-binary writer said: “There are so many communities I used to be a part of and got pushed out of simply for existing truthfully as myself, for seeing and pointing at true things, where staying would have meant violence.”
The controversy comes during trans awareness week.
