Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye … I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes this remark while reflecting on her childhood reading and early attempts at writing. Growing up in Nigeria, she initially encountered mostly British and American children’s books, which shaped her sense of what “belonged” in stories—often white characters, foreign settings, and culturally distant details. Discovering African writers such as Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye was a turning point: their work provided recognizable people, places, and textures of life, and it expanded her imaginative permission to see Africans—especially girls who looked like her—as legitimate subjects of literature. The comment is frequently cited in discussions of representation and literary influence.

The quote underscores how representation functions not merely as visibility but as imaginative authorization. Adichie describes a shift from internalizing a narrow, imported literary norm to recognizing that her own body, hair, and everyday reality are “literary” and therefore worthy of narration. By naming specific physical markers (“skin the color of chocolate,” “kinky hair”), she highlights how exclusion can be intimate and embodied, shaping a child’s sense of possibility. Achebe and Laye stand for a broader tradition that counters cultural erasure: their presence in her reading life helps dismantle the idea that only certain kinds of people can be protagonists, and it foreshadows Adichie’s later advocacy against the “single story.”