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• Notes on Grief ( memoir) Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2021

1. Notes on grief LCCN 2021931412 Type of material Book Personal name Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 1977- author. Main title Notes on grief / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Edition First. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. Projected pub date 2105 Description pages cm ISBN 9780593320808 (hardcover) (ebook)

• The Best Short Stories 2021: The O. Henry Prize Winners - 2021 Anchor, New York, NY

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie website - https://www.chimamanda.com/

  CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria.

  Her work has been translated into over thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a New York Times Notable Book; and Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013. Ms. Adichie is also the author of the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck.

  Ms. Adichie has been invited to speak around the world. Her 2009 TED Talk, The Danger of A Single Story, is now one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time. Her 2012 talk We Should All Be Feminists has a started a worldwide conversation about feminism, and was published as a book in 2014.

  Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017.

  A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Ms. Adichie divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

  For a detailed bibliography, please see the independent “The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Website” maintained by Daria Tunca.

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  Nigeria (b.1977)

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 and grew up in Nigeria. She moved to the United States to attend college and majored in communication and political science. In 2002, she was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her fiction has been published in literary journals including the Iowa Review, Prism International, Other Voices, Zoetrope All-Story, Calyx, and Wasafiri. Her stories have also been selected for Commonwealth Broadcasting Association and BBC awards. Purple Hibiscus, her first novel, will be published by Algonquin in October 2003. She is presently a student in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

  Genres: Literary Fiction

  New Books
  May 2021
  (kindle)

  Notes on GriefSeptember 2021
  (paperback)

  The Best Short Stories 2021
  Novels
  Purple Hibiscus (2003)
  Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)
  Americanah (2013)
  thumbthumbthumb

  Omnibus
  Half of a Yellow Sun / Americanah / Purple Hibiscus (2014)
  Things Fall Apart / Their Eyes Were Watching God / Half of a Yellow Sun (2018) (with Chinua Achebe and Zora Neale Hurston)
  Matchbook Classics Box Set (2019) (with J G Ballard, Jean-Dominque Bauby, Penelope Fitzgerald, Jonathan Franzen, Hilary Mantel, Alexander Masters, Tim O'Brien, Annie Proulx and Lorna Sage)
  thumbthumbthumb

  Collections
  The Thing Around Your Neck (2009)
  One World (2009) (with Vanessa Gebbie and Jhumpa Lahiri)
  thumbthumb

  Novellas
  Imitation (2015)
  The Arrangements (2016)
  The Shivering (2016)
  Zikora (2020)
  thumbthumbthumbthumb

  Anthologies edited
  The Best Short Stories 2021 (2021)
  thumb

  Non fiction
  We Should All Be Feminists (2014)
  Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017)
  We Should All Be Feminists: The Desk Diary 2021 (2020)
  Notes on Grief (2021)

• Wikipedia -

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  Adichie in 2013
  Adichie in 2013
  Born 15 September 1977 (age 43)
  Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria
  Occupation Novelist, short story writer, non-fiction writer
  Nationality Nigerian
  American
  Alma mater Eastern Connecticut State University (BA)
  Johns Hopkins University (MA)
  Yale University (MA)
  Period 2003–present
  Notable works Purple Hibiscus (2003)
  Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)
  Americanah (2013)
  We Should All Be Feminists (2014)
  Notable awards MacArthur Fellowship (2008)
  Spouse Ivara Esege ​(m. 2009)​[1]
  Children 1
  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's voice
  MENU0:00
  from the BBC programme Front Row, 3 May 2013.[2]
  Website
  www.chimamanda.com
  MENU0:00
  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about The Thing Around Your Neck on Bookbits radio
  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (/ˌtʃɪmɑːˈmɑːndə əŋˈɡoʊzi əˈdiːtʃeɪ/ (About this soundlisten);[note 1] born 15 September 1977)[3] is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories to nonfiction.[4] She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [which] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature",[5] particularly in her second home, the United States.

  Adichie, a feminist,[6][7][8] has written the novels Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists (2014).[9] Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017.[10] In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant.[11][12]

  Contents
  1 Personal life and education
  2 Writing career
  3 Lectures
  3.1 "The Danger of a Single Story"
  3.2 "We should all be feminists"
  3.2.1 "Flawless" song
  4 Awards and nominations
  4.1 Other recognition
  5 Bibliography
  5.1 Books
  5.2 Short fiction
  6 Discography
  7 See also
  8 Notes
  9 References
  10 Further reading
  11 External links
  Personal life and education
  Adichie was born in the city of Enugu in Nigeria, and grew up as the fifth of six children in an Igbo family in the university town of Nsukka in Enugu State.[13] While she was growing up, her father, James Nwoye Adichie, worked as a professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria. Her mother, Grace Ifeoma, was the university's first female registrar.[14] The family lost almost everything during the Nigerian Civil War, including both maternal and paternal grandfathers.[15] Her family's ancestral village is in Abba[3] in Anambra State.[16]

  Adichie completed her secondary education at the University of Nigeria Secondary School, Nsukka, where she received several academic prizes.[17] She studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the university's Catholic medical students. At the age of 19, Adichie left Nigeria for the United States to study communications and political science at Drexel University in Philadelphia.[18] She soon transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to be near her sister Uche,[19] who had a medical practice in Coventry, Connecticut. While the novelist was growing up in Nigeria, she was not used to being identified by the colour of her skin, which only began to happen as soon as she arrived in the United States for college. As a black African in America, Adichie was suddenly confronted with what it meant to be a person of colour in the United States. Race as an idea became something that she had to navigate and learn.[20] She writes about this in her novel Americanah. She received a bachelor's degree from Eastern Connecticut State University,[21] with the distinction of summa cum laude in 2001.[22]

  In 2003, she completed a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.[23] In 2008, she received a Master of Arts degree in African studies from Yale University.[24]

  Adichie was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University during the 2005–2006 academic year. In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.[11] She was also awarded a 2011–2012 fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.[22]

  Adichie divides her time between the United States, and Nigeria, where she teaches writing workshops.[25][1] In 2016, she was conferred an honorary degree – Doctor of Humane letters, honoris causa, by Johns Hopkins University.[26][27] In 2017, she was conferred honorary degrees – Doctor of Humane letters, honoris causa, by Haverford College[28] and The University of Edinburgh.[29] In 2018, she received an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from Amherst College.[30] She received an honorary degree, doctor honoris causa, from the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, in 2019.[31]

  In an interview published in the Financial Times in July 2016, Adichie revealed that she had a baby daughter.[32][33] In a profile of Adichie, published in The New Yorker in June 2018, Larissa MacFarquhar wrote, "the man she ended up marrying in 2009 was almost comically suitable: a Nigerian doctor who practiced in America, whose father was a doctor and a friend of her parents."[34] Adichie is a Catholic and was raised Catholic as a child, though she considers her views, especially those on feminism, to sometimes conflict with her religion. At a 2017 event at Georgetown University, she stated that religion "is not a women-friendly institution" and "has been used to justify oppressions that are based on the idea that women are not equal human beings."[35] She has called for Christian and Muslim leaders in Nigeria to preach messages of peace and togetherness.[36]

  Adichie supports LGBT rights in Nigeria and all of Africa as a whole; in 2014 when Nigeria passed the anti-homosexuality bill she was among Nigerian writers who objected to the law, calling it unconstitutional and "a strange priority to a country with so many real problems", stating that a crime is a crime for a reason because a crime has victims, and that consensual homosexual conducts between adults does not constitute a crime hence is unjust.[37] Adichie was also close friends with Kenyan openly gay writer Binyavanga Wainaina,[38] and when he died on 21 May 2019 after suffering a stroke in Nairobi, Adichie said in her tribute that she was struggling to stop crying.[39]

  In 2017, Adichie was criticized by some as transphobic, initially for saying that "my feeling is trans women are trans women."[40][8] Adichie later further clarified her statement, writing "that there is a distinction between women born female and women who transition, without elevating one or the other, which was my point. I have and will continue to stand up for the rights of transgender people."[41] Adichie expressed concern that the trans debate is being used as an excuse to take away freedom of speech by labeling and aggressively trying to silence people who may not agree with trans activism, and that the trans movement wishes an erosion of women as a political and biological class.[7] In 2020, she weighed into "all the noise" sparked by Rowling's article on sex and gender,[42] and defended Rowling's essay as being "a perfectly reasonable piece".[7] She again faced criticisms, some of which came from Nigerian author Akwaeke Emezi, who had graduated from Adichie's writing workshop.[43]

  Adichie criticised cancel culture, saying: "There's a sense in which you aren't allowed to learn and grow. Also forgiveness is out of the question. I find it so lacking in compassion."[42]

  Writing career
  Ngozi Adichie's original and initial inspiration came from Chinua Achebe, after reading his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, at the age of 10;[44] Adichie was inspired by seeing her own life represented in the pages.[17] She has also named Buchi Emecheta as a Nigerian literary precursor, on whose death Adichie said: "Buchi Emecheta. We are able to speak because you first spoke. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your art. Nodu na ndokwa."[45][46]

  Adichie published a collection of poems in 1997 (Decisions) and a play (For Love of Biafra) in 1998. She was shortlisted in 2002 for the Caine Prize[47][48] for her short story "You in America",[49][50][51] and her story "That Harmattan Morning" was selected as a joint winner of the 2002 BBC World Service Short Story Awards.[52] In 2003, she won the O. Henry Award for "The American Embassy", and the David T. Wong International Short Story Prize 2002/2003 (PEN Center Award).[53] Her stories were also published in Zoetrope: All-Story,[54] and Topic Magazine.[55]

  Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), received wide critical acclaim; it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction (2004)[56][57] and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (2005).[58] Purple Hibiscus starts with an extended quote from Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.[59]

  Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), named after the flag of the short-lived nation of Biafra, is set before and during the Nigerian Civil War. Adichie has said of Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra (1982): " [It] was very important for my research when I was writing Half of a Yellow Sun."[60] Half of a Yellow Sun received the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction[61] and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.[62] Half of a Yellow Sun was adapted into a film of the same title directed by Biyi Bandele, starring BAFTA award-winner and Academy Award nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor and BAFTA winner Thandie Newton, and was released in 2014.[63]

  Adichie's third book, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), is a collection of 12 stories that explore the relationships between men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.

  In 2010 she was listed among the authors of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" Fiction Issue.[64] Adichie's story "Ceiling" was included in the 2011 edition of The Best American Short Stories.

  Her third novel Americanah (2013), an exploration of a young Nigerian encountering race in America was selected by The New York Times as one of "The 10 Best Books of 2013".[65]

  In April 2014, she was named as one of 39 writers aged under 40[66] in the Hay Festival and Rainbow Book Club project Africa39, celebrating Port Harcourt UNESCO World Book Capital 2014.[67][68]

  Adichie's short story, "My Mother, the Crazy African" discusses the problems that arise when facing two cultures that are complete opposites from each other. On one hand, there is a traditional Nigerian culture with clear gender roles, while in America there is more freedom in how genders act, and less restrictions on younger people. Ralindu, the protagonist, faces this challenge with her parents as she grew up in Philadelphia, while they grew up in Nigeria. Adichie dives deep into gender roles and traditions and what problems can occur because of this.[69]

  In 2015, she was co-curator of the PEN World Voices Festival.[70]

  In a 2014 interview, Adichie said on feminism and writing: "I think of myself as a storyteller but I would not mind at all if someone were to think of me as a feminist writer... I'm very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that world view must somehow be part of my work."[71]

  In March 2017, Americanah was picked as the winner for the "One Book, One New York" program,[72][73] part of a community reading initiative encouraging all city residents to read the same book.[74]

  In April 2017, it was announced that Adichie had been elected into the 237th class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the highest honours for intellectuals in the United States, as one of 228 new members to be inducted on 7 October 2017.[75][6]

  Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, published in March 2017,[76] had its origins in a letter Adichie wrote to a friend who had asked for advice about how to raise her daughter as a feminist.[8]

  In 2020, Adichie published Zikora, a stand-alone short story about sexism and single motherhood.[77][78][79]

  In November 2020, Half of a Yellow Sun was voted by the public to be the best book to have won the Women's Prize for Fiction in its 25-year history.[80][81]

  In May 2021, Adichie will release a memoir based on her father's passing titled "Notes on Grief".[82]

  Lectures
  Adichie spoke on "The Danger of a Single Story" for TED in 2009.[83] It has become one of the top ten most-viewed TED Talks of all time with more than fifteen million views.[76] On 15 March 2012, she delivered the "Connecting Cultures" Commonwealth Lecture 2012 at the Guildhall, London.[84] Adichie also spoke on being a feminist for TEDxEuston in December 2012, with her speech entitled, "We should all be feminists".[85] It initiated a worldwide conversation on feminism and was published as a book in 2014.[76] It was sampled for the 2013 song "***Flawless" by American performer Beyoncé, where it attracted further attention.

  "The Danger of a Single Story"
  Adichie spoke in a TED talk entitled "The Danger of a Single Story", posted in July 2009.[83] In it, she expressed her concern for under-representation of various cultures.[86] She explained that as a young child, she had often read American and British stories where the characters were primarily of Caucasian origin. At the lecture, she said that the under-representation of cultural differences could be dangerous: "Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination and opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature."[86]

  Throughout the lecture, she used personal anecdotes to illustrate the importance of sharing different stories. She briefly talked about the houseboy that was working for her family whose name is Fide and said the only thing she knew about him was how poor his family was. However, when Adichie's family visited Fide's village, Fide's mother showed them a basket that Fide's brother had made, making her realize that she created her opinion about Fide based on only one story of him. Adichie said, "It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them."[86] She also said that on leaving Nigeria to go to Drexel University, she encountered the effects of the under-representation of her own culture. Her American roommate was surprised that Adichie was fluent in English and that she did not listen to tribal music.[87] She said of this: "My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals."[86]

  Adichie concluded the lecture by noting the significance of different stories in various cultures and the representation that they deserve. She advocated for a greater understanding of stories because people are complex, saying that by understanding only a single story, one misinterprets people, their backgrounds and their histories.[88]

  "We should all be feminists"
  In 2012, Adichie gave a TEDx talk entitled: "We should all be feminists", delivered at TedXEuston in London, which has been viewed more than five million times.[85] She shared her experiences of being an African feminist, and her views on gender construction and sexuality. Adichie said that the problem with gender is that it shapes who we are.[85] She also said: "I am angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change, but in addition to being angry, I'm also hopeful because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to make and remake themselves for the better."[89]

  "Flawless" song
  Parts of Adichie's TEDx talk were sampled in Beyoncé's song "Flawless" in December 2013.[90] Fourth Estate published an essay based on the speech as a standalone volume, We Should All Be Feminists, in 2014. Adichie later said in an NPR interview that "anything that gets young people talking about feminism is a very good thing."[14] She later qualified the statement in an interview with the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant: "Another thing I hated was that I read everywhere: now people finally know her, thanks to Beyoncé, or: she must be very grateful. I found that disappointing. I thought: I am a writer and I have been for some time and I refuse to perform in this charade that is now apparently expected of me: 'Thanks to Beyoncé, my life will never be the same again.' That's why I didn't speak about it much."[91]

  Adichie has clarified that her particular feminism differs from Beyoncé's, particularly in their disagreements about the role occupied by men in women's lives, saying: "Her style is not my style but I do find it interesting that she takes a stand in political and social issues since a few years. She portrays a woman who is in charge of her own destiny, who does her own thing, and she has girl power. I am very taken with that."[91] Nevertheless, she has been outspoken against critics who question the singer's credentials as a feminist and said that "Whoever says they're feminist is bloody feminist."[92]

  Awards and nominations
  On 20 May 2019, Ngozi Adichie received an honorary degree from Yale University.[93]

  Adichie on the cover of Ms. magazine in 2014
  Year Award Work Result
  2002 Caine Prize for African Writing[47] "You in America" Nominated[A]
  Commonwealth Short Story Competition "The Tree in Grandma's Garden" Nominated[B]
  BBCmeasuring Competition "That Harmattan Morning" Won[C]
  2002/2003 David T. Wong International Short Story Prize (PEN American Center Award) "Half of a Yellow Sun" Won
  2003 O. Henry Prize "The American Embassy" Won
  2004 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award: Best Debut Fiction Category Purple Hibiscus Won
  Orange Prize Nominated[A]
  Booker Prize Nominated[D]
  Young Adult Library Services Association Best Books for Young Adults Award Nominated
  2004/2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize Nominated[A]
  2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Best First Book (Africa) Won
  Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Best First Book (overall) Won
  2006 National Book Critics Circle Award Half of a Yellow Sun Nominated
  2007 British Book Awards: "Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year" category Nominated
  James Tait Black Memorial Prize Nominated
  Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Best Book (Africa) Nominated[A]
  Anisfield-Wolf Book Award: Fiction category Won[C]
  PEN Beyond Margins Award Won[C]
  Orange Broadband Prize: Fiction category Won
  2008 International Dublin Literary Award Nominated
  Reader's Digest Author of the Year Award Won
  Future Award, Nigeria: Young Person of the Year category[94] Won
  MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant[95] Won
  2009 International Nonino Prize[96] Won
  Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award The Thing Around Your Neck Nominated[D]
  John Llewellyn Rhys Prize Nominated[A]
  2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Best Book (Africa) Nominated[A]
  Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominated[B]
  2011 This Day Awards: "New Champions for an Enduring Culture" category Nominated
  2013 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize: Fiction category Americanah Won
  National Book Critics Circle Award: Fiction category[97][98] Won
  2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction[99] Nominated[A]
  Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction[100] Nominated[A]
  MTV Africa Music Awards 2014: Personality of the Year[101] Nominated
  2015 International Dublin Literary Award[102][103] Americanah Nominated[A]
  Grammy Awards: Album of the Year[104] Beyoncé (as featured artist) Nominated
  2018 PEN Pinter Prize[105][106] Won
  A^ Shortlisted
  B^ Runner-up
  C^ Joint win
  D^ Longlisted
  Other recognition
  2010 Listed among The New Yorker's "20 Under 40"
  2013 Listed among The New York Times' "Ten Best Books of 2013", for Americanah
  2013 Listed among the BBC's "Top Ten Books of 2013", for Americanah
  2013 Foreign Policy magazine "Top Global Thinkers of 2013"[107]
  2013 Listed among the New African's "100 Most Influential Africans 2013"
  2014 Listed among Africa39 project of 39 writers aged under 40[108]
  2015 Listed among Time Magazine's "The 100 Most Influential People"[109]
  2015 Commencement Speaker at Wellesley College[110]
  2017 Commencement Speaker at Williams College[111]
  2018 Class Day Speaker for Harvard University.[112]
  2019 Class Day Speaker for Yale University.[113]
  Adichie was one of 15 women selected to appear on the cover of the September 2019 issue of British Vogue, guest-edited by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.[114]
  Adichie was cited as one of the Top 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2019.[115]
  Chimamanda was also elected in March 2017 into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This made her the second Nigerian to be given such an honour, after Prof. Wole Soyinka. She was listed among the 40 Honorary members from 19 different countries.[116]
  Bibliography
  This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.
  Books
  Year Title Publisher ISBN Notes
  2003 Purple Hibiscus 4th Estate (London) ISBN 9780007189885 Novel
  2006 Half of a Yellow Sun 4th Estate (London) ISBN 9780007200283 Novel
  2009 The Thing Around Your Neck 4th Estate (London) ISBN 9780007306213 Short story collection
  2013 Americanah Alfred A. Knopf (New York) ISBN 9780307271082 Novel
  2014 We Should All Be Feminists 4th Estate (London) ISBN 9780008115272 Essay (excerpt in New Daughters of Africa, ed. Margaret Busby, 2019)[117]
  2017 Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions 4th Estate (London) ISBN 9780008275709 Essay
  2020 Notes on Grief 4th Estate
  (London)

  ISBN 9780593320808 Memoir
  Short fiction
  Year Title First published
  2013 "Checking Out" "Checking out". The New Yorker. 89 (5): 66–73. 18 March 2013.
  2015 "Apollo" "Apollo". The New Yorker. 91 (8): 64–69. 13 April 2015.
  2016 "The Arrangements: A Work of Fiction" "'The Arrangements': A Work of Short Fiction". The New York Times Book Review. 3 July 2016.
  2020 "Zikora" Amazon Original Stories[77]
  Discography
  Guest appearances

  "Flawless" (Beyoncé featuring Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

• TED - https://www.ted.com/speakers/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie

  TED Speaker
  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  Novelist

  Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature.
  Why you should listen
  In Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun has helped inspire new, cross-generational communication about the Biafran war. In this and in her other works, she seeks to instill dignity into the finest details of each character, whether poor, middle class or rich, exposing along the way the deep scars of colonialism in the African landscape.

  Adichie's newest book, The Thing Around Your Neck, is a brilliant collection of stories about Nigerians struggling to cope with a corrupted context in their home country, and about the Nigerian immigrant experience.

  Adichie builds on the literary tradition of Igbo literary giant Chinua Achebe—and when she found out that Achebe liked Half of a Yellow Sun, she says she cried for a whole day. What he said about her rings true: “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.”

  (Photo: Wani Olatunde)

  What others say
  “When she turned 10 and read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, about the clash between Igbo tradition and the British colonial way of life, everything changed: ‘I realized that people who looked like me could live in books.’ She has been writing about Africa ever since.” — Washington Post

• Times of India -

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie opens up about loss and grief in new book
  By - TIMESOFINDIA.COMCreated: Feb 15, 2021, 08:30 IST
  FACEBOOKTWITTERPINTREST
  ( Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie/ Facebook)
  ( Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie/ Facebook)
  Feminist-author-speaker Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shared the news of her upcoming book on February 12, 2021. Adichie, who is best known for novels 'Americanah' and 'Half of a Yellow Sun', has written a powerful essay on loss and grief titled 'Notes on Grief' which will be out this year.
  Announcing the news and sharing the details of the upcoming book, Adichie posted on her official Facebook page:

  "Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language," she writes. The book's blurb reads, "On 10 June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria... In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father. 'Notes on Grief' is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter's fierce love for a parent, and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief."
  Published by Fourth Estate, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 'Notes on Grief' is expected to be released on May 13, 2021.

• BBC - https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-54915487

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie voted best Women's Prize for Fiction winner
  Published12 November 2020

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun has been voted the best book to have won the Women's Prize for Fiction in its 25-year history.

  The Nigerian-born author, who won the prize in 2007, was chosen in a public vote from a list of all 25 winners.

  Other past winners include Zadie Smith, the late Andrea Levy, Lionel Shriver, Rose Tremain and Maggie O'Farrell.

  The one-off award marks the anniversary of the prize, formerly known as the Orange Prize and the Bailey's Prize.

  Half of a Yellow Sun is set in Nigeria during the Biafran War, exploring the end of colonialism, ethnic allegiances, class, race and female empowerment. Published in 2006, it has received global acclaim.

  Listen: Adiche on Half of a Yellow Sun on BBC Radio 4
  It was made into a film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton in 2013.

  Adichie said: "I'm especially moved to be voted Winner of Winners because this is the prize that first brought a wide readership to my work - and has also introduced me to the work of many talented writers."

  media captionChimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'We all breathe misogyny'
  She has received a silver edition of the prize's annual statuette, known as the Bessie. Author and playwright Kate Mosse, the founder and director of the UK-based prize, congratulated Adichie and said she was "thrilled" Half of a Yellow Sun had won.

  "Our aim has always been to promote and celebrate the classics of tomorrow today and to build a library of exceptional, diverse, outstanding international fiction written by women," she said.

  "The Reading Women campaign has been the perfect way to introduce a new generation of readers to the brilliance of all of our 25 winners and to honour the phenomenal quality and range of women's writing from all over the world."

  More than 8,500 people voted, and were invited to share their thoughts with the prize's digital book club, accessing newly created online reading guides and author interviews.

• CEO - https://www.theceomagazine.com/business/recommended/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/

  04 MARCH 2020 - 9:18 AM
  How Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie redefined 21st century feminism
  To celebrate International Women's Day, we've profiled 30 extraordinary trailblazers including the award-winning author.

  The fifth of six children to Igbo parents, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria, and grew up in the house in Nsukka previously occupied by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe.

  Perhaps she absorbed the spirit of Achebe, for she showed a flair for writing from an early age – a talent that has taken her to stages around the world and her books into millions of homes. After showing great promise at school, and later studying medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, she won a scholarship to study communication in the US. She packed her bags at just 19 and headed to Philadelphia, where she graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University in 2001, and then a Master’s degree in creative writing at John Hopkins University.

  This experience inspired her to begin writing her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which was published in 2003 and attracted immediate critical acclaim, as did her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, set at the time of the Biafran War. Her third novel is called Americanah.

  But it was her long essay, We Should All Be Feminists, published in 2014 by Fourth Estate as a book, that set the world alight with its definition of feminism in the 21st century. Originating as a speech at TEDx in 2013, it was called “the most important book of the year” by The Telegraph’s Rupert Hawksley, named in The Independent’s books of the year and was even sampled by Beyoncé for her song ‘Flawless’.

  Then in 2015, publisher Albert Bonniers Förlag and the Swedish Women’s Lobby distributed the book to every 16-year-old high school student in Sweden, hoping that it would generate new discussions about feminism and gender equality. It certainly did that.

  The reception of the essay in particular means Adichie is now a global feminist icon and is a regular guest speaker at conferences and seminars around the world. She does not always fit the typical feminist mould, however, and has even been criticised for making feminism mainstream, to which she replied in an interview with The Guardian, “Don’t we want it to be mainstream? For me, feminism is a movement for which the end goal is to make itself no longer needed.”

  The praise, critiques and outright anger for her essay prompted her own response in 2017 in the form of another short book called Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions – a distillation of a long letter she wrote to a friend offering advice on guiding a young girl to feminism. It searches the familiar terrain of motherhood, fatherhood, gender stereotypes and empowering both boys and girls to seek their own way in life.

  Honourable mention
  Toni Morrison
  Morrison passed away last year but her legacy lives on. The writer was the first African–American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and throughout her career her much-lauded work paved the way for others from minority groups.

  xxxx
  Toni Morrison
  Margaret Atwood
  The Canadian author is well-known for the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). It was adapted to film in 1990 and released as a four-season TV series in 2017, spurring Atwood to write The Testaments. The handmaids’ garb has become a symbol of women’s rights.

  xxxx
  Margaret Atwood
  From CEOs and politicians to humanitarians and athletes, we profile 30 extraordinary trailblazers creating major change in 2020. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood are among the iconic women we’re celebrating this International Women’s Day.

• JSTOR Daily - https://daily.jstor.org/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-i-became-black-in-america/

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I Became Black in America
  Adichie speaks on the meaning of blackness, sexism in Nigeria, and whether the current feminist movement leaves out black women.

  Bestselling author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at HCLS Miller Branch.
  Adichie in 2017 via Flickr/Howard County Library System
  By: Hope Reese August 29, 2018 15 minutes
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  “Some people ask: ‘Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?’ Because that would be dishonest,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote in We Should All Be Feminists (the book based on her 2012 TED Talk). “It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.”

  Adiche, the internationally celebrated novelist, moved to the U.S. from Nigeria, and some of her most powerful writing––in her 2013 novel Americanah, for instance––explores what it means to be African, and what it means to be African American, with extraordinary depth. Yet in her latest work, Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017), Adichie posits that sexism can be an even more destructive force than racism.

  Her words have not only earned her many literary honors, including the National Book Critics Award, the Orange prize, and a MacArthur fellowship, they also have resonated with many powerful figures, from Oprah to Beyoncé to Hillary Clinton.

  I spoke to Adichie on the phone and asked her what sexism looks like in Nigeria, whether the current feminist movement leaves out black women, and other topics. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

  Hope Reese: There’s a scene in your book We Should All Be Feminists where you are giving a talk in Nigeria and someone says that feminism is “un-African.” What does feminism mean in Nigeria?

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: People say that because they want to find a way to discredit feminism. And also because Western feminism is the most documented, the most known-about, so it’s seen as, essentially, the only feminism.

  I didn’t become a feminist because I read anything Western or African. I became a feminist because I was born in Nigeria and I observed the world. And it was clear to me, very early on, that women and men were not treated the same way; that women were treated unfairly, just because they were women.

  So I always felt this way. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t passionate about this feeling of injustice. I started to talk about it publicly with my book called We Should All Be Feminists––which was actually initially given as a talk at a TEDx event that was focused on Africa. My audience was actually African. The people who said you can’t talk about feminism because it’s Western, and I think, for them, feminism is what they read about. Feminism is Gloria Steinem, or feminism is the British stuff.

  But for me, feminism is my great-grandmother, who was a feminist. She may never have used that word––obviously, that word doesn’t exist in Igbo––but she was because she pushed back against all of these sort of cultural ideas that held her back because she was a woman.

  My great-grandmother was called a troublemaker, which I love. But, anyways, so now today in Nigeria there are many feminists. I mean, in Nigeria, as all countries of the world, you only have to look at the history of a country or the people and inevitably, you will learn about when they can push back. There’s nowhere in the world where there’s gender equality. But I think that everywhere in the world there’s been women who have pushed back, right? They’re always in the minority, obviously, but they’re there and they’re feminists. But today in Nigeria, young women are self-identifying as feminists and some young men as well, I have to say. The conversation is being had.

  For women who already were questioning these things––that marriage is the ultimate thing for you as a woman, marriage defines you, that you don’t get full respect until you’re somehow attached to a man or that you’re not supposed to have too much ambition because you’re going to intimidate men––suddenly there’s a language for it: feminism.

  “I wasn’t black until I came to America. I became black in America.”
  They still encounter a lot of pushback, and much of that pushback is couched in the language of culture. People will say, “Well Africa doesn’t support feminism because African culture says that the man is superior.” What I find interesting is that actually, it’s global culture that says the man is superior. It’s everywhere in the world. Culture is never static. The places where women were considered property some years ago, now, women are not considered property. So, things change.

  If you had been addressing a group of women, say, in Saudi Arabia––where women were recently granted the right to drive, but still have very few rights––would you say some of the same things to them? How can you help women where it might be dangerous for them to actually speak up and fight for themselves?

  I think that there is a small and very quiet Saudi feminism. Actually, Qatar is different in many ways. I remember speaking to women in Qatar, and they had the same sort of views that I had in many ways, right? A women said to me––she’s young, she’s married–– “I was reading everything in your book. If only I had read it before I got married. Things would have been different for me because I was thinking them but I didn’t know how to say them.”

  I found that very moving, right? This idea that she didn’t think she should have got married that young. There were other things she wanted to do with her life before getting married. If I had to talk to women in Saudi Arabia, I think it’s a very good idea to celebrate every little step. Change is always incremental.

  You live in a society that is so divided by gender. Public transportation is divided by gender. There are so many opportunities you don’t have because you’re a woman. But, I think it has to be incremental. We can’t expect Saudi women to go from zero to one hundred. They have to go from zero to one, then two, then three.

  I, for example, thought that the whole not allowing women to drive was just really dumb. Even if you want to oppress women, what you’re also doing is you’re oppressing the opportunities of your country, right? You’re holding back half your population. You don’t want the talent they have. You don’t know what they could contribute. You’re just holding them back for a reason that makes no sense.

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  I’m kind of a believer in making the economic argument. I don’t think women are better; I think women are human. But making the economic argument, which is to say if you deprive half your population of access, it also means that you’re depriving your nation of possible talent, it means that your economy is not doing as well as it could. In general, I think that men in power like economic arguments. So, if I speak to women in Saudi Arabia, I think that’s the tactic I would adopt.

  In your novel, Americanah, your heroine is African, and you illustrate her experience of coming to America and what she learned about blackness in America. I’m curious to hear about your experience of coming to America. What have you learned about how Americans see blackness in America? Or the difference between being African American and being African?

  First of all, I wasn’t black until I came to America. I became black in America.

  Growing up in Nigeria, I didn’t think about race because I didn’t need to think about race. Nigeria is a country with many problems and many identity divisions, but those identity divisions are mainly religion and ethnicity.

  So my identity growing up was Christian, Catholic, and Igbo. And sometimes I felt Nigerian in sort of a healthy way, especially when Nigeria was playing in the World Cup. Then I would think about my nationality as a Nigerian. But, when I came to the U.S., it just changed. I think that America, and obviously because of its history, it’s the one country where, in some ways, identity is forced on you, because you have to check a box. You have to be something. And, I came here and very quickly realized to Americans I was just black. And for a little while, I resisted it, because it didn’t take me very long when I came here to realize how many negative stereotypes were attached to blackness.

  For me, the story that I hold onto as my defining moment of realizing what blackness meant was when I was in college and I had written this essay and it was the best essay in the class, so the professor wanted to know who had written it. I raised my hand and he looked surprised when he found out that it was me.

  I remember realizing then that, “Oh, so this is what it means.” This professor doesn’t expect the best essay in class to be written by a black person. And I had come from a country where black achievement is absolutely normal. It wasn’t remarkable to me the idea that black people are academically superior because, you know, everybody in Nigeria was black. So the people who were bright were black. So I resisted it. I didn’t want to be black. I would say to people, “I’m not black, I’m Nigerian.” Or, another identity that America gives me was African, so that in college people just wanted me to explain Africa. I knew nothing about anywhere else, apart from Nigeria, really.

  “I decided that having understood African-American history, I was a part of it. African-American history doesn’t actually start on the slave ship. It starts in Africa.”
  Looking back, especially my first year in the U.S., my insistence on being Nigerian, or even African, was in many ways my way of avoiding blackness. It’s also my acknowledgement of American racism––which is to say that if blackness were benign, I would not have been running away from it. And so it took a decision on my part to learn more. I started, on my own, reading African-American history. Because I wanted to understand. It was reading about post-slavery and post-reconstruction, Jim Crow, that really opened my eyes and made me understand what was going on, and what it meant.

  And it also made me start claiming this blackness. I went full-circle and started identifying as black. I think it was a political decision; I decided that having understood African-American history, I was a part of it. African-American history doesn’t actually start on the slave ship. It starts in Africa. So in a way, we’re related. But America will label you black anyway––so the things that black people experience, I experience. I remember, for example, going to the store years ago. And it was a bit of a fancy store that sold expensive dresses, and I just wanted to go and look around. I remember very acutely––you know when somebody wants to make it clear to you that you’re not welcome, but they never actually say you’re not welcome? It was so obvious to me. I just remember being a little shaken by it. I think I hadn’t experienced anything of that sort.

  Nigeria has many divisions but it’s really hard to tell who is who just by looking at people––so that kind of immediate and overt discrimination just can’t happen. If I walk into a store in Nigeria you can’t tell if I’m Igbo or Yoruba. Now as a public figure, I’m still struck by how, in the airport––and this happens very often––I’m jumping in line, and I’m going to the First Class line, invariably somebody will say to me, “Oh, that’s not where you’re supposed to be, ma’am, this way.” And it’s just an automatic assumption. And I realize it’s because I’m black––you’re not supposed to be there because you’re black.

  The point is that I started out not identifying as black, now I do very happily, and also partly because I take a lot of pride. I deeply, deeply admire African-American history. I think it’s just all full of resilience and I think it is under-celebrated in the U.S., and I find that quite sad.

  I think the stories of slavery are important, but also I think the stories of just… grit. I look at these pictures and there’s this little girl that wants to go to school and she’s surrounded by a bunch of adults and they’re screaming at her. I just think it must take something deeply noble to somehow keep going when you live in a society that dehumanizes you, really.

  You didn’t grow up in America, so you likely have an advantage. Being taught that society values you less must take high toll on confidence, right? I’m curious about how people like that young African American girl can overcome that.

  Yes, I think it’s important to acknowledge that to be a black immigrant is different. To be a black immigrant from a black majority country is to come with a certain level of confidence. Just growing up seeing black achievement as normal. And to be African-American is to have had a very different experience. There are people who have said to me, “Oh, you’re not angry. You’re different.” And I find that deeply offensive because it’s Americans that say this, white Americans. And the reason I find it offensive is that by saying that, what they’re really doing is that they’re denying American history. If they think that African Americans are angry, there’s a reason for that. It’s just constantly being put down and absorbing all of these things in the media and culture. We’ve seen all of these studies about teachers who say to the black kids, “Oh, you can’t aspire to this thing; you can only do so much.”

  So I think that there’s a privilege to growing up black in a country that isn’t based on race. I also do think that America can do better and do more about racism. Actually maybe the first step is acknowledgement. I’m always struck––the minute an African American talks about experiences, I’m struck by how many people are very quick to find ways to discredit it. As though somehow African Americans like racism. I mean, nobody wants racism to exist.

  You know, an African American will talk about racism and people will say, “Oh, no, no, no, that can’t be.” But why else would somebody say that it’s racism? It’s not like we enjoy it. I want it to end.

  “The language with which we talk about racism in America hasn’t changed in 80 years.”
  I think, also, that we live in a culture where people don’t actually listen to one another and people don’t actually hear one another. And this is even before. I think America is terribly divided today. But even before this administration, people just didn’t really listen to one another. And I also think that people who are not black in America feel threatened, and feel that to talk about this is somehow to indict them and to make them responsible or guilty––and I don’t think that’s the case. I mean, white Americans didn’t choose to be born white, they just happened to be. I think what’s important is what one does with white privilege, right?

  So here’s an example: I think that white men have to be front and center in the fight against racism. They have the power, so they have to be the ones to say, “We need a more diverse workforce. We need to start very early. We need to have kindergartens in African American neighborhoods that are actually very good.” Because that’s where it starts.

  You bring up the current racial climate––we’ve now seen, in Charlottesville, for instance, some terrifying racism that has been bubbling under the surface. How did you feel when that happened? And where do we go from here?

  It’s not really that surprising. When did the majority of African Americans get their voting rights? In the 60s. But that doesn’t mean that automatically everything was fine because there’s still many, many communities in which people found ways to keep them away from voting. I would also argue that there are still many of those things going on today with all of these ways of trying to suppress the vote of African Americans and Latino people to a certain extent. So I wasn’t really surprised, sadly. I felt really sad, and I just felt deeply wounded that that young woman was killed, but knowing these people existed in America didn’t really surprise me. I think it’s taught. The reason that maybe some people were surprised is, I think, the language of racism and race. The language with which we talk about racism in America hasn’t changed in 80 years.

  Adichie book
  (Penguin Random House)
  But racism has changed in the way it manifests itself. I think we sort of assume that racists are the KKK in the white hood at night, but really the racist is the guy in accounting. Right? It’s really people who are normal and ordinary, and what Charlottesville did was it made it obvious. These people who are having these torches at night, in the morning they get dressed up and go to perfectly respectable jobs.

  Maybe the first thing we need to do is change the language and understand that racism isn’t just that somebody called you the “N”-word. That racism often is subtle and that we really, really should listen to African Americans. I just feel that that’s part of the thing, that it’s important to listen to them. It’s going to take a very long time to acknowledge and address the subtle, less obvious forms of racism, given that it’s taken so long for us to think of saying the “N”-word, which is a relatively overt form of racial aggression, as a crime

  American police unfairly target and even kill African Americans, especially young black men. How do you see this issue? What kind of solutions do you think could begin to address this problem, which seems so pervasive in our country?

  I want to sort of read up on this, on the recruitment process to the police force in the U.S. I don’t know quite know how it works, but it seems to me that something needs to change. I think reaching out to communities that historically have distrusted the police is important. And recruiting from those communities is important. Also, I haven’t had many encounters with the American police, but in the very few that I’ve had, I’m struck by how sort of almost non-human, almost mechanical they are, and not terribly friendly. The police, they’re supposed to be your protectors, they’re supposed to be human. That might be the first start.

  I remember when something happened in our neighborhood here in Maryland and the police went from house to house asking questions. When they came to our house I said, “Oh, what happened? Did something happen?” And this police person says to me, “Ma’am, just answer my question.” I just thought, my God. Right? I mean, here’s an opportunity to endear yourself to hearts and minds, and you have not taken it.

  My nephew is a 24-year-old black man in Connecticut who drives a Mercedes that he worked for. I’m constantly nervous. I’m constantly checking up on him. I’m constantly saying to him, “If you’re ever stopped, just don’t do anything. Don’t even talk back. Just do exactly as they say.” Because I’m terrified for him.

  “I don’t feel that western feminism is my own story. When people talk about the first wave, the second wave, I feel no personal connection to it.”
  The other thing that we’re not really talking about is guns. I think the police are afraid. Right? I think they wouldn’t be so afraid if America wasn’t a country that was utterly awash in guns. I was reading something a few days ago about a black man they had shot because they thought he had a gun. I remember thinking, but this is also a country that says you can have guns. So, then is it a question of who’s allowed to have a gun and who’s not?

  I think that guns have to be part of the conversation of policing, because otherwise I don’t think the police would be as terrified as they are, and therefore more likely to just murder people.

  So, some black women in America, like Roxane Gay, have been critical of what they see as a mainstream feminism that leaves black women out. How do you feel about feminism in America? Is it a white thing?

  I think it was a white thing for many years. I think, in the history of American feminism is one of racism as well. Because there were many white women who were feminists who didn’t want to include black women. Who didn’t want to acknowledge that black women had certain specific experiences that were different. Especially in regards to things like work. Right? Feminism meant, “we need to go out and work,” for white women. But black women had been required to work––in fact, we’re overworked. So I understand why African American women often feel excluded from American feminism. I think it’s changing a bit. But I also think that the answer is to widen the number of voices on the stage, so to speak. That we have different kinds of women who can talk about the differences in their experiences.

  It’s changing, but I don’t feel that western feminism is my own story. When people talk about the first wave, the second wave, I feel no personal connection to it––that’s not my story. Mine is quite different. So, as an observer, I think that it’s certainly changed a bit from its racist past, but I think there’s a lot more that could be done. But what’s even more important is to hear more people’s voices and more people’s stories.

  Sometimes on the left, feminism has become a thing that you have to be very careful about because you don’t know who you’re going to offend. I remember reading a review of this white woman’s book about her life and she was criticized because it was all about white feminism. I remember thinking, “Yeah, that’s what she knows. She’s a white feminist.” Right? I don’t want her writing about Latino feminism. She’s not Latino, right? But I remember thinking that it’s kind of sad that that had become a legitimate way of criticizing, sort of, a memoir. Because now I think there’s a certain type of feminism that dictates that if you’re a white straight women you cannot tell your story unless you account for the women in Bangladesh or something. I find that disingenuous, I really do.

  I think that the answer is to have the women from Bangladesh tell that story. And for that story to matter to all of us. You know?

• Vulture - https://www.vulture.com/2018/07/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-in-conversation.html

  IN CONVERSATION JULY 9, 2018
  In Conversation: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The novelist on being a “feminist icon,” Philip Roth’s humanist misogyny, and the sadness in Melania Trump.
  By David Marchese Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya for Vulture

  Photo: Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya for Vulture
  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the rare contemporary novelist to have earned celebrity status as a result of both her art and her politics, to the diminishment of neither. Her award-winning, best-selling novels, Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun, combine graceful storytelling with real moral heft; that latter quality also radiates throughout her nonfiction works, We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (the latter newly published in paperback). “I want to tell the truth,” says Adichie, talking at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan. “That’s where my storytelling comes from. My feminism comes from somewhere else: acute dissatisfaction.”

  Adichie, 40, is in New York for a brief visit before heading back to the home outside of Baltimore where she, her husband, and their little girl live when they’re not in her native Nigeria. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to tell stories,” says Adichie. “Sadly, I also don’t remember a time when I wasn’t telling people what I think about the world.”

  Dear IjeaweleWritten first as an email to a friend, Dear Ijeawele is a 15-point rubric on how to raise a feminist daughter, with nuanced entries like, “In teaching her about oppression, be careful not to turn the oppressed into saints.” is addressed to a girl — and you have a daughter of your own — but I’m curious: Do you have thoughts about raising boys? In some ways that task seems more fraught task than raising girls. Especially because of how easily young men can be drawn to the old misogynies and hierarchies.
  I think about that a lot. If I had a boy, one of the things I would do is not just say it’s okay to be vulnerable, but also to expect him to respect vulnerability. Actually, shaming him into vulnerability is a good idea, because there’s so much about the way that masculinity is constructed that’s about shame. What if we switch that shame around? Instead of shaming boys for being vulnerable, why don’t we shame them for not being vulnerable? I kind of feel — I was going to say I feel sorry for men, but I don’t want to say that.

  That’s a bridge too far!
  [Laughs.] Yes.

  Has #MeToo changed gender and power dynamics in meaningful ways?
  I hope it does, but it hasn’t. What I like about #MeToo is the idea that now women’s stories have the possibility of being believed, which is almost revolutionary. Now a woman can tell her story and she might still get castigated, but there’s the possibility that she gets public support and that there are consequences for whoever harassed or assaulted her. That’s not happened before. But the shape of the narratives around #MeToo can still be troubling.

  How so?
  It’s the idea that a woman doesn’t deserve sympathy unless she’s “good.” I’m sorry to get into race, but it’s similar to what happens with black men, where in this country it seems that they are not deserving of sympathy unless they are pure. If a young boy is murdered because he was going off to buy Skittles but we learn that he smoked marijuana, then that somehow makes him not deserving of sympathy. He shouldn’t have to be perfect to deserve sympathy and that applies to women as well. And, also, the way women are cast as innocent or blameless or helpless undercuts the idea of female agency. Often we’ll say things like, “She was coerced into going to the guy’s apartment.”

  As if a woman who wasn’t coerced is somehow culpable if something bad happens.
  Maybe she went to that apartment thinking that she liked the guy. That doesn’t mean she was counting on being assaulted. It bothers me sometimes, for example, when women who’ve gone through these things — we see them on TV and they’re nearly always crying. It’s like a performance that makes me uncomfortable; it’s trying to fit a certain narrative of what a good woman is. All that is part of a large system of valuing maleness — not just maleness but the patriarchy. That’s a word I was avoiding, but I don’t want to say maleness because the judgment that women get can come from men and women. I’ve heard from many women who say things about victims like, “Why was she wearing a short skirt?” My point is that a woman doesn’t have to be perfect to be deserving of justice.

  You wrote Dear Ijeawele before you had your daughter. Is there any advice in the book that, now that you have a childAdichie and her husband, fellow Nigerian and physician Dr. Ivara Esege, have a 2-year-old daughter together., feels like it’ll be harder to follow through on?
  Yes, I wrote that [Dear Ijeawele] when I wasn’t a mother and it’s easier to write about a hypothetical child than to write about a real one. The child that book was addressed to is sort of an idea of a child. But having my own — you don’t realize how difficult it is day-to-day to combat negative ideas. Sometimes when you’re raising a child it’s like the universe is in conspiracy against you. You go to the toy store looking for something not necessarily “girly” and you’re overwhelmed by the pink and the dolls. Even the prayers my daughter got from family members: They’re like, “We hope she finds a good husband.” I’m optimistic that those kinds of things will change but I think about how women are socialized — even the most resistant women still get things under our skin.

  How do we know when a given cultural attitude tips over from benign to malignant? I’m thinking of my 3-year-old daughter, who’s just starting to pick up on things like beauty standards and the different behavioral expectations for boys and girls. I sometimes find it hard to know which received attitudes need intervention.
  We don’t know. Here I am, a self-professed card-carrying feminist, and I don’t know. But it’s important not to overdo things; I don’t want to be that crazy feminist mother. I think human beings are hardwired to want to be valued and appearance is part of that. So my answer to your question is, “I don’t know.”

  You’re arguably better known for being a feminist than you are for being a novelist. Does it matter to you if feminism is the main lens through which people read your fiction?
  I don’t want to be read ideologically because my fiction isn’t ideological. If it were then all my women characters would be empowered. They’re not. In general, I don’t like reading fiction that is very ideologically consistent and where everybody does the right thing all the time. Life isn’t like that and fiction has to be about the real texture of life. Sometimes I’ll speak at schools and the students have been introduced to me as a feministAt a TEDx Talk in London in 2012, Adichie presented an inclusive definition for a feminist: “a man or a woman who says, ‘Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better.’” The talk had viral success outside the literary world with almost 5 million views, and, when expanded into a book, became a Times best seller. and they’ll ask questions like, “What is the feminist take on your character?” I don’t know the bloody feminist take on my character! I don’t know because that’s not where the impulse to write the character came from.

  A character of yours that I’ve been thinking about is Ugwu from Half of a Yellow Sun. He’s sympathetic throughout the book, and then toward the end he participates in a gang rape. The whole idea of expressing sympathy for someone who commits sexual assault has become so taboo. I realize that book was written a decade ago, but can you talk about the difficulty of writing that scene and that character?
  I know your question is not “would I write the same thing now” but I’m going to invent that question and say the answer would be yes. That was a very difficult scene to write. Ugwu was the soul of the novelA sprawling novel, Half of a Yellow Sun tells the interconnected story of a group of Nigerians (and one Englishman) whose lives are upended in various ways by the country’s 1967–1970 civil war. Chief among those characters is the houseboy Ugwu, who eventually finds himself fighting in the aforementioned war on the side of the Biafrans. but it was important for me that he was in that scene because that was true. I’d done so much research when I wrote that book and what I found deeply haunting was Biafran soldiers raping Biafran women — because that spoke to the damage war does. So again, it’s about truth telling. But I still come away from Half of a Yellow Sun thinking that Ugwu is a good person. Had Ugwu not been in a war, I don’t think he would be a person who commits rape. But this whole process of talking about sexual assault now is interesting. There are times I feel uncomfortable with the blanket condemnation that happens, which is why #MeToo maybe has to be a case-by-case thing.

  Are there any real-life examples you’re thinking of?
  I better not give a specific example, but what I say to myself — through my discomfort — is that not every movement can afford nuance. It’s sad, but I think it’s true, and we’ll get to a point where we can afford it.

  Why can’t movements afford nuance?
  With the #MeToo movement, it’s still so young and fragile that I understand the impulse to say that the perpetrators on the other side of it are completely evil. And if you acknowledge nuance you run the risk of the movement falling apart. I understand that, but I’m also person who believes in redemption — to a certain extent. Some people I don’t think are redeemable.

  I understand if you don’t want to talk about specific examples of men who have being accused of sexual impropriety, but when novelists or other artists have been subject to those kinds of accusations, does that change your thinking about their work?
  It’s very complicated. There are some decidedly un-feminist people whose work I like. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t.

  Would Philip Roth fall into that decidedly un-feminist category?
  Somebody was telling me recently that they felt bad for liking Philip Roth.With the reckoning of #MeToo and the death of the author in May, the perceived misogyny in Roth’s work has emerged as a contentious subject. In an essay grappling with the loss of her friend, Zadie Smith wrote that “he had blind spots, prejudices, selves he could imagine only partially, or selves he mistook or mislaid. But, unlike many writers, he did not aspire to perfect vision. He knew that to be an impossibility.” That bothered me. There was a humanity in Philip Roth’s work that is often overlooked when we talk about his misogyny. I read his women and roll my eyes but there is a truth there, because there are many men like his men. Misogyny is a reality in the world. Maybe there are people who want Philip Roth’s misogynists to die at the end of the novel so that they’ll know misogyny is bad. But that would be a little easy, wouldn’t it? The world is complex. People are not perfect. This goes back to how there are things about contemporary discourse that makes me uncomfortable.

  We’re not particularly good at dealing with nuance these days.
  I think in some ways nuance is dead. But you know something else that’s dead? I feel like in liberal-left circles, increasingly you can’t even say that you don’t know why something is wrong. I’ll talk to students and somebody will say something is terrible and everyone else will be nodding along; I’m thinking that half of them don’t know why that thing is terrible. They’re just afraid to ask and have other people think they’re terrible too.

  I realize you only have direct experience with half of this equation, but what do you think are the differences between male and female literary celebrity?
  Now, let me think about the time when I was a famous male writer.

  It’s a relatively little-known period in your career.
  Yes, it is. But do I have any useful thoughts on this difference? I don’t know. Well, that’s not true. Actually I do; it would be a cop-out not to share them. There are many things that a famous male writer can do without worrying about the risk of not being taken seriously — if you’re interested in fashion, for example. Very often women writers have to tread much more carefully because their grip on being considered as serious — which has nothing to do with how the world is — is more tenuous.

  Can you give me an example?
  When a woman says something controversial, she’s much more likely to be criticized about her personality and even about how she looks. Not that men don’t get that, but women get it more quickly and more often. And to be specific to writing, a man can write about a subject like marriage and immediately it can be seen as an insightful take on society. But a woman writes about marriage and it’s seen as this smaller, more intimate thing. We’ve gone past the point where women are directly criticized for their subject matter, but the language used about their writing hasn’t really changed. When men and women write about similar things, what the women write is often cast in less lofty terms.

  One of your TED Talks is about the need for a multiplicity of storiesAdichie’s first TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” from 2009, was another viral success. From a stage in Oxford, she discussed the importance of listening to all cultures and voices, and how limiting ourselves to one narrative is the root of prejudice: “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign,” she said, “but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.” and storytellers, which is also about the need for empathy. But what are the limits of empathy and storytelling? There’s that impulse toward “understanding” of people on the left that turns Hillbilly Elegy or whatever into a best seller, but doesn’t empathy need reciprocity in order to fully breathe? I don’t get the sense that a bunch of people on the right, for instance, are making good-faith efforts to understand why the left is so up in arms.
  The right doesn’t care about the left. The right knows how to be a tribe, but the left doesn’t.

  I’ve heard you use that phrase before and I’m not sure I know exactly what you mean.
  Well, the right will protect its own in ways that are ridiculous. There are people, who I think know better, who defend their president knowing that their president is wrong. But they do it for the group and what they see as the larger good. The left seems unable to do that.

  Isn’t it a good thing to resist the impulse to blindly defend something?
  Not all the time. Now we’re talking politics. Now we’re talking strategy. You need to think about what you want to achieve. The only way we can create the world we want is if we deal with the world as it is. Right now, for example, just reading about who might run for the Democrats, I’m constantly struck by how people on the left are like “oh no, she took money from so-and-so.” We sometimes have to ignore the faults of a person who is likely to push something progressive forward. If we eat our own, as the left often does, we risk giving up positions of power.

  Maybe I’m politically naïve, but doesn’t tribalism snuff out multiple perspectives in damaging ways?
  Yeah, but there are some things for which we shouldn’t consider multiple points of view. I don’t want to hear multiple perspectives on the question of human dignity. There’s one perspective: Every human being in the world deserves dignity. Or separating children from their parents: that’s inhumane. There are positions that the left should never compromise on. Anyway, what was your original question?

  The limits of empathy.
  There’s a few too many of these Let Us Understand the Trump Voter pieces in the left-leaning press in the U.S.

  At the expense of understanding other subjects?
  There’s the narrow idea that “working class” means white people in rural America. Around America there are working-class black and brown people.As of 2013, people of color accounted for 37 percent of the American working class; by 2032, they will make up the majority of the working class. I would like somebody to do a piece on what they’re thinking. Because they have many of the same concerns as working-class white people and apparently they didn’t vote in large numbers for Trump. So let’s hear from them. Or maybe we should have more pieces humanizing people who cross the U.S. border. Let’s actually talk on a human level about being separated from your children. I don’t need to read another 25 pieces about why people would support a president like Trump. I understand that. There are other things to talk about.

  In 2016, you wrote that great short story about Melania Trump. Has your thinking about her psychology changed since then?
  There’s a sense in which her characterization in the story still holds true for me.In January 2016, the New York Times Book Review commissioned Adichie to write a short story on the election. The result, “The Arrangements,” investigates Melania Trump’s internal life, and begins with a riff on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: “Melania said she would buy the flowers herself.” There’s something I feel about her and it lives in the same emotional space as compassion and pity — and that feeling has increased. Actually, when I wrote that story I thought it was about Trump’s daughter [Ivanka]. I saw the story as making a case for how he [President Trump] is unstable but is surrounded by people who are stable and reasonable, such as his daughter and his wife. There was also a very feminist take to the story’s premise, which was that the women around him know what they’re dealing with. There’s a kind of knowingness in dealing with somebody they care about but understand is crazy. I’ve since changed my mind about his daughter.

  Why?
  She doesn’t seem reasonable like we thought she might — not at all. For a character, you need something ambiguous to work with and Ivanka doesn’t have that for me anymore.

  It’s amazing, though, that Melania can still be such a cipher even with all the attention she gets.
  Yes, but one wonders. I look at pictures of her and I see great sadness. I don’t want anyone to be sad, but the idea that she might be sad about her situation is almost comforting because it reminds you that there’s still some sort of humane presence in the private space of the White House.

  I find myself having such ungenerous feelings about the president and First Lady’s personal life. It’s like, he might be president but least he’s not happy at home. It’s such mean-spirited thing to feel, but I can’t help it.
  [Laughs.] I know what you’re talking about. I do.

  This is related only insofar as it’s about you and your tangential relationship with an extremely famous woman: What effect did Beyoncé have on your career?
  It meant that some people who never would have heard of me now know about me.In 2013, Beyoncé sampled Adichie on the interlude of “***Flawless,” pulling from We Should All Be Feminists: “We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man.” But I don’t know that those people necessarily went out and bought my books. Honestly, I’m not terribly cool about popular culture. I’m not very big on music. I listen to Nina Simone and Nigerian highlifePioneered in Ghana, the West African dance music highlife features bright guitar lines and horns played over a clave rhythm. Nigerian highlife musicians, including Victor Olaiya and Dr Sir Warrior, often include traditional Igbo instruments, like the udu pot drum and ekwu slit drum. from the 1960s. I wish I had some interesting thing to say about the Beyoncé experience, but no, I just sort of think it’s good because some young people who heard that song [“***Flawless”] might start thinking about feminism.

  You’ve talked before about how it wasn’t until you came to America that you thought about yourself as “black,” because you’d never been identified by the color of your skin while you were in Nigeria. My understanding is that coming here and finding yourself slotted into that category was a frustrating experience. But were there were positives to it? What was gained?
  When I said that I didn’t mean it negatively. But I remember when I first came to the U.S.,After a brief attempt at studying medicine, Adichie moved to America for college when she was 19, graduating from Eastern Connecticut State University in 2001. Like the protagonist of Americanah, she has also spent time in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. my sister was in Brooklyn so I spent the summer with her. And when I was there an African-American man called me “sister.” I’d been in the U.S. only a few weeks, but I already knew that “sister” meant blackness and that blackness was loaded with negatives. I remember saying to the man, “Don’t call me your sister.” Almost 20 years later, I’m ashamed of having done that. If blackness in America were benign, I wouldn’t have had a problem with being called “sister.” I had internalized negative stereotypes. But my need to understand those stereotypes made me start reading African-American history, and now I take a lot of pride in that history. There’s a lot of grace and resilience with black American stories. So to answer your question, for me there are many positives. I’m quite happily black. But I also make a distinction: to be African is different from being African-American. We’re both black, but we’re distinct ethnic groups — America labels us both “black”: You walk into a fancy store, you look like me, and there are people who think, why are you here?

  In your New Yorker profile you said that one day you’d tell your daughter what it means to be black“Someday she will talk to her about what it means to be black, but not yet,” wrote Larissa MacFarquhar in a recent Adichie profile in The New Yorker. “She wants her daughter to be in a place where race as she has encountered it in America does not exist.”. Do you know what you’ll say?
  No, I don’t. I want to protect her from everything. I know I can’t.

  I want to return to the subject of empathy and representation. Actually, sorry, this is relevant: Have you seen Black Panther?
  I can’t tell you that.

  Why not?
  [Laughs.] Because I’d lose my black card! I need to see it. I just haven’t had time.

  Ah, okay. My question was related to that movie, but let’s try anyway. When Black Panther came out it was seen as a victory for representation. But is representation enough as a political end? The cynic in me sometimes wonders if a bunch of white guys in a boardroom somewhere can look at the all money Black Panther made and feel like that lets them off the hook for there still being all white guys in the boardroom.
  I don’t think people who celebrate Black Panther think representation is enough. Representation is a start, but I want a black person to be writing the checks. I don’t know how you get into the secret society of people who actually write checks but that’s where black women and men need to get to, and white women, and Chinese women. How wonderful it would be if in that meeting of the executives you had white men, Chinese men, Indian men, black men, white women, black women, Sri Lankan women. The stories that would come out of that would be fantastic because if someone brought up cultural bullshit, there’d be someone there who could call it bullshit. So to get back to your question, yes, I like that Black Panther exists. But it makes me sad that it’s 2018 and the reaction to that movie speaks to how novel its existence is. It shouldn’t be so novel.

  Does America today still offer the sense of opportunity that it did for some of your Nigerian characters in Americanah? Has Trumpism reduced that sense of possibility?
  Actually there’s a large number of Nigerians who admire Trump because he represents a certain kind of African big man. Also, for Christian Nigeria, Trump is fixing all the bad things they believe Obama did, one of which is gay marriage. So for many people, America’s standing hasn’t changed. And for intellectuals and people who are left-leaning politically, there’s a kind of wicked glee [about Trump’s rise], because they think now America can’t lecture us about good governance. It’s a glee that’s very easy to understand, because Americans are very good at coming to tell you how to do something properly.

  You said earlier that you don’t think of yourself as an ideological writer, but what made you feel comfortable being a public advocate for feminism? Were you always interested in being a public intellectual in the same way that I assume you always wanted to be a writer?
  When I started, all I wanted was to write books that somebody would read. I didn’t plan to become this “feminist icon,”What other novelist is quoted in the rarefied air of a Beyoncé single and has their work quoted on a Dior T-shirt? which is something I feel uncomfortable with. People say, “This is what you’re known for.” But that’s not what I know myself for.

  Why are people so quick to tag you as a feminist rather than a novelist?
  Feminism is an easy hook. In a way, literature is more diverse, and maybe it’s easier for people to peg me as a feminist icon than a novelist. But I’ve always been interested in politics. The burning thing of how do we make things better is what makes me keep talking about feminism. And I have to tell you: doing that is not always good for my art. I’m trying to better balance my time. But talking about feminism comes from passion. I really believe we can make the world better.

  Were you worried about what having a child would mean for your art?
  Yes. I used to think I wouldn’t be a good mother because I was so dedicated to my art. I said to myself, I have nephews and nieces who I adore, and I helped raise them, so those will be my children. That’s what I thought for a long time, because I felt that I couldn’t be true to both my art and my child.

  What changed?
  Getting older. I like to joke and say that you’re ready [to have a child] when your body isn’t ready, and when your body is ready, you’re not mentally ready. I guess you have the best eggs when you’re, like, 22, but at 22 you don’t even know yourself. Then when you’re 38 and know yourself, your eggs are not the best quality. Anyway, we’ll talk about eggs another time. But my baby happened, and it’s important to talk honestly about this, because having her changed a lot. Having a child gets in the way of writing. It does. You can’t own your time the way you used to. But the other thing that motherhood does — and I kind of feel sorry for men that they can’t have this — is open up a new emotional plane that can feed your art.

  Do you have a current idea for a new novel?
  Yes, but maybe not.

  That’s a coy answer.
  I might be doing some research for it. Maybe not.

  I guess we’ll have to see how that next novel — whatever it may be — turns out to know if your ideas about motherhood and creativity hold true.
  He said with a veiled threat. I really do think motherhood feeds art. How that will be executed is another question. But having access to the emotional plane that comes with birthing a child: I can see the world through her eyes and notice things that I wouldn’t have noticed without her. I’ve lost out on time, but I’ve gained quite richly in other ways. At least that’s the theory I’m working with now.

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/11/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-to-publish-memoir-about-her-fathers-death

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to publish memoir about her father's death
  This article is more than 1 month old
  Notes on Grief will recount the life of ‘a remarkable man of kindness and charm’ and the author’s struggle to absorb his loss during lockdown last year

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
  ‘Being one of the millions of people grieving’ … Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Photograph: Manny Jefferson/The Guardian
  Alison Flood
  Thu 11 Feb 2021 14.18 GMT

  118
  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a memoir about the sudden death of her father in lockdown last year. Notes on Grief, by the Orange prize-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, will be published on 11 May. Her UK publisher 4th Estate described it as “a timely and deeply personal … work of meditation, remembrance and hope”.

  Adichie’s father, James Nwoye Adichie, died unexpectedly from complications of kidney failure last summer. He was in Nigeria, while his daughter was in the US. The author detailed his death, and her response to it, in an essay for the New Yorker in September, writing of how her four-year-old daughter re-enacts how she responded to the news: “She gets down on her knees to demonstrate, her small clenched fist rising and falling, and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was, utterly unravelling, screaming and pounding the floor.”

  Adichie has built on the essay to explore the nature of collective grief during the pandemic, of “being one of the millions of people grieving, about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief, and also about the loneliness and anger that accompany it”. The book will also tell her father’s life story, from his survival of the Biafran war to his career as a statistics professor, painting a portrait of “a remarkable man of kindness and charm”.

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘America under Trump felt like a personal loss'
  Read more
  In an interview with the Guardian last November, Adichie described her father as “the loveliest man” and said that many of his stories from the Biafran war fed into Half of a Yellow Sun. “I really do feel that I’ve been remade,” she said of losing him. “I feel that I’ve been remade by grief.”

  4th Estate editor Nick Pearson said: “Notes on Grief is a moving tribute to the father Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie loved fiercely and whose sudden death devastated her. It will be treasured by readers for the light it sheds on the pain of navigating the loss of someone we love.”

1. Notes on grief
LCCN
2021931412
Type of material
Book
Personal name
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 1977- author.
Main title
Notes on grief / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Edition
First.
Published/Produced
New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.
Projected pub date
2105
Description
pages cm
ISBN
9780593320808 (hardcover)
(ebook)

QUOTE: "Adichie has that great gift of distilling concepts that could otherwise be too academic, too heady, into what feels like a line your wise older sister just uttered while fixing her hair," commented Julia Burk in The Progressive. Burk added: "To citizens of the world who haven't embraced feminism: consider this book your formal invitation."
We Should All Be Feminists By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Knopf Doubleday. $7.95.64 pages.

When actress Emma Watson spoke before the United Nations last fall introducing her "He for She" campaign for gender equality, she attributed the lack of feminist progress in the world to the negative connotations the word "feminist" has attracted.

Men have not been made to feel welcome by feminists, she explained; we have not adequately shown men how feminism can benefit them. "I would like to take this opportunity to extend your formal invitation," she told the audience of elder statesmen, to a round of applause.

Fawning headlines proclaiming "men need more feminists like Emma Watson" didn't sit right with me and many fellow feminists of the more ornery stripe, particularly those of us who have heard too many times that "feminists have to stop hating men."

All this is why Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is so downright inspiring. Beyonce is rightly credited for bringing the word "feminist" new cultural capital with the song "Flawless," but it wouldn't be such a powerful musical moment if the words being sampled weren't so elegantly simple:

"We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much."

The lines are from Adichie's 2012 Ted Talk, which has since been expanded into the pocket-sized book of the same title, We Should All Be Feminists. It is the perfect size to keep for easy reference or to hand to anyone who seems unconvinced.

Adichie has that great gift of distilling concepts that could otherwise be too academic, too heady, into what feels like a line your wise older sister just uttered while fixing her hair.

Ifemelu, her character in the 2013 novel Americanah, is a young Nigerian immigrant to the United States who turns her musings on racial politics in America into a successful blog.

In one post, she sums up white Americans' unwillingness to talk about race: "Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don't even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion."

In Feminists, you get the sense Adichie is responding to a thousand ignorant commenters with her every disarming aside.

Recalling the first time she was called a feminist, Adichie describes her adoration for the male friend who said the word--and her confusion when she realized it was not a compliment. "I could tell from his tone--the same tone with which a person would say, 'You're a supporter of terrorism,' " she recalls.

Adichie's memories of attempting to reconcile this negative baggage with wanting to be unabashedly female and feminine will be familiar to many. When a male journalist tells her she should avoid the word feminist because "feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands," she adopts the moniker Happy Feminist. When a Nigerian woman insists that feminism is Western and incompatible with African culture, she begins to call herself a Happy African Feminist. "At some point," she recalls, "I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes To Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For Men."

On the theory Watson perpetuated that feminists are too "militant," Adichie recalls being told something she wrote was too angry. "Of course, it was angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change." Adichie briefly mentions that she's also full of hope for humanity's ability to better itself, before adding, "But back to the anger."

She writes of an American female friend with a high-paying job who felt slighted in a meeting, when a boss gave a male colleague credit for her work. "She wanted to speak up, to challenge her boss," writes Adichie. "But she didn't. Instead, after the meeting, she went to the bathroom and cried, then called me to vent about it. She didn't want to speak up because she didn't want to seem aggressive."

Adichie muses about the source of this all-too-common fear.

"What struck me--with her and with many older female American friends I have--is how invested they are in being 'liked.' How they have been raised to believe that their being likeable is very important and that this 'likeable' trait is a specific thing. And that specific thing does not include showing anger or being aggressive or disagreeing too loudly."

On making sacrifices to preserve peace in a marriage, Adichie notes, "When men say it, it is usually about something they should not be doing anyway," while when women say the same, "it is usually because they have given up a job, a career goal, a dream."

On "playing the gender card," Adichie is at her most quotable:

"Some people ask, 'Why the word 'feminist'? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?' Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights, in general--but to choose to use the vague expression 'human rights' is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded ... that the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human."

As for the rabbit hole of men who wish to derail conversations about feminism by pointing out that they, too, can be oppressed, Adichie nimbly steps around it: "Some people will say, 'Well poor men also have a hard time.' And they do. But that is not what this conversation is about."

Though many of Adichie's stories take place in Nigeria, the experiences are to some extent universal--and often cringe-worthily so. Speaking of her friend Louis, who is kind and compassionate but simply couldn't believe that sexism existed until he saw it for himself, she writes, "I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else."

Louis is intelligent and progressive, but like many men he believes that sexism is a thing of the past (just as many white people are quick to characterize the United States as "post-racial" and dismiss evidence to the contrary). One night out in Lagos, Adichie recalls, a parking attendant went to great lengths and theatrics to locate for her and Louis a suitable parking spot (those who have visited Nigeria will be familiar with this custom). When she gave him a tip, the attendant took the money, but thanked Louis instead. "'Louis looked at me, surprised, and asked, 'Why is he thanking me? I didn't give him the money.' Then I saw realization dawn on Louis's face. The man believed that whatever money I had ultimately came from Louis. Because Louis is a man."

Adichie has no patience for the "I'm not a feminist, but" crowd. Just call yourself a damn feminist. Anything less is not enough. If taking a gentler approach were a successful strategy for social change, women's social, political, and economic oppression would have attracted more attention by now.

To citizens of the world who haven't embraced feminism: consider this book your formal invitation.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The Progressive, Inc.
http://www.progressive.org/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Burke, Julia. "A flawless case for feminism." The Progressive, vol. 79, no. 4, Apr. 2015, p. 41+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A412411084/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=27f649c5. Accessed 7 Apr. 2021.

QUOTE: an "affecting paean," as well as an "elegant, moving contribution to the literature of death and dying."
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi NOTES ON GRIEF Knopf (NonFiction None) $16.00 5, 11 ISBN: 978-0-593-32080-8

An affecting paean to the author’s father, James Nwoye Adichie (1932-2020).

“I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.” So writes award-winning Nigerian novelist Adichie, reflecting on her father’s remarkable life in this slim volume. The first professor of statistics in his country, James lived an eventful and sometimes fraught life. During the Biafran War, for instance, Nigerian soldiers burned all his books, which American colleagues rushed to replace—and, Adichie adds, sent bookshelves as well. He courted the author’s mother sight unseen: A relative bragged about the young scholar, saying he needed an educated wife: “A relative of hers said that she was educated and beautiful, fair as an egret. Fair as an egret! O na-enwu ka ugbana! Another standing family joke.” Funny and principled, James died during the pandemic—not of the virus but kidney disease. Compounding her grief was distance, and Adichie and her siblings followed Igbo tradition by making an “immediate pivot from pain to planning.” In one Zoom call after another, they arranged a burial on an approved Friday that’s not a holiday, since Fridays are the one day the parish priest will bury an elderly person—and, Adichie writes, not being given a proper funeral is a fear that amounts to existential dread among people of her father’s generation. She moves through some of the classic stages of grief, including no small amount of anger—at the well-meaning but empty word demise as well as the ineffectual condolences of well-meaning people: “ ‘It has happened, so just celebrate his life,’ an old friend wrote, and it incensed me.” Eventually, the author reflects on a newfound awareness of mortality and finds a “new urgency” to live her life and do her work in the ever present shadow of death.

An elegant, moving contribution to the literature of death and dying.

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"Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: NOTES ON GRIEF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A654727675/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8ac11357. Accessed 7 Apr. 2021.

QUOTE: This book takes what seems obvious to Adichie--and other well-read feminists--and effectively breaks it down into the fundamentals for a wider readership."
WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

New York: Anchor Books, 2015

We Should All Be Feminists is a pocket-sized book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that functions as a non-academic defence of feminism. Adichie writes this essay from the perspective of her experience as a woman based out of contemporary Nigeria and America. Following the thesis established by the book's title, the form and the content of this book are intended to make feminism--as a term of self-identification and as a social and political movement--accessible to a mass audience. Adichie uses anecdotal evidence to make her argument that gender-based discriminations persist in contemporary life, and that feminism is needed to actively face "the problem of gender." Adichie directly reasons with those who say that feminism is no longer needed today. She chooses examples that resonate with a wide readership; the informal tone and straightforward language suits an audience that might not be accustomed to thinking critically about gender.

While Adichie took up the issue of male violence against women in her 2003 novel Purple Hibiscus, the moments of gender-based discrimination that she illustrates in We Should All Be Feminists are less explicitly violent and therefore make for a less taxing read. In choosing examples like the socialization of girls and boys into their respective gender roles, and the ways in which women in managerial positions are read as aggressive for the same behaviours that garner a male manager praise as assertive, Adichie takes on gender oppression while keeping the tone respectively light. There are moments of humour and self-reflexivity throughout: Adichie recalls how she began to identify as a "Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men" as a means of anticipating the stereotypes she encountered as a self-identified feminist. Keenly, Adichie emphasizes how men will benefit from feminism just as women do--that the pressures that patriarchy places on the masculine role can be just as detrimental as those placed on women. Hence, the title's argument--We Should All Be Feminists--rings true for persons of all genders.

For those familiar with feminist theory, Adichie's title brings to mind bell hooks's Feminism is for Everybody (2000). bell hooks structured Feminism is for Everybody as an accessible handbook on feminism, which she defines as "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression" (1). Both Adichie and hooks are black feminists who attempt to write non-academic primers on feminism as a means of making feminism accessible to non-academic readers; both begin with the premise that feminism is widely misunderstood and negatively stereotyped; both do not formally cite sources besides themselves; both speak in terms of what hookss calls "Visionary Feminism," where readers are encouraged to envision a world that is more equitable and joyous for a greater number of people.

When it comes to contemporary feminist and postcolonial scholarship, and whether or not Adichie's text brings something new to the conversation, this text is limited. Adichie takes a heteronormative and cis-gendered approach to feminism: throughout the book, gender is assumed to be a binary in which persons are biologically male or female--no room is made for trans and other non-binary identities. More consequential to her overall argument is the decision Adichie makes to focus solely on gender, rather than opting for an intersectional approach. Adichie makes the decision to draw her examples from life in contemporary Lagos, defamiliarizing Western readers' stereotypical understandings of Africa just as she defamiliarizes stereotypical understandings of feminism; in the Introduction, Adichie explains that this essay evolved from a talk at TEDxEuston, "a yearly conference focused on Africa" (3). And yet, Adichie seems to disavow an intersectional approach to feminism in this book: she implies that she is not interested in talking about class or race, here--that "...this conversation is about gender" (43-44). To isolate gender from other positionings can perhaps only be done in the abstract. And yet, it is clear that Adichie is doing so in an effort to rhetorically strip down our complicated social realities and make her argument simple: feminism is needed as a means of acknowledging "the specific and particular problem of gender" (41).

Early in the book, Adichie admits "I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else" (14). What is obvious to Adichie but is not obvious to many of the people in her life is that feminism is still needed in contemporary life. This book takes what seems obvious to Adichie--and other well-read feminists--and effectively breaks it down into the fundamentals for a wider readership.

Lauren Fournier is an artist and PhD student in the Department of English at York University, where she studies contemporary feminist literature, art theory, and performance. HShe is currently a SSHRC Doctoral-CGS holder.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Canadian Woman Studies
http://www.yorku.ca/cwscf/
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Fornier, Lauren. "We Should All Be Feminists." Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 31, no. 1-2, 2014, p. 143. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A470868032/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=80d78ad4. Accessed 7 Apr. 2021.

QUOTE: "An eloquent, stirring mustread for budding and reluctant feminists."
ADICHIE, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists. 64p. ebook available. Vintage/Anchor. 2015. pap. $7.95. ISBN 9781101911761.

A personal essay adapted from the writer's TEDx talk of the same name. Adichie, celebrated author of the acclaimed Americanah (Knopf, 2013), offers a more inclusive definition of feminism, one that strives to highlight and embrace a wide range of people and experiences. Drawing on anecdotes from her adolescence and adult life, Adichie attempts to strike down stereotypes and unpack the baggage usually associated with the term. She argues that an emphasis on feminism is necessary because to focus only on the general "human rights" is "to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded." Her focus on women of color is also an aspect of the movement that hasn't always been given its due, and Adichie works in her own experience and life as a feminist within a more conservative Nigerian culture in an organic and eye-opening way. She also points to examples in Nigeria that are unfortunately universal: a young woman who is gang-raped at a university and is then vilified and blamed for the crime, which, unfortunately, happens often in the United States. Injustices such as these, she posits, are reasons enough to be angry and outspoken. The humorous and insightful tone will engage teens and give them an accessible entry point into gender studies. This title would also work well as a discussion starter in debate and speech classes. VERDICT An eloquent, stirring mustread for budding and reluctant feminists.--Shelley Diaz, School Library Journal

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Diaz, Shelley. "Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists." School Library Journal, vol. 62, no. 2, 2016, p. 110+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A442780685/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=85bb88a2. Accessed 7 Apr. 2021.

"Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2014. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A393255069/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=428a22d2. Accessed 7 Apr. 2021. Burke, Julia. "A flawless case for feminism." The Progressive, vol. 79, no. 4, Apr. 2015, p. 41+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A412411084/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=27f649c5. Accessed 7 Apr. 2021. "Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: NOTES ON GRIEF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A654727675/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8ac11357. Accessed 7 Apr. 2021. Fornier, Lauren. "We Should All Be Feminists." Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 31, no. 1-2, 2014, p. 143. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A470868032/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=80d78ad4. Accessed 7 Apr. 2021. Diaz, Shelley. "Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists." School Library Journal, vol. 62, no. 2, 2016, p. 110+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A442780685/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=85bb88a2. Accessed 7 Apr. 2021.

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