Talks by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Talks by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, (born September 15, 1977, Nigerian author whose work drew extensively on the Biafran war in Nigeria during the late 1960s. Early in life Adichie, the fifth of six children, moved with her parents to Nsukka, Nigeria. A voracious reader from a young age, she found Things fall apart by novelist and fellow igbo chinua achebe transformative. After studying medicine for a time in Nsukka, in 1997 she left for the United States, where she studied communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University (B.A., 2001). Splitting her time between Nigeria and the United States, she received a master's degree in creative writing from John Hopkins university and studied African history at Yale university.

Dangers of single story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Danger of a Single Story" Ted Talk, in July 2009, explores the negative influences of a “single story”. By sharing her personal experience of being a trap of single story she pressures on having more than one perspective for looking towards the world. She grew up reading American literature and later her works also had blue- eyed characters and later when she went to white land for education she realized the single story of Americans towards Africans.

This idea can be or must be experienced by everyone, in a fight between two when we hear a story of only one we start making prejudices for the opposite person and without having any personal grudges we start hating them.

Taking an example of literature. Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë hasn't grown a character of Bertha Mason and so we feel like what's happening with her is to happen because she is made. But then Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso sea (1966) gave readers a new perspective. It broke the prejudices towards Bertha and her single story got new perspectives.

Reading characters is the novel or meeting people from different communities, groups, schools, streams etc . We have a habit of generalizing a single person for the whole group/ community/ or nation.

Adichie also tackles the effect of political and cultural power on stories. Power controls “how [stories] are told, who tells them, when they're told, [and] how many stories are told”.

In 20112 when petrol prices were hiked, various Bollywood actors tweeted about it, following the orders of political power. At present, when the same political power is ruling and prices are increasing, touching 100 they are deleting their tweets. This is how stories and told and controlled by power.

Saturday, 29 October 2022

Chimamanda Njogi

Hello everyone,

This blog is a response to the task assigned by professor Dilip Barad sir as part of a thinking activity in which I would like to share my understanding of the given videos.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works include novels, short stories and nonfiction.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", particularly in her second home, the United States.

Adichie has written the novels Purple Hibiscus , Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah, the short story collection. The Thing Around Your Neck , and the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists. Her most recent books are Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions , Zikora and Notes on Grief.

In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. She was the recipient of the PEN Pinter Prize in 2018.

Second Video:-

She started with her friend and then she talked about one journalist who gave advise to her that she should never called herself a feminist because "Feminist are women who are unhappy because they can not find husbands- so she decided to called herself 'happy feminist'. Then academic Nigerian woman told her that feminism wasn't our culture and that feminism wasn't African and that she was calling herself a feminist because she had been corrupted by 'western books' .

We have different hormones, we have different sexual organs, different biological abilities, women can have babies, men can't. 52% of the world population is female but most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men.

The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate wangari mathai put it simply and we'll when she said,

'The higher you go, the fewer woman there are'

The physically strong person was more likely to lead and men in general are physically stronger, but today we live in a vastly different world. The person more likely to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more creative person, the more intelligent person, the more innovative person and there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be creative, to be innovative.

"Gender matters everywhere in the world".

But she thinks about a utopian society where we must have raised our son differently. Our daughters are different. We do a great disservice to boys on how we raise them. We teach girls to shrink themselves to make themselves smaller. We says to girls

'You can have ambition but not too much'.

'You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you would threaten the man.'

In talking about marriage and relationship- the language is often the language of ownership rather than partnership. We used the word 'RESPECT' to make something a woman shows a man but often not something a man shows a woman. We teach females that in relationships compromise is what women do. We raise girls to see each other as competition not for jobs or for accomplishments which could be a good thing But for the attention of men.

She gave some solutions and idea about how one should raise child:-

What if in raising children we focus on ability instead of gender? What if in raising children we focus on interest instead of gender? What if parents from the beginning taught both the boy and the girl to cook food?

We should unlearn many lessons of gender that internalised when we were growing up.

'GENDER MATTERS' Men and women experience the world differently. Gender colours the way we experience the world.

'CULTURE DOES NOT MAKE PEOPLE,

PEOPLE MAKE CULTURE'

Chimamanda- I AM FEMINIST - 'A PERSON WHO BELIEVES IN THE SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY OF THE SEXES'

A feminist is a person man or women who says 'YES THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH GENDER AS IT IS TODAY AND WE MUST FIX IT, WE MUST DO BETTER'.

Thank you!