Talks by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

TOPIC OF THE BLOG:- 

This blog is a part of a thinking activity given by Dilip Barad Sir from The English Department, MKBU, Bhavnagar. Check out Dilip Barad sir's Blog Site (Click Here) for more information and knowledge about  works and writers. In this blog I am going to discuss about Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. These talks are on 'The Dangers of Single Story', 'We should all be Feminists' and 'Harvard University - Importance of Truth in Post - Truth Era'. 

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE:-

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on September 15, 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria. She is Nigerian writer whose second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), gained international acclaim for its depiction of the devastation caused by the Nigerian Civil War. Her novels, short stories, and nonfiction explore the intersections of identity. (Luebering) To Know more about her this blog by Dilip Barad Sir (Click Here).

Talks by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on 'The Dangers of Single Story', 'We should all be Feminists' and 'Harvard University - Importance of Truth in Post - Truth Era'

'THE DANGERS OF SINGLE STORY':-

• In this talk she firstly mentioned how she started reading and writing how it influenced her. Like she said when I started writing around the age of seven all my characters drink ginger beer and talk about weather but at that time in reality we didn’t even talk about weather and I don’t know what ginger beer tastes like.
• Because she read stories in her childhood in which white people or foreigners are in that story she used to think that story by their nature had to have foreign characters in it. But when she found the African books her thoughts changed.
• Through this we can assume that we tend to think something is right, unless we didn’t read more about that. As an example we can see that Jane Austen read patriarch works in her age and might be because of that her women character should be perfect the way men like. But if we see the works of Virginia Woolf we find her women characters are different and more independent compared to Austen.
• In the case of Adichie racism and ideas of color differences open up a new way of thinking. African LIterature saved her from having a single story of what books are.
• Furthermore, In her house a boy named Fide used to work and all Adichie knows about him is his family is very poor and one when she and her mother goes to his village, his mother show them a basket of made from dyed raffia that his brother had made, she was shocked and never thought that anyone in his family can make something. And it is difficult for her to think that they are anything other than poor. That poverty was her single story of them.
• Her roommate was shocked to know that she knows English, can work the stove, and has pity for her even before she saw her. That is her roommate's single story of Nigeria: a single story of catastrophe.
• She told about her single story about Mexican immigrants and when she showed people laughing and happy she felt ashamed of her single story. 
• Whenever someone talks about Story, the word Power comes with it. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. 
• If a particular African person in the novel is bad that makes all Africans bad, and he was somehow representative of all Africans.
• The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. 
• The consequences of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. 
• She ended her talk by saying this: When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. 

WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS:-

• Let’s start this one by the First time when she was called feminist by her friend she didn’t know what feminist means. Of course her friend didn’t call her feminist in a positive tone. When she published her work about a man who beats her wife, the plot didn’t end well. When she was promoting her novel in Nigeria, a journalist came to give her advice that she should never call herself feminist because feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.
• Now, the definition of Feminism also differs from person to person. According to me it didn’t include hate for men because they are biologically the opposite gender. I like to make myself beautiful for my happiness but what most think, if she wears something new or does lipstick and stuff probably she wants to impress the biologically opposite gender. Feminism isn’t to rule the world by womans but it’s about equal rights and place.
• She further told two stories, one is about a class monitor she can’t become because she was female and second about a car parking tip and that man thought that whatever the money she had came from her friend Louis.
• Let’s start this one by the First time when she was called feminist by her friend she didn’t know what feminist means. Of course her friend didn’t call her feminist in a positive tone. When she published her work about a man who beats her wife, the plot didn’t end well. When she was promoting her novel in Nigeria, a journalist came to give her advice that she should never call herself feminist because feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.Men and Women are different of course biologically by the Body. Around 52% of the population are female even though most of the power positions are occupied by Male. She quoted a line said by the late Kenyan Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai, “The higher you go, The fewer Women there are.” 
• Earlier the stronger are meant to rule the world because of the situation and Men are Physically stronger than Women, but the world we are living in now has a different situation. Now, The person more likely to lead is not the physically stronger person, it is the more creative person, the more intelligent person and more innovative person. 
• To start a different world in which Men and Women both can be equally happy, We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. 
• We do a great disservice to boys on how we raise them; we stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves because they have to be a Man. 
• She asked very interesting and important questions. What if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity with money? What if the attitude was not "the boy has to pay" but rather "whoever has more should pay"?  
• We do a much greater disservice to girls because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of men. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say 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." If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, you have to pretend that you're not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.
• Furthermore, we get the idea about how womans are pressured to marry and if she is above a certain age and unmarried, society teaches them to see it as a deep personal failure. The language of marriage is often the language of ownership rather than a language of partnership.
• Difference between “We did it for peace in my marriage” for men and women. Now if Men says he did it for peace in his marriage he will say "Oh my wife said I can't go to a club every night, so for peace in my marriage, I do it only on weekends." But when a woman says, "I did it for peace in my marriage," she's usually talking about giving up a job, a dream, or a career.
• What Compromise is, We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what women do. We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or for accomplishments, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. We teach girls shame. "Close your legs", "Cover yourself". We make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot see they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot see what they truly think, and they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form. 
• Gender and class are different forms of oppression. Gender matters. Men and women experience the world differently. Gender colors the way we experience the world.
• Adichie’s Definition of Feminist, A feminist is 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."

'HARVARD UNIVERSITY - IMPORTANCE OF TRUTH IN POST - TRUTH ERA':-

• Firstly, Truth and Lie have different ideas in it. Some say a lie is something which is not a lie until someone proves that but here Adichie addressee, lie as a political potent. And raises questions like Should we call a lie a lie? When is a lie a lie?
• We must protect the value of truth. Further she said, the biggest regrets of my life are those times when I did not have the courage to embrace the truth. 
• She share an experience about her lying, she attended gatherings of writers where she shook hand with a writer and told him how great fan she was and her wife ask her that which one did she read and she told the one in which men discover himself and she goes away but before that she heard that man saying to his wife that honey you shouldn’t done that. Adichie said no, I shouldn't have done that.
• When her works started to get rejected she convinced herself that her works didn’t find the right home but there was another truth that the manuscript was not very good. 
• Furthermore, It is hard to tell ourselves the truth about our failures, our fragilities, our uncertainties. It is hard to tell ourselves that maybe we haven't done the best that we can. It is hard to tell ourselves the truth of our emotions, that maybe what we feel is hurt rather than anger, that maybe it is time to close the chapter of a relationship and walk away and yet when we do we are better off for it.
• Think of people as people not as abstractions who have to conform to bloodless logic but as people fragile imperfect with prides that can be wounded and hearts that can be touched. Further she described how literature influences her and what literature means to her.
• Be courageous to tell the Truth. Be courageous to accept that life is messy and does not always match your ideology. Be courageous enough to say I don’t know. It takes courage to admit the truth of what you do not know.
• Change a slice of the world no matter how small, if you feel a sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo nurture that dissatisfaction be propelled by your dissatisfaction, act, get into the system and change the system, challenge the steel assumptions. Tell new stories, champion new storytellers because the truth is that the universe does not belong to any one group of people. Everybody's story is potentially universal, it just needs to be told well. Change the media, make it about truth not about entertainment not about profit-making. 
• She quoted Mary Oliver by her line, Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.
• These are some things or ideas which I learnt from these three videos.  

WORKS CITED:-

• Luebering, J.E.. "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie". Encyclopedia Britannica, 15 Sep. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Chimamanda-Ngozi-Adichie.

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