Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes on feminism
“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. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
“Teach her that the idea of 'gender roles' is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl.'Because you are a girl' is never reason for anything. Ever.”
“Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.”
“A man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in.”
“Feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive. It is misogynistic to suggest that they are. Sadly, women have learned to be ashamed and apologetic about pursuits that are seen as traditionally female, such as fashion and makeup. But our society does not expect men to feel ashamed of pursuits considered generally male - sports cars, certain professional sports. In the same way, men's grooming is never suspect in the way women's grooming is - a well-dressed man does not worry that, because he is dressed well, certain assumptions might be made about his intelligence, his ability, or his seriousness. A woman, on the other hand, is always aware of how a bright lipstick or a carefully-put-together outfit might very well make others assume her to be frivolous.”
“We have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.”
“If we don't place the straitjacket of gender roles on young children, we give them space to reach their full potential.”
“At some point 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.”
“Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women. For X please insert words like “anger,” “ambition,” “loudness,” “stubbornness,” “coldness,” “ruthlessness.”
“Tell Chizalum that women actually don't need to be championed and revered; they just need to be treated as equal human beings.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes from ‘We Should All Be Feminists’
“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. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.”
“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”
“We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likable. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons. All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.”
“I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.”
“A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick.”
“My own definition is 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. All of us, women and men, must do better.”
“We teach girls shame. “Close your legs. Cover yourself.” We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”
“Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.”
“I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else.”
“I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.”
“And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males. 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 will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.”
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes from Purple Hibiscus
“We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.”
“The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?”
“There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.”
“Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right.”
“People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival.”
“It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't.”
“...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary.”
“I was stained by failure.”
“I cannot control even the dreams that I have made.”
“Papa sat down at the table and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip, as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you love.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes on love
“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.”
“That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out”
“And it's wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It's possible to love something and still condescend to it.”
“He was already looking at their relationship through the lens of the past tense. It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go? Perhaps real love was familial, somehow, linked to blood, since love for children did not die as romantic love did.”
“I'm chasing you. I'm going to chase you until you give this a chance.”
“Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”
“Why do I love him?...I don't think love has a reason...I think love comes first and then the reasons follow.”
“I don't want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life," Curt said with a force that startled her.”
“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
“Love is the most important. The most necessary human emotion. Not just romantic love. Love. The ability of human beings to connect”.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes on education
“Education is a priority! How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?”
“The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?”
If the government doesn't fund education, which they often don't, students are going to stay home and not go to school. It affects them directly. But I'm really not interested in writing explicitly about that. I'm really interested in human beings, and in love, and in family. Somehow, politics comes in.
“A good education isn’t the same thing as making the whole damn world something to be explained!”
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes on Africa
If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.
Nigerian politics has been, since the military dictatorships, largely non-ideological. Rather than a battle of ideas, it is about who can pump in the most money and buy the most access.
There is, for me, as a black woman, as an African woman, a sense of possibility in America that I don't feel when I'm in Europe.
If you followed the media you'd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that's not the case; so it's important to engage with the other Africa.
It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.
I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.
Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in 'real' African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.
Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.
What I find problematic is the suggestion that when, say, Madonna adopts an African child, she is saving Africa. It's not that simple. You have to do more than go there and adopt a child or show us pictures of children with flies in their eyes. That simplifies Africa.
In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - would never leave.
When I go back home now, when I go back to Nigeria now, I get off the plane in Lagos and I just don't think of race. I get on the plane and arrive in Atlanta, and immediately I'm aware of race.
I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria - it always will be. I consider myself a Nigerian who is comfortable in the world. I look at it through Nigerian eyes.
You know, I don't think of myself as anything like a 'global citizen' or anything of the sort. I am just a Nigerian who's comfortable in other places.
I think I'm ridiculously fortunate. I consider myself a Nigerian - that's home; my sensibility is Nigerian. But I like America, and I like that I can spend time in America.
There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes on writing
Literature shows us who we are, takes us into history, tells us not just what happened but how it felt and teaches us, as an American Professor once put it, about things that are “not googleable.” Books shape our understanding of the world.
You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.
I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.
I had people read it early on and, you know, well-meaning people said to me, you should take out the blogs. I didn't get much positive feedback. Only because most of these people were protective of me - it was sort of like a "tone it down, make it easier to swallow" kind of thing. And I just thought if I do that then it's not the book I want to write.
My grandfather died in the war, my family went through the war, and it affected my parents in really profound ways. I've always wanted to write about that period - in some ways to digest it for myself, something that defined me but that I didn't go through.
If the government doesn't fund education, which they often don't, students are going to stay home and not go to school. It affects them directly. But I'm really not interested in writing explicitly about that. I'm really interested in human beings, and in love, and in family. Somehow, politics comes in.
I do not deny the power of words to wound. Words can break the human spirit. Some of the deepest pain I have experienced in my life have come from words that somebody said or wrote, and some of the most beautiful gifts I have received have also been words.
I believe deeply in the principle of free expression, and I believe this particularly because I am a writer and a reader, and because literature is my great love and because I have been formed and inspired and consoled by books.
No human endeavour requires freedom as much as creativity does. To create, one needs a kind of formless roving of the mind, to go nowhere and anywhere and everywhere. It is from that swell that art emerges.
While social media has re-shaped the traditional power dynamic by giving some access to the powerless, it has also made it easy to mistake the loudest voices for the truest.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes ‘The Danger of a Single Story’
“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.”
“What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could personally not identify.”
“Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again and that is what they become”
“The consequence of the single story is that it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult and it emphasizes that we are different rather than how we are similar.”
“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”
“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity….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.”