Talks by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Hello, readers! I am Divya Parmar and I welcome you all to read my blog. This blog is a response to the thinking activity which is given by Dr. Dilip barad sir. In this blog i will write my learning outcomes from videos by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
1 . The danger of a single story:
Chimamanda Is a storyteller. And in the above Video She tells a few personal stories about what she likes to call “the danger of the single story.”
She grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. Her mother says that she started reading at the age of two, although she thinks four is probably close to the truth. So she was an early reader, and what she read were British and American children’s books. She was also an early writer, and when she began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, she wrote exactly the kinds of stories she was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.
She loved reading American and British books she read. They stirred her imagination. They opened up new worlds for her. But the unintended consequence was that she did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for her was this: It saved her from having a single story of what books are. She comes from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. Her father was a professor. Her mother was an administrator. And so They had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year she turned eight, they got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing her mother told them about him was that his family was very poor. Her mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when she didn’t finish her dinner, her mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So she felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.
She had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, she began to understand my roommate’s response to me. If she had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all she knew about Africa were from popular images, she too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. She would see Africans in the same way that she, as a child, had seen Fide’s family.
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.
The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. “They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.”
She ends with a thought: That 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.
2. We should all be feminist:
In this video she talks first about her one friend. Okuloma lived on her street and looked after her like a big brother. If she liked a boy, she would ask Okuloma’s opinion. Okuloma died in the notorious Sosoliso Plane Crash in Nigeria in December of 2005.
Okuloma was a person with she could argue with, laugh with, and truly talk to. He was also the first person to call her a feminist. She was about fourteen, they were at his house, arguing. Both of them bristling with half bit knowledge from books that they had read. She don’t remember what this particular argument was about, but she remember that as she argued and argued, Okuloma looked at her and said, “You know, you’re a feminist.” It was not a compliment. She could tell from his tone, the same tone that you would use to say something like “You’re a supporter of terrorism.”
She wrote a novel about a man who among other things beats his wife and whose story doesn’t end very well. While she was promoting the novel in Nigeria, a journalist, a nice well-meaning man, told her ,he wanted to advise her. And for the Nigerians here,I'm sure we’re all familiar with how quick our people are to give unsolicited advice. He told her that people were saying that her novel was feminist and his advice to her— and he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke — was that she should never call herself a feminist because feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands. So she decided to call herself “a happy feminist.”
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