Hello Friends, 

This blog is my response to the task assigned to us by our Prof. Dr. DilipSir on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi and listen to her talks and write few words on it. Read, understand and enjoy. Happy Learning!

Official website of Chimamanda

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie born 15 September 1977 is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories to 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, a feminist, 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). Her most recent books are Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017) and Notes on Grief (2021). In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. (Wikipedia)

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1977. She grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where her father was a Professor and her mother was the first female Registrar. She studied medicine for a year at Nsukka and then left for the US at the age of 19 to continue her education on a different path.

She graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State University with a degree in Communication and Political Science.

She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Arts degree in African History from Yale University. She was awarded a Hodder fellowship at Princeton University for the 2005-2006 academic year, and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University for the 2011-2012 academic year. In 2008, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.

She has received honorary doctorate degrees from Eastern Connecticut State University, Johns Hopkins University, Haverford College, Williams College, the University of Edinburgh, Duke University, Amherst College, Bowdoin College, SOAS University of London, American University, Georgetown University, Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Northwestern University.

Ms. Adichie’s work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), won the Orange Prize. Her 2013 novel Americanah won the US National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013.

She has delivered two landmark TED talks: her 2009 TED Talk The Danger of A Single Story and her 2012 TEDx Euston talk We Should All Be Feminists, which started a worldwide conversation about feminism, and was published as a book in 2014.

Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017.

Her most recent work, Notes On Grief, an essay about losing her father, has just been published.

She was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2015. In 2017, Fortune Magazine named her one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders. She is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ms. Adichie divides her time between the United States and Nigeria, where she leads an annual creative writing workshop. 

https://www.chimamanda.com/about-chimamanda/

1. THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY 

Q-1 Did the first talk help you in the understanding of postcolonialism?

Ans. Basic premise of Post colonial criticism, it concerns with 

☆ Undermining universalism, universalism is rejected, one way of seeing the world, unquestionable truth

☆ Language is very important, she calls herself as chocolate skin colour, chocolate has positive connotation. 

Hybrid unstable identity, moving from one geographical location to another, how people look at us, if some Indians go to USA, or Africans or any third world countries, they'll looked upon as inferior, lower than them, might be considered as blacks. 

Chimamanda's roommates shocked, they said you should be listening to your singers only, conflict of identity, being a sensitive writer, she observes, as how do we record things in our memory, cross cultural interactions. 

Americans surprised at Chimamanda's English language, so very skilled & mastered. 

Our own literature should be read & compared, use literature in our works, a combination to various literatures to form a fusion. 

Chimamanda is a story teller, writer, and in the above video, she calls for the dangers of a single story. She grew up in a University campus, Nigeria, started reading at age of 2 or 4, early writer at 7, her characters were white blue eyed, played in snow, ate apples, talked of weather, drank gingerbear, in short her characters were foreign, influenced by the British, American books she read. In Nigeria there was no snow, they ate mangoes, no one talked on weather. But books should have foreigners, they open the new world for us.

If many writers will write, all will have their own story to tell, so many angles to look from at a same situation and thus to avoid the dangers of a single story. 

Chimamanda came from middle class family, her mother administrator and her father professor. At age 8, they had a new house boy came from a very poor family, but we know only one story of him that he's a poor boy, but when they visited his village, they saw that his brother can make very beautiful baskets, it means apart from being poor they had talent, this is other side of the story. 

English is the official language of Nigeria, Africa known for beautiful landscape, animals, incomprehensible people. But Chimamanda also knows the other side of Africa, poor people as she saw Fidey's family from childhood. People have chocolate skin colour, curly hairs so cannot form pony tails, these are different versions of the same story, literature should tell of all these too. Literature should also tell of failure of African states, she had a very happy childhood, but then there also was repression by military government, sometimes parents not given salary, normalized political fear. 

Another stereotype is that Nigerians don’t read literature but it's not so, literature should be made affordable and available. Once she met a woman who told her she didn’t like the ending of the novel so suggested her to write another sequel and also told her the storyline to write. 

Many stories matter, to empower, to humanize, can break, can repair. When we reject a single story, we gain a kind of Paradise, when we realise there is never a single story about a place or a person. 

African people, some who are unable to speak for themselves, Western literature story of America, Rudyard Kipling- Half devil half child. 

Ebo - to be greater than other, depends on power, how many what stories are told. Many stories of America she read, happy childhood to be successful. Grandfather died in military, Polly cousin died due to lack of Healthcare, friend died in plane crash, some problems she suffered were like jam disappeared from breakfast table, milk became ration, political fear. All these are also real life stories. All these are what makes, shapes Chimamanda who is today an excellent speaker, she’s best able to express her feelings and emotions into words, she knows how to say what she wants to say very precisely. 

A single story creates stereotypes, they're incomplete. Some stories robs people of dignity, rather than emphasising how we are different, how we're similar. We need many stories to create a balance. 

So yes, the first talk helped me to understand post colonialism, how other countries like America considered Africans as subaltern and how the Africans were also under British colonization and they caused them troubles by threatening the life and not giving salary many times. How the minds of people are also colonized by various stereotypes based on a single story and how first world countries look, treat and consider the third world countries and common people when they go there. 

 2. We Should All Be Feminists 

Q-2 Are the arguments in the second talk convincing?

Ans. Yes, the arguments in this talk are very much convincing. 

Okoma, the first person to call her feminist. But Chimamanda calls herself a Happy African Feminist. She calls herself who not hate men, she does things what she likes at heart and not to please men. 

The higher we go, the fewer women there are. We live in a vastly different world, the person most 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 this attributes. 

Anger has long history of bringing about positive change but in addition to being angry I'm also hopeful, ability of human beings to make and remake for better. 

A woman’s success can never be a threat to a man, infact she supports man to excel and a vice-versa. Both are complementary to each other as yin yang.  ☯️

Marriage can be a good thing, it can be a sort of joy, love, mutual support. 

Some people make women feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something and so girls grow up to be a woman who cannot say they've desire, who silence themselves. They grow up to be woman who cannot say what they truly think, they grow up to be woman who pretence into an art form. 

Culture does not make people, people make culture. 

Feminist- dictionary meaning - A person who believes in the social, political, and economical equality of sexes. 

As per Chimamanda, A Feminist is a man or a woman who says yes there's problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better. 

3. Talk on importance of Truth in Post-Truth Era

Q-3 What do you like about the third talk?

Ans. Below are some points which I liked from the third talk.

Name Chimamanda, In Ebo it means my personal spirit will never be broken. 

The title of this talk is "Above all else, Do not lie."

Or at least do not lie often. Tell the truth. We always feel our best and and do our best when we wear truth as our armour. Telling the truth may not always work out, Actually sometimes it doesn't, but because we will sleep well at night. Sometimes we need to find the courage to embrace the truth. 

To read a novel is to give honour to art. 

Be a  fantastic bull shit detector - work on it. It means to be able to sense when a person is saying empty words, these are the qualities of an established writer. We also need to use these on ourself too and sometimes the hardest truth are those we've to tell ourselves. Empty words - it feels much worse than if one had said nothing at all. 

"It's hard to tell ourselves the truth about our failures, our fragilities, our uncertainties. It's hard to tell ourselves that may be we haven't done the best that we can; the truth of our emotions that may be what we feel is hurt rather than anger, that maybe it's the time to close the chapter of our relationship and walk away."

Harvard college mission calls for to be citizen leaders. To bend towards the truth, to go on the side of the truth and to help us to do this make literature your religion which is to say read widely, read fiction, poetry, narrative non-fiction. Make human story the center of our understanding of the world. Think of people, as fragile, imperfect, with pride that can be wounded and hearts that can be touched. Literature should be our religion. 

For many people all over the world, Harvard is a metaphor. Harvard is much more than just a school for untouchable intellectual achievement. The world will make assumptions about us. Use power to change the world, change a slice of the world, no matter how small, if we feel a sense of dissatisfaction, be propelled by our dissatisfaction, act, get into the system and change the system. 

Everybody's story is potentially universal, it just needs to be told well. 

For Chimamanda, she says, "Writing is what I love."

Some of us know what we love, some don't, if we don't know, we will. If not something that we love, then something we like, something that we don’t hate or something. But we will find it. But to find it, we must try. We have to do something until we can do something else. Try if it does work out, try something else. Anything we do is not wasted time, it's experience and experience will serve us in the ways we do not expect. 

A line from a lovely poem by Mary Oliver, "Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination."

When you don't get what you want, think of literature, think of the early bloomers and the late bloomers, think of the many experimental novels that do not follow the traditional form. Your story does not have to have a traditional arc. There's an Ebo saying, translated as "whenever you wake up, that's your morning." What matters is that you wake up. The world is calling you, the America is calling you, there's work to be done, there're tarnished things that need to shine again. There're broken things that need to be made whole again. 

We're in a position to do this. We can do it. Be courageous. Tell the truth. I wish you courage and I wish you well. 

Thank you. 

Q-4 Are these talks bringing any significant change in your way of looking at literature and life?

Ans. These talks by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are life changing, talks by her deal with important things of life, her talks reveal the truth of life and how to deal with life in all ups and downs, it tells that there are various ways of looking at a single story, to keep looking at things from various perspectives and not to conclude anything on looking at one aspect of it. Her talks gives solutions to various problems of life. She is an excellent speaker as well as an excellent writer. She loves writing, writing is her passion, when one does what one loves, that always is the best one can. She is our biggest inspiration. 

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