Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Hello Monks...

I am Riddhi Bhatt. You know...what is today's blog ?This blog is about Sunday Task on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper The Postcolonial Studies(paper-203). So, let’s start making this wonderful blog task. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie :

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 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.

1) Did the first talk help you in understanding of postcolonialism?
The first talk is about the danger of a single story. Adichie explains that if we only hear about a people, place or situation from one point of view, we risk accepting one experience as the whole truth. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Danger of a Single Story" Ted Talk, in July 2009, explores the negative influences that a “single story” can have and identifies the root of these stories. 

Here She also talked about that It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. 

Adichie shares two primary examples to discuss why generalizations are made. Reflecting on her everyday life, she recalls a time where her college roommate had a “default position” of “well-meaning pity” towards her due to the misconception that everyone from Africa comes from a poor, struggling background (04:49).

She said "Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. "

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. 

(Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TEDGlobal, TED, 23 July

2009)

2. Are the arguments in the seconds talk convincing?

Adichie's TED Talk argues that "feminist" isn't a bad word and that everyone should be feminist. She begins with a brief anecdote about her friend Okoloma. She said that she  decided to call myself "a happy feminist." Then an academic, a Nigerian woman told her that feminism was not our culture and that feminism wasn't African, and that she was calling herself a feminist because she had been corrupted by "Western books." Which amused her, because a lot of her early readings were decidedly unfeminist. she thinks she must have read every single Mills & Boon romance published before she was sixteen. And each time she tried to read those books called "the feminist classics," she'd get bored, and she really struggled to finish them. But anyway, since feminism was un-African, she decided that she would now call herself "a happy African feminist." At some point she was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men. 

Men have testosterone and are in general physically stronger than women. There's slightly more women than men in the world, about 52 percent of the world's population is female. But most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate, Wangari Maathai, put it simply and well when she said: "The higher you go, the fewer women there are." In the recent US elections we kept hearing of the Lilly Ledbetter law, and if we go beyond the nicely alliterative name of that law, it was really about a man and a woman doing the same job, being equally qualified, and the man being paid more because he's a man.So in the literal way, men rule the world, and this made sense a thousand years ago because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival. The physically stronger person was more likely to lead, and men, in general, are physically stronger. Of course there are many exceptions. (07:17)

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." The best feminist I know is my brother Kene. He's also a kind, good-looking, lovely man, and he's very masculine. 

(Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi." We Should All Be Feminist"  TEDGlobal, TED,December 2012)

3. What did you like about the third talk?

" Be courageous enough to accept your life

 as messy, your life is not always

 perfectly matching to your ideology."

It was very interesting to know about Chimamanda African author with voice of Marginalized people. Presenting very new and fresh thought about feminism and importance of truth in post-truth era in this third talk.

"Whenever you wake-up

That is your morning, what matters is you wake up."

The point is that intent matters, that context matters. Somebody might very well call me Chimichanga out of a malicious desire to mock my name, and that I would certainly not laugh about. But there is a difference between malice and a mistake.

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

Yes...It is change my view that I always believe that literature is always for reading but after watch this video and  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's talk it's change my mind toward the literature. My perception has totally changed. Also I can understand that whatever is happening near us is also literature. She said that what is the point of culture? I mean there's the decorative, the dancing ... but also, culture really is about preservation and continuity of a people. In my family, I am the child who is most interested in the story of who we are, in our traditions, in the knowledge about ancestral lands. My brothers are not as interested as I am. But I cannot participate, I cannot go to umunna meetings, I cannot have a say. Because I'm female. Culture does not make people, people make culture. So if it is in fact true -if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we must make it our culture. Its very interesting.

THANK YOU......