Hello everyone,
This blog is a response to the task assigned by professor Dilip Barad sir as part of a thinking activity in which I would like to share my understanding of the given videos.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works include novels, short stories and 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 has written the novels Purple Hibiscus , Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah, the short story collection. The Thing Around Your Neck , and the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists. Her most recent books are Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions , Zikora and Notes on Grief.
In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. She was the recipient of the PEN Pinter Prize in 2018.
First video:- Another story
In this video she talked about her writing experience and the experience she got from society. When she began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that her poor mother was obligated to read, she wrote exactly the kinds of stories she was reading: All her 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. This despite the fact that she lived in Nigeria. She had never been outside Nigeria. They didn't have snow, they ate mangoes, and They never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.
What this demonstrates, according to her, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all she had read were books in which characters were foreign, she had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which she could not personally identify. Now, things changed when she discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, she went through a mental shift in her perception of literature. She realised that people like her, girls with skin the colour of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. She started to write about things recognized.
She shared her one experience with the Fide's family, 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 their old clothes, to his family. And when she didn't finish 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. Then one Saturday, They went to Fide's village to visit, and his mother showed them a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. She was startled. It had not occurred to her that anybody in his family could actually make something. All she had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for her to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was her single story of them.
Then she shared one more experience of her , When she left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. She was 19. Her American roommate was shocked by her. She asked her where she learned to speak English so well, and was confused when Chimamanda said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language.
What struck her was this: She had felt sorry for her even before she saw her. Her default position toward Chimamanda, as an African, was a kind of patronising, well-meaning pity. Her roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals. She must say that before she went to the U.S., she didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to her. Never mind that she knew nothing about places like Namibia. But she did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways she think of herself now as African. Although she still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being her otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries."
After she had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, she began to understand her roommate's response to her. 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.
This single story of Africa ultimately comes, she thinks, from Western literature. Quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eves in their breasts." what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child."
She began to realise that her American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told her that her novel was not "authentically African." Now, she was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but She had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, she did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told her that her characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. Her characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African.But she must quickly add that too she was just as guilty in the question of the single story.
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that she thinks about whenever she thinks 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.
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.
She's always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasises how we are different rather than how we are similar.
Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanise. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.when we reject the single story, when we realise that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.
Second Video:-
She started with her friend and then she talked about one journalist who gave advise to her that she should never called herself a feminist because "Feminist are women who are unhappy because they can not find husbands- so she decided to called herself 'happy feminist'. Then academic Nigerian woman told her that feminism wasn't our culture and that feminism wasn't African and that she was calling herself a feminist because she had been corrupted by 'western books' .
We have different hormones, we have different sexual organs, different biological abilities, women can have babies, men can't. 52% of the world population is female but most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men.
The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate wangari mathai put it simply and we'll when she said,
'The higher you go, the fewer woman there are'
The physically strong person was more likely to lead and men in general are physically stronger, but today we live in a vastly different world. The person more 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 those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be creative, to be innovative.
"Gender matters everywhere in the world".
But she thinks about a utopian society where we must have raised our son differently. Our daughters are different. We do a great disservice to boys on how we raise them. We teach girls to shrink themselves to make themselves smaller. We says 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.'
In talking about marriage and relationship- the language is often the language of ownership rather than partnership. We used the word 'RESPECT' to make something a woman shows a man but often not something a man shows a woman. We teach females that in relationships compromise is what women do. We raise girls to see each other as competition not for jobs or for accomplishments which could be a good thing But for the attention of men.
She gave some solutions and idea about how one should raise child:-
What if in raising children we focus on ability instead of gender? What if in raising children we focus on interest instead of gender? What if parents from the beginning taught both the boy and the girl to cook food?
We should unlearn many lessons of gender that internalised when we were growing up.
'GENDER MATTERS' Men and women experience the world differently. Gender colours the way we experience the world.
'CULTURE DOES NOT MAKE PEOPLE,
PEOPLE MAKE CULTURE'
Chimamanda- I AM FEMINIST - 'A PERSON WHO BELIEVES IN THE SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY OF THE SEXES'
A feminist is a person man or women who says 'YES THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH GENDER AS IT IS TODAY AND WE MUST FIX IT, WE MUST DO BETTER'.
Third Video:-
She started a talk with a contemporary situation that we live in a culture of calling out a culture of outrage and you should call people out you should be outraged but always remember context and never disregard intent.
Absurd questions of America such as ' should we call a lie a lie when a lie is a lie. Why lie about giving honour to something to which you have no idea.
It is hard to tell ourselves the truth about our failures, our fragilities, our uncertainties, it is hard to tell ourselves. Maybe we haven't done the best that we can. It is hard to tell ourselves the truth of our emotions that may be what we feel is hurt rather than anger . Maybe it is time to close the chapter of a relationship and walk away. Bend always towards truth and by doing that make literature your religion which is to say read widely read fiction, poetry and narrative nonfiction. Make human story the centre of your understanding of the World.
Sometimes in politicised spaces telling the truth will be an act of courage be courageous never set out to provoke for the same of provoking but never silent yourself out of fear that a truth you , speak might provoke be courageous, be courageous enough to acknowledge that even if there is no value in knowing what that position is listen to the other side at least the reasonable other side. Be courageous enough to acknowledge that democracy is always fragile and that democracy is always fragile and that justice has nothing to do with the political left and the political right. Be courageous enough to recognise those things that get in the way of telling the truth. She ends her talk with one moral: Whenever you wake it's your morning - what matters is that you wake up and the world calls you.
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