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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nigerian writer
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 15 September 1977) is a Nigerian writer of, 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 that is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature", particularly in her second home, the United States.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reading at 2013 Fall for the Book

Adichie has written the novels like; 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), Zikora (2020) and Notes on Grief (2021).

In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. She was the recipient of the PEN Pinter Prize in 2018. She was recognized as one of the BBC's 100 women of 2021.

In 2002, she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story "You in America", and her story "That Harmattan Morning" was selected as a joint winner of the 2002 BBC World Service Short Story Awards. In 2003, she won the David T. Wong International Short Story Prize 2002/2003 (PEN Center Award).

Quotes

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  • The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are. Now imagine how much [more?] happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.
  • My father tells a story about his father dying in a refugee camp. His father was a titled man in Igboland, which meant that he was a great man. He had one of the highest titles a man could have. But his hometown fell, so he had to leave and go to a refugee camp, and he died and he was buried in a mass grave. Which is just heartbreaking for a man, particularly a man like him. My father, who's the first son, and who takes his responsibilities very seriously, couldn't go to bury his father because the roads were occupied. He was in a different part of Biafra and so it took a year until ... he could go to the refugee camp. ... And he goes there and he says, 'I want to know where my father was buried.' And somebody waved very vaguely and said, 'Oh we buried the people there.' So it was a mass grave. So many people had died. And my father says he went there and he took a handful of sand, and he said he's kept the sand ever since. For me, that was one of the most moving things I had ever heard."
  • In Nigeria I'm not black ... We don't do race in Nigeria. We do ethnicity a lot, but not race. My friends here don't really get it. Some of them sound like white Southerners from 1940. They say, "Why are black people complaining about race? Racism doesn't exist!' It's just not a part of their existence."
  • I don’t think sexism is worse than racism, it’s impossible even to compare ... It’s that I feel lonely in my fight against sexism, in a way that I don’t feel in my fight against racism. My friends, my family, they get racism, they get it. The people I’m close to who are not black get it. But I find that with sexism you are constantly having to explain, justify, convince, make a case for.
  • This is the kind of capitalism I hate. This is bullying capitalism. Look, I am Igbo, I come from a trading culture. My people are merchant and I'm all for buying and selling. But capitalism has to be a fair exchange.
    • "[1] (Paris review, 2019)

  • Feminism is not that men and women are the same. If men and women are the same, we won't have sexism. We are just stating the differences and people should stop giving negative value to all the attributes that women have. It's not that men and women are the same but they've equally human.
  • 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.
  • I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.
  • The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable.
  • 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.
  • There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.
    • Quote extracted from 'It is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts' [2]

Americanah (2013)

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  • Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
  • "Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice."
  • "When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. "We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall."
  • "If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion."
  • "I'm chasing you. I'm going to chase you until you give this a chance."
  • "They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge."

Purple Hibiscus (2003)

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  • "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."
  • "I cannot control even the dreams that I have made."
  • "People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival."
  • "The white missionaries brought us their god,” Amaka was saying. “Which was the same color as them, worshiped in their language and packaged in the boxes they made. Now that we take their god back to them, shouldn’t we at least repackage it?"
  • "Eugene has to stop doing God's job. God is big enough to do his own job. If God will judge our father for choosing to follow the way of our ancestors, then let God do the judging, not Eugene."
  • "There was a helplessness to his joy, the same kind of helplessness as in that woman’s despair."
  • Things started to fall apart when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère.
  • (Page 1)
  • I meant to say I am sorry that Papa broke your figurines, but the words that came out were, ‘I’m sorry your figurines broke, Mama.’
  • ( Page 10)
  • Imagine what the Standard would be if we were all quiet.’
  • It was a joke. Ade Coker was laughing; so was his wife, Yewande. But Papa did not laugh. Jaja and I turned and went back upstairs, silently.
  • ( Page 58)
  • I looked at Jaja and wondered if the dimness in his eyes was shame. I suddenly wished, for him, that he had done the ima mmuo, the initiation into the spirit world. I knew very little about it; women were not supposed to know anything at all, since it was the first step toward the initiation to manhood. But Jaja once told me that he heard that boys were flogged and made to bathe in the presence of a taunting crowd. The only time Papa had talked about the ima mmuo was to say that the Christians who let their sons do it were confused, that they would end up in hellfire.
  • (Page 87)
  • I thought the Igwe was supposed to stay at his place and receive guests. I didn’t know he visits people’s homes,’ Amaka said, as we went downstairs. ‘I guess that’s because your father is a Big Man.’

I wished she had said ‘Uncle Eugene’ instead of ‘your father.’ She did not even look at me as she spoke. I felt, looking at her, that I was helplessly watching precious flaxen sand slip away between my fingers.

  • ( Page 93)
  • When she made a U-turn and went back the way we had come, I let my mind drift, imagining God laying out the hills of Nsukka with his wide white hands, crescent-moon shadows underneath his nails just like Father Benedict’s.
*(Page 131)
  • Morality, as well as the sense of taste, is relative.’

( Page 156)

  • This cannot go on, nwunye m,’ Aunty Ifeoma said. ‘When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head.’
  • (Page 213)
  • Rain splashed across the floor of the veranda, even though the sun blazed and I had to narrow my eyes to look out the door of Aunty Ifeoma’s living room. Mama used to tell Jaja and me that God was undecided about what to send, rain or sun. We would sit in our rooms and look out at the raindrops glinting with sunlight, waiting for God to decide.
  • (Page 217)
  • She picked up an enterprising snail that was crawling out of the open basket. She threw it back in and muttered, ‘God take power from the devil.’ I wondered if it was the same snail, crawling out, being thrown back in, and then crawling out again. Determined. I wanted to buy the whole basket and set that one snail free.
  • ( Page 238)
  • That night when I bathed, with a bucket half full of rainwater, I did not scrub my left hand, the hand that Father Amadi had held gently to slide the flower off my finger. I did not heat the water, either, because I was afraid that the heating coil would make the rainwater lose the scent of the sky. I sang as I bathed. There were more earthworms in the bathtub, and I left them alone, watching the water carry them and send them down the drain.
  • (Page 269-270)
  • Kambili is right,’ she said. ‘Something from God was happening there.’
  • (Page 275)
  • Of course God does. Look at what He did to his faithful servant Job, even to His own Son. But have you ever wondered why? Why did He have to murder his own son so we would be saved? Why didn’t he just go ahead and save us?'
  • (Page 289)
  • We will take Jaja to Nsukka first, and then we’ll go to America to visit Aunty Ifeoma,’ I said. ‘We’ll plant new orange trees in Abba when we come back, and Jaja will plant purple hibiscus, too, and I’ll plant ixora so we can suck the juices of the flowers.’ I am laughing. I reach out and place my arm around Mama’s shoulder and she leans toward me and smiles.

Above, clouds like dyed cotton wool hang low, so low I feel I can reach out and squeeze the moisture from them. The new rains will come down soon.

  • (Page 306-307)
  • Things started to fall apart at home.”
  • (Page 3)
  • A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you loved […] The tea was always too hot, always burned my tongue.”
  • (Page 8)
  • Jaja’s defiance seems like Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.”
  • (Page 16)

Half of a yellow sun (2006)

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  • "Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him."
  • "This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles"
  • "Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?"
  • "...my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came."
  • "The truth has become an insult."
  • "This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see."
  • "There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable."
  • "A gorgeous pitless account of love, violence and betrayal."
  • "Greatness depends on where you are coming from."
  • “...my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”

The Best Short Stories (2021)

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  • "I look to stories for consolation,the kind of small consolation that one needs to want to wake up everyday;as template for life;for news on how others live;for reminders that life's mysteries have no key"
  • "A successful story for me exist in a moral universe, not one where goodness always triumph, because that would be false but one with an inherent awareness of goodness"

[4]

On Gender

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  • "My own definition is a feminist is a man or 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."[5] chimamanda quote based on gender.
  • "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.”[6]
  • “Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”[7]
  • “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.”[8]
  • “Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”[9]
  • "So true--when people see an absence of women in engineering, science and technology, then it becomes self-reinforcing."[10]
  • “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.”[11]

On Perception

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  • "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."[12]
  • "Many stories matter. Stories that 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"[13]

On Money and wealth

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  • "Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living." [14]
  • "How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation. Which of your favourite quotes by Chimamanda did we miss?"[15]
  • "There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich."[16]

On Men, Love and Relationship

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  • "Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage."[17]
  • "Of course I am not worried about intimating men. The type of man who will be intimidated is exactly the type of man I have no interest in."[18]
  • "Please love by giving and by taking. Give and be given. If you are only giving and not taking, you’ll know. You’ll know from that small and true voice inside you that we females are so often socialized to silence. Don’t silence that voice. Dare to take."[19]
  • trans women are trans women
    • [20] Chimamanda responding to a question about whether she considers trans women as real women.

Chinasa

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  • "And even though I helped to clean the wounded, I had never taken anyone into my room.But I took this girl into my room.Her name was chinasa."[21]
  • I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.

We Should All Be Feminists (2014)

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  • You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you don’t wear makeup, you don’t shave, you’re always angry, you don’t have a sense of humor, you don’t use deodorant.
    • Page 11
  • I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else.
    • Page 13
  • We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.
    • Page 17-18

The Thing Around Your Neck (2009)

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  • The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give-and-take. You gave up a lot but you gained a lot, too.
    • Page 198

Zikora (2020)

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  • It was something like pain and different from pain.
    • Page 2
  • Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman...
    • Page 2
  • If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.
  • I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold
  • You can’t nice your way to being loved.
  • Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time.
  • How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,
  • I looked at my mother, standing by the window. How had I never really seen her? It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind.
  • The frequent flare of sad longing.
  • I felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make me come fully undone.
  • Tears were so cheap now
  • Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable:
  • They learned instead from mainstream pornography, where women were always shaved smooth and never had periods, and so they became men who thought the contrived histrionics onscreen were How Things Were Done.
  • Something was growing inside me, alien, uninvited, and it felt like an infestation.
  • He would kill you, but he would do it slowly
  • I felt ragged and hopeless, high on my desperation. I had already ripped up my dignity, so I might as well scatter the pieces.
  • "I think I should leave. Is that okay?” he asked as though he needed my permission to abandon me. He would kill you, but he would do it courteously.
  • I just want them to know I can handle it, I can do it alone,” I said. “Some of us have men and are still doing it alone,” Mmiliaku said. She could have gloated. She could have asked, “Isn’t this the perfect man you won by deciding not to settle?” She could have been passive aggressive, or resentful, or lectured me in that world-weary way of a woman who believed that men would be men. But she didn’t, and so with the light streaming through my apartment window, I began to weep because my cousin had grace and I lacked grace.
  • Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man
  • Some days I was fine and some days I was under water, barely breathing
  • It felt like the Old Testament. A plague. A primitive wind blowing at will, evil but purposelessly so, an overcoming in my body that didn’t need to be.
  • Love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold.
  • When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain.
  • sifted through my memories, as though through debris, trying to find a reason.
  • my dark day further darkened.
  • for a moment I felt an intense desire to pass out and escape my life
  • was suspended in a place of no feeling,
  • The labor and delivery ward needed to have a false eye-lash policy
  • What did “It’s time to get married” mean, anyway? Why did she have to marry at all?
  • What was “normal”? That Nature traded in unnecessary pain? It wasn’t his intestines being set on fire, after all.
  • He rolled his eyes in a kind of disbelieving amusement. “What, the single friend will seduce the husband, or the single friend will make the wife want to be single again?
  • I made myself boneless and amenable. I spent weekends willing the landline next to my bed to ring. Often it didn’t. Then he would call, before midnight, to ask if I was still up, so he could visit and leave before dawn.
  • Each morning, I coated concealer on the dark bags under my eyes. Most days, I caressed a bottle of Advil, longing for the translucent green pills, but knowing that I would never take them.
  • I didn’t question whether it was real, because I knew it was. I questioned where it had gone. How could emotions just change? Where did it go, the thing that used to be?
  • I believed then that love had to feel like hunger to be true.
  • I began to cry. Tears were so cheap now. How do some memories insist on themselves?
  • Ours was an ancient story, the woman wants the baby and the man doesn’t want the baby and a middle ground does not exist.
  • I knew how I was supposed to feel, but I did not know how I felt. It was not transcendental. There was a festering red pain between my legs. Somewhere in my consciousness, a mild triumph hovered, because it was over, finally it was over, and I had pushed out the baby. So animalistic, so violent—the push and pressure, the blood, the doctor urging me, the cranking and stretching of flesh and organ and bone.
  • We scrub and scrape our armpits and upper lip and legs because we hate to have hair there. Then we pamper and treat the hair on our heads because we love hair there. But it’s all hair. It’s the wanting that makes the difference.
  • Zikky, it won’t be easy, but it won’t be as hard as you think. How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,
  • We mostly spoke English; Igbo was for mimicking relatives and for saying painful things.
  • He grew up with his dreams already dreamt for him
  • Respect: a starched deference, a string of ashen rituals. It was my mother who sat beside my father at weddings and ceremonies; it was her photo that appeared above the label of “wife” in the booklet his club published in his honor. Respect was her reward for acquiescing.
  • He said, “I thought you let me because you had protection.” I said, “What are you talking about? You know I stopped taking the pill because it made me fat, and I assumed you knew what it meant, what it could mean.” He said, “There was miscommunication.
  • In my head, there was a queue of emotions I could not name, wanting to be tried out one after the other.
  • A geyser of anxiety had erupted deep inside me and I was spurting fear.
  • Only later did I see how, to survive, she wielded her niceness like a subtle sharp knife.
  • was to remember like a brief blur my life as it once was, when I was only a daughter, not a mother.
  • My father told jokes and laughed and charmed everyone, and broke things and walked on the shards without knowing he had broken things.
  • I felt light from relief, weightless, unburdened.
  • How swift the moment is when your life becomes a different life.
  • Symptoms can mean nothing if a mind just cannot.
  • And I never told the boy who didn’t love me, the boy I was trying to make love me when I didn’t yet know that you cannot nice your way into being loved.
  • Her silence bruised the air between us.
  • A fog blanketed me, a kind of deadness. I didn’t cry; crying seemed too ordinary for this moment.

Notes on Grief (2021)

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  • Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.
  • I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.
  • For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.
  • How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?
  • It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed.
  • Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved.

Quotes about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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  • (Whose writing today most inspires you?) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work — both fiction and nonfiction...
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