FEATURE:
Feminist Icons
PHOTO CREDIT: Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
__________
MAYBE she would find it…
PHOTO CREDIT: Emma Summerton for Harper’s Bazaar
problematic or inappropriate being called a ‘feminist icon’. At the very least, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has discussed the reasonability of being labelled as such. For this part of my series, I wanted to shine a light on the Nigerian author. Even though her heart is in fiction and her new novel, Dream Count (“Through the interconnected lives of four women, the critically acclaimed author of Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah spins a mesmerising and moving study of love, happiness and the quest for fulfilment in contemporary society”), is highly acclaimed, she is someone who is regarded as a central figure in postcolonial feminist literature. The Nigerian’s 2012 talk, We Should All Be Feminists, was sampled by Beyoncé as well as featuring on a T-shirt by Dior in 2016. She is remarkably powerful and influential voice in feminism. Before getting to some interview where we can learn more about Adichie as this iconic and influential feminist, I want to grab wholesale from Wikipedia when it comes to her legacy. Adichie is also on the Concepción Feminist Mural in Madrid, Spain:
“According to Lisa Allardice, a journalist writing for The Guardian, Adichie became the "poster girl for modern feminism after her 2012 TED Talk 'We Should All Be Feminists' went stratospheric and was distributed in book form to every 16-year-old in Sweden". Adichie has become "a global feminist icon" and a recognised "public thinker" per journalist Lauren Alix Brown. Parts of Adichie's TEDx Talk were sampled in the song "Flawless" by singer Beyoncé on 13 December 2013. When asked in an NPR interview about that, Adichie responded that "anything that gets young people talking about feminism is a very good thing." She later refined the statement in an interview with the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, saying that she liked and admired Beyoncé and gave permission to use her text because the singer "reached many people who would otherwise probably never have heard the word feminism."
But, she went on to state that the sampling caused a media frenzy with requests from newspapers world-wide who were keen to report on her new-found fame because of Beyoncé. Adichie said, "I am a writer and I have been for some time and I refuse to perform in this charade that is now apparently expected of me". She was disappointed by the media portrayal, but acknowledged that "Thanks to Beyoncé, my life will never be the same again." Adichie was outspoken against critics who later questioned the singer's credentials as a feminist because she uses her sexuality to "pander to the male gaze". In defence of Beyoncé, Adichie said: "Whoever says they're feminist is bloody feminist."
Scholar Matthew Lecznar said that Adichie's stature as "one of most prominent writers and feminists of the age" allowed her to use her celebrity "to demonstrate the power of dress and empower people from diverse contexts to embrace [fashion] ... which has everything to do with the politics of identity". Academics Floriana Bernardi and Enrica Picarelli credited her support of the Nigerian fashion industry with helping put Nigeria "at the forefront" of the movement to use fashion as a globally-recognised political mechanism of empowerment. Toyin Falola, a professor of history, in an evaluation of scholarship in Nigeria, criticised the policy of elevating academic figures prematurely. He argued that scholarship, particularly in the humanities, should challenge policies and processes to strengthen the social contract between citizens and government. He suggested that the focus should shift from recognising scholars who merely influenced other scholars to acknowledging intellectuals who use their talents to benefit the state and serve as mentors to Nigerian youth. Adichie was among those he felt qualified as "intellectual heroes", who had "push[ed] forward the boundaries of social change”.
I want to go back to 2017 and an interview from The Guardian. In it, she answered the questions/accusation aimed at her that she was making equality mainstream (as The Guardian noted: “Isn’t that the point?”). Adichie is fascinating to listen to and read. As a diversion, Adichie is a key voice when it comes to feminist fashion. How women who love fashion and makeup are often seen as silly, shallow or vain and without any depth. She has acknowledged the relationship between beauty, fashion, style and socio-political inequalities. Adichie is also hugely committed to promoting body positivity as a way of acquiring agency. She is someone who takes immense pride in her African features such as her skin colour, hair texture and curves; dressing in bold designs featuring bright colours to make a statement about self-empowerment:
“The success of We Should All Be Feminists has made Adichie as prominent for her feminism as for her novels, to the extent that “now I get invited to every damned feminist thing in the whole world”. She has always been an agony aunt of sorts, “the unpaid therapist for my family and friends”, but having the feminist label attached has changed things, and not just among her intimates. “I was opened to a certain level of hostility that I hadn’t experienced before as a writer and public figure.”
This is partly why she has written the new book, to reclaim the word feminism from its abusers and misusers, a category within which she would include certain other progressives, and to lay down in plain, elegant English her beliefs about child-raising.
In Nigeria, you control children. My daughter is 15 months. So she tears a book? Whatever. She throws my shoes down. So?
Dear Ijeawele is, in some ways, a very basic set of appeals; to be careful with language (never say “because you are a girl”), avoid gendered toys, encourage reading, don’t treat marriage as an achievement, reject likability. “Her job is not to make herself likable, her job is to be her full self,” she writes in reference to her friend’s daughter, a choice Adichie has come to elevate almost above any other.
That day in Lagos last summer, her friends were furious at the cheek of the young man’s question, but she rather liked his bravery and honesty in asking it. She replied in the same spirit. “Keep your love,” Adichie said. “Because, sadly, while I love to be loved, I will not accept your love if it comes with these conditions.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Voss/The Guardian
Having a baby has made Adichie think differently about her own parents, particularly her mother. Grace Adichie, who had six children and worked her way up from being a university administrator to the registrar, taught her daughter to love fashion as well as books, and was a “very cool mum” whom she idolised as a child. Nonetheless, and in the manner of most snotty young adults, young Chimamanda went through a phase of being “very superior” to her mother. Now, the novelist looks at her daughter and gulps.
Adichie recently came across her own kindergarten reports. “My father keeps them all. You know what the teacher wrote? ‘She is brilliant, but she refuses to do any work when she’s annoyed.’ I was five years old.” She laughs. “I couldn’t believe it. My husband couldn’t believe it. I must have been an annoying child.”
It’s not as if she comes from a family of radicals. “My parents are not like that. They’re conventional, reasonable, responsible, good, kind people. I’m the crazy. But their love and support made that crazy thrive.”
Unlike Adichie, who was raised exclusively in Nigeria, her daughter will be raised in two cultures and subject to slightly diverging social expectations. Already, Adichie says with a laugh, friends and relatives from home are concerned that her mothering is insufficiently stern.
“A friend was just visiting and she said to me, ‘Your parenting is not very Nigerian.’ In Nigeria – and, I think, in many cultures – you control children. And I feel like, my daughter is 15 months, she doesn’t have a sense of consequences. And I enjoy watching her. So she tears a page of a book? Whatever. She throws my shoes down. So? It’s fun. I love that she’s quite strong-willed.” The joke between Adichie and her husband – whom, to her intense annoyance, their daughter looks much more like – is that her character cleaves to the maternal side. “He says to me, ‘Well, at least we know where she got her personality from.’ She’s quite fierce.”
In the new book, Adichie’s advice is not only to provide children with alternatives – to empower boys and girls to understand there is no single way to be – but also to understand that the only universal in this world is difference. In terms of the evolution of feminism, these are not new lessons, but that is rather Adichie’s point. She is not writing for other feminist writers, and shows some frustration at what she sees as the solipsism of much feminist debate.
The proposition is that feminism has become so mainstream as to be an empty marketing tool, a mere slogan on a bag or a T-shirt. Without being named, Adichie is implicated in this critique, given that last year she collaborated with Christian Dior on a T-shirt bearing the line We Should All Be Feminists; depending on one’s view, this is either a perfect example of pointless sloganeering or a brilliant piece of preaching to the unconverted.
“I’m already irritated,” Adichie says. “This idea of feminism as a party to which only a select few people get to come: this is why so many women, particularly women of colour, feel alienated from mainstream western academic feminism. Because, don’t we want it to be mainstream? For me, feminism is a movement for which the end goal is to make itself no longer needed. I think academic feminism is interesting in that it can give a language to things, but I’m not terribly interested in debating terms. I want people’s marriages to change for the better. I want women to walk into job interviews and be treated the same way as somebody who has a penis.”
Adichie’s irritation with aspects of what she thinks of as “professional feminism” is that it runs counter to her ideas as a writer: that people contain multitudes. She is a brilliant novelist and a serious thinker, and she is also someone who makes no apology for her own trivial interests. “Life doesn’t always follow ideology,” she says. “You might believe in certain things and life gets in and things just become messy. You know? I think that’s the space that fiction, and having a bit more of an imaginative approach, makes. And that the feminist speaking circuit doesn’t really make room for”.
Before ending with a couple of recent interviews, I want to come to this interview from last year and some takeaways. It really captured my eyes. An interview people should listen to/read in full. In it, “Chimamanda delves into gender dynamics in African societies, the influence of colonial histories on women's narratives, and the crucial work of reframing African stories. From literature to feminism, this episode explores the rich complexity of African identity and storytelling through the lens of one of the continent’s leading literary voices”:
“Makhtar: Thats very powerful and personally touched me. Let me go back to feminism. What I see in your literature is that you talk about the resilience, the strength of women, I found a lot of this resilience in what you mentioned about these ancestors, these women which were very strong. And people forget, often that Queens were the head of some empires in Africa, people forget it. So, tell me the link between what you express as feminism today. And that affiliation that you have with our history.
Chimamanda: I think I've always said that there are different feminism's and that for me, my feminism is African, because I'm African. And really, it's just this belief that women are equally human. It's actually quite simple. And, you know, I think that my ancestors believed that as well. And I don't I don't like to romanticize our history, I don't want to suggest that, oh, everything was fine before the white man came because that's not true. But at the same time, there's a complexity that we had that somehow has been erased from, from us, collective idea of ourselves. So the way that we have learned to talk about ourselves, for me is not authentic. And so, I like to talk about my great grandmother, who I've already mentioned who she was, she was described as a headstrong woman. But that's because she stood her ground. That's because she was a feminist. That's because she felt that the parts of culture that diminished her, she wanted to resist. Her husband died quite young. And so his brothers wanted to sort of take over these things. And she said, No, and that was kind of unusual at the time. So she was labeled headstrong. But in the stories that we tell about our past, the women are all kind of really submissive, and they don't really have a voice.
And, and that's not true. I love reading about pre-colonial Africa, I find it fascinating just how just wonderfully complex the worlds were. So, I remember reading this account of an English woman who was sort of touring through Igbo Land in the 1860s, 70s. And she was just shocked that women did so much because she'd come from this Victorian England where women just sat at home. And Igbo women were the traders in the market, Igbo women, and she just found it shocking. And because she found it shocking, she labeled it bad, because it did not match her own idea of what the world should be. So imagine this person then writing a book, and saying, oh, this terrible thing they do. And then people go to school and read that book, and they absorb these ideas. And that's how we start to think of ourselves in just really, in my opinion, dangerous ways because we learn to diminish who we are. So, there's a part of me that just wants to really resist that and to say, there's a lot about our history that we can take in and be proud of. Because, you know, it was beautiful.
Makhtar: And you know, an example of that I sometimes give is ‘Mrs.’. Yes. Mrs. doesn't exist in my traditional culture. Women keep their name. And that just illustrates for me some of the things that sometimes were not identified as belonging to our society.
Chimamanda: I'm not a Mrs. I do have a wonderful husband, and children. But so in Nigeria, many people did not understand why I choose to keep my name. And so often some people would say to me, this is very bad, because you're not following Igbo culture. And then I would say, this is not even Igbo culture. I mean, you can choose to do whatever you want, but don't justify it using culture in a way that is not true. And we're teaching our children what is not true. Because actually, traditionally, in Igboland, people did not have surnames, children were identified by the names of their mothers, because often it was polygamous. So you know, my father, for example, would say to me that his grandfather was known as Mya Omeni. Omeni was his mother, and had my father not gone to school, he would have been known as Mwanem, son of his mother. And actually, in Igbo the word for sibling is my mother's child is one name, my mother's child. And so, you know, I think about these things. I think, ‘I wish we had more of an infusion of our real history, so that we actually know what it was like’. We don't have to follow it if you don't want it. But you know, I think we've lost that as well. And I really have been thinking about waste. I'm thinking about writing something about pre colonial Africa, for example, that will, you know, again, not romanticize, but just tell it like it was because there's so much that's beautiful. And you look at the history of Europe, for example, which many of us know, because we went to school, and a lot of it is still a kind of selective storytelling, you know. So the reason that we can think about the monarchies of Europe with a kind of respect is because they have been selective about what they told us, you know. I want to do that for West African history as well”.
I am going to finish up soon. Before I get, there are a couple of other interviews that I am keen to include. Harper’s Bazaar recently spoke with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Someone who claims fiction is her religion, this is a great discussion. The world has waited a long time for a new novel. It is wonderful that “the author, activist and cultural phenomenon is back with a book full of dreams as big as her own”:
“While her award-winning novels – Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah – are transportive, incisive portraits of family and societal conflict within sweeping political contexts, her lectures and essays seem to encapsulate truths of the modern age, whether she is examining grief, championing storytelling or speaking out against artistic censorship. Her prescient ideas have helped define feminism for the 21st century, the message adopted and the word spread not just via bestselling books or TED talks, but also through the lyrics of Beyoncé or Maria Grazia Chiuri’s launch collection at Dior.
Adichie had concluded her talk with the sentiment: “I like to think of literature as my religion… fiction is in many ways like faith, which is a leap of the imagination.” When we connect a couple of months later in February – she in her bright Maryland home, hair up, and clad in a coral sweater; me in London – I remind her of the last time we met: how the setting had amusingly reinforced that parallel between fiction and faith. I ask whether she finds herself turning to the latter more nowadays. “I think that is such an important and relevant question, so the short answer is ‘yes,’” she responds. “You know how young people say, ‘I felt seen?’ You just asking that made me feel ‘seen.’” She gives a deep laugh. “But seriously, it’s not just that we live in – at the risk of sounding melodramatic – perilous times. We do. It’s also that after my father died and then my mother died, everything changed for me. I changed. I have felt this awareness of how fleeting life is, and suddenly this deep longing for meaning. That’s all tied up with the idea of faith”.
I am going to end with an interview from The Guardian from February. It is quite a revealing and open interview. Adichie has lost both parents and seen Donald Trump become President again. She has also come back to writing fiction following backlash regarding her comments on gender and trans women in particular. A writer and feminist whose work I am quite new to, having read interviews and experienced some of her work, she has definitely opened my eyes and mind. I am definitely going to seek out Dream Count:
“Incubating for some time at the back of her mind was the idea that she should write more about the “gritty reality” of women’s bodies and the obstacles to women’s lives caused by gynaecology. She saw it as demystifying the experience of, say, premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Or fibroids. Or the violence of the birthing experience. “There’s a lot that has to do with having a female body that isn’t much talked about,” she says, “and it’s consequential for women’s lives.” For a long time, she was reluctant to discuss these, fearing she – a renowned feminist – would fuel a tendency to treat things such as PMS as a joke. “Code for a woman being unreasonably irritable,” she says, darkly. But in addition to the “remarkably unpleasant experience” of having surgery for “a very big fibroid”, hormonal issues have plagued her entire life.
“If one is writing honestly about women’s lives, it seems self-evident that we have to talk about these issues in a very open way, because they affect everything. They affect how well a woman does. They affect your emotional wellbeing. They get in the way of your dreams. If you’re a woman whose dream is to have a family, for example, fibroids can get in the way.” She laughs that she is not trying to raise awareness in an NHS public service announcement sort of way, but because “I was trying to write about women’s lives in a way that feels truthful and wholesome and full for me”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jared Soares/The Guardian
She says hers was a life “deeply shaped” by her parents, that their deaths have left her truly changed. In this way, Dream Count is a “departure”: “The person who wrote Purple Hibiscus was young, but still the person who wrote Half of a Yellow Sun. And in some ways also the person who wrote Americanah. But today I am alone. I’m a person who looks at the world differently.” She spoke to her mother the night before she died. “She was fine; she went to mass. The next morning – my father’s birthday – she was gone. If somebody wrote that in a fiction class I was teaching, I’d be like, ‘No, this is too much.’”
The time since has involved much self-reflection. There are “things I regret; positions I took”. Can she name any? She clicks her tongue. “Not even so much the position as the how.” She says she didn’t want to talk about this because she knew she would cry. “My mother and I were very close. But there are many times when I was short with her when I didn’t need to be. There’s a tendency for girls to do that with mothers. I wish we would stop. I want to tell all the girls in the world. I’m not saying, ‘Don’t express frustration.’ I’m just saying, take a step back and think, ‘Am I doing this with grace?’ Was this in her teenage years? “No, older. When I was a teenager, I was equal opportunities horrible: I felt I knew everything, that my parents knew nothing. Sometimes, I would not be patient with her. I would be patient with my father. She saw the world a lot more clearly, as women often do.
“Women go through a lot. I wish I could have done better.” She finds a tissue. “Lord, why did I start saying this?” She smiles. “My mother would not read everything I wrote, but she would tell everybody that it was wonderful”.
Maybe some might not feel Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a feminist icon or someone who is seen as one of the great feminist voices and writers. I would disagree. Whether you agree with her comments about trans women in 2017 or feel that the way she was criticised was fair or not, she is a modern-day feminist icon. On the transgender argument, it is something that I have had to think about and wrestle when writing this feature. Whether, if anyone reads this, people would criticise me for celebrating her in light of her remarks. I am a huge advocate and supporter of the trans community so cannot wholeheartedly agree with and support Adichie’s phrasing. However, I can recognise how powerful her writing is regarding women and feminism. This article highlights the importance of feminism and gender discourse. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an activist and author whose…
WORK you should read.