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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

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Famous Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

“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. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”

FeminismAmbition
Book:We Should All Be Feminists
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“Many of us think that the less feminine a woman appears, the more likely she is to be taken seriously. A man going to a business meeting doesn’t wonder about being taken seriously based on what he is wearing—but a woman does. “I wish I had not worn that ugly suit that day. Had I then the confidence I have now to be myself, my students would have benefited even more from my teaching. Because I would have been more comfortable and more fully and truly myself.”

FeminismGender EqualityWomen In The Workplace
Book:We Should All Be Feminists
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“She felt as if she had somehow failed him and herself by allowing his mother’s behavior to upset her. She should be above it; she should shrug it off as the ranting of a village woman; she should not keep thinking of all the retorts she could have made instead of just standing mutely in that kitchen. But she was upset, and made even more so by Odenigbo's expression, as if he could not believe she was not quite as high-minded as he had thought.”

RelationshipsFailureEmotionsAnger
Book:Half of a Yellow Sun
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“No era sólo a tus padres a los que querías escribir, también a tus amigos, a tus primos y tíos. Pero no podías permitirte comprar suficientes perfumes, bolsos y zapatos para todos, y pagar el alquiler con lo que ganabas de camarera, de modo que no escribías a nadie. Por la noche algo se enroscaba alrededor de tu cuello. Algo que casi te asfixiaba antes de que te quedaras dormida.”

AutorasLiteratura ContemporáneaLiteratura Nigeriana
Book:The Thing Around Your Neck
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“—Ejima m, ¿qué ocurre? —volvió a preguntar. —En realidad, nada. Nada que sea nuevo —contestó Olanna, con la mirada fija en la botella de coñac sobre la mesa—. Quiero que esta guerra acabe para que él pueda volver. Se ha convertido en otra persona. —Todos estamos en esta guerra, y nos toca a nosotros decidir si nos convertimos o no en otra persona —dijo Kainene.”

WarGuerraCognacCoñacKaineneOlanna
Book:Medio sol amarillo
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“Is Obama Anything but Black? So lots of folk—mostly non-black—say Obama’s not black, he’s biracial, multiracial, black-and-white, anything but just black. Because his mother was white. But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass had white fathers. Imagine them saying they were not black. Imagine Obama, skin the color of a toasted almond, hair kinky, saying to a census worker—I’m kind of white. Sure you are, she’ll say. Many American Blacks have a white person in their ancestry, because white slave owners liked to go a-raping in the slave quarters at night. But if you come out looking dark, that’s it. (So if you are that blond, blue-eyed woman who says “My grandfather was Native American and I get discrimination too” when black folk are talking about shit, please stop it already.) In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you. Barack Obama, looking as he does, would have had to sit in the back of the bus fifty years ago. If a random black guy commits a crime today, Barack Obama could be stopped and questioned for fitting the profile. And what would that profile be? “Black Man.”

BlackRaceBiracialMultiracialObamaMixed Race
Book:Americanah
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“Hay gente que pregunta: "¿Por qué usar la palabra "feminista"? ¿Por qué no decir simplemente que crees en los derechos humanos o algo parecido?". Pues porque no sería honesto. Está claro que el feminismo forma parte de los derechos humanos en general, pero elegir usar la expresión genérica "derechos humanos" supone negar el problema específico y particular del género. Es una forma de fingir que no han sido las mujeres quienes se han visto excluidas durante siglos. Es una forma de negar que el problema del género pone a las mujeres en el punto de mira.”

Human RightsWomen S RightsFeminismoDerechos HumanosDerechos De La Mujer
Book:We Should All Be Feminists
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“If the justification for controlling women's bodies were about women themselves, then it would be understandable. If, for example, the reason was 'women should not wear short skirts because they can get cancer if they do.' Instead the reason is not about women, but about men. Women must be 'covered up' to protect men. I find this deeply dehumanizing because it reduces women to mere props used to manage the appetites of men.”

ParentingMotherhoodDress Codes
Book:Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
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“I learned a lot about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, "Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?" This type of question is a way of silencing a person's specific experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This same man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably have responded, "Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?")”

WorldTalkingBlindGenderOppressionWomanQuestionExperiencesHuman BeingSystemsSilencingBlack Men
Book:We Should All Be Feminists
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“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. (There are of course many exceptions.) Today, we live in a vastly diʃerent world. The person more qualiɹed to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.”

FeministGender RolesWage Gap
Book:We Should All Be Feminists
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“But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.Remember this is our newly middle-class world. We haven’t completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow’s udder.”

PoliticsThird World Countries
Book:Americanah
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“You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy." "Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening.”

RaceFunny QuotesRace RelationsRace In AmericaLiterature About Literature
Book:Americanah
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“I prefer Ms. because it is similar to Mr. A man is Mr. whether married or not, a woman is Ms. whether married or not. So please teach Chizalum that in a truly just society, women should not be expected to make marriage-based changes that men are not expected to make. Here’s a nifty solution: Each couple that marries should take on an entirely new surname, chosen however they want as long as both agree to it, so that a day after the wedding, both husband and wife can hold hands and joyfully journey off to the municipal offices to change their passports, driver’s licenses, signatures, initials, bank accounts, etc.”

Ms
Book:Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
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“I taught an introductory creative writing class at Princeton last year and, in addition to the classic ‘show don’t tell’, I often told my students that their fiction needed to have ’emotional truth’ […]: a quality different from honesty and more resilient than fact, a quality that existed not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind of fiction that shows. All the novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have this empathetic human quality. And because I write the kind of fiction I like to read, when I started Half of a Yellow Sun […], I hoped that emotional truth would be its major recognizable trait. […] Successful fiction does not need to be validated by ‘real life’; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is ‘real’. Yet, […] to write realistic fiction about war, especially one central to the history of one’s own country, is to be constantly aware of a responsibility to something larger than art. While writing Half of a Yellow Sun, I enjoyed playing with minor things [such as inventing a train station in a town that has none]. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time. I could not let a character be changed by anything that had not actually happened. If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally keen to be true to the spirit of the time as well as to artistic vision of it. The writing itself was a bruising experience. […] But there were also moments of extravagant joy when I recognized, in a character or moment or scene, that quality of emotional truth.” In the Shadow of Biafra (essay included in the 2007 Harper Perennial edition of Half of a Yellow Sun).”

WritingFictionHistoryHistorical FictionArtistic VisionEmotional TruthTrue FactsVerifiability
Author:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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“Mas HÁ umas olimpíadas da opressão a decorrer. As minorias raciais americanas - negros, hispânicos, asiáticos e judeus - apanham com a merda dos brancos, diferentes tipos de merda, mas merda de qualquer maneira. Cada um dos grupos acredita secretamente que apanha com a pior merda. Por isso, não, não existe uma Liga Unida dos Oprimidos. No entanto, todos os outros acham que são melhores do que os negros, porque, bem, não são negros.”

Sad But TrueMinority Groups
Book:Americanah
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“Les filles sont conditionnées pour aspirer au mariage, mais pas les garçons, ce qui entraîne dès le départ un déséquilibre. Les filles deviennent des femmes qui sont obnubilées par le mariage, les garçons deviennent des hommes qui ne sont pas obnubilés par le mariage. Les femmes épousent ces hommes. La relation est automatiquement inégale, parce que l’institution compte plus aux yeux de l’une que de l’autre.”

MalheurInégalitésMariageFillesAttentesGarçons
Book:Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
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