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Quote by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Work

Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

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Author

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a renowned Nigerian author whose works delve into the intricacies of African life and identity. Born on September 15, 1977, she has garnered international recognition for her novels and short stories. more

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“We gather as we always have: Naomi and Ruth, Aphrodite and Helen, Eve and her lioness. We are good girls. Mothers and dancers and counselors. We are wicked too, but we won't tell you this. Instead we arrange plates of bread and fruit, slip into the center of each other. Find our childhoods, our varied pleasures, the aged and blistered scars. We are half drunk, half destroyed. Nothing left but blood and bone. Still we surface— fold into each other like paper cranes. Her, like a long-lost lover. Her, a cool and healing balm.”

“I resent having to refer to my career as my baby in order to explain myself to parents. It suggests that as long as a woman has something she feels maternal toward, then she passes as a regular human being. "She want to swaddle her career! So we'll make an exception and give her a pass." Women don't have to have maternal urges to be women. My career is not my surrogate baby, just like my car is not my surrogate sex slave just because I turn it on and ride it. Men don't call their careers their sons or daughters. A fireman without kids doesn't have to pretend his job is his baby replacement. "Oh yeah, when I walk up those forty flights of stairs fighting back the burning and falling asbestos, I just cradle the hose in my arms and think, 'this is my baby'.”

“No matter how much a husband loves you, Kirabo, you must buy your own land and build your own house—in case. Most women do it on the stealth, but I say, let him know you are doing it so he knows you have an alternative to his home. Until the law starts to protect us, we must find ways. And Kirabo,” she added, “you should only have children you can bring up on your own. Too many women are trapped in bad marriages because of children.”

“No person should be subjected to this.' If a woman's value, a woman's autonomy, her right to be free from assault, is dependent on her relationships as a mother, wife, a sister or daughter to the men in her life, it means she is only a human as the strength of her relationships to the men around her-that women are only conditionally human." (pg.269)”

“So central, however, is reading to feminist reality that it is not unusual to find women acknowledging that a particular book "changed my life"; and so central is writing to feminist experience that it is not unusual to find a feminist defined as "a woman who writes".”