Chimamanda Adichie at Sweet Briar College

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello welcome I'm Kerry Brown I'm a professor at the college and the director of the Centers the college's Center for creativity design and the arts and it's a great pleasure to welcome you to Sweet Briar this evening and a joy to introduce our guest Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie first do please silence your cellphone's second miss aditya has kindly agreed to sign books after her presentation when she's finished speaking she will leave the stage briefly while staff from the bookstore get organized onstage and then she'll return to the stage and stay for a half hour before she has to get back on the road this is a busy woman if you'll line up on the right your left am i right please will we'll move things along as efficiently as possible you can just come up the stage and exit exits stage left so to begin with some background born in Nigeria in 1977 Chimamanda was 26 years old in 2003 when she published her first novel Purple Hibiscus a powerful story of family life and political drama set in Nigeria and which won the Commonwealth writers prize and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award her next novel half a Yellow Sun was published in 2006 writing about Chimamanda for the New York Times magazine Dave Eggers called it quote a shimmering work of historical fiction that reminded the world of the be Aafrin war and made it deeply personal it won the Orange Prize now known as the bailius women's Prize for fiction and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a New York Times notable book her most recent novel the best-selling Americana which tells the story of a young Nigerian woman's troubled and troubling and sometimes funny passage away from her own country to the u.s. won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the New York Times 10 top 10 best books of 2013 this is really only some of the awards that these books won Chimamanda is also the author of the story collection the thing around your neck which one critic quote nothing less than a literary feast and which contains the story American Embassy which won the AL Henry Prize in 2003 her 2009 TED talk the danger of a single story is now one of the most viewed TED talks of all time and her 2012 talk we should all be feminists was published as a book in 2014 her most recent book is Dae GAE a feminist manifesto in 15 suggestions she studied medicine in Nigeria for two years before coming to the US where she graduated summa laude from Eastern Connecticut State went on to earn a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University another in African Studies from Yale a 2005 six hotter fellow at Princeton and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2011-2012 she is also the recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation fellowship the so-called genius award her work has been translated into over 30 languages and her stories and essays have been widely published in journals and newspapers and magazines around the world including the New Yorker Granta the Atlantic the New York Times beyonce sampled a passage from we should all be feminists in her hit song flawless Dior incorporated her words in its spring 2017 collection and recently Chimamanda became the very beautiful face of the makeup brand number seven she is a writer a humanist a public intellectual feminist icon she divides her time now between the United States and Nigeria where she runs writing workshops that have helped encourage dozens and dozens of new voices from her country the great writer Chinua Achebe who died in 2013 and whose novel Things Fall Apart is probably the most widely read book in modern African literature and a great influence on Chimamanda by the way said early in her career we do not usually associate wisdom with beginners but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers that short account of her professional accomplishments and it is necessarily abbreviated and incomplete or we would be here all evening listening to me talk about her should leave one feeling a bit breathless imagine what it is like to be the person behind all those accomplishments imagine the shear work of it the intensity of it the difficulty of it the excitement of it the struggle to find time to write as her fame increased the hardships and the rewards of travel and public recognition the tension between being a public figure and a private citizen a spokesperson and also a mother and wife and daughter and sister and friend imagine the full and complex human being behind it the enormous scale of her heart and mind my husband John Gregory Brown who directs the college's Creative Writing Program invited Chimamanda to Sweetbriar in the spring of 2004 after Purple Hibiscus was published she came to dinner at our house spoke to classes engaged with students gave a powerful reading recently I pulled down from the Shelf the copy of the novel that she signed for us a very sweet inscription written in purple ink in a rather girlish hand and looked at the photo of her I was moved by how young she looked in the picture how young she was when we first came to know her how young and yet clearly how very gifted how hard-working and how full of promise in 2010 Chimamanda wrote to my husband to say that her green card had arrived in the mail at last and to thank him for helping her with a letter on her behalf during the application process one way of acquiring a green card is through establishing significant professional credentials I am still amused she wrote to him quoting the specific language of u.s. immigration by the idea of being a permanent immigrant quote of extraordinary ability now as then of course her extraordinary ability is beyond contest please welcome this person of extraordinary ability of extraordinary grace and talent and kindness and intelligence a woman who has as we like to say at Sweet Briar found her fierce Chimamanda Adichie thank you I love Carrie Brown and the fortunate man who she married John Gregory Brown it's really nice to be here it's nice to be back and it's it's been a long time I didn't realize how how long it's been and I just also want to start by saying that I'm so grateful and happy that Sweetbriar is alive and well [Applause] so I was thinking that I will talk about some of the things I've been thinking about which is to say that this isn't a terribly organized speech so I thought I would just share my thoughts with all of you kind people here and then I'll do a very short reading from my most recent book thi well M which isn't really a book it's kind of like a pamphlet but anyway as I travel I travel on a Nigerian path I have a Nigerian passport and although I am an immigrant of extraordinary ability I still can't see with that lastly but but it's really very cool all the way I was told that the president's wife also got that [Applause] and and I don't mean to be unkind but I'm just saying that when I applied it was actually for having an extraordinary ability but anyway this is the last sheet I will do I'm going to be very nice now so I'm I'm a u.s. permanent resident a very proud one because I consider America my home as well as Nigeria but I have just one passport which is Nigerian and one of the things about trying to traveling on a Nigerian Passport is that you very quickly get used to people assuming that you are not what you say that you are there to be Nigerian is to carry with you this weight of of assumptions that you're lying that you're a fraudster and so often when they ask me what do you do and I say I'm a writer there's always writer as though somehow I can't possibly have an ID and passport and be a writer I remember once in Denmark being asked what do you do and I said am i writer and he said prove it to me and I thought I wasn't sure how shall I write in a sentence but of course the thing and then asked me to step aside and and being asked to step aside is to kind of feel guilty of something even though you know you haven't done anything wrong but later I was told by my Danish friend that he had assumed that I was a sex worker because apparently there was an influx of Nigerian women who were doing a sex walk in Denmark but anyway this is this story is not about the sex work so about three months ago I went to London and because of my nature and Passport I've learned to approach immigration officers at different countries with a certain level of trepidation and so this morning I approached with my usual wariness and the immigration officer was a woman a white woman a certain British type brisk and brusque but she showed zero prejudice she was efficient she asked why I was here she stamped my passport and then she wanted to know what I wrote about I usually say I'm a fiction writer but this time deliberately I said I write about feminism feminism she said she paused as if taken aback yes I said and she went back to doing her walk stamping things and so I asked her do you think it's important she paused looked at me and then said yes but you had to think about it I said to her with curiosity but not with judgment well because people use it as a dirty ward don't they she said and then another pause and she added but that's not what it says it's about treating everyone fairly exactly I said for some reason her wards warmed my heart and as I turned to leave she pointed at my bright orange backpack and said I like your bag is it a posh one now that warmed my heart even more now that little bit about the back is irrelevant on the surface but I'm a fiction writer and it is a detail such as this that novelists used to ground their storytelling if I were to recast this episode in a short story a story about the basic and simple meaning of feminism as told by a middle-aged immigration officer I would certainly use the detail about her liking my back because it humanizes her and also because it shows that feminism is not about unreasonably angry women who do not shave and who hate men it shows us that feminism is quite simply about like in handbags all right there was a flood joke but it shows I what I liked about that moment was that high definition seemed to me perfect it's about treating everyone fairly and so I want to read the short excerpt from tha well ai1 of that when I started out writes in I I didn't think for one minute that I would be considered anything like a feminist icon I'm still not entirely entirely sure what that means I often say that I need to get a hat that says feminist icon so I can wear it around but oh maybe a t-shirt but but but but I'm grateful that being a writer who was read gave me the platform to talk about social issues that I care about and one of those issues is gender equality I did not become a feminist because I read any feminist text I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember which is to say that I do not remember a time when I was not alert to the ways in which the wall gives men dignity because they're men and deprives women of dignity because there are women I wrote this little book DHR Willy which actually was a letter to a friend of who had a bit who had given birth to a baby girl and who then said to me I want I want her experience to be different and better than mine so tell me what to do to raise - honest and of course when my friend said that I went into a mild panic because I thought I don't know what you're supposed to do a child but I also remember thinking that this might be my opportunity to in fact articulate to myself what it does mean to raise a child feminists to be feminists in the world and so I wrote her a long email which ended up being this little pamphlet called da jelly but I've also been rethinking I mean one of the interesting things about having a public platform is that sometimes people think that your ideas and your views never change and and should always be static and what I have found is that since I wrote the idea well a I am rethinking a number of things and so I want to talk about that a little bit I'm going to read this is a book called de jelly oh if Emily's manifesto in 15 suggestions so I'm going to read the eighth suggestion and then I'll talk a little bit about it eighth suggestion teach her to reject likeability her job is not to make herself likable her job is to be her full self a self that is honest and aware of the equal Humanity of other people remember I told you how upsetting it was to me that our friend chama would often tell me that people would not like something I wanted to say or do I always felt from her the unspoken pressure to change myself to fit some mold that would please and a more force entity called people it was upsetting because we want those close to us to encourage us to be our most authentic selves please do not ever put this pressure on your daughter we teach girls to be likable to be nice to be false and we do not teach boys the same this is dangerous many sexual predators have capitalized on this many girls remain silent when abused because they want to be nice many girls spend too much time trying to be nice to people who do them harm many girls think of the feelings of those who are hurting them this is the catastrophic consequence of likability we have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have for so long been conditioned to fooled themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable so this so apparently this seems to have taken off among certain circles of young women in Nigeria we checked likability and so I was recently in Lagos and a man said to me in Nigeria because I'm now known as a feminist I am often held responsible for all kinds of things the the breakdown of marriages and so this man came to me and he said you're teaching young girls to be horrible and you know what do you mean he said well you said reject likeability and so because you said that now they're really horrible and mean and so I started thinking about it and I thought I want it to be fair and I thought maybe maybe I can see how that can be read as saying don't be nice which is not what what it means to say that we need to teach girls to reject like likeability is to say that we need to teach them not to change themselves in ways that are false or untrue because they want to please I think all human beings like to be liked I think it's it's part of a self-preservation but it is girls who are raised to think need to be liked and I find this to be very dangerous and it's also interesting to me that they're mixed may suggest girls young girls get very mixed messages today on the one hand they're raised according to the gospel of positive self-esteem especially in this country you know where people get you know you get an A for trying hard even if you don't get it right um because we're told that we need to protect the self-esteem of kids I'm sure you can tell what I think about that but anyway so so we have young girls who are being raised on this gospel of positive self-esteem which which has some of some benefits but on the other hand young girls receive these messages the societal messages telling them that we have to be likable that they have to reduce themselves that they have to in many ways disavow their success or their ambition and so I find it to be conflicting how how as a woman can you show ambition and confidence and strength and at the same time follow the societal rules of likeability all over the world women are socialized to think of love as their ability to sacrifice as their ability to give I was just looking at a cartoon earlier today of a Nigerian woman who in this cartoon she has about five hands five arms and with one she is comforting a baby with the other she's cooking with the other she's comforting a man who appears to be her husband who's sick in bed with the other she's trading goods in the market and with the other one she is making it making a bed I think and this cartoon was apparently done by a man who said this is why I love my mother and it made me think because I think that cartoons always captures this idea of what are the things that we praise women for how much they sacrifice and how much they give I think love is about giving but love is also about expecting to be given love is also about taking and so to say that we should teach girls to reject likeability is to say to them you should dare to see loving as given and as taken it is to teach girls that they are not may object to be liked or disliked but that they themselves are subjects who can like or dislike another thing that I have found myself rethinking or wondering if I need to clarify further in this book is the idea of reversing things and so I'm often asked well what's the feminist response to something and of course I should say that one of the burdens of being this feminist icon is that half the time I don't know the answer to anything some often thinking do I pretend that I know the answer or do I just tell them I have no idea what's going on and even that it has its own challenges but in general I say that I don't I think that feminism is always contextual that it always depends on context but that I have two tools in thinking about feminism and the first tool is the premise that you start off with for a woman and the premise is i matter i matter equally . i think that if you walk with that premise as a woman then it just becomes clear to you when things are unjust the second premise in the book this is the one that i found myself rethinking is can you reverse something and get the same results in other words the questions people will ask me oh you know my husband cheated and people say i should leave but i don't want to leave and then I say well let's reverse it if you cheated what would happen and so forth sort of simple examples it seems to walk but increasingly I'm not sure that too is is the best because I think that their assumptions about that too that that I just find myself questioning I don't think that it's possible to reverse everything just simply because feminism is about acknowledging that men and women have different experiences of the world treats us differently and so sometimes we can't reverse and I'll give you an example so first of all when I was growing up I'm the fifth of six children and my my brothers I have an elder brother and a younger brother so the three of us were sort of the three musketeers when we were growing up we had a lot of fun we played football together we fought we we did everything together and we fully woman we fought quite a bit especially my older brother he and me and whenever we fought the one word that that just was another man that we were not supposed to see was bastard I don't know why but but so once so but but once in a while okay wood in the middle of fighting with me say to me bastard and then I would race upstairs to my mother and say okay called me bastard and my mother would would make such a fuss of it she asked me to come upstairs she would talk to him I mean for hours you'd say do never call your sister a bastard so bastard took on the sort of hello and I also have to say that I did colicky bastard from time to time and so so so I remember this day that we had a relative calm and so this relative was watching us the younger children and this relative was sort of maybe 1819 and okay and I got into a fight okay called me bastard so I run to cousin and I say okay called me bastard and our cousin said we'll call him bastard and I was so taken aback that I that I had been giving this permission also with great great pleasure I was like okay and now of course so there was sort of there's a certain kind of a satisfactory symmetry to this but the same insult carried the same weight and it didn't matter to whom it was addressed we didn't tell our mother about this because I think she would have spoken to that relative but but the the reason I talk about this is to say that while bastard as an insult seemed to carry the same weight for cookie and for me boy girl at the time increasingly I think about the wards the the poisonous wards that are sometimes used for women that really we cannot reverse I want to read a section from a news article about Zimbabwean politics so there two people running one is a man mr. cha Missa one is a woman miss Cooper a crowd of mr. cha mrs. supporters shouted slogans and sang folk songs to shame miss Cooper and many of them called her a reading that line made me think what is the male equivalent of this sexualized attack on women has serious consequences that many people who would not vote for her because she had been labeled a and it is an accusation that is not in fact about being promiscuous it's about her being a woman when a male politician calls a woman a what can we call the male politician to have it have the same poisonous wait we can't call a man a because that's really in cultures all over the world not an insult so it's not about being promiscuous it's about being a woman and in thinking about this and thinking about in the u.s. how when Hillary Clinton was running for president so much of the coverage was about whether she was likable and so little of the coverage of the person she was running against had anything to do with likability when in fact it seemed to me that that was the candidate we perhaps should I'll be talking about whether was it was likable or not I think of misogyny as the invisible cop from which we all drink I think that both men and women are guilty of misogyny and I say this as a person who I myself constantly questioned my own my own feelings and my own judgments I think that women are often disliked for reasons that have nothing to do with their behavior or their personality we just really because they're women and so to think of the idea that different behaviors when that the same behavior when exhibited by different bodies becomes that we judge it differently and that idea that a man is authoritative but a woman who exhibits exactly the same behavior is annoying and I find myself as a person who talks about feminism thinks about feminism questioning myself about my own reaction to women and and how much misogyny I have internalized I say that because I think it's important even for people who are self-declared feminists to think about their own complicity and living in both Nigeria and the u.s. I have had the pleasure of observing the way that misogyny functions in both societies I do have to say that what I found what I often find profoundly annoying is Americans telling me oh how terrible it is for women in Africa because really it's also terrible for women in America [Music] but but the the the the the the way that feminism is about context misogynist of also often about context I find for example that the idea of body shaming women the idea of narrow very narrow beauty standards is if we can compare it's much worse in the u.s. than it is in Nigeria Nigeria is still a society that has a fairly broad understanding of what is considered beautiful and for a woman to be larger than a size 8 in Nigeria is often seen as a good thing and while young women in Nigeria now who who watch a lot of American cultural products are starting to buy into the idea that their bodies are things to hate and things to change and and I hear there's something on Instagram now called and selectively is any young person here going to tell me selective weight loss where you're supposed to lose weight in particular places but not in others which is such nonsense but but apparently that's happening now for many young women but still but in general I think that body shaming is something that in the West is much more pronounced I think age functions differently for women in in both cultures I think in Nigeria because it's a society that still has reverence for age that women when they get older actually become more visible but because this Western society is one that has no reverence for aged women in this society to get more invisible as they get older I think the laws that protect women in the US are much stronger much better than in Nigeria where really they're almost non-existent I also think that in Nigeria there's a kind of overt sexism and I'm not sure whether this is good or bad because in the in Nigeria people will tell you all I would never vote for a woman I don't think a woman can be governor oh I don't think a woman can resident in the US you wouldn't necessarily hear that but it turns out people are thinking it and so one wonders whether it's fair to say that one is better or not but I guess my points is just to say that that sexism is a global problem and that increasingly I believe in this idea of of a kind of universal response a kind of universal experience I'm struck by how women from different cultures all over the world often because they have been raised as women have very similar experiences have very similar ways of looking at the world so I there's a woman who was an American woman who's talking about she got in a taxi with her husband in New York City and she knew where they were going her husband didn't and so she told the taxi driver here's what we're going she gave him the address and she sort of gave him fake directions and the taxi driver doesn't respond to her he turns to her husband and he says so sir should I take the bridge or the tunnel and I remember her telling that story and I sort of remember just feeling this moment of them of mutuality because I thought this is exactly what happens in Lagos but in a different way it's that you walk into a restaurant with a man and and the host says hello to the man shakes his hand and acts as though you don't exist and it's that idea of the continuing invisibility of women that interests me very much but secondly because it's not it's not a big and dramatic thing but I think the little things matter the little things matter I so I want I think the matter even more now that America is different America is changing I have been here for 20 years often on and I've never felt the mix of emotions about this country that I feel now and something happened yesterday that I think came close to clarifying for me what I'm thinking and feeling about America my American home is in Maryland it's a lovely server outside of Baltimore where my husband and I live with our three-year-old daughter and so yesterday I went to pick up something for my daughter and it wasn't a big shopping mall and there are all kinds of shops and things and a very big parking lot so I had just parked my car and then and next to me was a truck and in that truck was the white man when older white man and so I parked my car and I said I'm getting out of the car and he he next thing I see is sort of leaning out of his window to sort of toward me and my first reaction was visceral panic I remember thinking my God he's going - my first thought was is me to hurt me somehow and then I thought no he's going to scream the n-word at me and then I thought knew he has a gun he's going to shoot me because he doesn't like black people and then this guy just says to me I like your hair and and you know I and later I sat in my car and I actually came very close to Tian's because I thought there's something very sad about how this is what America has become I've never felt that way before I've never felt a visceral present terror about my safety but but on the other hand I think that looking at it in a way that's detached and objective it's not that surprising that I feel that way one only has to read the news and so he made me think a lot about where America is going there's a lot that it's not so much that there are many countries that are doing a sort of heading to the right in the way that the US right now and I should be specific what I mean is the idea that immigrants are dehumanized that asylum seekers are seen somehow as inherently evil that people who want to leave their homes because they want more because they want better and demonized now one can agree or disagree about whether they should be allowed to stay in the US but to somehow rob them of their humanity to take their children and put them in K in cages is the kind of thing that I never thought would happen in America and so what's happening I think for me is a kind of sadness that America is spiraling into ordinariness America is not supposed to be ordinary I think that's the whole point of it I think it's the reason that people from all over the world look to America but now it's spiral it's really really spiraling very quickly into into a kind of sad sad ordinariness and he breaks my heart and so I want to talk to the young people here and to say you need to walk and do everything you can to stop that spiraling and I say this as a person who obviously is not American as you know because I have that Nigerian passport but as a person who cares very deeply about what America represents the real values that America represents I was watching the and again living in America the past two years has made me realize how urgent feminism is feminism is no longer just about the theory of feminism and arguing about I don't even know second wave and first weave or whatever those things mean right now it's about talking about women having the right to do what they want with their bodies it means women having having a sense of dignity it means women knowing that the person who is the president of the country doesn't think of them as just may objects whose body parts can be grabbed in watching the the hearings the Supreme Court nomination hearings I remember thinking two things well I was one of those women who was almost in tears apparently it seems to be that America was divided between the women who were in tears watching this woman who was was talking about her experience and the women who were not in tears and so I'm here to say very proudly that I was in tears but it wasn't for me it wasn't so much what she had experienced and I believed her and I believed her but it was watching how she twisted herself into shapes to be helpful and nice and pleasant that you could tell she knew she couldn't afford to be angry even though she had every damn reason to be angry and and that was what broke my heart because I thought you're not even allowed reach about something you experienced and and then of course the reverse was watching the man she had accused who exhibited the most petulant wimey persona and somehow that was seen as a strength I found that fascinating and clarifying because it made me think about that idea of likability that clearly this woman felt compelled to practice likability and and with good reason because we see that even though she did she still was mocked publicly and I remember watching the president walking her and I remember seeing standing behind him people who were laughing and I just thought what does that mean I mean what do you tell your children when you go home that it's okay to laugh to mock a person and there's something very gendered about that laughter and I mean obviously it was men and women laughing but I mean gendered in the sense that the subject of the laughter was a woman and it's not idea somehow that that that somehow there is a there's a lack of internal coherence in women right and here's what I mean I've never understood that the idea that large numbers of people seem to believe that many women will wake up one day and just decide to lie about having being sexually assaulted and apparently they want to do this because they want to be famous and I know many women who want to be famous I don't know one single woman who would like to be famous for having been sexually assaulted and so I think to believe this idea that oh you know culture is full of women who lie about these things is to fundamentally think of women as not being fully human because because if you did think about women as fully human and as complex then the first option would be to question that because it makes no sense it makes sense only if you think women are fundamentally stupid ok actually I was as much talking about literature but I think I got carried away I'm sorry I thought someone said something alright so so um I hope so what I would like to do is read another little bit which I now can't find I want to read another section from thi Whaley okay which is the bit about love and sex but I can't seem to find it ok so talk to her about sex and start early it will probably be a bit awkward but it is necessary remember that seminar we went to in class 3 where we were supposed to be taught about sexuality but instead we listen to vague semi threats about how talking to boys would end up with us being pregnant and disgraced I remember that hall and that seminar as a place filled with shame ugly shame the particular brand of shame that has to do with being female me your daughter never encountered it don't pretend that sex is merely a controlled act of reproduction or and only in Marriage Act because that is disingenuous you and your husband were having sex long before marriage and your daughter will probably know this by the time she is 12 tell her that sex can be a beautiful thing and that apart from the obvious physical consequences for her as the woman it can also have emotional consequences tell her that her body belongs to her and to her alone that she should never feel the need to say yes to something she does not want or something she feels pressured to do teach her that saying no when no feels right is something to be proud of tell how you think it's best to wait until she's an adult before she has sex but be prepared because she might not wait until she's 18 and if she doesn't wait you have to make sure she's able to tell you that she hasn't it's not enough to say you want to raise your daughter you want to raise a daughter who can tell you anything you have to give her the language to talk to you and I mean this in a literal way what should she call it what would should she use I remember people used iki when I was a child to mean both anus and vagina anus was the easier meaning but it left everything vague and I never quite knew how to see for example that I had an itch in my vagina most childhood development experts say it is best to have children call sexual organs by their proper biological names I agree but that is a decision you have to make you should decide what name you want her to call it but what matters is that there must be a name and it cannot be a name that is weighed down with shame to make sure she doesn't inherit shame from you you have to free yourself of your own inherited shame and I know how terribly difficult that is in every culture in the world female sexuality is about shame even cultures that expect women to be sexy still do not expect them to be sexual all right so I'm going to stop there and I want to talk about I would somebody asked me once so this is a book about raising a girl baby girl and somebody again a Nigerian man it's always Nigerian men and I'd asked me well why are you just talking about reason girls what about raising boys which I thought was a fair question and I've actually found myself thinking about it a lot because my concept of feminism is is a movement of women and men I think that men have to come on board I think that we can make all the changes we want to women and for women if men do not change nothing changes and so I think if I were to write this book for a friend who whose baby was a boy I think I would probably start by saying that the most important thing is that to start a very deliberate project of remaking masculinity and what I mean by this is I think many of the problems that we associate with men and and you know I'm also interested in the conversation about is it nature is it nurture but for me the answer to that conversation is we don't know we don't know because for so long we have depended on the nature of things so we've pushed things that boys and girls because we see that's what boys and girls do but but we don't know and I don't think we'll know until we actually deliberately start to focus on nurture and so to remake masculinity would be to start off very early to teach boys that vulnerability is a human thing not a thing for girls a human thing and in fact to expect vulnerability from them right now part of the problem I think of masculinity is this idea that men are afraid of being sent to be weak not just by other men but also by women and so often I say that not only do we need to teach boys it's okay to cry not only should we expect boys to cry but we also need to teach girls that it's okay for boys to cry and for me to remake masculinity also means to give men the language to express emotion when I when I watch actually I don't really watch but my husband is my husband is a Nigerian but one of the vices he has picked up in America is an unreasonable passion for American football so which means that our house on certain days is full of shouting and troublingly loud expressions like gory burns and a three-year-old daughter has also been forced into this cult she recently got a ribbon much to my sadness because I have to say that for me football is something that people do when they kick a ball something that people do when we watch the World Cup okay moving on no boy but I actually I was talking about no I was talking about we make him masculine it's giving me in the language of emotion but also kind of holding man responsible I've you know that idea that a boy cleans his room and he gets fries why I think that we should grease boys to know that we expect domestic abilities from them I often say to women in Nigeria that the knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina I and so the idea being that domestic skills are learned anybody can learn them and if we raise boys very early on to know that this is expected of them not something they do to get praised not something they do when it's cute but just something they do I've observed many progressive families well-meaning but but because we're so deeply deeply entrenched in in the sexist perceptions of boys and girls I have seen many progressive families where because the boy has cleaned his room he gets excessive praise as though somehow it's similar to the way that some that in many many parts of the world today still and I'm talking about progressive circles men get a lot of praise for caring for their children I have always found that really interesting and I have to say that even personally have experienced it my husband is a very present parent I mean so present that at some point I got very resentful because I thought our daughter liked him better than she liked me but so I want to warn you that this is one of the perils of a feminist marriage your child might like the man so I have been trying consistently to manipulate her so that she likes me better but what I mean is that so fortunate to be Mary it's a lovely kind gentle man and I'm struck by how members of my family members of his family constantly praising him because when the bit when she was a little baby they were shocked that he could change diapers and sometimes sometimes I remember once after I had her I didn't want to go anywhere I just wanted to spend my whole time holding my baby but finally when she was about four five months old I went off for a day and I came back the next day but all my family they were like what's going to happen to the baby and I thought she's with her father why is that so but but and then there were Pauline Haim that like is everything okay do you need and and it seems to me that there's something about it that that is that for men this kind of infantilizing of men is kind of sort of having such low standards that we praise them for the smallest thing I I do have to say that to his credit he was vaguely irritated by the priests there are many men who expect the priests but but one little story about how this so a few weeks ago I had an event in London so I went I went to London ahead of my husband and daughter they came and joined me two years later and he said that at the airport in London he was asked to step aside and he was questioned because they're not used to men travelling alone with a little I mean my daughter is three and they kept saying does the mother know where she is and my husband was very upset and he said she's my daughter and and then they said to him we need proof that the mother knows and it was actually quite serious I mean I remember when he told me this thinking I thought this is unfair in the same way I think that we need to change the rules that just automatically assign ability to people based on gender the way that we think that you know sort of the mother is always the better parent which is completely not true but at the same time I couldn't help feeling that an ever so slight twinge of joy because I thought this is what it means to be privileged right this is what it means to have power that you haven't walked for so this woman at the airport just assumes that because I'm the mother I am a better parent and I'm the one who should be traveling with my child and I couldn't help but so my poor husband what my poor husband had to do fortunately we had just exchanged text messages in which I had said oh I can't wait until you both come so he actually had to show this woman our personal messages and that's how he was allowed to go through with our daughter so I'm just saying for the women here if you know if you have a moment of rage about all the horrible sexist things happening in the wall just remember my husband being harassed at the airport and hopefully feel a little better about it but but I really do think that it's important the project of remaking masculinity and increasingly I want to meet and talk to young men because especially when they're they're quite young because that's also when they're likely to listen to a woman in the sad thing about this culture is that men listen to men and the older they get I think the more difficult it is to reach them because that hard cage of masculinity that society constructs has already trapped them in when I talk about giving men the language I also increasingly think that it would be helpful actually to use shame in useful ways hear me out in general I don't like shaming I mean well actually that's not true the people who I think deserve to be shamed I was means going to another rant about the person who is president but I need to move on I think I think I think that shame and what I mean is what if for example with little boys baby boys toddler boys we made them feel ashamed for not being vulnerable what if we made them feel ashamed for not talking about emotions because right now we already use shame in raising children but the question is what is it we shame them for if my cousin who has a toddler was at a playground in Nigeria recently and she said that a little boy who was about 2 and a half was playing with her daughter and then he fell down he started to cry and his mother very quickly said stop crying be a man and I remember thinking you know my cousin was horrified and she said she went and picked up the boy but it made me think about how early we start to construct this ugly ugly cage in which we try men and I'm not here to say somehow that I mean obviously men as a group benefit from the way that society is structured but I think I think that there is room in there for neurons and that nuances for all of us to recognize that men also suffer from patriarchy and that if we if we all sort of collectively decide that we want to remake masculine see it will be better off for all of us the last thing I want to say that I think man should be denied the right to anger at least until women have the full right to anger and I like and I say this because you know ANCA is such an interesting it's so interesting to me that and I am curious in reading about different cultures that it seems to be the same women are not allowed anger men are and what I mean is of course women feel anger but women know that their consequences to showing it and I and my sort of little amateur theory is that maybe that's why the the rates of depression are higher in women because not being allowed to show anger everything then becomes sort of internal and churning and awful and so I want to start a campaign men not allowed anger women allowed anger for the next fifty nine years so anytime I talk about feminism anytime I talk about feminism there's always somebody who pops up and says she's angry it happens all the time and in different parts of the world and it sort of seems to me that it's impossible to be a woman and show anger without being reduced to being just about anger I think anger is a human emotion and there many things I feel angry about I feel very angry about gender injustice all over the world but my feeling angry does not mean that I'm an angry person and which is why I think it's important for us to get to the point in the world where a woman can be angry show her anger on her damn anger and not be labeled an angry person so in conclusion I think of not sure how much time do I have ten minutes to say something else okay no I don't remember I don't realize I really don't remember but anyway I want to conclude I want to conclude by saying that I really and so there's a lot that's happening in the world about which I feel close to despair but at the same time I know that I cannot afford despair and I just want to conclude by saying that we cannot afford to spare and that I believe the hope is essential and I'm not saying this in a sort of pollyannaish optimistic way but but in a sort of more that it's about resilience that I really do think that I'm calling on all the young people here to know that you have to put your hands together and resist this spiralling that America is doing into ugly ordinariness you have to all collectively want America to remain that place that everyone looks up to despite being flawed because no place is perfect and and I'm not talking about the idea that we all have to agree with one another we don't but we can disagree while still holding on to a respect of everybody's humanity and that's what this country is losing and and I just hope that all of you young people will take it seriously that you'll take it personally thank you [Applause]

Channel: Sweet Briar College

Views: 28,446

Rating: 4.8932037 out of 5

Keywords: Chimamanda Adichie, Sweet Briar College

Id: PZ7EGdxT2ZI

Length: 60min 28sec (3628 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 01 2018