Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Storytelling - Chatham House 2018

hello Thank You Sophie it's always nice to be introduced by a stunning woman and Thank You Robin for having me it's nice to be here I I wanted to come because I wanted to demystify the Chatham House thing so I flew in from Washington DC this morning and because I travel on a Nigerian Passport I have learned to approach immigration officers and in various countries with a certain level of trepidation there have been so many instances of my being told step aside being asked if I'm really a writer and so this morning I approached with my usual wariness the officer was a white woman a certain British type brisk brusque but she showed zero prejudice she was efficient she asked why I was here she stamped my passport she wanted to know what I wrote about so I usually say that I'm a fiction writer which is really what I am but this time deliberately I said I write about feminism she paused as if she was a bit taken aback feminism she said I said yes and then she went back to stomping things and then she gave me my passport and I said do you think it's important and she said what I said feminism she paused as though she was thinking about it and then she said yes and I said to her you had to think about it and now I said that with no judgment just curiosity and she said well because people use it as a dirty war don't they and then after another pause she added but that's not what it is it's really about treating everyone fairly exactly I said for some reason how Awards warmed my heart and I also remember thinking as I walked away with my passport that's the story I'm going to start with today I was very grateful to her for giving me story and so as I turned to leave she pointed up my handbag bright orange handbag and she said I like your bag is it a posh one that warmed my heart even more now that bit about the handbag is irrelevant on the surface of things but I'm a fiction writer and it is detail such as this that novelists used to ground their storytelling if I were to recast this episode from this morning in a story a story about the basic and simple meaning of feminism as told by a middle-aged white immigration officer I would certainly use the detail about highlighting my handbag because it humanizes her and because it shows that feminism is not about unreasonable angry women who do not shave and who hate men it shows that feminism is quite simply about handbags that's a joke I wasn't sure it would work so my brother okay and my brothers actually okay I'm killin it often tell me to stop my foolish jokes they say to me that they often don't walk but you know I keep trying because really what would the world be without failed attempts at humor I grew up in Nigeria I grew up in Asuka university town my father was a professor my mother was an administrator I was an early reader and what I read as a young child were precision American children's books only those books the characters were white and blue eyed they had pink pits and snow at Christmas they ate apples and they had Easter eggs at Easter I was also an early writer and when I began to write at about the age of seven stories written in pencil on lined exercise books all my characters were white and blue-eyed they ate apples and plead in the snow at Christmas and talked about going out when the Sun came out now this despite the fact that I lived in a world where people were mostly black and ate mangoes rather than apples and didn't have snow and never talked about the weather because there was no need to the Sun was always out and of course I had never seen a pretty pink pig all the pigs are seeing were brown and quite disgusting what this demonstrates I think is the power of stories how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of stories because I had read books in which characters were white and foreign I had become convinced that the stories that were worthy of books were those in which characters were white on foreign I loved those British and American books they stared my imagination they opened up new worlds for me but unintended consequence was that I did not consciously actively know that people like me little girls with skin the color of chocolate whose kinky hair did not form ponytails could all so exist in literature representation matters if we see only one kind of person doing a certain job over and over we begin to think that only that kind of person can do that job which is of course not true and I thought about this while reading this morning about the rage expressed by many men and some women here in the UK because the BBC had a female commentator for one of the World Cup matches many complaints apparently were about the high pitch of her female voice but I didn't see anything much about what I thought really mattered just was a commentary good or not in my family I was the child who wanted to know the story of who we are I was the child who found a certain romance in our history who felt nostalgia for things that I had not experienced I was the child who sharpened very early on the skill of eavesdropping the pastime at which I am still quite adept I do not know a time when I was not drawn to story to human emotions a human motivation so this is all I have ever known this longing the sense of being always one step removed one step apart and watching always watching I'm now used to being described as a person who writes about something called identity and often I find it reductive not because I don't write about identity but because their assumption in Western discourses that identity is something only members of subordinated groups write about women and people who are not white but the truth is that identity is about everyone when a white man writes about his life he's writing about identity as much as when an asian woman does in American politics identity politics is used to refer to black brown and Asian people but it is not used to refer to what Americans call the white working-class which is as much identity politics as anything else identity is about all of us and identity matters because identities tied to rights and to stereotypes because identity shapes the way we deal with the wall and shapes the way the wall deals with us I didn't think of myself as black until I went to the US when I was 19 to go to college I had red roots but but I do that white thing that that black identity meant me until one of my very first essays in college and my professor came back with the papers he had graded and he said this is the best essay and I want to know who wrote it and he said my last name and I raised my hand and he looked surprised and it was a very small fleeting moment but at that moment I realized what it meant to be black in America that it meant that you came already burdened with stereotypes and that America was a place where black achievement was considered extraordinary two days ago I went to get my hair done in the US and I was in a hurry so I dashed out of the car and I forgot my wallet in the car and when the woman was done with my hair I realized I'd forgotten my wallet and I panicked I could easily have gone back to the car but I felt like I needed to explain to her that I really was coming back and I really just forgot it in my car again because I realized that she was looking at me and thinking yep black people just probably lying a woman told me once about approaching venture capitalists to raise money for a startup that she wanted to do when she said that she was very aware of how being a woman and coming out to ask for money and to have ambition meant that people would judge her differently and so that she started off always by saying to the man it was always men and a woman I don't want you to judge me differently and then she would deliver her spew I don't know that worked for her but the point is that her identity shaped the way that his men saw her so in our world a man is confident but a woman is arrogant a man is uncompromising but a woman is a ballbreaker a man is assertive a woman is aggressive a man is strategic a woman is manipulative a man is a leader a woman is controlling a man is authoritative the woman is annoying the characteristic or the behavior is the same what is different is the sex and based on the sex the world makes assumptions and the world treats us differently anytime I talk about feminism there's invariably somebody who pops up and labels me angry it's a civil woman is not allowed to feel anger without being reduced to being only about anger anger is a human emotion and there are many things I feel angry about one of which is the terrible in justices that comprise sexism I am angry that women in South Korea are protesting about hidden cameras that invade their privacy I'm angry about domestic violence all over the world in Italy there's a woman killed every week by an intimate partner I'm angry that in parts of Africa women cannot inherit property because they are women I'm angry that in Latin America women are dying because governments decide that they cannot do anything about pregnancies that they no longer want but my feeling angry does not mean I'm an angry person a man who shows righteous anger is not likely to be reduced to that label of angry person I was a feminist long before I knew what the word meant I didn't read feminist texts I did try to read one once and I just couldn't get through it I simply watched the world I knew that the world did not give to women the same dignity that he gave to men I was aware of how much the socialization of women was focused on men don't wear a miniskirt so that men will not rape you learn to cook and clean so you can keep a man don't be too ambitious so you don't intimidate a man don't always say what you really think and learn to pretend so that you can protect a man's ego and make him feel that he is brighter than he actually is I feel like women here yes and men are like wait you mean I'm not that bright and because I'm a writer I'm much more interested in story than in theory because story acknowledges nuance and complexity and story shows that despite nuance and complexity the underlying truths remain the underlying need for justice remains we should change laws that diminish women but changing mindsets is even more important we should in that enact policy that supports women but changing cultural attitudes is even more important so it's wonderful for example to have a law that expects a father to take time off to care for a new baby but how does society really think of that man who takes the time off that man who stays home while the woman walks do we release it as completely neutral his domestic walk really gender-neutral or do women still do a majority of it the politics of domestic arrangements matters very much because the discourse around women and walk is really about domestic walk if the traditional expectation were not that caregiving and domestic walk where women's domains then we would not even need to have that conversation about kind of woman have it all why do we not speak of whether a man can have it all I find it quite infuriating to hear people men and women who respond to a woman's story of harassment with questions like why is she coming out now why didn't she report it right away and maybe it makes logical sense kind of logical sense that is completely lacking in context in context and complexity to immediately report an episode of harassment but the reality of lived experience is very different and it is stories that can eliminate this storytelling forces us to think of people as people not as abstractions who have to conform to bloodless logic and by the way what we think of as objective logic is often our own very carefully curated and subjective prejudice why do women wait to say something why not go to the police why not scratch his eyes out oh she just wants to be famous and the idea of a woman wanting fame as the person who's been raped has always been confusing to me I don't know anyone any woman like that and I've asked many women I know they know any women like that and they don't so of course it's possible that such people exist the world is a large place after all but there must be a miniscule percentage being famous or getting attention for having been raped or harassed is not less than in the least bit so while I've been very happy about the meets in movement and have been heartened by it I've also felt concerned about the way it's been covered in the media by the abstraction in the language of and used in the u.s. I would read the news and I would find myself thinking what does sexual misconduct even mean I wanted the story it is the story that provides the kind of detail that can educate people and it seems to me that we all need some education on sexual harassment it is the story that makes it difficult to silence women it is storytelling with all its nuance and complexity that can show that sexual harassment is more about power than it is about sex and that women know the difference between what is consensual and what is not I was also troubled by how much of the media coverage of women was done in ways that aligned with traditional ideas of how women should be so we saw women crying women helpless women faultless and I felt that it risks infantilizing women because it aligned with that idea that for a woman to be deserving of sympathy she has to be as non-threatening as possible now America may be the only country in which the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in its constitution but it seems to me that this is in fact a human need how we go about obtaining this happiness and indeed what counts as happiness may differ among us but to be alive to be human is to always be in pursuit of joy the problem with sexism is that it is a large obstacle in a woman's human pursuit of joy I think of literature as my religion and I have learned from literature that all of us human beings are flawed and I've also learned that most of us have the possibility of redemption we can remake masculinity we can remake masculinity from a narrow cage for men into a humane expansive idea we can expect men to be vulnerable we can give men the language of emotion so I want to quote from a lovely novel that I've just read by meg wallet so it's called the female persuasion and I think it illustrates what is a major factor in this this sort of this idea of the innovate and inevitability of male failure the mother had gotten it into her head early on that boys could not be tamed so there was no point in even trying so it's not so much that boys don't want to cry as it is that they're ashamed of becoming victims at the hands of other boys for not performing masculinity and the fear that means that they will be thought weak by girls and so in trying in teaching boys we must also teach girls that it is ok for boys to cry there's a wonderful essay by Susan Orlean in The New Yorker 15 years ago maybe which is called the American male at age 10 and she writes that it's at age 10 that American the young American boys starts to get screwed up I don't know if any American may want to show their experiences but um and so I think that we need to do it before they turn 10 we need to most importantly what we need to do before they turn 10 is teach boys that women are human when it can seem obvious of course women are human but if our walls truly value the humanity of women then I would not be here speaking about feminism I read where a celebrity a young man recently wrote that we must Revere women and that really bothered me because it's important to keep in mind that women are not special they're just human women as human as men women are not little gods that have to be worshipped the danger of this thinking that women are somehow special somehow morally better is that if this is true then there's a certain level of autonomy that they can never truly have and it is important to teach boys that women have full autonomy just as men have that a woman's body belongs to the woman alone we teach women to be safe and to protect themselves from rape but so we teach men not to rape a Witter assume that men are wild animals I think not I know enough men that prove that this is not so so they're those who speak of male desire as being primitive but somehow forget the female desire exists too so this idea of sort of the atavistic explanation for male behavior isn't fully satisfactory to me what a civilization mean how much is nurture and how much is nature we know from the science of epigenetics that can affect nature I am more interested in nurture which we have control over than I am in nature we haven't tried nurture on a large scale in a determined way and so until we do we haven't earned the right to see in response to a man doing something terrible that men will be men we use the sexuality of women against them which is what Americans call slut-shaming and I've often wondered is it possible to slut-shame men no because male sexuality is considered normal we can create a world where women can be full sexual beings where slut-shaming never happens where women face no backlash for being angry or bold or aggressive or ambitious where there are many women as men in positions of real power because representation matters we can make a world where there is no such thing as a pregnancy penalty for women's walk a world where we all collectively support the human beings whose bodies do the difficult and physical work of ensuring that the human species does not become extinct I've learned from the creature that we humans are flawed all of us but even while flawed we are capable of goodness we are capable of doing better we are capable of being better we do not need first to be perfect before we can do what is right and just one way of doing this I think men should read more stories by and about women we know from studies that men read men and women read men and women perhaps if men read more women stories there would be more likely to see them see them as fully human and less likely to see them as objects who exist for the needs of men some people believe that women feel and men think but nearer science has shown that all thinking is infused with feeling that feeling is a form of thinking there is value in booth and storytelling is about both when we read as the Irish writer colum McCann put it we become alive in bodies not our own we live in a world today where it's become increasingly important to try and live in bodies not our own to embrace empathy Plato was a great philosopher but he thought that human beings were made of different kinds of metal and that some metals were more precious than others when we embrace literature when we embrace storytelling and stories we realize how wrong little was I'm not saying that we are all the same that has always struck me as not just untrue but also incredibly simplistic and I would be terribly bored in the world in which everybody was the same what I am saying is that we need to conceive of a world in which the idea of difference is just different rather than something necessarily better or worse we need to conceive of a world in which the different needs of different people can be met for the simple reason that we are all human how we experience humanity depends on our culture but what we have in common is that humanity what's worth said of his poetry that it is the breadth and fineness spirit of all knowledge and I would go further and say that storytelling is the breadth and fineness spirit of all knowledge thank you you

Channel: Chatham House

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Keywords: chatham house, international affairs, think tank, foreign policy, policy institute, feminist manifesto, americanah, author, 2018, storytelling, london conference, half of a yellow sun, youtube, nigeria, purple hibiscus, video, chimamanda ngozi adichie, chimamanda, adichie, feminism

Id: VfzgtOuA-co

Length: 25min 5sec (1505 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 25 2018