Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | INBOUND 2018 Spotlight

thank you i'm so excited to be here i thought i would wear a top with a star wars theme so hello inbound i'm very happy to be here and i thank you all for being here and i thank you for that welcome i do have one regret though i'm told that michelle obama was here last year and i'm deeply certain that i wasn't here last year or that she's not here this year so i would like to start by telling you a story about bagels when i was growing up in nigeria i loved to read i once read an american book in which a character had something called a bagel for breakfast i had no idea what a bagel was but i thought it sounded very elegant and i pronounced it bagel i desperately wanted to have a bagel i was nine that year my family visited the u.s for the first time on vacation and at the airport in new york i told my mother that as a matter of the gravest urgency she needed to buy me a bagel and so she went to a cafe and bought one finally i would have a bagel now you can imagine my disappointed surprise when i discovered that this bad girl this exotic confection from the book i had read was really just a dense doughnut i love to tell this story because of how wonderful books are at making our imagination sore but there was also something comforting and instructive about the discovery of a bagel in the demystifying ordinariness of the bagel the realization that other people like me ate regular food i believe in storytelling i look at the world through the lens of stories i believe that stories can change minds i believe that stories can take away dignity and i believe that stories can also restore dignity i'm one of those people who always knew what they wanted to do i've been writing since i was old enough to spell i don't remember a time when i wasn't drawn to stories to reading stories and writing stories and finding stories i have this memory from childhood very clear in my mind i'm sitting in the backseat of my mother's car looking out of the window and suddenly i feel a melancholy pang a kind of muted morning because what i saw through the window as we drove were stories so many stories waiting to be told and i knew that i would not be able to tell them all i was born into an academic family in sukkah in southeastern nigeria my father was a professor my mother was a university administrator i also did well in school and like all children who do well in school in nigeria i was expected to become a doctor i didn't want to be a doctor all i wanted to do was to read and write but i also knew that i was not very likely to earn a living by engaging in such an esoteric venture as reading and writing so i decided that i would go ahead and become a doctor and i had it all nicely planned out i would become a psychiatrist and i would work as a psychiatrist during the day and at night i would use my patient stories for my fiction but after a year of medical school when i found myself so bored in class that i was writing little poems at the back of my notebooks i realized it was time to leave and so i took the sacs and i got a scholarship and i came to the us to go to college later when i told people the story of leaving medical school some of them particularly the nigerians said that i was very brave it's very difficult to get into medical school and nobody just leaves voluntarily but i didn't think of it as brave i thought of it as trying i wanted to try i knew it might not have worked out i might not have gotten the scholarship but i wanted to try and before i came to the us i had already published a small book a play which i now hope that nobody ever reads it was written when i was 17. but when i came to the us i tried to get my first novel published it was a book set mostly in nigeria in small town nigeria and i'd done my research and found out that the way to get a good book published is to find an agent and so i started to send the manuscript out to agents and very soon the rejections poured in a few of them were kind at least kind enough to tell me why they had rejected me nobody knows where nigeria is and nobody cares was one of the responses another agent told me to use what he called the african material as the backdrop but then set the book in the u.s and for a minute i thought how can i do that but then the entire book was set in nigeria and the things that happened in the book were particularly nigerian so i wasn't sure how i could in fact make that just the background and then set the story in the u.s and then another agent said to me i don't know how to sell you because there's no contemporary african who's been published in the us if you were indian it would be easier because then i could say that you're the next arundhati roy now arundhati roy is a marvelously talented writer who had just published a novel that did very well and so for a short time i began to think how can i make myself indian i couldn't figure out how to do that so finally an agent a black woman in washington dc outside of the center of literary publishing decided to take me on and she said i will never forget she said i will take a chance on you the manuscript sold in weeks and even though it was to a small publisher what happened was that the book became hand sold by independent book sellers and i will die feeling deeply grateful to independent booksellers who among other wonderful things actually read the books what [Applause] there's any any indie bookseller here thank you thank you what this taught me though is that gatekeepers can be wrong that just because something has been done a certain way doesn't mean it's the only way that it can be done and this is a lesson i have kept close a lesson about trying about possibility and about hope when i came to live in the u.s i found it fascinating as a country i had of course read american books and listened to american music and and watched american films but to actually live here was different i was puzzled that the words corn dog actually meant something that you ate and i was puzzled that anybody could understand the game of baseball and speaking of sports and yes i know i'm in boston why was this other game in which large men wore shoulder pads called football when everyone surely knew that what football is actually what happens during the world cup and i was deeply shocked to discover american poverty the american pop culture i had consumed in nigeria had not prepared me at all for the rows and rows of depressed boarded up buildings in west philadelphia or for the hearts in the countryside of georgia that had no indoor plumbing but despite my early disorientation i came to like america for its sense of possibility for its sense of physical and psychic space for its sense of the possibility of doing more doing better and i now consider it my home part of the year but the most significant thing that happened to me in america was that i became black in nigeria i had not thought of myself as black because unlike parts of east and south africa where white settlers unfairly took land and created a racial hierarchy blackness is not a real category of identification in nigeria most people are black instead it is ethnicity and religion but in america i very quickly realized i was black there was much i didn't understand about this new identity that had been thrust on me my ignorance of america was matched only by how quickly i absorbed the negative stereotypes attached to black people two weeks of watching local television news in brooklyn after i arrived and i thought crime was a problem only about black americans one day a guy in a store in brooklyn called me sister he was african-american and my almost automatic response was to recoil i'm not your sister i said and what i really meant was i'm not black because of course i knew that his calling me sister was about being black it's been 20 years since i said that in 1998 and i still feel ashamed of it today because those words came from a malignant form of ignorance i think also that my reaction was an indictment of racism because if blackness were benign in america i would not have said that i would not have wanted to exclude myself from blackness but of course it's important to say that blackness itself is not the problem all of the black people i know myself included are happy being black and particularly happy that black don't crack so the pro it's true though so so the problem is not blackness because blackness is beautiful the problem is that american society has imposed on blackness the burden of many negative stereotypes the [Applause] the moment that i first began to understand this on a personal level happened shortly after i arrived in the us it was the first essay i wrote for the first writing class that i took we had sent in the essays by email and and at the time i would send in the essay with just my last name and my initial and the professor brought the papers back into class and he said this particular essay is very good and i want to know who wrote it and so he he called my my name my last name which sometimes americans seem to think might be italian because they call me adichie but actually it's adichie so he said adichie and i raised my hand and he looked surprised and it was a very small and fleeting moment but i understood in that moment that he was surprised because he didn't expect the person who wrote the best essay in class to be black it surprised me it annoyed me i had come from a country which had many many problems but it was also a country in which black achievement was seen as ordinary where a black student doing well in school was considered normal and had nothing to do with race and so i found myself struggling to make sense of this new identity that seemed to impose negative stereotypes on me i wanted to understand i wanted to confront my own ignorance and so i began to read i read everything i could find about african-american history i began to ask questions i began to learn and today as a black person who is not african-american i am amazed at the litany of grace and grit that is african-american history in this country and i am amazed that this history is not celebrated more i am amazed at how recent so much of it feels how heartbreakingly recent the overt forms of racism are not just the big issues like african americans being refused mortgages or african-americans world war ii soldiers being treated much worse than german prisoners of war or african-americans being excluded from government programs that helped many other americans become middle class but also just smaller things that less than 50 years ago there were white communities in this country who were draining swimming pools just so that black americans would not swim too and that it has been less than 50 years in this very city of boston that white adults through stones bricks at little black children who wanted to go to school i'm often described in the us as a writer who writes about identity and i'm often less than enthusiastic about that description and it's not because i don't write about identity i do but it's because the assumption in western discourse is 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 but in this country the term 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 walking class which is also identity politics identity is about all of us and identity matters because identity is tied to rights and to stereotypes because identity shapes the way that the world interacts with us and in turn it shapes the way that we interact with the world so i want to tell you the story of a limo driver i recently got an honorary degree from a rather prestigious liberal arts college which was quite lovely and the limu driver who came to pick me up at the airport a white man was chatty and nice even if a little over familiar he asked what i did and i said i was a writer oh i don't read books he said but even if i read books i wouldn't read or know about books like yours why do you say that i asked oh i just know i wouldn't because you think i write about things that won't interest you i said and he said yes we both knew what he meant black things and woman things i thought that this was a moment of remarkable honesty on the subject of identity in america what struck me first was sadness for him how sad i thought that he will never know the glorious fiction of toni morrison and then i thought about how the reverse could never happen i read books by white men all the time because in this society white maleness is seen as the norm and we think of white men writers writing about so wide a range of things that we cannot assume what they write about merely by looking at them and when they do write about white male things we think of those things as universal but really we should think about all good literature as universal i know from a lifetime of loving and reading books that any story if done well becomes universal because in telling stories we appeal to that which is human in all of us i grew up reading books from all parts of the world and even though i sometimes didn't understand every specific thing about say in russia in the novel fathers and sons i didn't always get all the tiny details but i got the book i got the larger human story i loved them for the past 10 years i've been teaching a writing workshop in lagos in the workshop we read stories we critique stories and we talk about the world because art to me is as important as the context of the art thousands of people apply to the workshop for 20 slots and so to make the selection i walk with a final short list of 50 all of them talented but i define talent in a particular way i don't look for polish as much as i look for promise i look for a sense that a person will make a good editor or a good writer that a person has what i like to call heart and i consider stories that are good even though they might not be my particular cup of tea because i think diversity in writing styles is important and then i read their biographies from their names from where they grew up from where they live even from their grammar which is often a marker of class i choose 20 people i want a diverse group because different viewpoints matter and each year we all learn from one another i learned about my own country i grew up roman catholic in southern nigeria which is predominantly christian and before i started the workshop northern nigeria was an unknown monolith to me it was just a large muslim space but in my workshops i came to understand and deeply appreciate the nuances of northern nigeria and it has helped me much better understand present-day politics in my country so i have another story about another limo driver so this happened at another university very prestigious where i also got an honorary degree thank you and um because i think it's still really cool i um so we so we the the commencement exercises were done there was a lovely um launch on for for people who had been honored and our families and i had some nigerian friends come and join my my husband and my family and being nigerians we spend a lot of time talking very loudly and we don't necessarily respect time constraints and so in the end we were the last to leave the venue of the luncheon and the other well-behaved um honorees had you know they left when they were supposed to so so it was me and my family left and the organizer said to me oh there's a shuttle waiting for you and you know the shuttle driver knows that the honorary degree recipient is is coming one more person is coming and so when i was done we we go and we find the shuttle and there's a white man driving it he's waiting there so i i tried to go in and he says no no this is not for you this is reserved and i said yes but i'm it's actually me i got the honorary degree and he said no it's for the honorary degree recipient and i said yes that would be me and he goes no this is for the person who got an honorary degree so at this point i'm actually wanting to bring out the thing and say well here look it actually wasn't pleasant i can laugh about it now but i remember thinking genuinely thinking and wondering why is it so hard how is it possible that this man's view of what an honorary degree recipient should be is so narrow and so hardened that he resisted even in the face of evidence sometimes we're held back by what we carry in our head by what we think should be instead of what actually is i believe that we can truly hear each other's stories i believe that we can create a world where everyone truly feels that they matter but the reason it's difficult to do is because we have long had a world in which we did not hear each other's stories and where everyone did not feel that they truly mattered and so to truly hear one another we need to create more space we need to extend the boundaries we need to widen our ideas of everything or we will be left behind what does a writer look like what does the ceo look like what does the recipient of an honorary degree look like there was once a woman at a bookshop who had gone in to look for children's books and i had said to her that i was having difficulty finding children's books that had black characters in them many of the children's books had animal characters and then some of them had white characters and she said to me very sympathetically oh i understand why you would find that important and her emphasis was on the you as though she didn't think that this was important for her now there's something wonderful and affirming about reading about your own reality and reading about people like you and nobody should ever be denied of that pleasure but it is equally important to read about people who are not like you i wished that that woman had also considered diverse children's books important to her if she reads diverse books to her children then she's preparing them hopefully for a world in which their conception of people is wider and healthier i do not merely want to read about people who do not look like me but i also want to hear people i disagree with and so even though my politics in this country is left leaning very proudly and happily left leaning i i subscribe to the wall street journal which is a publication that is not left-leaning i want to know the world view of people who do not see the world as i do because in that way i'm better able to understand the world so i i was going to talk about one of the mantras i live by which is never admire quietly i believe in telling people what i admire about them when people die and i read or hear about people saying nice things about them i often wonder did the dead person know did you tell her when she was alive and so i never admire quietly i will tell you but i was i was going to suggest this mantra to everyone here but then i realized it must be very hard for men in this age of me too to adopt this mantra of mine because men are no longer sure if they can admire and what to admire is that a bad joke kind of but i want to make a case for humor and bad jokes what would life be without some failed attempts at humor but really i come from a family steeped in laughter and i think that humorlessness is like an internal death but i also know that there are things i will never laugh about and i know we cannot use humor as an excuse we cannot use humor to deflect what matters and in today in the context of me too even laughter is complicated there are many situations with men in which women laugh not from humor but from discomfort so there's recently been in the news a lot of noise about the pastor at at the funeral of one of the greatest artists of all time aretha franklin and and i've been reading pieces and people have been sending me things because the thing about being a feminist publicly is that people send me every imaginable thing that remotely has to do with anything that is about women so i've read i've read way too many pieces about about this pastor and did he grab her breast and did he not and what i was thinking was that it wasn't so much about whether or not he grabbed her breast as it was the larger idea of entitlement that we see entitlement the way he touches her and holds her and in the way that he is completely blind to her very obvious discomfort but she was smiling and laughing the problem we have is that too many men have a level of entitlement towards women's borders too many men feel that they have a right to women's bodies no she doesn't have to give you a reason for saying no no she isn't smiling as she says no because she really means yes she's smiling because she's the product of years and years of socialization that tells her to be nice to men either so that they marry her or to be nice to men so that they don't beat her or kill her and no me too is not the end of romance there is flirting that is charming and respectful and welcome and then there is harassment that is unwelcome and unjust and criminal and just wrong adults know the difference adults should know the difference and so romance is not dead quite the contrary perhaps romance will finally be romance perhaps some men will now understand that real romance means understanding that women are human that women's needs are legitimate that women matter so long live romance and love [Applause] when i teach writing i always tell my students to make sure they have a truth teller who loves them somebody who will read their work and tell them the truth whether good or bad the love part is important and i mean love in a very broad sense i mean a person who wishes you well a person who's acting in good faith because sadly the world is full of people who in the name of giving you feedback just want to put you down and spread ugly negative energy in your life avoid them at all costs and so in hearing one another's stories we have to start with a platform of good faith brian stevenson who is one of the most admirable men in america says about the expression truth and reconciliation that the first has to happen in order for the second to happen people often want the reconciliation part without the truth part because truth telling can be difficult especially when it means acknowledging things about yourself that are not terribly flattering when i was a teenager i remember once going to my ancestral hometown where my grandmother lived and my cousin had a friend who was visiting her a young woman who lived in the village this young woman was unwell and so she had she had gone to a self-styled chemist who had given her a potion to drink and that potion had made her violently sick and i remember saying to her oh my goodness why would you do that why would you risk your life why didn't you just go to hospital i didn't know then that i had class privilege that i was fortunate to have been born into an educated family to have easy access to health care if we were sick we went to the university medical center where the doctors and nurses were good and where the care was free and the wait times were short i was blind to the experience of this young woman who lived in the village for whom health care was impossible she couldn't afford it hospital was too far away and knowing that i have blind spots makes me keen to learn i'm endlessly learning and here is some of what i have learned to be a member of an oppressed group does not mean you're sanctified if you're part of an oppressed group then you're just that oppressed you do not become a saint by being oppressed so a white feminist woman who is fighting misogyny can be an anti-black racist a black person fighting racism can be homophobic a gay person who suffers from the homophobia that is still rampant everywhere in the world can also be an anti-arab racist i've learned that oppression works in complicated ways i've learned that we are all vulnerable to stereotypes we are all guilty of absorbing stereotypes if you live in a world that devalues women you're likely to grow up devaluing women whether you're a woman or not if you live in a world that devalues a particular group of people you're likely to grow up devaluing that group of people whether or not you're actually a member of that group and so a woman being misogynistic should not be a reason to discredit the important work of fighting sexism or a black person having anti-black prejudice does not make the problem of racism in america any less serious the systems of oppression the cultural and societal ideas and institutions that perpetuate these various injustices are what we need to remake so i'm apparently supposed to be a feminist icon i didn't bring my icon hat with me today but um i grew up bilingual i grew up speaking ibu and english at the same time and i consider both to be my first languages igbo does not have gender-specific pronouns in it the word o is used for both male and female and so some time ago a friend of mine went to see a consultant and she told me about it and and with my friend as with my family we speak a mix of igbo and english often in the same sentence and so she said oh i've been to see the consultant and she was saying this in ibu and then i switched to english and i said to her so what did he say and my friend started to laugh and she said oh my goodness you're constantly lecturing us about not making assumptions and yet you just assumed the consultant was a man actually was a woman so i hung my head in shame but patriarchy is an old human habit and like all old habits it will take a long time to die but we can hasten its demise and we can do so by telling a different story we often use nature to justify men's behavior and yet we also as human beings have agreed that civilization and progress is a measure of how well we are able to tame those parts of our nature that are inimical to our well-being so we might by nature be lawless and selfish and brutal but we've enacted a system of laws and orders to tame that nature for a sense of collective progress and so we don't actually know if women are drawn to particular kinds of jobs if women are incapable of doing particular things we don't actually know because we haven't tried to focus on nurture we can hasten the demise by telling a different story of religion and why do i say religion because i think religion is very important because i think religion has been the basis of many of the injustices all over the world that hold people back from becoming their full selves and particularly in my continent of africa it is impossible to engage with injustice without engaging with religion and so we can tell a different story about religion we can in christianity for example talk about the various and very instructive interactions that jesus had with women instead of talking about the bible telling women to be silent in the church we can talk about how the bible also tells us that when jesus rose from the dead he revealed himself first to women and it was to women that jesus gave the central message of christianity that he had risen we can hasten the demise by redefining masculinity we can tell a different story about what masculinity is what do we admire in men what do we teach little boys how is it that we think so little of men that we hold them to such low standards we tell women to protect themselves from rape which is all well and good but why don't we tell men not to rape masks masculinity is a small tight ugly cage we should break up that cage and then rebuild it we trap male human beings in that cage both men and women suffer the illnesses that lead to death by suicide but it is men who have a much higher rate of dying by suicide why because men are socialized to suppress so many human parts of themselves men are socialized not not to ask for help men are socialized to see asking for help as a weakness instead of the strength that it actually is men are socialized to be afraid of fear men are socialized not to show vulnerability and so from the moment we tell a little boy that boys don't cry or we tell a hurting teenager to man up we are creating an adult man who will be cheated of the full range of his human emotions and so while men benefit from patriarchy as we all know the truth is that men also suffer from it and we can tell a different story about this we can remake masculinity and we can also tell a different story about gender roles which is to say that there is no such thing there is nothing that a woman should be because she is a woman there is nothing that a man should be because he's a man and and this this makes me think of how often women are said to be special especially by people who claim to be in support of women's rights but women are not special yes my sisters we're not get over yourselves women are not special women are human women are flawed just like men a woman is as likely as a man to be kind or unkind people who think women will make the world this perfect utopia have not been to an all-girls boarding school if we keep saying that women are special then we judge them at a higher and unfair standard i remember years ago when a female politician in nigeria was accused of having embezzled quite a lot of money and a lot of people were very upset and i was struck by how a lot of the coverage was about how can a woman do that she's a woman how could she have stolen money the way i saw it she was a politician and she had done what most nigerian politicians do oh oh another story about a friend of mine who was talking who told me about a woman and a neighbor who had cheated on her husband in lagos and this friend of mine told me the story with such horror and she said how can a woman cheat you know a woman is supposed to be the one who holds a family together she is blessed by god to be and i thought no she's just a person she's just a human being and just as men cheat women cheat if we as a society are going to judge cheating we have to judge it equally for both men and women men don't get to have a past because they're men but even as a child i had i began to notice many situations where a man and a woman would show the same behavior but a woman will be judged quite differently so for example a man would do something and be called confident a woman would do something similar and be called arrogant now confident is admirable arrogant is something that our society thinks is deserving of censure a man would act in a certain way and be described as authoritative but a woman would act in it in a similar way and be called annoying or nagging the characteristic is the same the behavior is the same what is different is the body exhibits in it and i began to realize that actually it wasn't about the behavior at all it was about the body because surely if we're a cult if as a culture we agree that equality for example being self-confident is a good thing then we should celebrate it for all people but when we do not celebrate it in women i realize that our problem is not with self-confidence our problem is with women whenever i talk about feminism someone will invariably pop up to say oh you're such an angry person which is really a way of shutting you up right i am angry i am angry about injustice and i think everybody every human with a heart should be angry about various injustices in the world but my being angry about injustice does not make me an angry person and by the way an angry person is just a made up an empty idea that is used to close conversations anger is a valid human emotion and women are judged very harshly for showing anger in this country it is terrible for white women to show anger and it is catastrophic for black women to show anger because the stereotype of the angry black woman is one that is impossible to shrug off once it has been pinned on you it will follow you your entire life it will prevent you from getting opportunities that you deserve i know many accomplished women of all races who have held themselves back in many situations because they don't want to be considered angry or difficult they don't want to be called the even if what they are doing is simply asking for what is their due a higher salary more opportunities black men too in many corporate circumstances are extra careful because they too are not allowed that human emotion of anger no matter how justified and often i wonder with sadness how much the world has lost out on how much we have missed from talented people who have held themselves back because they know that they will not be judged fairly racism is a strong ward that makes everyone uncomfortable but what if we start to think of these isms in terms of stories so what if instead of talking about racism we talk about the fact that a black american boy young boy a child is not allowed merely to be a child that to be a young black american boy today means that you do certain things that in other non-black bodies would be considered what a child does but in the body of a black boy becomes threatening or disruptive it becomes a reason to suspend him from school it becomes a reason to murder him i dream of a fair world a fair world is one in which a behavior is judged in the same way no matter the physical body that exhibits that behavior because i'm a storyteller i think of myself as a dreamer i dream of the way i wish the world where i dream of the way i wish the world were but it isn't merely wishful dreaming it is to imagine the way that i know the world can be i truly believe that we can remake the world we can remake the world by taking very little steps but we can remake it but first we must imagine it before we can remake it thank you for listening

Channel: INBOUND

Views: 251,359

Rating: 4.8902745 out of 5

Keywords: inbound, innovative, leader, thought, inspiring, chimamanda, chimamanda ngozi adichie, inbound18

Id: qq27Ha07RHw

Length: 45min 27sec (2727 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 11 2018