Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[Applause] good afternoon I'm very happy to be here and very moved by the walk that the hilton Foundation does very inspired by it and looking at the list of past laureates I find many organizations that I have great admiration for and the laureate for today my tog Rossi I've been looking up and also been very moved by their walk but particularly by their offering interpretation for Refugees because to give people the opportunity to tell their story in their own language I think is to give them dignity because sometimes most times it is by telling our stories in our own languages that were able to to truly map out the emotional contours of our stories so I'd like to start by telling you a story about my parents in 1967 my parents lived in a Sukkah a university town in southeastern Nigeria my father had just returned from the US where he got his PhD in statistics from Berkeley and was employed as a lecturer it was a heady hopeful time across the continent of Africa many countries were newly independent free of the European dictatorship that was colonialism and many Africans were eager to help build their countries my parents had two small children a house a car a cook and a stable life with social evening spent with their friends at the university staff club then the Nigeria Biafra war started only days later my parents heard the sound of shelling and gunfire so frightening so close that they had very little time to pack anything before they ran they left almost all their belongings behind they ended up in another town a town already very crowded even the refugee camps fool my father was desperate he was worried about being out in the open because of the possibility of air raids he knew a man from that town a man called Emmanuel Emmanuel lived in a cramped house that was full of people members of his extended family people whose homes the war had also snatched my father knew that it would be very difficult for Emmanuel to accommodate them very difficult to stretch what was already badly stretched still my father knocked on Emanuel's door Emmanuel looked at my parents holding on to their two small scared daughters the faces shattered in despair and he said we will make room for you I think often of that moment because I wonder if my parents would have survived the war had they not benefited from that act of kindness for three years until 1970 my parents were refugees but there were not just refugees nobody's ever just a refugee nobody's ever just a single thing nobody ever just has a single story by the time I was born in 1977 my parents had picked up their lives my father had become a full professor and my mother an administrator who would become the first woman to head the university administration and I'm immensely proud of her grit when I was growing up on the campus of the University of Nigeria it was a slow small and lovely place a place of green hills well-tended hedges red dust hibiscus flowers mango trees cashew trees and a wonderful children's library I was an early reader my mother says that I started reading at the age of two although I think four is probably closer to the truth what I read what I read as a very young child were British and American books I was also an early writer at the age of six I was writing multiple page stories in pencil with crayon illustrations and I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading all my characters were white and - I'd they ate apples and leading the snow they drank they drank ginger beer because the British characters in the books I read drowned ginger beer never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was my characters also talked about the weather like the characters and the books I read even though I could not understand for the life of me what people actually said when they talked about the weather in my world the Sun was always out except for when it rained and then the Sun was out again in my world people were black and ate mangoes and did not have snow but I was a child and like all children I was vulnerable in the face of a story because I had not seen myself reflected in books I did not think that people like me could be in books I loved those British and American books they stared my imagination they opened up new worlds for me but the unintended consequence was that I did not consciously actively know that little girls like me little girls with skin the colour of chocolate could also exist in literature things changed when I discovered African writers because of writers like camara Laye and chin OHA Bay I slowly went through a mental shift in my perception of literature I began to write stories about people who looked like me and did things that I recognized what that discovery did for me was that it saved me from having a single story of what books are writing is what gives my life meaning I love the solitude of writes in I love the near mystical sense of creating characters who sometimes speak to me I love the possibility of touching another human being with my work I love spending a large amount of time in the spaces between the imaginary and the concrete the British playwright Harold Pinter once said that when he was unable to write it was like being separated from himself and I could not agree more all of this is to say that stories formed me I don't remember a time when I wasn't drawn to story to reading them writing them finding them I have this memory from childhood sitting in the backseat of my mother's car looking out of the window and suddenly feeling a melancholy pang a kind of muted mourning because what I saw through the window as we drove we're stories so many stories waiting to be told and I knew that I would not be able to tell them all I did well in school and like all children who did well in school I was expected to become a doctor I didn't want to be a doctor all I wanted to do was to write and read stories but I also knew that I was not likely to earn a living by reading and writing stories so I decided that I would indeed go ahead and become a doctor I had it all planned out I would become a psychiatrist and during the day I would walk as a psychiatrist and then at night I would use my patient stories for my writing I mean I didn't think about the ethics of it but after a year of medical school when I found myself so bored in class that I was writing poetry at the back of my notebooks I knew I had to leave the Nigerian Nobel laureate in literature will assuring her once said that the need to write comes from a sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo and a belief that things can be better more just more equal than they are and so to write is in some ways to seek higher ground to show what is possible to let some lights into that which in us is dark to show how we can be how we should be I think of literature as my religion and I have learned from literature that there is no such thing as perfection that we are all flawed all of us human beings are flawed but that we do not need first to be perfect before we can do what is right I have learned from literature that we human beings are not a collection of logical flesh and bones we are also emotional beings for every human being in the world dignity and pride matter as much as bread and water and I have learned to look at the world through the lens of the human story I recently heard somebody say well if you don't want you to be separated from your kids at the border then don't bring your kids to the border but if we look at that comment through the lens of the human story it becomes something else a story of love a story of a parent saying I want more for you I want better for you and I am determined to try everything I can to achieve that I came to the u.s. to flee the study of Medicine and shortly after and and shortly after I arrived I realized that for many Americans an African immigrant was a person who was fleeing catastrophe war or extreme poverty someone who grew up with nothing or whose village had been burned down I was baffled by how often Americans expected me to be able to talk about my experience with poverty because they automatically assumed that to be African was to be poor the story of catastrophe and poverty in Africa is very important and it should be told but it is not my story and it is not the only story of Africa shortly after my first novel was published an American professor told me that my novel was not authentically African now I was perfectly willing to accept that there were a number of things wrong with the novel but I had not quite imagined that he had failed at achieving something called African authenticity in fact I did not know what African authenticity was the professor told me that my characters were middle-class they drove cars they were not starving therefore they were not the real Africa he was an American who felt he could decide what the real Africa was because my book did not fit into his single story of Africa he had decided that it was inauthentic I wondered what he say if somebody told him that the story of his life in a middle-class American suburb was not the real America because it was not about food deserts in the inner city or malnourished children in Appalachia but I must add that I too am just as guilty on the subject of the single story years ago I visited Mexico for the first time from the US and the political climate in the u.s. at the time was tense and there were debates going on about immigration as often happens in this country immigration became synonymous with Mexicans Mexicans were all portrayed through a singular lens of negativity there were stories about Mexicans fleece in the healthcare system bringing disease similar to what is happening today but perhaps not quite as poisonous I remember walking around Guadalajara on my first day there admiring the architecture the market watching the people going to walk smoking laughing I remember first feeling slight surprise and then I was overwhelmed with shame I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind the abject immigrant I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself this is how to create a single story show our people as one thing as only one thing over and over again and that is what they become we must seek the higher ground of multiple stories many stories as a way of reminding ourselves of our common humanity we are unfamiliar with one another I think because we are unfamiliar with the stories of one another I recently got an honorary degree from a prestigious liberal arts college here in the US which was very lovely and the limo driver an older white man who picked me up from the airport was chatty and nice even if a little over familiar he asked he asked what I did for a living and I said I was a writer 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 he said because you think I write about things that won't interest you I said yes he said we both knew what he meant black things and woman things I thought that this was a moment of remarkable honesty and the subject of identity in America what struck me first was sadness for him poor guy I thought he'll miss out on all the wonderful writing of women like Toni Morrison and Arundhati Roy and then I thought about how the reverse could never happen I read books by white men all the time some of my favorite writers are white men in this society white Milnes is seen as the norm and we think of white male 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 things and male things we think of those things as universal which is really how we should think about all good literature I know from a lifetime of loving 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 detail about say Russia in the novel fathers and sons I still got the human story a friend of mine a man from Western Europe recently told me that he had bought Michelle Obama's memoir becoming as gifts for his women friends why only for your women friends I asked why not for your male friends and he looked slightly taken aback now that memoir becoming is a compulsively readable and gorgeously honest book one that I think many men would benefit from reading in fact there's a wonderful passage about the first kiss between Barack Obama Michelle Obama which I think would be a great blueprint for consent just say another time I was talking to a friend who loves rock music and had read many rock memoirs and so I asked him have you read Patti Smith's lovely memoir he said no now this friend is a good and kind man but to him the stories of women belong to another universe entirely we know statistically that men read men while women read men and women it is time to change that it is time to reach for the higher ground of multiple stories where all stories are given the same level of dignity it is time to place the stories of women and the stories of any kind of minority group where they rightly belong on the universal shelf I I believe that if more men read women's stories then communication would be better between men and women and there I be overly optimistic and say that if men read more women stories it would lead to reduce rates of male violence against women which today is an epidemic almost everywhere in the world human stories force us to see people as human as whole beings female socialization all over the world is remarkably similar and a major component of female socialization is shame women are socialized to be familiar with shame with their periods their bodies and even about what they cannot control which is the reaction of men to their bodies and it is impossible to understand how women navigate the world without understanding this and we cannot understand this unless we read and hear the stories of women as told by women themselves we must seek the higher ground of equalizing the value of all stories of not relegating the stories of any group to the ship to the Shelf of niche or the Shelf of special interest there is a particular sense of validation and joy and pleasure that comes from reading stories that are about our own particular experiences and nobody should ever be denied that but it is as important that we read stories that are not about our own particular experiences a student was asked me will you always write about Nigeria or will you write about more normal things and what struck me was that he had a sense of what was normal and Nigeria was not part of this normal the student was not evil he meant well but we can mean well and be wrong economic superiority is a fact of our existence but it can also sometimes give birth to a certain kind of casual moral superiority some parts of the world has such cultural and economic power that they end up defining normal for everyone else it is time to widen our ideas of what is normal in my language EBU the word for love is if Ananya and its literal translation is to see it is important to see those about whom we speak it is important to remember that human beings all share a desire to be valued a desire to matter we want our bodies to be nourished we also want our hearts to be nourished we will be unable to understand people if we speak of them only in terms of their need we must speak of their need because that's important but also we must speak of what they love what they resent what wounds their pride what they aspire to what makes them laugh we should read human stories to remind ourselves that we are not alone to remind ourselves that we in the wonderful words of the poet Pablo Neruda belonged to this great mass of humanity not to the few but to the many and especially today that is politically fraught we must seek the higher ground of multiple stories as a rebuke to despair we cannot afford despair we cannot afford hopelessness we cannot afford cynicism we cannot afford the defeat of our human spirit we cannot lose sight of the enduring importance of compassion and kindness thank you [Applause]

Channel: Conrad N Hilton Foundation

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Length: 20min 31sec (1231 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019