Roda Viva | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 14/06/2021

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] um yes my it's a very difficult time for me my father's death was something i was still trying to make sense of and then my mother died and even saying it here my mother dies just seems so so unreal and so strange and i'm i'm going through a period of grieving and i and i'm i think i'm also going through a period of learning what grief means and it's difficult and it's difficult to even put into words what one feels in times like this and so when i wrote notes on grief after my father died it was my way of trying to i was trying to find a language to talk about what i was feeling i was feeling all of these emotions and i wasn't even sure i could name them and so writing notes on grief was my way of trying to even just you know just trying to name what i was feeling and now with with my mother's death i i sometimes i feel as though i'm living in a novel and i don't believe the plot of that novel hello [Music] i think losing my parents has made me feel even more compassion for what people are going through this period and it's not even just that people have lost loved ones i think this pandemic has really shifted and changed the world in a way that it's created absence for for so many people we cannot see the people we love and we for so long we could not touch them in many parts of the world you still cannot hug the people you love and i feel as though this period calls for a lot of compassion that we i feel a lot of compassion for my family and for everyone who's going through this because now that i've been through it i can only imagine how terrible it must be for the people who could not even attend the funerals of their loved ones i mean in my case i was fortunate enough that i could attend the funeral of of my parents and i can't imagine how painful it is for people who had to do it over zoom um who couldn't go who's whose loved ones had to be buried really quickly because of who did um so i just i just feel a lot of compassion for what's going on in the world uh right i mean i i really i think that i was very fortunate to have just the most wonderful parents and um so i grew up in a university town in osuka in eastern nigeria and growing up was i just had a very i had a very happy childhood of the fifth of six children and culturally we were brought up to know that we were in more people we spoke more at home actually we spoke both languages we spoke emo and english at home but we were brought up in a kind of um so you know it was it was cosmopolitan we were supposed to read books but also we were very much rooted in where we came from so we spent christmas in our ancestral hometown and often we would just go to visit my grandmother and i think it gave me a sense of my interest in history in in where we came from how we came to be where we are i think started in the way that i was raised because when we go back to my ancestral hometown i want to know not just the story of my grandmother but my great-grandmother and her mother and of course my grandfather and his fathers as well and um i so i've grown up to i've become a person who is intensely proud to be an evil woman proud of my culture my history i'm very interested in the connections between um the peoples of my part of the world i'm interested in the stories of africans before colonialism came i'm really interested in west african history before colonialism and i think it's because of the way i was raised i want to know more about my you know my um the history of my family if that makes sense but i do you're right i do have many happy memories the thing about grief though is that because it's still so new to me because my mother it's just been three months since my mother died and it's a year this month since my father died i haven't quite come to the place where i can just focus on the happy memories right now for me it's still a question of thinking about how much i have lost and how much i will never have again and my parents and i were so close i um you know before doing events i would you know um send my father my itinerary if my father were alive he would know that i was i was doing this um this interview in in brazil he would he would follow by text he would send me a text and say are you done yet um good luck well you know and so having that kind of connection to my parents and then using them the way that i have sometimes it's difficult to focus just on the happy memories right now i just think of i cannot believe that this is now my life you know but i'm hoping that i'll get to the point where where i'm just grateful because really i am grateful to have had them and i know that that i'm fortunate to even have this grief because had i not had the love that i had for them i would not be grieving the way that i'm grieving so i do feel is oh this is such an interesting question and i wish i had the answer to it it's something that i'm it's something that i'm i think trying to figure out as i go through it so one of the things that i've discovered about the good fortune of success and i'm very grateful to be read um and i'm very grateful that people that i have people who read my work and who take books seriously because i think really that's what every writer wants you want to be taken seriously but what comes with that often is that we now live in this world of social media and and all kinds of expectations and because i happen to talk about something i feel very strongly about which is feminism for so many people i've become just a feminist and i'm expected to take positions not just on feminism but those positions are supposed to align with whatever people think is the current thinking on feminism and i'm a very independent person i'm a very independent thinker i want to i want to learn and to grow but i want to come at it i want to make the journey myself i don't want to be told what to think and so i think constantly for me it's about i i want to keep really focused on [Music] being able to think for myself being able to learn and keeping the noise out one of the ways i do that is that i'm not on social media i think social media has some good things about it i think it can bring people together but there's a lot about it that is very alienating and i think when you become a public figure it becomes even more difficult people often will deliberately misunderstand you so one of the reasons i don't do social media i mean i do instagram but that's that's that's nice because it's just pictures but i don't sort of do twitter because i think um that it can it can get in the way of your creativity i mean if you have all of this noise coming at you sometimes it's difficult to focus and create and for me even now sometimes i think that success can get in the way of creativity because you know you're kind of busy doing things events and interviews like this i could actually be trying to do some writing right now vape um first of all i really want to come to bahia so the next time i'm in brazil i want to come and i want to come to the university as well i um so so a number of things for me the first is that most people who say that are not saying that in good faith because anybody who really understands what feminism is knows that it's not about division it's about justice it's about if nobody who acknowledges the history of the world can say that women have not been excluded women have been excluded because they are women so often when i when i have conversations with my friends who are black men and they say these things i find it surprising because i think we can actually draw a parallel with racism and so sometimes friends of mine will say things like a woman was raped and they'll say well you know what was she wearing and i think but you cannot see something like that because it's very similar to when a black man is is attacked or shot and someone says well why was he out late or or you know why didn't he um take his hands off the steering wheel or you know stupid reasons that are made up to justify prejudice and to justify discrimination and so you know when i talk about feminism it's also important i think to make it clear that it's not about taking away rights from any group it's about giving rights to a group that doesn't have rights and and i use examples because i'm a storyteller i really believe in the power of storytelling i think that stories have much more power than theory because when you're trying to convince a person if you tell a story it stays with them so i use stories i'll um you know here in nigeria for example actually i just i went out with my husband earlier today and we came across about seven different people seven of them said good morning sir to my husband none of them said good morning to me men don't notice these little things but when you start to point it out to them then they start to see in nigeria you have many jobs where women are told well you're a woman you can't get the job because you know you have to take care of your children and your husband and the job requires you to travel or the job requires you to end late you're not asking the woman what she wants you're making the assumption that because she's a woman she's somehow incapable of doing that job so really for me it's that i focus on storytelling um and i also because i want to be heard right because i i want to reach people i want to try and change people's minds and so because of that it means having to somehow i don't know how to put this it's not so much control as it is to channel my anger so i don't start off with anger even though sometimes i'm very angry but anger alienates people and so when i'm trying to convince a person i sort of you know i put my anger in my pocket for a little while and i try to be very factual and i try to use stories because the truth is that feminism is necessary for the world if we want justice in the world we all have to embrace feminism and the whole point for me of feminism is that we get to a point where we do we don't need feminism anymore right we get to a point where women are allowed to be full human beings i mean it seems so obvious but all over the world it's just not happening when we allow women to have rights where we allow women to have full autonomy over their bodies over their choices where we do not judge women for the things that we don't judge men for you know so a woman often will be called arrogant she's just confident a man who is exactly like her would be called confident when we get to that place in the world where we're not judging women harshly where we're not having higher standards for women where women are not held back from opportunities because they're women then you know then we wouldn't need to me we won't need feminism anymore so that for me that's the goal of feminism and so in talking to men um i try to i try to make that clear but i also want to say just to end that there's certain criticisms of feminism that i will not respond to because i think they're not in good faith some people will say things just because they don't actually they don't they're not sincere they're not genuine questions they're not looking to understand they just want to make trouble and for me the best feminism um yes actually i'm interested i'd like to know a bit more about because i this is the first time i'm hearing about um this person who interviewed me and was criticized for not asking me about feminism i'm sure i don't remember the interview but i'm sure i was happy to talk about literature because literature is my first love that's actually you know i think of myself primarily as a writer that's what i am um feminism came up because and feminism is something i feel very strongly about very strongly but it came up because my writing gave me a platform to talk about something i cared about and i talked about feminism and i think because i use language that people could identify with and could understand then it kind of became popular and then i kind of became a feminist but it was never my plan right but at the same time i have been a feminist since i was old enough to understand the world i didn't need to read any books i just observed the world and i realized the world does not give the same dignity to women as it gives them to men and so the question about activism i think is really it's a complex one because i don't think it's fair to expect every woman who is feminist to be an activist and by activist i mean you know to to somehow do some kind of work that advances the cause of feminism there are some women who who can't afford to be activists and i say that not not just in material terms but there's some women for whom activism is emotionally and mentally difficult but i think that they're still feminists i think the woman in the market in my ancestral hometown whose husband was a dc when she left him who managed to find a small loan and started her own small hair hair breathing business who is raising both her sons and her daughters really in the same way teaching them to do domestic chores whether it's a boy or a girl having all of them go to school whether boy or a girl i think that woman is a feminist because she's making deliberate choices often outside of convention um and she is acknowledging her own autonomy i think she's a feminist but is she an activist she's not an activist she um you know she has a she has a job she has a business where she has to be there from eight in the morning until six in the evening and she goes in to take care of her kids and she's you know struggling a bit she doesn't have the time to be an activist oh she's a feminist i sometimes think that when we talk about feminism we make it um sometimes we make it a bit too much of an academic exercise where it becomes a thing that we talk about in universities and it ends there and i don't think so or sometimes we make it about just grassroots activism i think all of those things are important they're all part of what i like to call the ecosystem of feminism but but it's important to remember the ordinary women who who are the ones who actually who inspire me the most because they are the ones who are living it right the woman who if you live in a culture like nigeria where marriage is considered a prize for women where women who were in terrible marriages abusive marriages are often advised to stay there because you know at least you have a husband and this cuts across class so you have you know upper-class women middle-class women lower-class women that idea of marriage as a prize is something that is it cuts across class in nigeria so when you have these ordinary women who can make decisions for themselves to leave bad marriages to become more independent to become more self-sufficient i find that really admirable and and that and for me that's feminism you know it's everyday feminism the young women who decide that they're going to speak up about the men who harassed them on the streets i find that really admirable the women who decide that they're going to act about low wages for for domestic workers and most domestic workers are women we know that for me that's feminism and so you know i think they're different ways to be a feminist and i also think that sometimes we shouldn't put so much pressure on women to um you know if a woman is not ready to sort of shout out her feminism interval without her whom [Music] amanda futuro [Music] [Music] i'm obviously very grateful that um biden is now the u.s president because i think he is um reasonable and i think that in general he's good for not just america but for the world america is so powerful that whatever happens in the u.s somehow manages to have an effect in the rest of the world um i because the past few months have been difficult for me i haven't really followed world news in the way that i usually do um and so usually when i read world news i read a lot about brazil because i'm interested in brazil i haven't read in detail as much recently but i do know that that the virus effects are still really badly felt there and and my thoughts are always with brazil i think that brazil is a country that deserves better leadership if oh i see what you mean yes i think um one of the things that i i find myself arguing about is this idea that feminism is a western concert western feminism is the feminism that has most been documented but it doesn't mean that it's the only feminism that exists i like to say that my great-grandmother was a feminist and if anything she's my she's my icon my great-grandmother my father's grandmother because she lived in a world that was very very male-dominated um pre-colonial ebola so it will land in the sort of in the 1890s and have her husband died i'm quite young so she was left alone with her son and her husband's family wanted to take away all her property because you know she now she was a widow without a man to protect her and she fought back and she was known in my hometown as a troublemaker which for me is a wonderful compliment because whenever a woman stands up for her rights she becomes a troublemaker and so for me i like to talk about my great-grandmother because it's my way of saying that just because i have feminism and the feminism of women like her in continents like africa and asia and latin america just because those women's um acts were not documented doesn't mean that they did not exist and i think it's also important to say that feminism and sexism are very they're very culture specific i mean the things that happen in nigeria that that don't necessarily happen in the us and nigeria and the u.s are the two countries i know well both of them you know sexism exists in america sexism exists in nigeria but often they manifest themselves in slightly different ways because of the specific cultures and so often when we talk about feminism as though it's this big western invention i worry that we sometimes lose these nuances these ways of thinking about specific cultures and the way that sexism manifests in them but i think i've talked for too much i'm supposed to keep sorry i'll keep my answers shorter a yes absolutely um i think we just have to keep um we just have to keep going we have to keep telling those stories and my approach to storytelling is i don't tell stories from a place of ideology i'm a feminist i look at the world through lenses that are very feminist but it doesn't mean that all my stories have to have characters who are feminists because the world is not full of i mean everyone in the world is not a feminist and i think stories have to be honest storytelling has to be honest um i'm interested in human beings and human beings are flawed and messed up and wonderful and terrible i mean all of those things i'm interested in those things and the problem with starting writing fiction with ideology mind or even reading fiction ideologically is that you forget the messiness of human beings you know we're not all tidy we don't all fit in little pockets i mean i'm a feminist but i can tell you that i'm not always pure in my feminism um i like to tell a story about my friend who went to see a doctor and when she came back she said oh the doctor says and then i said to her in english i said so what did he say i just assumed the doctor was a man but actually the doctor was a woman and here i am you know madame feminist and i was still sort of thinking like that and for me the point is we're all you know nobody's perfect and i think fiction is about that the imperfections in our in our in our human selves um so i don't i don't need to justify the fact that my my characters are not all feminists and the idea that women's fiction that when you have many women in your story then somehow it becomes women's fiction i think it's also something we need to address with the people who are the gate keepers in publishing because it's a very lazy and easy way of selling a book but it's actually not true so if we had um publishers refuse to do that refuse to put the label you know when it's when it's when it's by a woman and has many female characters it's women's fiction it's time to start to challenge that because you know women's stories are human stories just like men's stories are human stories [Music] um the danger really is that you you come away ignorant and if you don't know the full story of a place or a person then you don't actually know that place occurs um and for me in particular continents like africa latin america asia and and often it's it's about economic power so that the continents and the countries in them that are not considered economically powerful often don't get their full stories told but in my opinion this is a deliberate choice that is made in the west and it's a choice that can be unmade and in journalists i think they're starting to change a little bit um sometimes the coverage of africa now in very small ways is not as terrible as it was 20 years ago i think some people now try to acknowledge the the humanity of africans and to actually acknowledge that africa is a continent populated by human beings who have agency who can act and think and who are not all waiting for some white person to come and save them but but i still think it's a very dangerous thing because what it does is that it leaves us ignorant of the real realities of the world and because of that it makes it difficult for us to really engage in a way that's honest and useful with the world marcel brown says i think both i think both i think um it has to start at home right when so i can talk about my own experience that when i when i had my daughter my daughter is five now my husband and i made very deliberate choices about how we were going to raise her and the things that we were going to say to her so some of the things that we i made the choice for example that i would i would make sure that she was very active physically active and the reason i made that choice was because i think you have to start early to try and deal with the kind of horrible negative messages that girls are given about their bodies and my thinking was that if i can raise her to think of her body as something that can do things you know i can run i can climb the tree then maybe she's less likely to think about how her body doesn't fit the beauty ideals that the world has set out um and the way that we we make sure for example that she's growing up in a place where she doesn't think the mother has to cook because the mother is the mother right that she sees both parents cooking um but then when she started preschool in the u.s i noticed that she then would come back and say things to me like that toy is for boys which is something that we never told her at home because at home we bought her every kind of toy actually to be honest i wanted her to have less of the girly toys because when i was growing up i had dolls and i keep saying that the reason i cannot do practical things today is because they bought me dolls and they bought trucks and toy cars for my brothers and so my brothers could fix things and i was just holding a door so um so for my daughter i you know we we bought her more toy cars than dolls but i noticed that that that the school the preschool had started to do a kind of social education on her where they were starting to teach her these ideas of gender that a truck was a toy for boys and when she said that it was very important for me to immediately say to her no no that's not true anybody can play with the truck and it's the same with princesses you know she she started to learn about the princess as the ideal thing and again these are small things but i think they really do contribute to the way that girls start to think about themselves and so i think it's really important to start early and to do it in a way that's that's kind of natural and hopefully fun because also i don't want to be the crazy feminist mother right um so yeah so she she comes back and so my point is that it's important to start at home because often often the schools are not teaching your children what you necessarily want them to teach your children when it comes to social ideas right so that they're of course they're very good at teaching your children mathematics and and grammar that's wonderful but what else are they teaching them so if your child is coming back from preschool and telling you that a truck is a toy for boys that's a problem or telling you um i can only be a princess for halloween and i said no you can be anything you want so now what i've managed to convince my daughter about is that princesses are boring princesses are very pretty but they're boring and when i ask her why are they boring she says because they can't really do anything so instead she's a superhero but i also tell her you can wear a pink skirt and be a superhero and do many things so it's my way of trying to um challenge the things that she's that she's learning things like you know a truck is for boys and i think a number of things i mean the first thing really was i just kept asking well where are the black people you know i wanted to see i know that brazil has a large number of black people and i wanted to see the black people in brazil you know as a black woman whenever i go to country that i know has a black population i kind of i'm interested i want to see you know what i like to call my people i want to see people who look like me um but what i realized is that and i should say that my um i came to brazil for a literary festival and the literary festival was lonely and my hosts were really wonderful but i couldn't help but notice that there were there weren't many black brazilians present they just were not present and we would go to a nice restaurant and i would look around and i just wouldn't see any black brazilians and i also realized that asking questions about that made people uncomfortable people didn't seem to want to acknowledge that it was a problem and i think that if you have a country that has a sizable black population and that black population is not represented in any way especially the higher you go then it's a problem it's a problem it says something about that society because i think that ability does not recognize race you know black people white people asian people all kinds of people um are likely to be intelligent if that makes sense are likely to be hard-working i like so if you if you have a country where a certain group of people don't have the same opportunities as the other groups then it's not the fault of the members of that group it's the fault of a society that has excluded them and i was also surprised um and curious that it seemed to me that there was a kind of you know brazilians would say oh we're all you know we're all the same we're all mixed up but i also noticed that the beauty standards in brazil were not at all even remotely african or black so i like to look at commercials when i go to countries i like to look at who who's being used to advertise products um because i think that says a lot about what the beauty ideals are in that country and i i don't remember seeing one single black especially dark skinned i should say because when we talk about race i think we also should you know be very honest and open and talk about how much anti-black racism is about a race but it's also about color so that the darker one is within a race the more likely one is to encounter prejudices or no i i really i think the first thing to say is that these conversations are difficult right it makes people uncomfortable but i think they're necessary if we because what's the point of these conversations for me the point is that we get to a place where we fix it right when we make things better and we cannot make things better unless we talk honestly about those things even though it's difficult and i think for for a community for community like black brazilians who already have have a sense of being marginalized from the larger brazilian society i can understand how there would be reluctance to acknowledge that there is a problem even within the society itself that has been marginalized but it's important i would say though that it's also important to keep in mind to sort of for me and i'm sorry to sort of move to feminism but i i like to draw parallels so when people say when they're talking about sexism and women and feminism you know women are their own worst enemies women attack women that sort of thing and it's true but for me the question is let's still keep focused on answering the question who is benefiting and it's still men so even when women attack women women still don't benefit men do and so i think that within the black community we should talk about colorism because it really it's an important thing and it has real consequences for people but we should also keep focused on the the fundamental problem which is racism right if racism did not exist colorism would not be a problem evolving [Music] a [Music] oh i'm very excited i'm very excited about my well what are my expectations my expectations are really i hope she'll become president um i think she's competent she's um she's an inspiring figure she um i think that her politics whether one agrees with it or doesn't agree with it is consistent you know i i just think she's a solid she's a solid character and a solid um politician and i'm and also just the symbolism of her being a black woman is important i think symbols are important because it's easy to um it's easy to forget how important it is for people to see what is possible i mean there's so many young people today who because of kamela harris are going to reach higher i think she's a good vice president so far i think she would make a good president but at the same time i don't have i don't have over-inflated expectations of her because i don't think that she needs to be perfect and i say this because often when a woman or a person of color takes on a position that has until then been occupied by white men we sometimes bring expectations that are too high on them higher than we have for the white men as though somehow they have to prove themselves in a particular way so i i just it's important for me that i don't do that and i think i think she's very bright very competent um i hope she'll be president i but at the same time i don't think that she's a messiah you know i don't think she has to be perfect like like like a god right before we can we can acknowledge that she has done well i see this happen too often to women and to people of color in the way that and i think it happened to barack obama i think that people placed expectations on him that were just in my opinion quite unreasonable him being the first black president um meant that people just you know people expected so much much more than i think was fair expectative all the time yeah i mean and you know for me and this is also what i mean about my view of feminism being one that is rooted in experience but always open like i want to grow i want to keep growing i want to keep learning and i'm also you know i think of myself as a student of life and a student for life i wake up and i think about all the books i haven't read and all the things i don't know that i want to know and for me feminism is also the same thing i want to and most of all actually i want to learn about women's lives in different parts of the world and how women are dealing with and coping with the challenges that come to them because they are women i'm very interested in that i find it really inspiring and i want to learn and i learn from you know learning about women's lives and so i i don't read i don't read reviews of my work but that's for my literature i don't read the reviews because i think reading the good ones can make you a bit smart and think like yes i have it all but also it can it can start to affect the way that you create i think that if i read so sometimes i've seen the little bits of reviews that my publishers put at the backs of my book and even that i don't want to look at because sometimes when i look at them i think oh so they said that i do this well and then i'm thinking okay maybe that's what i really need to be doing now right and then the bad ones of course because human nature you know you can read 20 good reviews and one bad one and you only think about the bad one and i just don't want to give myself you know there's i don't have the time and i know that i'm a person who can be a bit obsessive and so if i read the bad ones you know i might just spend my time thinking about what i could possibly do to the review or who wrote the bad review so i think it's just best not to read them feminism oh wait nigerians came to comment on the on the cover commentary um am i still a controversial you know being asked that question kind of makes me um i like i often it's a bit upsetting and i'll tell you why i think that you know i guess the answer to the question is i guess i am because i talk about feminism and feminism is the subject that nigerians have decided is controversial but the reason it upsets me to even be labelled controversial is that really there's nothing that i say that is really controversial um if we really believe that women are full human beings i mean i think that my positions are actually kind of not that remarkable you know i say that men and women are equal i say that that marriage is not a prize for women um i say that in nigeria for example i say that it's very important that we give dignity to nigerians who are gay i say that i do not support the laws that criminalize um homosexuality and i say that women should be given the same respect that men are you know those things really shouldn't be controversial and it sometimes seems to me that really the controversy fundamentally is about the silencing of women there is still this societal need to silence women and so a woman who chooses to speak up and doesn't apologize automatically becomes controversial sometimes i don't think nigerians actually hear what i'm saying i think i think it's the idea of this woman who you know won't shut up and won't apologize and won't back down and so that that there's something about it that i think people just don't respond well to and by people i mean both men and women not just men so so in talking about feminism we also have to talk about that societal desire to silence women that societal desire to keep women in a place where they are not heard but they may be seen there's a problem with that and i think it's the root of my being controversial in nigeria but i also want to say that it's not just controversial though i mean i have to say that there's also a lot of love in nigeria and there are many young women who i think because they see me talking about issues that they care about it emboldens them to talk about those issues themselves different well i think that the important thing to see first of all is that across the continent of africa pentecostal christianity is just overwhelming um and and they're good things about it and they're not good things about it the good things about it i think is that people need in in a continent and in a country like nigeria where people don't really have access to mental health care so in some ways religion plays that role and but at the same time um it's a certain kind of pentecostal christianity that preaches prosperity and and links wealth to blessings and so this idea that you know if you pray god will make you rich you're gonna give you money and that kind of thing i i find very troubling the reason i was raised catholic and actually since since my mother died i've been thinking a lot more about religion and having many more conversations about faith because i think that's what happens when you start you know when you're in pain and you you're asking questions about the person you you love who has died um but in terms of african religion it's interesting because one of the things that christianity did when it came with colonialism was that it managed to teach many africans that the religion that was theirs and their fathers and their forefathers was somehow bad so you will find so many people today talking about traditional religions as though they are somehow you know evil and demonic and bad and all of those things so there is really isn't much of a consciousness about traditional african religions among young nigerians for me really it's a question of how because christianity is so mainstream i mean apart from the i mean in southern nigeria in northern nigeria it's it's islam i think it's for me what i'm interested in increasingly is how to africanize christian christianity you know i went at the funeral in my hometown i remember looking at the statue of the blessed virgin mary and thinking you know it's so strange as a child i didn't notice how strange this was that you have a statue of a white woman and first of all this is historically inaccurate because she couldn't possibly have been blonde and blue-eyed but secondly i just keep thinking why hasn't it occurred to us to try and africanize these um images that reflect our faith right it's surely it's possible to africanize christianity and make it and own it a bit more you know the way that finally now in many churches they're allowing children to take on traditional names when they get confirmed which was not a thing that happened years ago you had to have an english name you know um i think i've talked for too long so i'll stop perfectly [Music] amanda [Music] futuro a well i found that american catholicism is very political very politicized and so when i would attend [Music] mass in the u.s i was surprised by how a lot of it was about politics you know um you should vote against abortion you should vote for the republican candidates because you know and i just remember thinking i found it very alienating and so in the u.s when people talk about religion it's often in a way that politicizes religion if that makes sense and i came from a culture where religion wasn't politicized in that way but i should say that i had started by the time i went to the u.s i had started questioning some of the teachings of roman catholicism and it wasn't so much that america made me start questioning it i already had started questioning it because i was reading a lot and you know just observing the world and sometimes one just has questions about certain teachers in the church that you sometimes feel um i'm not so sure there was a facebook ground oh i like it this is who i am i you know i think that there are many women like me in the world but i think that because of the way we've been conditioned to believe certain things to believe for example that if you're interested in fashion then you must be frivolous you know you're not serious and so many intelligent women i know who like fashion will not talk about fashion because you know the wall tells us that if a woman is interested in fashion she cannot be intelligent and again i think it goes back to that idea that women are not allowed to be many things and also that idea of you're either this you're you know as a woman you're either the saint or you're the sinner and you cannot be both and i just one of them i made the choice to stop hiding because actually when i started out writing i would just pretend that i was not interested in fashion or in makeup because i wanted to be seen as this very serious person and and i felt and actually this is true in the u.s that often to be a woman who's taken seriously you cannot be seen as a person who cares about your appearance but i had come from a culture here in nigeria where you have to take care of your appearance and having been raised by my mother grace did she you better take care of your appearance so um so really i just think of this as who i am i want to be allowed to be all of the things that i am and and in being all of those things i don't want one of them to somehow be used as a reason to um to question my intelligence or my ability that makes sense i'm genuinely interested in fashion i genuinely like um makeup i genuinely like history i genuinely like art i deeply love literature i'm very very interested and passionate about feminism and politics all of those things make me and i don't want to have to deny any part of myself so i cannot tell you [Laughter] but you know when you say that i i am i'm writing essays and speeches it's maybe because i'm really struggling to write fiction it's not so much that i prefer speeches it might just be that the fiction is not happening but really my first love is fiction um the thing that makes me happiest when it's going well is when i'm writing fiction it really makes me happy but sometimes i'll do a speech i'll do an essay because i'm feeling very passionate about it and i feel that i i have to say something you know i get i get very passionate about things i care about and but really that's a really good question um and i it's true about i mean again it's making me think about the ways that women have to navigate things i i i don't think i'm always smiling though i'm also known to get quite angry i have a temper i should say but i try to keep it within the family um you know there are times when especially when i'm in nigeria that i i'm careful about because my my default is to be warm is to be playful that's the personality i have and that's really in my family where we're like that but at the same time because i'm a woman in the world there are times when i have to watch it because there are times when i hold back my warmth there's sometimes when i hold back my humor because i know that there's a possibility that people will misread it that for some men it might mean that you're somehow no longer worthy of their respect that they no longer take you seriously or that they decide to cross boundaries because you're smiling or laughing or joking so there are times when i've held back but in general again it's really important for me i want to be my authentic self i want to be who i am and so in general um i i bring myself and you know what i often say to people is that i was so fortunate to be loved by my parents and my family and so i no longer need i mean it's wonderful to be loved by other people but i don't really need it and so i'm going to be myself and if it means that somebody doesn't like you don't like me that's fine living in the us under trump it started to make the idea of dystopia seemed almost redundant because it felt like you were living in a world so absurd that it didn't even make sense to write absurd fiction anymore because your reality was so absurd that absurd fiction would no longer be absurd um if i had to write fictional i really don't know um i don't know i don't know what it would be and also i don't like to i don't like to speculate about my fiction because i'm very superstitious um well i think it's i think it's very unfortunate and sad and um and upsetting and and i find it when especially with black men i find it a bit surprising because black men understand racism and i find it really surprising how little they understand sexism because i because in a way you would think that if you experience a certain kind of prejudice then it makes you more um understanding of other kinds of prejudices but i found that that is not the case at all um and violence against women is something that is so widespread and even the language that we used to talk about it sometimes bothers me because it's now called um i think it's called gender-based violence and part of my problem with that expression is that i i think it's very easy to forget that yes i know that there are some rare cases where men are abused but overwhelmingly it is women who suffer fiscal violence from men from men intimate men husbands brothers fathers and sometimes i think that the language we now used to talk about it somehow doesn't quite center that you know the fact that women experience this violence and they experience this violence fundamentally because on average women um have smaller bodies therefore not as physically strong and also because culturally women have been raised to um in some ways to think of themselves as not being equal i have a cousin whose um husband was physically abusing her and my cousin is you know she's a physically strong woman and i remember she said to me you know i could beat him back and i probably would beat him but then i can't because i have to show respect and it made me think about the ways that i mental conditioning as women is also part of the story of domestic violence and how if we're going to talk about domestic violence we have to talk about that in nigeria there's a lot of talk about gender-based violence like you know gender-based violence and and i think that's good but but the layers of it we need to talk about how we talk about marriage if we're telling a woman that the marriage is a prize and if we're telling her that without her husband she's incomplete and if we're telling her that the minute she turns 23 she should start worrying if she's not married and start going to church to pray for her husband then we're contributing to it because when she does eventually get married and that man becomes abusive because of all the things that we've told her about marriage she's not likely to take action she's not likely to save herself [Music] foreign [Music] just um well i think that you know the problem is we we live in mission states and nation states protect themselves each country protects its own the reason that this doesn't make sense in this pandemic is that the coronavirus does not respect boundaries it does not respect borders and so i was reading recently that the us is hoarding a large number of vaccines instead of you know sending them to countries where people don't have access to them it doesn't make sense because you could val you could vaccinate everybody living in the u.s but as long as the borders are open and people are traveling you you know you you don't have any um you don't have any insurance that that the coronavirus will not come into your country so it makes sense for the countries that are wealthy and have access to to vaccines it makes a lot of sense for those countries to think about not just their citizens but to think globally we have to think globally because this pandemic shut down the world and the world is so interconnected now i mean you know i remember that walmart in the u.s um the shops the shelves were empty for a while because they couldn't bring their goods from china because of the lockdown and the our world is so interconnected and so it makes no sense for countries like america to hoard vaccines when there are other countries that have just almost nothing in nigeria there's a bit you know people people most people a lot of people have had the first um dose of of the astrazeneca and there's now a lot of talk about people saying they're not sure they can get the second dose i really do think that the us and not just the u.s actually the european union is doing a bit more than america is doing um but really i think that the countries that can afford it should not just as a moral action but also as a practical action they should make sure that the countries that cannot afford it get the vaccines uh militant feminists but no that pepsi commercial was a bit stupid of course because um i think that if pepsi had black people on their advertising i don't know comics e group they would not have done that um it's possible i mean pepsi could in fact have used that black lives matter and made a better commercial so i'm not sure that the problem is using um the mantra or the the logo of activism the problem is whether one uses it well because quite frankly we live in such a such a i mean in some ways we live in such a consumerist society we're all consuming something where in some ways we even if we ourselves our commodities when we you know we sell our we sort of give up our information to you know i don't know google and facebook and whatever and then they sell us ads and then they you know so there's a sense in which we're all kind of in this strange world of of capitalism in different versions of it and my opinion is that it depends on how it's done so with with um the fashion label dior the what i liked is that dior for the first time for the first time in dio's history had a woman as creative director and that woman was an intelligent thoughtful woman who was feminist and so when she contacted me i was really excited about not just this not not just that she was a creative director of dior and for me quite frankly i was thinking why did you take a french label that is known for this sort of very feminine form why did it take them so long to have a woman as creative director but anyway i was excited by by what but how she thought about things and so when she said let's you know i want to do this t-shirt with the awards i was like yeah it's fine um would i have said that for another fashion brand that was different maybe not i mean if it was somebody who i felt really didn't believe or agree with that sentiment i probably would have said no so really for me it's about how it's done and i'm not you know i'm part of a capitalist society i'm a consumer and so i don't have purist tendencies i'm not going to tell you oh all kinds of capitalism is so terrible and i'm above it all i'm not going to do that what i want to do is be very um educate myself and be very thoughtful about how how i'm a consumer and also about how my own words are used is what i would say to young black women who are starting out writing is um don't give up you need to acknowledge that it's difficult it's going to be more difficult for you than it is for a writer who's not black that's just the reality but that's not a reason to stop you have to keep writing and most of all you have to do the best that you can i believe that every story can be universal it has to be written well and the other thing i would say is do not ever ever apologize for being black or for being a woman and don't try to somehow tone your story down don't think your story is too black or it's too much about women so maybe i shouldn't don't do it don't apologize for being who you are tell the true story that you want to tell i think that a good story will find a home it might take a long time it might not be quite the perfect home that you want but a good story that's written well will find a home and so really we need so many more black women writing we mean there's so many stories that have not been told and so i think it's important for for young black women who are starting out to to know that there are challenges but to keep going you cannot you cannot stop because because you think it's going to be difficult you have to keep going portuguese is [Music] do you know actually i don't think i would change i wouldn't change very much um but i think that maybe the the one thing i would change would be to say to the mother of a boy please expect him to be vulnerable expect him to cry so teach him all of those things that we teach boys not to do teach him to do them so when a boy little boy falls down when we say oh you know be strong don't cry no tell him to cry and teach him how to talk about emotions i think that there's so much men do not do today because they were not taught how to do them and it's not to excuse men or male behavior but just to say that there's a lot that we can do by social conditioning right you have men who when they were little boys were not nobody told them to talk about emotions but girls were encouraged to talk about emotions when a girl talked about an emotion it was fine when a boy did it was shameful and so of course it's going to grow to be a man who doesn't talk about emotion who is closed and then he gets into a relationship with a woman and their problems right so if it were a little boy i don't think i would change very much but i would maybe emphasize how important it is to start very early to teach little boys about human emotion talking about emotion about vulnerability when i um when i was younger i helped raise my my nephew actually my two nephews my sister's sons and so when i realized i was going to have a girl even though i very much wanted to have a girl i remember thinking i don't really know how to raise a girl because you know i kind of know what to do with little boys because i helped raise my nephews but i thought i don't know what to do with a little girl but it turns out actually children are kind of children um i think physically there might be a few differences i think my nephews were more likely to want to play with a lot more sort of energy and and jumping on chairs but my daughter also kind of jumps and chairs um for me what was important in raising my nephews was to make them understand that domestic work is completely normal for boys i never praise them for doing domestic work because i think that it's normal everybody should domestic work um for my daughter i don't make her think that she has to know how to do domestic work because she's a girl i make her think domestic work is important because you should just know how to keep your environment clean so that you don't get sick again no i generally i don't counsel people um i think you know i think we now live in this world where everyone is supposed to be perfect and pure and it makes me very uncomfortable but in general um my feeling is it depends again it's always specific it depends on what was done how that kind of thing um you know abusing a child so i have boun i have lines that i can't so if i know that a person is a person who abuses children i don't i don't want to support that person's work because i'm just really utterly disgusted by the idea of people who abuse children but if if it's somebody you know i i read men who i know are misogynistic but i read them for me it's a question of degree right because if you decide to counsel everyone who doesn't align with your ideology with the way you look at the world you cancel half the world if not more and i also believe that just because the person doesn't agree with me doesn't mean that i might not potentially learn something from that person is [Music] a

Channel: Roda Viva

Views: 175,669

Rating: 4.9065223 out of 5

Keywords: roda viva, tv cultura, debate, jornalismo, entrevista, Vera Magalhães, kalil, vacinas, coronavírus, covid-19, coronavac, pfizer, educação, escola, são paulo

Id: pxe92zWOotE

Length: 94min 41sec (5681 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021