Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on the 15th of September 1977,
in the city of Enugu, grew up the fifth of six children in an Igbo family in the university town of Nsukka in southeastern Nigeria, where the University of Nigeria is situated. While she was growing up, her father James Nwoye Adichie was a professor of statistics at the university, and her mother Grace Ifeoma was the university's first female registrar.
Adichie studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the university's Catholic medical students. At age 19, Adichie left Nigeria for the United States to study communications and political science at Drexel University in Philadelphia;
In 2003, she completed a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. In 2008, she received a Master of Arts degree in African studies from Yale University.
Adichie a Nigerian novelist, nonfiction writer and short story writer. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book, and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year; and the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Her latest novel Americanah, was published around the world in 2013, and has received numerous accolades, including winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction; and being named one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year.
But the young Nigerian author is also one of the most accessible contemporary public intellectuals of our time, who has been giving compelling public lectures for years. Adichie’s public speaking first came into prominence with the TED talk about “the danger of a single story”, through which she talked about how storytelling intersects with power in order to create stereotypes about communities.
The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes a surprise appearance on Beyoncé's album, released on iTunes titled FLAWLESS "We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls 'You can have ambition, but not too much'."
The novelist's intervention comes during the track ***Flawless, appearing as a series of samples from her impassioned TEDxEuston talk, "We should all be feminists".
During the speech, the Orange prize-winning author argues that differing expectations of men and women damage economic and social prospects in Nigeria, and more generally around Africa and the world.
Beyoncé has been particularly inspired by sections where Adichie explores attitudes towards marriage, sampling a passage where the novelist talks directly about aspirations.
"Because I am a female, I am expected to aspire to marriage," Adichie says. "I am expected to make my choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Marriage can be... a source of joy and love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same?"
Another section sampled on ***Flawless argues that girls are raised "to see each other as competitors, not for jobs or accomplishments which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men".
Beyoncé has also used lines from a part of the speech where Adichie queries parents' attitudes towards young people's sexuality:
"We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends, but our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. But of course when the time is right we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husband.
The pop diva quotes Adichie's definition of a feminist as "a person who believes in the social, economic and political equality of the sexes".
Over the course of the 30-minute speech, the novelist argues that we do "a great disservice" to boys in how we raise them, putting them in the "hard cage" of masculinity; and that we do "a greater disservice" to girls.
"We say to girls, you should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten The Man."
Adichie begins her talk by recalling a Nigerian childhood spent reading British and American literature which inspired her to write novels featuring African characters.
Wellesley Commencement Address: 2015
Here we have Adichie once again speak about gender, which she says “is always about context and circumstance,” and the complex things it means to her. For example, she says she started to wear makeup in order to look older, because of an “unpleasant man” who did not take her seriously during a family gathering. There’s something wonderful about what it illustrates about her relationship with makeup, whose “...possibilities for temporary transformation” she has come to appreciate.
Adichie has often spoken about how her own desire to present herself a certain way, and societal expectations of women’s appearance have created many dilemmas for her over the years. As she tells the graduating students she is addressing: “Your standardised ideologies will not always fit your life. Because life is messy.”
Girls Write Now Awards Speech: 2015
Adichie talks about how difficult it is to be a “truly truthful” teller of one’s own story, because of the fear of “offending people, and possible consequences”. Further, she talks about how difficult it is for writers, especially women writers, to dismiss the idea of “likeability”: “... you’re supposed to twist yourself into shapes to make yourself likeable, that you're supposed to hold back sometimes, pull back, don't quite say, don't be too pushy, because you have to be likeable.”
And here’s what Adichie thinks of that:
“And I say that is bullshit. So what I want to say to young girls is forget about likeability. If you start thinking about being likeable you are not going to tell your story honestly, because you are going to be so concerned with not offending, and that's going to ruin your story, so forget about likeability. And also the world is such a wonderful, diverse, and multi-faceted place that there's somebody who's going to like you; you don't need to twist yourself into shapes
Best of CHIMAMANDA Ngozi Adichie's Quotes.
You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?” Aunty Ifeka said. “Your life belongs to you and you alone.
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.
Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.
Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.
There are people who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not crawl, once.
If you don't understand, ask questions. If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.
other things easily forgivable.
I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho,and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.
...my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.
Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.
She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.
Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian.
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