Chimananda Ngozi Adichie

Three Talks, One Question: Who Tells the Story, and Is It True?

This blog is written as a task assigned by the head of the Department of English (MKBU), Prof. and Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. Here is the link to the professor's blog for background reading: Click here.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian novelist, short-story writer, essayist and public intellectual. Going through her work, I noticed how often she starts from one person's life and ends up speaking about a whole society. Her subjects include identity, gender, race, migration, culture, history and belonging. Her major works are Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013). She is also known for the essay We Should All Be Feminists (2014), which grew out of her TEDx talk.

Her narrative style is a big part of what draws readers to her. Her characters feel believable, and she lets a social problem be seen from more than one side instead of giving the reader a single verdict. She joins personal experience with wider cultural reality, and she builds her characters through shifts in perspective, memory and cultural detail. Her language stays plain enough to follow, even when the questions she raises are difficult.

Americanah follows Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who moves to the United States. Through her, the novel looks at race, immigration, cultural identity, love and belonging. Adichie shows how hard it is to settle into a new society, and she also shows that migration can change what a person means by home. I find her treatment of race especially important, because the novel makes clear that race is experienced differently in Nigeria and in the United States.

Half of a Yellow Sun shows another side of her ability. It is set during the Nigerian Civil War, and she tells the conflict through several characters instead of one. She does not treat the war only as a historical event. She looks at what it does to ordinary people, families, relationships and a person's sense of self. In this way the novel ties history to private life and shows political violence reaching into the home.

Her influence goes beyond her fiction. Her public talks have made her a leading voice on gender equality, cultural representation and the need for many kinds of stories. In "The Danger of a Single Story," she argues that when we hear only one narrative about a person, a culture or a country, we end up with stereotypes and an incomplete picture. Her answer is to listen to many stories so that our understanding becomes more balanced. We Should All Be Feminists, based on her TEDx talk, argues that gender equality still matters today. She mixes personal experience with social observation, which makes her argument easy to follow and hard to brush aside. It also shows how storytelling can question social assumptions and push people to think critically.

What makes Adichie important, I think, is that she ties together literature, personal experience and social commentary. She writes about migration in Americanah, war and memory in Half of a Yellow Sun, family and religion in Purple Hibiscus, and gender and representation in her essays and talks. In each case she gives voice to complicated human experience. Her work shows why diverse narratives matter and how literature can challenge stereotypes and help us understand the world we live in.

Talk on importance of Story / Literature 

Adichie starts with her own childhood, which I found the clearest way into the talk. She grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria and read British and American children's books. When she began writing at about seven, her characters were white, played in the snow, ate apples and talked about the weather, even though she had never seen snow. She uses this to show how impressionable children are in front of a story. Since every book she knew had foreign characters, she assumed books had to be about people unlike her. Things changed when she found Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye. Their books showed her that girls like her could also exist in literature. She does not reject the foreign books she loved. Her point is that they left her with one idea of what a book could be. 

The second story is about Fide, a boy who came to work in her family's home when she was eight. Her mother told her only that his family was very poor, so Adichie felt pity for them. Later she visited his village and saw a beautifully patterned basket that his brother had made. She was startled, because poverty was the only thing she had ever been told about them. 

The third story reverses the direction. At 19 she went to university in the United States, where her roommate was surprised that she spoke good English, asked to hear her "tribal music," and assumed she could not use a stove. Adichie's reading is that the roommate felt pity for her before they had even met. In the roommate's mind Africa was one story of catastrophe, with no room for connection between equals. 

Adichie then asks where this single story comes from. She traces it to Western writing and points to the account of John Lok, a London merchant who sailed to West Africa in 1561 and described Africans in wildly dehumanizing terms. For her, this marks the start of a tradition of presenting Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, difference and darkness. The tradition is still active. A professor once told her that her novel was not authentically African because her characters were educated, middle-class people who drove cars and were not starving. 

What makes the talk honest is that she includes herself. When she visited Guadalajara, after years of American media coverage of Mexican immigration, she felt slight surprise at ordinary people going to work, and then shame. She realized she had reduced Mexicans to a single image. She is not standing above the problem. She shows that anyone can fall into it. 

The most important part of the talk, for me, is where she brings in power. She uses the Igbo word nkali, which roughly means to be greater than another, to argue that how stories are told, who tells them and how many are told all depend on power. Power, she says, is not just telling someone's story but making it the definitive one. She borrows an example from the poet Mourid Barghouti: begin a story with the arrows of Native Americans instead of the arrival of the British, or with the failure of the African state instead of its colonial creation, and you get a different story. Her reply to a student who thought Nigerian men were abusers because of a character in her novel was to mention American Psycho. She had many stories of America, so she never took one killer as representative of all Americans. 

Her definition of the problem is precise. Stereotypes are a problem, she says, "not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete." That line explains why she does not deny Africa's real problems. She admits the continent has serious catastrophes and says the other stories are just as important to tell. The cost of the single story is dignity. It makes equal humanity harder to recognize and stresses difference over similarity. 

She ends with a list of the stories her roommate never heard. They include her Nigerian publisher, who believed people would read if books were affordable, a messenger at a TV station who told her how the sequel to her novel should go, the filmmakers of Nollywood, and a hair braider starting her own business. She closes by saying stories can dispossess and malign, but they can also empower and repair broken dignity, and that rejecting the single story lets us regain a kind of paradise. 

Students of postcolonial theory will hear Edward Said here. His Orientalism argues that Western writing about the East produced knowledge that served power. Adichie gives us a personal, story-driven version of the same idea. She takes the argument out of theory and puts it in a dormitory room, a village and a classroom.

We Should All be Feminist

The second talk is about gender, and it begins with a story about a word. Adichie explains that a close friend, Okuloma, first called her a feminist when she was about fourteen, and it was meant as an insult. Later a journalist told her that feminists are unhappy women who cannot find husbands, and an academic told her that feminism was un-African and came from Western books. Her tongue-in-cheek answer was to call herself a happy African feminist. She is showing how much baggage the word carries before she argues for it. 

She then gives small, specific stories. As a nine-year-old she scored highest on a test that would decide the class monitor, but the teacher said the monitor had to be a boy. Her friend Louis believed things were no longer harder for women. Then a man who had helped them park thanked Louis, not Adichie, for the tip she had paid from her own bag. Neither story contains a villain. The teacher and the parking attendant were just following what they had been taught, which is the point. 

Her main argument is that the world has changed and our ideas about gender have not. Men and women differ biologically, but a thousand years ago physical strength decided who led, and today creativity, intelligence and innovation matter more, and no hormone controls those. She adds that men still hold most positions of power, and she uses the Lilly Ledbetter law, which concerned a man paid more than an equally qualified woman, as an example. 

She also describes what this feels like day to day. A hotel guard assumed that a woman walking in alone was a sex worker, some bars will not admit women without a man, and waiters greet her male companion and ignore her. She says these small things can sting the most. She is also open about her anger. She calls gender as it works today a grave injustice and says anger has a long history of bringing positive change, but that she is also hopeful. 

I think the most interesting part of the talk is how much of it is about men. She says that we define masculinity narrowly, teach boys to fear weakness, and leave them with fragile egos. Boys are expected to pay on dates to prove masculinity, and she asks why the rule should not be that whoever has more should pay. Girls, meanwhile, are taught to shrink themselves, to have ambition but not too much, and to see marriage as their main aim. The language of marriage often sounds like ownership, not partnership, and a woman who says she did something "for peace in my marriage" has usually given up a job or a dream. She also says girls are taught shame and pretense, and she gives the example of a woman who hates housework but pretends to enjoy it so she can be seen as good wife material. 

Her sharpest sentence about gender is that it prescribes how we should be instead of recognizing how we are. Socialization exaggerates biological differences until they become self-fulfilling, and she questions whether women have a cooking gene by pointing out that most famous chefs are men. Judith Butler's well-known essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" makes a related point in academic language, that gender is produced through repeated acts. Adichie makes it with noodles. She describes a family where the daughter is always told to cook Indomie for her brother, and a wife who thanks her husband for changing their baby's diaper. 

She admits that she still feels these pressures. Before teaching her first writing class in graduate school she worried more about what to wear than about the lesson, and she chose a serious suit over the lip gloss and skirt she preferred. She later said she wished she had not, and that she no longer apologizes for her femininity. 

The last third of the talk answers the usual objections. She rejects the ape argument by saying we are not apes. She agrees that poor men also struggle but says gender and class are different forms of oppression that can be blind to one another. She dismisses bottom power as borrowed power, not real power. On culture, her reply is direct. Culture keeps changing, and she reminds the audience that her twin nieces would once have been killed under Igbo custom. She concludes that culture does not make people, people make culture. 

She finishes with a dictionary definition, a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes, and adds her own: a feminist is a man or woman who admits there is a problem with gender as it is and says we must do better. She also says her great-grandmother was a feminist without knowing the word. Her larger hope is for "a world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves." 

My reading. Adichie says clearly that she is speaking from Nigeria and Africa because that is where she knows and where her heart is. That matters, because it keeps her from making a single story of her own. A critical reader could still ask whether so many Nigerian examples risk fixing one image of Nigerian society. I think she avoids this because the same talk includes her great-grandmother, her brother and her nieces, so her examples keep varying.

Talk on importance of Truth in Post-Truth Era

The third video is a different kind of talk, but it grows from the same concern. Adichie gave it at Harvard's Class Day, and she noted that the students themselves choose the speaker. The Harvard Crimson reported that she mixed jokes about Harvard and Yale with a serious message about honesty. 

She opens with her name. In Igbo, Chimamanda means that her personal spirit will never be broken. She tells how a woman introducing her in London worked hard to pronounce it and still introduced her as chimichanga. A dinner guest later said the woman could have tried harder, but Adichie's point is that she had tried very hard and made an ordinary human mistake. Intent and context matter, she says, and in a culture of calling out we should not ignore them, even though real malice deserves to be called out. This is a plea for judgment, and it links to her first talk, where she asked us to look at the full picture of a person before deciding who they are. 

Her central instruction is "above all else, do not lie." She says the idea of lying has real political weight in America today, where people ask whether a lie should be called a lie, and that protecting the truth has never felt more urgent. She does not preach from a distance. She admits to small lies, like misstating her height and saying she is stuck in traffic in Lagos when she is still at home getting dressed. She says her best moments have come when she leaned toward the truth, and that honesty does not always work out but lets you sleep well. 

The story I liked best is about her mistake at a writers' conference. Before her first novel was published she praised an established writer's work without having read it, and his wife asked which of his books she had read. She improvised an answer about a man discovering himself and fled. She now respects that wife's detector for empty words, tells the graduates to develop one, and says they must turn it on themselves. Her own example is how long it took her to admit that her first manuscript was not good enough, and it stayed in a drawer. 

From there she moves to advice about how to live. She urges the graduates to treat literature as a guide, reading fiction, poetry and narrative nonfiction so that they see people as fragile, imperfect and capable of enduring goodness, not as abstractions. She asks them to be courageous, meaning that they should speak the truth in politicized spaces without provoking for its own sake, listen to the reasonable other side, admit when life does not match their ideology, and be willing to say "I don't know." She warns against empty cleverness, morally bankrupt irony and confusing cynicism with sophistication. One more idea matters for journalists. Balance is not always needed, because when you report that the sun rises in the east, there is no real other side. 

She also speaks about privilege and fear. A Harvard degree gives access and power, she says, and she asks the graduates to use it to change a slice of the world, to tell new stories and to champion new storytellers, because the universal belongs to no single group. She calls procrastination a form of fear, describes shopping for shoes online instead of writing, and says creating anything of value needs both self-doubt and self-belief. 

What connects the three talks

Once I had gone through all three, the link seemed clear to me. Each talk is about telling a story truthfully, and each defines dishonesty as leaving something out.

In the first talk, the single story is a kind of lie by omission. Nothing in the roommate's picture of Africa needs to be entirely false, but it hides most of what is true. In the second, the story that women are naturally suited to certain roles hides how much of that role is taught. In the third, she turns the same demand inward. We do not only tell incomplete stories about others, we tell them about ourselves, and we defend them with excuses, like the writer who "just had not found the right home."

Two habits of method also run through all three. The first is that she argues through personal anecdotes, from the ginger beer to the chimichanga, and she uses humor to make listeners feel a problem before she names it. The second is that she admits her own guilt. She confesses to the Mexico mistake, the ugly suit, the fake compliment and the lie about her height. That gives her the right to ask something of her audience, because she has already asked it of herself.

Power connects them too. Nkali explains why some stories win. In the feminism talk, power sits in the assumptions of waiters, teachers and marriage customs. In the Harvard address, it is the power of a degree, which she asks graduates to use for telling truer stories. Across all three talks, her answer to power is not silence or anger alone but more stories, told better and by more people.

Conclusion

What stays with me is that Adichie never asks us to stop telling stories. She asks us to keep telling them until they are complete. The single story, the gender script and the flattering lie about ourselves all share the same fault: they let one version stand for everything. Her answer in all three talks is the same. Add the missing stories, question who is telling them, and be honest enough to include the parts that make us uncomfortable. For anyone who studies literature, that is a good reminder that our field is less about admiring texts than about asking what a text leaves out.

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Class Day Address. Harvard College Class Day, 23 May 2018, Tercentenary Theatre, Harvard U, Cambridge, MA. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrAAEMFAG9E.

---. "The Danger of a Single Story." TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford. YouTube, uploaded by TED, 7 Oct. 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg.

---. "We Should All Be Feminists." TEDxEuston, Dec. 2012, London. YouTube, uploaded by TEDx Talks, 12 Apr. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg3umXU_qWc.

Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519-31.

Halper, Jamie D. "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Makes the Case for Truth in College Class Day Speech." The Harvard Crimson, 24 May 2018, www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/5/24/adichie-college-class-day-address/.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.