#adichie

[blackswaneuroparedux]

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

People who do not recognise that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponise’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)

And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.

- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If social media was a house then twitter would be the under the floorboards sewage pipe where everyone’s shit would be clogging up the pipes.

[onequoteperday]

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.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[jhesite]

“She woke up torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead. Everything had thickened. She was swallowed, lost in a viscous haze, shrouded in a soup of nothingness. Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care. Sometimes she woke up flailing and helpless, and she saw, in front of her and behind her and all around her, an utter hopelessness. She knew there was no point in being here, in being alive, but she had no energy to think concretely of how she could kill herself. She lay in bed and read books and thought of nothing.“

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[metaphorwrites]

thinking back to 8th March

I started reading the book from where I had left it this morning.  “We don’t have the right to educate women. This is not acceptable in society. Bindu can easily read the religious books with whatever she has learnt so far.” Thus goes a paragraph in the book Sei Somoy (Those Times) by Sunil Gangopadhyay, the time frame of the novel being from 1840 to 1970. This was said by the home tutor who…

[lilacsupernova]

In teaching her about oppression, be careful not to turn the oppressed into saints. Saintliness is not a prerequisite for dignity. People who are unkind and dishonest still deserve dignity. Property rights for Nigerian women, for example, is a major feminist issue, and the women do not need to be good and angelic to be allowed their property rights.

– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2016) Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, p. 58.

[thoughtkick]

I don’t want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[feral-ballad]

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, from Notes on Grief

[resqectable]

I don’t want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[litsnaps]

[haggishlyhagging]

You remember how a journalist unilaterally decided to give me a new name—Mrs. Husband's Surname—on learning that I was married, and how I asked him to stop because that was not my name. I will never forget the smoldering hostility from some Nigerian women in response to this. It is interesting that there was more hostility, in general, from women than from men, many of whom insisted on calling me what was not my name, as though to silence my voice.

I wondered about that, and thought that perhaps for many of them, my choice represented a challenge to their idea of what is the norm.

Even some friends made statements like "You are successful and so it is okay to keep your name." Which made me wonder: Why does a woman have to be successful at work in order to justify keeping her name?

The truth is that I have not kept my name because I am successful. Had I not had the good fortune to be published and widely read, I would still have kept my name. I have kept my name because it is my name. I have kept my name because I like my name.

There are people who say "Well, your name is also about patriarchy because it is your father's name." Indeed. But the point is simply this: Whether it came from my father or from the moon, it is the name that I have had since I was born, the name with which I traveled my life's milestones, the name I have answered to since that first day I went to kindergarten on a hazy morning and my teacher said, "Answer 'present' if you hear your name. Number one: “Adichie!”

-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

[cowboyx2]

- on family and what has always been, rotten or not

*all photos from pinterest

“the hairpin turn” by @quynhorlose | war of the foxes by richard siken | antigone | poem for my sister by @cowboyx2 (me) | let your dad die energy drink by cecilia corri | notes on greif by chimamanda ngozi adichie | unknown | tinkers by paul harding | unpublished piece by @cowboyx2 (me) | costar

[oldwinesoul]

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

[quotemadness]

I don’t want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[asexual-juliet]

i did have feelings for you. they weren’t the right ones, but i promise i did.

i am not okay with this (2020) // chimamanda ngozi adichie, americanah // boygenius, “bite the hand”

[words-and-coffee]

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

[stay-close]

I don’t want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie