SR : Talks by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 Hello friends!

I am Bhavna Sosa from Department of English MK Bhavnagar University. This blog is Sunday Reading : Talks by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie assigned by Dr.Dilip Barad sir.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie :-

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories to nonfiction. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature",particularly in her second home, the United States. Adichie, a feminist, has written the novels Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists (2014).Her most recent books are Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017) and Notes on Grief (2021).In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant.

 She talk on 'The Dangers  of Single Story':- 

The first talk is about the danger of a single story. Adichie explains that if we only hear about a people, place or situation from one point of view, we risk accepting one experience as the whole truth. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Danger of a Single Story" Ted Talk, in July 2009, explores the negative influences that a “single story” can have and identifies the root of these stories. 

Here She also talked about that It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. 

Adichie shares two primary examples to discuss why generalizations are made. Reflecting on her everyday life, she recalls a time where her college roommate had a “default position” of “well-meaning pity” towards her due to the misconception that everyone from Africa comes from a poor, struggling background (04:49).

She said "Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. "

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. 

We Should all be Feminists and Havard Uni :-

Adichie's talk about that "feminist" isn't a bad word and that everyone should be feminist. She begins with a brief anecdote about her friend Okoloma. She said that she  decided to call myself "a happy feminist." Then an academic, a Nigerian woman told her that feminism was not our culture and that feminism wasn't African, and that she was calling herself a feminist because she had been corrupted by "Western books." Which amused her, because a lot of her early readings were decidedly unfeminist. she thinks she must have read every single Mills & Boon romance published before she was sixteen. And each time she tried to read those books called "the feminist classics," she'd get bored, and she really struggled to finish them. But anyway, since feminism was un-African, she decided that she would now call herself "a happy African feminist." At some point she was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men. 

Men have testosterone and are in general physically stronger than women. There's slightly more women than men in the world, about 52 percent of the world's population is female. But most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate, Wangari Maathai, put it simply and well when she said: "The higher you go, the fewer women there are." In the recent US elections we kept hearing of the Lilly Ledbetter law, and if we go beyond the nicely alliterative name of that law, it was really about a man and a woman doing the same job, being equally qualified, and the man being paid more because he's a man.So in the literal way, men rule the world, and this made sense a thousand years ago because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival. The physically stronger person was more likely to lead, and men, in general, are physically stronger. Of course there are many exceptions. 

A feminist is a man or a woman who says, "Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better." The best feminist I know is my brother Kene. He's also a kind, good-looking, lovely man, and he's very masculine. 

Talk on Importance of Truth in Post Truth Era:-