Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie On Why You Should Never Admire Quietly

So I would like to start by telling you a story about bagels. When I was growing up in Nigeria, I loved to read. I once read an American book in which a character had something called a bagel for breakfast. I had no idea what a bagel was, but I thought it sounded very elegant and I pronounced it bagel. I desperately wanted to have a bar girl. I was nine. That year, my family visited the US for the first time on vacation. And at the airport in New York, I told my mother that as a matter of the gravest urgency, she needed to buy me a bagel. And so she went to a cafe and bought one. Finally, I would have a bagel. Now you can imagine my disappointed surprise when I discovered that this bar girl, this exotic confection from the book I had read, was really just a dense donut. I love to tell this story because of how wonderful books are at making our imaginations soar. But there was also something comforting and instructive about the discovery of a bagel in the demystifying ordinariness of a bagel, the realization that other people, like me, ate regular food. I believe in storytelling. I look at the world through the lens of stories. I believe that stories can change minds. I believe that stories can take away dignity. And I believe that stories can also restore dignity. I'm one of those people who always knew what they wanted to do. I've been writing since I was old enough to spell. I don't remember a time when I wasn't drawn to stories, to reading stories and writing stories and finding stories. I have this memory from childhood, very clear in my mind. I'm sitting in the backseat of my mother's car, looking out of the window, and suddenly I feel a melancholy pang, a kind of muted mourning. Because what I saw through the window as we drove were stories. So many stories waiting to be told. And I knew that I would not be able to tell them all. I was born into an academic family in Nsoka, southeastern Nigeria. My father was a professor. My mother was a university administrator. I also did well in school. And like all children who do well in school in Nigeria, I was expected to become a doctor. I didn't want to be a doctor. All I wanted to do was to read and write. But I also knew that I was not very likely to earn a living by engaging in such an esoteric venture as reading and writing. So I decided that I would go ahead and become a doctor. And I had it all nicely planned out. I would become a psychiatrist, and I would walk as a Psychiatrist during the day and at night I would use my patient stories for my fiction. But after a year of medical school, when I found myself so bored in class that I was writing little poems at the back of my notebooks, I realized it was time to leave. And so I took the sats and I got a scholarship and I came to the US to go to college. Later, when I told people the story of leaving medical school, some of them, particularly the Nigerians, said that I was very brave. It's very difficult to get into medical school and nobody just leaves voluntarily. But I didn't think of it as brave. I thought of it as trying. I wanted to try. I knew it might not have worked out, I might not have gotten the scholarship, but I wanted to try. And before I came to the US I had already published a small book, a play, which I now hope that nobody ever reads. It was written when I was 17. But when I came to the US I tried to get my first novel published. It was a book set mostly in Nigeria, in small town Nigeria. And I'd done my research and found out that the way to get a good book published is to find an agent. And so I started to send the manuscript out to agents. And very soon the rejections poured in. A few of them were kind, at least kind enough to tell me why they had rejected me. Nobody knows where Nigeria is and nobody cares was one of the responses. Another agent told me to use what he called the African material as the backdrop, but then set the book in the US and for a minute I thought, how can I do that? But then the entire book was set in Nigeria and the things that happened in the book were particularly Nigerian. So I wasn't sure how I could in fact make that just the background and then set the story in the US and then another agent said to me, I don't know how to sell you because there's no contemporary African who's being published in the U.S. if you were Indian, it would be easier because then I could say that you're the next Arundhati Roy. Now, Arundhati Roy is a marvelously talented writer who had just published a novel that did very well. And so for a short time I began to think, how can I make myself Indian? I couldn't figure out how to do that. So finally an agent, a black woman in Washington D.C. outside of the center of literary publishing, decided to take me on. And she said, I will never forget. She said, I will take a chance on you. The manuscript sold in weeks, and even though it was to a small publisher. What happened was that the book became hand sold by independent booksellers. And I will die feeling deeply grateful to independent booksellers who, among other wonderful things, actually read the books. There's any indie bookseller here. Thank you. Thank you. What this taught me though, is that gatekeepers can be wrong. That just because something has been done a certain way doesn't mean it's the only way that it can be done. And this is a lesson I have kept close, a lesson about trying, about possibility, and about hope. When I came to live in the US I found it fascinating. As a country, I had, of course, read American books and listened to American music and. And watched American films. But to actually live here was different. I was puzzled that the words corn dog actually meant something that you ate. And I was puzzled that anybody could understand the game of baseball. And speaking of sports and yes, I know I'm in Boston. Why was this other game in which large men wore shoulder pads, called football, when everyone surely knew that football is actually what happens during the World Cup? And I was deeply shocked to discover American poverty. The American pop culture I had consumed in Nigeria had not prepared me at all for the rows and rows of depressed, boarded up buildings in West Philadelphia or for the huts in the countryside of Georgia that had no indoor plumbing. But despite my early disorientation, I came to like America for its sense of possibility, for its sense of physical and psychic space, for its sense of the possibility of doing more, doing better. And I now consider it my home part of the year. But the most significant thing that happened to me in America was that I became black. In Nigeria, I had not thought of myself as black because unlike parts of east and South Africa where white settlers unfairly took land and created a racial hierarchy, blackness is not a real category of identification. In Nigeria, most people are black. Instead, it is ethnicity and religion. But in America, I very quickly realized I was black. There was much I didn't understand about this new identity that had been thrust on me. My ignorance of America was matched only by how quickly I absorbed the negative stereotypes attached to black people. Two weeks of watching local television news in Brooklyn after I arrived at and I thought crime was a problem only about black Americans. One day, a guy in a store in Brooklyn called me sister. He was African American. And my almost automatic response was to recoil. I'm not your sister, I said. And what I really meant was, I'm not black. Because of course I knew that his calling me sister was about being Black. It's been 20 years since I said that in 1998, and I still feel ashamed of it today because those words came from a malignant form of ignorance. I think also that my reaction was an indictment of racism because if blackness were benign in America, I would not have said that. I would not have wanted to exclude myself from blackness. But of course, it's important to say that blackness itself is not the problem. All of the black people I know, myself included, are happy being black and particularly happy that black don't crack. So the. It's true, though. So the problem is not Blackness, because Blackness is beautiful. The problem is that American society has imposed on blackness the burden of many negative stereotypes. The moment that I first began to understand this on a personal level happened shortly after I arrived in the U.S. it was the first essay I wrote for the first writing class that I took. We had sent in the essays by email, and at the time, I would send in the essay with just my last name and my initial. And the professor brought the papers back into class, and he said, this particular essay is very good, and I want to know who wrote it. And so he called my name, my last name, which sometimes Americans seem to think might be Italian, because they call me Adichie, but actually it's Adichie. So he said, adichie, and I raised my hand, and he looked surprised. And it was a very small and fleeting moment, but I understood in that moment that he was surprised because he didn't expect the person who wrote the best essay in class to be black. It surprised me. It annoyed me. I had come from a country which had many, many problems, but it was also a country in which black achievement was seen as ordinary, where a black student doing well in school was considered normal and had nothing to do with race. And so I found myself struggling to make sense of this new identity that seemed to impose negative stereotypes on me. I wanted to understand. I wanted to confront my own ignorance. And so I began to read. I read everything I could find about African American history. I began to ask questions. I began to learn. And today, as a black person who is not African American, I am amazed at the litany of grace and grit that is African American history in this country. And I am amazed that this history is not celebrated more. I am amazed at how recent so much of it feels, how heartbreakingly recent the overt forms of racism are. Not just the big issues like African Americans being refused mortgages or African American World War II soldiers being treated much worse than German prisoners of war, or African Americans being excluded from Government programs that help many other Americans become middle class, but also just smaller things. That less than 50 years ago there were white communities in this country who were draining swimming pools just so that black Americans would not swim too. And that it has been less than 50 years in this very city of Boston, that white adults threw stones, bricks, at little black children who wanted to go to school. I'm often described in the US as a writer who writes about identity. And I'm often less than enthusiastic about that description. And it's not because I don't write about identity. I do. But it's because the assumption in Western discourse is that identity is something only members of subordinated groups write about. Women and people who are not white. But the truth is that identity is about everyone. When a white man writes about his life, he's writing about identity as much as when an Asian woman does. But in this country, the term identity politics is used to refer to black, brown and Asian people, but it is not used to refer to what Americans call the white working class, which is also identity politics. Identity is about all of us, and identity matters because identity is tied to rights and to stereotypes, because identity shapes the way that the world interacts with us, and in turn, it shapes the way that we interact with the world. So I want to tell you the story of a limo driver. I recently got an honorary degree from a rather prestigious liberal arts college, which was quite lovely. And the limo driver who came to pick me up at the airport, a white man, was chatty and nice, even if a little over familiar. He asked what I did and I said I was a writer. Oh, I don't read books, he said. But even if I read books, I wouldn't read or know about books like yours. Why do you say that? I asked. Oh, I just know I wouldn't. Because you think I write about things that won't interest you, I said. And he said yes. We both knew what he meant. Black things and woman things. I thought that this was a moment of remarkable honesty on the subject of identity in America. What struck me first was sadness for him. How sad, I thought, that he will never know the glorious fiction of Toni Morrison. And then I thought about how the reverse could never happen. I read books by white men all the time because in this society, white maleness is seen as the norm. And we think of white men writers writing about so wide a range of things that we cannot assume we what they write about merely by looking at them. And when they do write about white male things, we think of those things as universal. But really, we should think about all good literature as universal. I know from a lifetime of loving and reading books that any story, if done well, becomes universal. Because in telling stories, we appeal to that which is human in all of us. I grew up reading books from all parts of the world. And even though I sometimes didn't understand every specific thing about, say, in Russia, in the novel Fathers and Sons, I didn't always get all the tiny details. But I got the book. I got the larger human story. I loved them. For the past 10 years, I've been teaching a writing workshop in Lagos. In the workshop, we read stories, we critique stories, and we talk about the world, because art to me is as important as the context of the art. Thousands of people apply to the workshop for 20 slots. And so to make the selection, I walk with a final shortlist of 50. All of them talented. But I define talent in a particular way. I don't look for polish as much as I look for promise. I look for a sense that a person will make a good editor or a good writer, that a person has what I like to call heart. And I consider stories that are good, even though they might not be my particular cup of tea, because I think diversity in writing styles is important. And then I read their biographies from their names, from where they grew up, from where they live, even from their grammar, which is often a marker of class. I choose 20 people. I want a diverse group because different viewpoints matter. And each year we all learn from one another. I learn about my own country. I grew up Roman Catholic in southern Nigeria, which is predominantly Christian. And before I started the workshop, Northern Nigeria was an unknown monolith. To me. It was just a large Muslim space. But in my workshops, I came to understand and deeply appreciate the nuances of northern Nigeria. And it has helped me much better understand present day politics in my country. So I have another story about another limo driver. So this happened at another university, very prestigious, where I also got an honorary degree. Thank you. And because I think it's still really cool, the commencement exercises were done. There was a lovely luncheon for people who'd been honored and our families and I had some Nigerian friends come and join my husband and my family. And being Nigerians, we spend a lot of time talking very loudly and we don't necessarily respect time constraints. And so in the end, we were the last to leave the venue of the luncheon. And the other well behaved honorees had, you know, they left when they were supposed to. So it was me and my family left and the organizer said to me, oh, there's a shuttle waiting for you. And the shuttle driver knows that the honorary degree recipient is coming. One more person is coming. And so when I was done, we go and we find the shuttle, and there's a white man driving it. He's waiting there. So I tried to go in, and he says, no, no, no, this is not for you. This is reserved. And. And I said, yes, but it's actually me. I got the honorary degree. And he said, no, it's for the honorary degree recipient. And I said, yes, that would be me. And he goes, no, this is for the person who got an honorary degree. So at this point, I'm actually wanting to bring out the thing and say, well, here, look. It actually wasn't pleasant. I can laugh about it now. But I remember thinking, genuinely thinking, and wondering, why is it so hard? How is it possible that this man's view of what an honorary degree recipient should be is so narrow and so hardened that he resisted even in the face of evidence? Sometimes we're held back by what we carry in our head, by what we think should be instead of what actually is. I believe that we can truly hear each other's stories. I believe that we can create a world where everyone truly feels that they matter. But the reason it's difficult to do is because we have long had a world in which we did not hear each other's stories and where everyone did not feel that they truly mattered. And so to truly hear one another, we need to create more space. We need to extend the boundaries, we need to widen our ideas of everything, or we will be left behind. What does a writer look like? What does a CEO look like? What does the recipient of an honorary degree look like? There was once a woman at a bookshop who I'd gone in to look for children's books, and I had said to her that I was having difficulty finding children's books that had black characters in them. Many of the children's books had animal characters, and then some of them had white characters. And she said to me very sympathetically, oh, I understand why you would find that important. And her emphasis was on the you, as though she didn't think that this was important for her. Now, there's something wonderful and affirming about reading about your own reality and reading about people like you. And nobody should ever be denied of that pleasure. But it is equally important to read about people who are not like you. I wished that that woman had also considered diverse children's books important to her if she reads diverse books to her children, then she's preparing them, hopefully, for a world in which their conception of people is wider and healthier. I do not merely want to read about people who do not look like me, but I also want to hear people I disagree with. And so, even though my politics in this country is left leaning, very proudly and happily left leaning, I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, which is a publication that is not left leaning. I want to know the worldview of people who do not see the world as I do, because in that way I'm better able to understand the world. So I was going to talk about one of the mantras I live by, which is never admire quietly. I believe in telling people what I admire about them. When people die and I read or hear about people saying nice things about them, I often wonder, did the dead person know? Did you tell her when she was alive? And so I never admire quietly, I will tell you. But I was going to suggest this mantra to everyone here. But then I realized it must be very hard for men in this age of MeToo to adopt this mantra of mine, because men are no longer sure if they can admire and what to admire. Is that a bad joke? Kind of. But I want to make a case for humor and bad jokes. What would life be without some failed attempts at humor? But really, I come from a family steeped in laughter. And I think that humorlessness is like an internal death. But I also know that there are things I will never laugh about. And I know we cannot use humor as an excuse. We cannot use humor to deflect what matters. And today, in the context of MeToo, even laughter is complicated. There are many situations with men in which women laugh not from humor, but from discomfort. So there's recently been in the news a lot of noise about the pastor at the funeral of one of the greatest artists of all time, Aretha Franklin. And I've been reading pieces, and people have been sending me things, because the thing about being a feminist publicly is that people send me every imaginable thing that remotely has to do with anything that is about women. So I've read way too many pieces about this pastor. And did he grab her breast and did he not? And what I was thinking was that it wasn't so much about whether or not he grabbed her breast as. As it was the larger idea of entitlement. That we see entitlement in the way he touches her and holds her and in the way that he is completely blind to her very obvious discomfort. But she was smiling and laughing. The problem we have is that too many men have a level of entitlement towards women's bodies. Too many men feel that they have a right to women's bodies. No, she doesn't have to give you a reason for saying no. No, she isn't smiling as she says no because she really means yes. She's smiling because she's the product of years and years of socialization that tells her to be nice to men either so that they marry her or to be nice to men so that they don't beat her or kill her. And no, me too is not the end of romance. There is flirting that is charming and respectful and welcome, and then there is harassment that is unwelcome and unjust and criminal and just wrong. Adults know the difference. Adults should know the difference. And so romance is not dead. Quite the contrary. Perhaps romance will finally be romance. Perhaps some men will now understand that real romance means understanding that women are human, that women's needs are legitimate, that women matter. So long live romance and love. When I teach writing, I always tell my students to make sure they have a truth teller who loves them, somebody who will read their work and tell them the truth, whether good or bad. The love part is important. And I mean love in a very broad sense. I mean a person who wishes you well, a person who's acting in good faith because sadly, the world is full of people who, in the name of giving you feedback, just want to put you down and spread ugly negative energy in your life. Avoid them at all costs. And so, in hearing one another's stories, we have to start with a platform of good faith. Bryan Stevenson, who is one of the most admirable men in America, says about the expression truth and reconciliation that the first has to happen in order for the second to happen. People often want the reconciliation part without the truth part, because truth telling can be difficult, especially when it means acknowledging things about yourself that are not terribly flattering. When I was a teenager, I remember once going to my ancestral hometown where my grandmother lived and my cousin had a friend who was visiting her, a young woman who lived in the village. This young woman was unwell and so she had gone to a self styled chemist who had given her a potion to drink and that potion had made her violently sick. And I remember saying to her, oh my goodness, why would you do that? Why would you risk your life? Why didn't you just go to hospital? I didn't know then that I had class privilege, that I was fortunate to have been born into an educated family to have easy access to health care. If we were sick, we went to the university medical center where the doctors and nurses were good and where the care was free and the wait times were short. I was blind to the experience of this young woman who lived in the village for whom health care was impossible. She couldn't afford it. Hospital was too far away. And knowing that I have blind spots makes me keen to learn. I am endlessly learning. And here is some of what I have learned. To be a member of an oppressed group does not mean you're sanctified. If you're part of an oppressed group, then you're just that, oppressed. You do not become a saint by being oppressed. So a white feminist woman who is fighting misogyny can be an anti black racist. A black person fighting racism can be homophobic. A gay person who suffers from the homophobia that is still rampant everywhere in the world can also be an anti Arab racist. I've learned that oppression works in complicated ways. I've learned that we are all vulnerable to to stereotypes. We are all guilty of absorbing stereotypes. If you live in a world that devalues women, you're likely to grow up devaluing women, whether you're a woman or not. If you live in a world that devalues a particular group of people, you're likely to grow up devaluing that group of people whether or not you're actually a member of that group. And so a woman being misogynistic should not be a reason to discredit the important work. Fighting sexism or a black person having anti black prejudice does not make the problem of racism in America any less serious. The systems of oppression, the cultural and societal ideas and institutions.