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She Rested Her Head Against His And Felt, For The First Time, What She Would Often Feel With Him: A Self-affection. He Made Her Like Herself. With Him, She Was At Ease; Her Skin Felt As Though It Was Her Right Size.. It Seemed So Natural, To Talk To Him About Odd Things. She Had Never Done That Before. The Trust, So Sudden And Yet So Complete, And The Intimacy, Frightened Her.. But Now She Could Think Only Of All The Things She Yet Wanted To Tell Him, Wanted To Do With Him.

-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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She Rested Her Head

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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She Rested Her Head Against His And Felt, For The First Time, What She Would Often Feel With Him: A Self-affection. He Made Her Like Herself. With Him, She Was At Ease; Her Skin Felt As Though It Was Her Right Size.. It Seemed So Natural, To Talk To Him About Odd Things. She Had Never Done That Before. The Trust, So Sudden And Yet So Complete, And The Intimacy, Frightened Her.. But Now She Could Think Only Of All The Things She Yet Wanted To Tell Him, Wanted To Do With Him.

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If I Had Not Grown Up In Nigeria- And If All I Knew Of Africa Were Of Popular Images- I Too Would Think That Africa Was A Place Of Beautiful Landscapes, Beautiful Animals And Incomprehensible People Fighting Sensless Wars, Dying Of Poverty And Aids- Unable To Speak For Themselves And Waiting To Be Saved By A Kind White Foreigner.

She Rested Her Head Against His And Felt, For The First Time, What She Would Often Feel With Him: A Self-affection. He Made Her Like Herself. With Him, She Was At Ease; Her Skin Felt As Though It Was Her Right Size.. It Seemed So Natural, To Talk To Him About Odd Things. She Had Never Done That Before. The Trust, So Sudden And Yet So Complete, And The Intimacy, Frightened Her.. But Now She Could Think Only Of All The Things She Yet Wanted To Tell Him, Wanted To Do With Him.

When The Writing Is Going Well, I'm Obsessive. I Don't Shower, I Don't Take Phone Calls, I Hardly Respond To Text Messages, I Don't Do Email. I Take Breaks Only To Read, And Usually I Read Poetry. When It's Not Going Well, I Just Lie In Bed And Eat Chocolate.

In America, Racism Exists But Racists Are All Gone. Racists Belong To The Past. Racists Are The Thin-lipped Mean White People In The Movies About The Civil Rights Era. Here's The Thing: The Manifestation Of Racism Has Changed But The Language Has Not. So If You Haven't Lynched Somebody Then You Can't Be Called A Racist. If You're Not A Bloodsucking Monster, Then You Can't Be Called A Racist. Somebody Has To Be Able To Say That Racists Are Not Monsters.

My Grandfather Died In The War, My Family Went Through The War, And It Affected My Parents In Really Profound Ways. I've Always Wanted To Write About That Period - In Some Ways To Digest It For Myself, Something That Defined Me But That I Didn't Go Through.

Perhaps It Is Time To Debate Culture. The Common Story Is That In "real" African Culture, Before It Was Tainted By The West, Gender Roles Were Rigid And Women Were Contentedly Oppressed.

If I Were Not African, I Wonder Whether It Would Be Clear To Me That Africa Is A Place Where The People Do Not Need Limp Gifts Of Fish But Sturdy Fishing Rods And Fair Access To The Pond. I Wonder Whether I Would Realize That While African Nations Have A Failure Of Leadership, They Also Have Dynamic People With Agency And Voices.

Why Must We Always Talk About Race Anyway? Can't We Just Be Human Beings? And Professor Hunk Replied - That Is Exactly What White Privilege Is, That You Can Say That. Race Doesn't Really Exist For You Because It Has Never Been A Barrier. Black Folks Don't Have That Choice.

White Privilege

In Primary School In South-eastern Nigeria, I Was Taught That Hosni Mubarak Was The President Of Egypt. I Learned The Same Thing In Secondary School. In University, Mubarak Was Still President Of Egypt. I Came To Assume, Subconsciously, That He - And Others Like Paul Biya In Cameroon And Muammar Gaddafi In Libya - Would Never Leave.

There Were People Thrice Her Size On The Trenton Platform And She Looked Admiringly At One Of Them, A Woman In A Very Short Skirt. She Thought Nothing Of Slender Legs Shown Off In Miniskirts--it Was Safe And Easy, After All, To Display Legs Of Which The World Approved--but The Fat Woman's Act Was About The Quiet Conviction That One Shared Only With Oneself, A Sense Of Rightness That Others Failed To See.

Americans Think African Writers Will Write About The Exotic, About Wildlife, Poverty, Maybe Aids. They Come To Africa And African Books With Certain Expectations.

I Am Interested In Challenging The Mainstream Ideas Of What Is Beautiful And What Is Acceptable.

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. America Doesn't Care.

She Rested Her Head Against His And Felt, For The First Time, What She Would Often Feel With Him: A Self-affection. He Made Her Like Herself.

To Choose To Write Is To Reject Silence.

You Americans, Always Peering Under People's Beds To Look For Communism.

Stories Can Break The Dignity Of A People, But Stories Can Also Repair That Broken Dignity.

There's Something Very Lazy About The Way You Have Loved Him Blindly For So Long Without Ever Criticizing Him. You've Never Even Accepted That The Man Is Ugly,' Kainene Said. There Was A Small Smile On Her Face And Then She Was Laughing, And Olanna Could Not Help But Laugh Too, Because It Was Not What She Had Wanted To Hear And Because Hearing It Had Made Her Feel Better.

Richard Exhaled. It Was Like Somebody Sprinkling Pepper On His Wound: Thousands Of Biafrans Were Dead, And This Man Wanted To Know If There Was Anything New About One Dead White Man. Richard Would Write About This, The Rule Of Western Journalism: One Hundred Dead Black People Equal To One Dead White Person.

Her Blog Was Doing Well, With Thousands Of Unique Visitors Each Month, And She Was Earning Good Speaking Fees, And She Had A Fellowship At Princeton And A Relationship With Blaine - "you Are The Absolute Love Of My Life," He'd Written In Her Last Birthday Card - And Yet There Was Cement In Her Soul. It Had Been There For A While, An Early Morning Disease Of Fatigue, Shapeless Desires, Brief Imaginary Glints Of Other Lives She Could Be Living, That Over The Months Melded Into A Piercing Homesickness.

Love Of My Life

The Only Reason Race Matters Is Because Of Racism.

I Write From Real Life. I Am An Unrepentant Eavesdropper And A Collector Of Stories. I Record Bits Of Overheard Dialogue.

Race Doesn't Really Exist For You Because It Has Never Been A Barrier. Black Folks Don't Have That Choice.

White Privilege

Yes, There's A Problem With Gender As It Is Today, And We Must Fix It, We Must Do Better.

About 52% 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.'

Position Of Power

I Had People Read It Early On And, You Know, Well-meaning People Said To Me, You Should Take Out The Blogs. I Didn't Get Much Positive Feedback. Only Because Most Of These People Were Protective Of Me - It Was Sort Of Like A "tone It Down, Make It Easier To Swallow" Kind Of Thing. And I Just Thought If I Do That Then It's Not The Book I Want To Write.

Red Was The Blood Of The Siblings Massacred In The North, Black Was For Mourning Them, Green Was For The Prosperity Biafra Would Have, And, Finally, The Half Of A Yellow Sun Stood For The Glorious Future.

All Over The World, There Are So Many Magazine Articles And Books Telling Women What To Do, How To Be And Not To Be, In Order To Attract Or Please Men. There Are Far Fewer Guides For Men About Pleasing Women.

There Are Many Different Ways To Be Poor In The World But Increasingly There Seems To Be One Single Way To Be Rich.

My Characters Are Usually Composites. I Wish I Could Pretend That I Make Up All Of These Characters, But No. I Steal From People. But People Will Say To Me, "oh, That's Me!" And I'm Thinking, No, That's Not You!

The Higher You Go, The Fewer Women There Are.

Culture Does Not Make People. People Make Culture.

The Idea That Sex Is Something A Woman Gives A Man, And She Loses Something When She Does That, Which Again For Me Is Nonsense. I Want Us To Raise Girls Differently Where Boys And Girls Start To See Sexuality As Something That They Own, Rather Than Something That A Boy Takes From A Girl.

I Like The U.s. And Feel Gratitude Towards It.

Power Is The Ability Not Just To Tell The Story Of Another Person, But To Make It The Definitive Story Of That Person.

Creative Writing Programmes Are Not Very Necessary. They Just Exist So That People Like Us Can Make A Living.

If You Start Thinking About Being Likable You Are Not Going To Tell Your Story Honestly.

...he Did Not Want Me To Seek The Whys, Because There Are Some Things That Happen For Which We Can Formulate No Whys, For Which Whys Simply Do Not Exist And, Perhaps, Are Not Necessary.

At Some Point I Was A Happyafricanfeminist Who Does Not Hate Men. And Who Likes Lip Gloss And Who Wears High Heels For Herself But Not For Men.

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There Are Some Things That Are So Unforgivable That They Make Other Things Easily Forgivable.

He Was Already Looking At Their Relationship Through The Lens Of The Past Tense. It Puzzled Her, The Ability Of Romantic Love To Mutate, How Quickly A Loved One Could Become A Stranger. Where Did The Love Go? Perhaps Real Love Was Familial, Somehow, Linked To Blood, Since Love For Children Did Not Die As Romantic Love Did.

Feminist: A Person Who Believes In The Social, Political And Economic Equality Of The Sexes.

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I Have Many Problems In My Life, But I Don't Think That Identity Is One Of Them.

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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.

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American Poverty

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We Do Not Just Risk Repeating History If We Sweep It Under The Carpet, We Also Risk Being Myopic About Our Present.

Because I Am Female, I’m Expected To Aspire To Marriage. I Am Expected To Make My Life Choices Always Keeping In Mind That Marriage Is The Most Important.

I Didn't Know I Was Even Supposed To Have Issues Until I Came To America

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When We Realize That There Is Never A Single Story About Any Place, We Regain A Kind Of Paradise.

Is Love This Misguided Need To Have You Beside Me Most Of The Time? Is Love This Safety I Feel In Our Silences? Is It This Belonging, This Completeness?

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I Think Human Beings Exist In A Social World. I Write Realistic Fiction, And So It Isn't That Surprising That The Social Realities Of Their Existence Would Be Part Of The Story.

We Teach Girls Shame; Close Your Legs, Cover Yourself, We Make Them Feel As Though By Being Born Female They're Already Guilty Of Something.

I Am A Person Who Believes In Asking Questions, In Not Conforming For The Sake Of Conforming. I Am Deeply Dissatisfied - About So Many Things, About Injustice, About The Way The World Works - And In Some Ways, My Dissatisfaction Drives My Storytelling.

Asking Questions

If You Followed The Media You'd Think That Everybody In Africa Was Starving To Death, And That's Not The Case; So It's Important To Engage With The Other Africa.

Show A People As One Thing, Only One Thing, Over And Over Again, And That Is What They Become.

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.

Our Histories Cling To Us. We Are Shaped By Where We Come From.

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.

Asking Questions

Never Ever Accept 'because You Are A Woman' As A Reason For Doing Or Not Doing Anything.

Each Time He Suggested They Get Married, She Said No. They Were Too Happy, Precariously So, And She Wanted To Guard That Bond; She Feared That Marriage Would Flatten It Into A Prosaic Partnership.

He Was Making Her Feel Small And Absurdly Petulant And, Worse Yet, She Suspected He Was Right. She Always Suspected He Was Right. For A Brief Irrational Moment, She Wished She Could Walk Away From Him. 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.

I Would Come, Many Years Later, To Understand Why To Kill A Mockingbird Is Considered An Important Novel, But When I First Read It At 11, I Was Simply Absorbed By The Way It Evoked The Mysteries Of Childhood, Of Treasures Discovered In Trees, And Games Played With An Exotic Summer Friend.

I Can Write With Authority Only About What I Know Well, Which Means That I End Up Using Surface Details Of My Own Life In My Fiction.

I Didn't Want To Be Apologetic About My Love Story, And I Think To Be Willing To Write About Love You Have To Be Willing To Sound Foolish. I Wanted To Write About Foolish And Goofy Love And Different Relationships. I Wanted To Write About Interracial Relationships In A Way That Does Not Pretend As If Race Does Not Exist.

The Problem With Gender Is That It Prescribes How We Should Be Rather Than Recognizing How We Are. Imagine How Much Happier We Would Be, How Much Freer To Be Our True Individual Selves, If We Didn't Have The Weight Of Gender Expectations.

Our Society Teaches A Woman At A Certain Age Who Is Unmarried To See It As A Deep Personal Failure. While A Man At A Certain Age Who Is Unmarried Has Not Quite Come Around To Making His Pick.

Racism Should Never Have Happened And So You Don't Get A Cookie For Reducing It.

Greatness Depends On Where You Are Coming From.

Being Defiant Can Be A Good Thing Sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma Said. "defiance Is Like Marijuana - It Is Not A Bad Thing When It Is Used Right.

She Wanted To Ask Him Why They Were All Strangers Who Shared The Same Last Name.

I Think It's Important To Humanize History; Fiction Can Help Us Remember. A Lot Of Books I've Read In The Past Have Been So Much More Important Than Textbooks - There Is An Emotional Connection With One Particular Person. I'm Very Much Of A Research-is-important Type Of Fiction Writer, Even For Contemporary Fiction. I Wrote About Blogs In America And I've Never Blogged. But I Read Many, Many Blogs - Usually About Feminist Things, Or About Race, Or About Hair.

I Was Stained By Failure.

All Over The World, Girls Are Raised To Be Make Themselves Likeable, To Twist Themselves Into Shapes That Suit Other People. Please Do Not Twist Yourself Into Shapes To Please. Don't Do It. If Someone Likes That Version Of You, That Version Of You That Is False And Holds Back, Then They Actually Just Like That Twisted Shape, And Not You. And The World Is Such A Gloriously Multifaceted, Diverse Place That There Are People In The World Who Will Like You, The Real You, As You Are.

If The Government Doesn't Fund Education, Which They Often Don't, Students Are Going To Stay Home And Not Go To School. It Affects Them Directly. But I'm Really Not Interested In Writing Explicitly About That. I'm Really Interested In Human Beings, And In Love, And In Family. Somehow, Politics Comes In.

That Her Relationship With Him Was Like Being Content In A House But Always Sitting By The Window And Looking Out

When It Comes To Dressing Well, American Culture Is So Self-fulfilled That It Has Not Only Disregarded This Courtesy Of Self-presentation, But Has Turned That Disregard Into A Virtue. "we Are Too Superior/busy/cool/not-uptight To Bother About How We Look To Other People, And So We Can Wear Pajamas To School And Underwear To The Mall.

There Are People Who Dislike You Because You Do Not Dislike Yourself.

They Themselves Mocked Africa, Trading Stories Of Absurdity, Of Stupidity, And They Felt Safe To Mock, Because It Was A Mockery Born Of Longing, And Of The Heartbroken Desire To See A Place Made Whole Again.

How Easy It Was To Lie To Strangers, To Create With Strangers The Versions Of Our Lives We Imagined.

She Could Not Complain About Not Having Shoes When The Person She Was Talking To Had No Legs.

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

Stories Matter. Many Stories Matter.

I Have My Father's Lopsided Mouth. When I Smile, My Lips Slope To One Side. My Doctor Sister Calls It My Cerebral Palsy Mouth. I Am Very Much A Daddy's Girl, And Even Though I Would Rather My Smile Wasn't Crooked, There Is Something Moving For Me About Having A Mouth Exactly Like My Father's.

Culture Does Not Make People - People Make Culture. So If It Is In Fact True That The Full Humanity Of Women Is Not Our Culture, We Must Make It Our Culture. [...] A Feminist Is A Man Or A Woman Who Says, 'yes There Is A Problem With Gender As It Is Today And We Must Fix It. We Must Do Better.'

We Teach Girls To Shrink Themselves, To Make Themselves Smaller. We Say To Girls 'you Can Have Ambition, But Not Too Much'.

I Often Make The Mistake Of Thinking That Something That Is Obvious To Me Is Obvious To Everyone Else.

You Deserve To Take Up Space.

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Some People Ask: "why The Word Feminist? Why Not Just Say You Are A Believer In Human Rights, Or Something Like That?" Because That Would Be Dishonest. Feminism Is, Of Course, Part Of Human Rights In General-but To Choose To Use The Vague Expression Human Rights Is To Deny The Specific And Particular Problem Of Gender. It Would Be A Way Of Pretending That It Was Not Women Who Have, For Centuries, Been Excluded. It Would Be A Way Of Denying That The Problem Of Gender Targets Women.

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.

When I'm In A Good Mood I Like To Cook. But I Don't Like Saying It In Public Because I Find Myself Being Resentful Of The Idea; "now You Will Make A Good Wife. You Can Cook, Right?" So When People Ask Me I Go, "no, I Don't Like Cooking!"

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.

Of Course I Am Not Worried About Intimidating Men. The Type Of Man Who Will Be Intimidated By Me Is Exactly The Type Of Man I Have No Interest In.

People Have Crushes On Priests All The Time, You Know. It’s Exciting To Have To Deal With God As A Rival.

I Had Consumed A Lot Of American Culture, But I Was Not Quite Prepared For The Reality Of American Poverty.

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Privilege Blinds, Because It's In Its Nature To Blind. Don't Let It Blind You Too Often. Sometimes You Will Need To Push It Aside In Order To See Clearly.

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The Problem With Gender Is That It Prescribes How We Should Be, Rather Than Recognising How We Are.

Death Would Be A Complete Knowingness, But What Frightened Him Was This: Not Knowing Beforehand What It Was He Would Know.

We Did That Often, Asking Each Other Questions Whose Answers We Already Knew. Perhaps It Was So That We Would Not Ask The Other Questions, The Ones Whose Answers We Did Not Want To Know.

The Educated Ones Leave, The Ones With The Potential To Right The Wrongs. They Leave The Weak Behind. The Tyrants Continue To Reign Because The Weak Cannot Resist. Do You Not See That It Is A Cycle? Who Will Break That Cycle?

Why Did People Ask "what Is It About?" As If A Novel Had To Be About Only One Thing.

And It's Wrong Of You To Think That Love Leaves Room For Nothing Else. It's Possible To Love Something And Still Condescend To It.

I Think You Travel To Search And You Come Back Home To Find Yourself There.

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I Live Half The Year In Nigeria, The Other Half In The U.s. But Home Is Nigeria - It Always Will Be. I Consider Myself A Nigerian Who Is Comfortable In The World. I Look At It Through Nigerian Eyes.

You Can Have Ambition But Not Too Much You Should Aim To Be Successful But Not Too Successful Otherwise You Will Threaten The Man

I Have Chosen To No Longer Be Apologetic For My Femaleness And My Femininity. And I Want To Be Respected In All Of My Femaleness Because I Deserve To Be.

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Change For The Better

Papa Sat Down At The Table And Poured His Tea From The China Tea Set With Pink Flowers On The Edges. I Waited For Him To Ask Jaja And Me To Take A Sip, As He Always Did. A Love Sip, He Called It, Because You Shared The Little Things You Loved With The People You Love.

I Am Drawn, As A Reader, To Detail-drenched Stories About Human Lives Affected As Much By The Internal As By The External, The Kind Of Fiction That Jane Smiley Nicely Describes As 'first And Foremost About How Individuals Fit, Or Don't Fit, Into Their Social Worlds.'

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 Novels I Love, The Ones I Remember, The Ones I Re-read, Have An Empathetic Human Quality, Or 'emotional Truth'. This Quality Is Difficult To Fully Define, But I Always Recognise It When I See It: It Is Different From Honesty And More Resilient Than Fact, Something That Exists Not In The Kind Of Fiction That Explains But In The Kind That Shows.

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