Extended excerpt: [Newspaper interview] “Oh goodness!” she screams to my loony question whether her fame doesn’t scare away men from her, given the peculiar Nigerian environment where accomplished women are dreaded. “It’s not my problem,” she says. “First of all, I think it’s very important for people to know that those men who are scared by women who are accomplished are the kind of men accomplished women don’t want. So it’s nobody’s loss,” she sniggers for a while. “It’s a question of confidence and respect, because I think that, if those men really respected women, there is no reason to be put off by a woman who is accomplished. I think it is a shame.”

Source note: While a number of academic texts have attributed this quote Henry Akubuiro’s 2007 interview with Adichie for the Daily Sun – and the text of the interview re-posted on the cited forum appears to be legitimate – to date, Repeat Right has not been able to locate an original copy of the article. The source information that we have been able to locate leads us to believe that the quote is correctly attributed, but this is one of the few items included on the website that we have not independently confirmed. You will want to confirm the source title and other citation information independently in any academic or published work.

Source link: “I’ve soft spot for a reserved, intelligent guy – Chimamanda Adichie” (14 January 2007) repost of interview from The Daily Sun; online via Naijarules: https://www.naijarules.com/index.php?threads/i%E2%80%99ve-soft-spot-for-a-reserved-intelligent-guy-chimamanda-adichie.20587/

Extended excerpt [Adichie, responding to a question from Andrew Solomon regarding about media coverage of African vs. Western events; on-stage conversation following a PEN World Voices presentation0:

“You know, actually, I’ve found that the older I get, the less interested I am in how the West sees Africa, and the more interested I am in how Africa sees itself. [smiling & laughing] This is true! And so, I used to spend a lot of emotional energy being angry, but now [laughing] I am much more interested in Kenya covering Nigeria then in the U.S. covering Nigeria, really.”

Source link: “Freedom to Write Lecture” (10 May 2015) C-SPAN: http://www.c-span.org/video/?326002-1/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-freedom-write-lecture&start=4262

Extended excerpt [On-stage ‘TED talk’]:

“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.”

Source link: “The Danger of a Single Story” (July 2009) TED: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en

Extended excerpt  [Fiction – Italics original to cited text]:

“And so, in the following weeks, as she gave more talks at companies and schools, she began to say what they wanted to hear, none of which she would ever write on her blog, because she knew that the people who read her blog were not the same people who attended her diversity workshops. During her talks, she said: “American has made great progress for which we should be very proud.” In her blog she wrote: Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it. Still more invitations came.”

Source: Editor’s copy – Americanah (2013|March 2014 Anchor Books) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 978-0-45592-5

Extended excerpt [On-stage ‘TED talk’]

“All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. 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.”

Source link: “The Danger of a Single Story” (July 2009) TED: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en

Extended excerpt [Commencement speech]:

“It’s not about my discovering gender injustice because of course I had discovered years before then. From childhood. From watching the world. I already knew that the world does not extend to women the many small courtesies that it extends to men. I also knew that victimhood is not a virtue. That being discriminated against does not make you somehow morally better. And I knew that men were not inherently bad or evil. They were merely privileged. And I knew that privilege blinds because it is the nature of privilege to blind.”

Source link: “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the class of 2015 at Wellesley’s 137th Commencement Exercises” (29 May 2015) Wellesley College: http://www.wellesley.edu/events/commencement/archives/2015/commencementaddress

Extended excerpt [On-stage ‘TED talk’]:

“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognizing how we are.

Now 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. Boys and girls are undeniably different biologically, but socialization exaggerates the differences and then it becomes a self-fulfilling process.”

Source link: “We Should All Be Feminists” (1 December 2012) online via TED: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_we_should_all_be_feminists

Extended excerpt [Fiction]:

“Olanna had wanted to give the scent of his mother’s visit some time to diffuse before telling him she wanted to have a child, and yet here he was, voicing her own desire before she could. She looked at him in wonder. This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.” (p. 106)

Source: Library – Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) International Standard Book Number (ISBN): 0-676-97812-6