--"When the experiences shared evidences that the speaker knows or has experienced very little actual experience on the subject. Ms. Adichie, to this date, has never been married and has no husband."- Lavonda StaplesActually, Ms. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is married, and has a husband ;-) I am not sure how that experience or the lack of it denies her the right or the competence to talk about the state of relationships between men and women. There is plenty to take issues with in Adichie's piece; that, I guess is the point of the essay - Let's have a conversation about this. She was not doing comparative studies about the difference between women's plight in Nigeria versus America. She was talking about her experience in Nigeria. And it is not something to sneeze at. My mother would tell you that, if she could write like Adichie. She once visited me here in America and after watching the dynamics between me and my lover, she exclaimed: "Ah, my son, this is how to be married! In America, women are in charge! In my next life, I am marrying in America!" She who wears the bata knows where it pinches. I have nothing to say to Adichie; she has told her story, who am I to tell her where it hurt?Be well.- Ikhide
From: Lavonda Staples <lrstaples@gmail.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, December 13, 2010 10:55:33 AM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chambi,And excuse me Mr. African Man, what in the hell does a degree have to do with life?"How can sharing one's experience be inexperience?"When the experiences shared evidences that the speaker knows or has experienced very little actual experience on the subject. Ms. Adichie, to this date, has never been married and has no husband.This is someone who has also lived in the US so she knows something about the over-celebrated independence of African American women.Living ain't being.Morever, she does not have to superimpose her experience in Nigeria with that in/from the US.I never said that. I only meant that she is saying the same things, requesting the same freedoms as women in the US espoused in the '60s and '70s. A similar request might receive a similar outcome.By the way, the history of African women in Nigeria does not have to follow a linear progression from that of African American women in the US - how can one even insinuate that the former are where the latter where 30 years ago?But what about the history of Nigerian women when they join their husband's in America? What happens to the rate of divorce of Nigerians in America? My friend, does the marriage rate stay the same or does the rate of divorce go up, up, up and away?"Chimamanda was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University during the 2005-2006 academic year, and earned an MA in African Studies from Yale University in 2008".Why does an African need an American institution to co-sign the fact that she has learned a little something about Africa?When one reads her interviews on how she wrote Half of a Yellow Sun, what keeps coming up is an image of a writer/novelist who does a lot of historical research.A real writer can only tell you of how their life led them to write this or that. Relating to someone, in a nuts and bolts, scientific fashion, the details of how you wrote a book is no different than relating to someone the details of how you made love. If it can be explained in a trial and error fashion (scientific method) my friend you didn't make love, it was not creative or passionate force, you had sex - something which every dog and cat does in every alley every day.
La VondaOn Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Chambi Chachage <chambi78@yahoo.com> wrote:
--I disagree. . Does she need to study African American History to know more about power? I don't think so. According to http://www.l3.ulg.ac.be/adichie/cnabio.html , ------
My mission is to acquire, produce and disseminate knowledge on and about humanity as well as divinity, especially as it relates to Africa, in a constructive and liberating manner to people wherever they may be.
-------
Address: P. O. Box 4460 Dar-es-Salaam, TanzaniaCell : + 255 754771763/+ 255 718953273Blog: http://udadisi.blogspot.com/
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From: Lavonda Staples <lrstaples@gmail.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, December 12, 2010 6:42:20 AM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
First and foremost, I read the whole thing. I read it again and I was even wearing my glasses.I love Ms. Adichie's work. I love her writing. But I wish she would study African American history.My comments are not relative to her political aspirations but pertain to her statements about power.Her statements were made and followed about 30 years ago by women who looked like her but lived in another country.Now, in that other country, the husbands no longer pay the rent.The men are no longer husbands.The women have the absolute freedom to never marry at all.No one asks these women when are they going to get married.Oh, yeah, they did manage to get elected mayor and even Secretary of State.Ms. Adichie has caused me to feel very old. I can see the genius in her writing. I can hear the inexperience in her words.La VondaOn Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 3:53 PM, Funmi Tofowomo Okelola <cafeafricana1@aol.com> wrote:
--
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
By Chimamanda Ngozi AdichiePublished: December 10 2010 19:29 | Last updated: December 10 2010 19:29A humid night two years ago, sitting beside a male friend in his car, and I roll down my window to tip a young man, one of the thousands of unemployed young men in Lagos who hang around, humorous and resourceful, and help you park your car with the expectation of a tip. I brought the money from my bag. He took it with a grateful smile. Then he looked at my friend and said, "Thank you, sir!"This is what it is to be youngish (early thirties) and female in urban Nigeria. You are driving and a policeman stops you and either he is leering and saying "fine aunty, I will marry you," or he is sneering, with a taunt in his demeanour and the question so heavy in the air that it need not be asked: "which man bought this car for you and what did you have to do to get him to?" You are reduced to two options; to play angry and tough and to thereby offend his masculinity and have him keep you parked by the roadside, demanding document after document. Or to play the Young Simpering Female and massage his masculinity, a masculinity already fragile from poor pay and various other indignities of the Nigerian state. I am infuriated by these options. I am infuriated by the assumption that to be youngish and female means you are unable to earn your own living without a man. And yet. Sometimes I have taken on the simpering and smiling, because I am late or I am hot or I am simply not dedicated enough to my feminist principle.
I have a friend who is, on the surface, a cliché. An aspirational cliché. She has a beautiful face, two degrees from an American Ivy League college, a handsome husband with a similar educational pedigree and two children who started to read at the age of two; she is always at the top of Nigerian women achievers lists in magazines; has worked, in the past 10 years, in consulting, hedge funds and non-governmental organisations; mentors young girls on how to succeed in a male-dominated world; recites statistics about anything from trade deficits to export revenue. And yet.
One day she told me she had stopped giving interviews because her husband did not like her photo in the newspaper, and she had also decided to take her husband's surname because it upset him that she continued to use hers professionally. Expressions such as "honour him" and "for peace in my marriage" tumbled out of her mouth, forming what I thought of as a smouldering log of self-conquest.
Another friend is very attractive, very educated, sits on boards of companies and does the sort of management work that is Greek to me. She is single. She is a few years older than I am but looks much younger. The first board meeting she attended, a man asked her, after being introduced, "So whose wife or daughter are you?" Because to him, it was the only way she would be on that board. She was, it turned out, a chief executive. And yet. She lives in a city where her friends dream not of becoming the CEO but of marrying the CEO, a city where her singleness is seen as an affront, where marriage carries more social and political cachet than it should.
Another friend is a talented writer, a forthright woman who makes people nervous when she speaks bluntly about sex, a woman who describes herself as a feminist, and who talks a lot about gender equality and changing the system. And yet. She earns more than her husband does but once told me that he had to pay the rent, always, because it was the man's duty to do so. "Even if he is broke and I have money, he will have to go and borrow and pay the rent." She paused, rolling this contradiction around her tongue, and then she added, "Maybe it is because of our culture. It is what they taught us."
There is, of course, always that "they". Two years ago, we were slumped on sofas in his Lagos living room, my brother-in-law and I, talking about politics as we usually did.
"I think I'll run for governor in a few years," I said in the musing manner of a person who only half-means what they say.
"You would never be governor," he said promptly. "You could be a senator but not governor. They won't let a woman be governor."
What he meant was that a governor had too much power, and was in control of too much money, none of which could be left to a woman by that invisible "they". And yet. I realise that 15 years ago he would not have said, "you could be a senator." Civilian rule brought greater participation of women in politics and the most popular and most effective ministers in the past 10 years have been women. In the next decade, my brother-in-law could be proved wrong. In the next three decades, he will certainly be proved wrong. But she would have to be married, the woman who would be governor.
My first novel is on the West African secondary school curriculum. My second novel is taught in universities. One question I am almost always certain of getting during media interviews is a variation of this: we appreciate the work you are doing and your novels are important but when are you getting married? I refuse to accept that the institution of marriage is what gives me my true value, and I refuse to come across as silly or coy or both. The balance is a precarious one.
"Would you ask that question to a male writer my age?" I once asked a journalist in Lagos.
"No," he said, looking at me as though I were foolish. "But you are not a man."
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La Vonda R. StaplesAdjunct Professor, Department of Social SciencesCommunity College of the District of Columbia314-570-6483"It is the duty of all who have been fortunate to receive an education to assist others in the same pursuit."
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La Vonda R. StaplesAdjunct Professor, Department of Social SciencesCommunity College of the District of Columbia314-570-6483"It is the duty of all who have been fortunate to receive an education to assist others in the same pursuit."
--
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