This is certainly not the time to go on a Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie binge considering I have a French exam tomorrow and I need to become fluent in less than 24 hours - Heaven help me - but I can listen to this bold, fearless and audacious woman speak all day.
I'm only 6:37 minutes in and I finally understand a weird encounter that I have had with Adichie. When she says that she 'goes through life watching', that just sums up my experience of seeing her in a Target store in MD, USA many years ago. She was with a relative, I imagine, and I (as a 10 or 11 year old kid) with my family (Nigerian - we were visiting family ourselves, in the US). So we see her, and recognise her as the popular, young Nigerian author who was such a big deal/name back home; and yet she was right in front of us, in Target like any other regular shopper. It was a little surreal, yet none of us approached her, we just kind of stared, because what do you say (I had never read her books) 'oh I recognise you as a famous author's to whom's works I have never really paid much attention' - that would have been a bit odd and awkward. But what was peculiar about that encounter was that as much as we were staring and glancing at her, she was sort of, for a short moment, staring back, in a kind of curious familiarity, in other words, she could probably identify that we were fellow Nigerians (our accents and loud, boisterous voices in the store, as kids, would have given that away) and I would never forget her stark gaze, she seemed keen to know who we were and what 'our story' was, why we were there, perhaps we knew people in the same circles etc - my mother is igbo as well, it's possible that she might have identified that. Anyway I'm basically validating her stance of 'going through life watching', as that's definitely the experience I got from my silent encounter with Adichie, those many years ago in a Target store, as a 10 or so year old fellow Nigerian. I am just thrilled by her incredible and well deserved success now, and wish her many more successes in future.
I just love this girl. She makes me so proud being Nigerian and Igbo. She is an incredible role model. Some of us have foreign passports for ease of travelling but than does not any way make us any less Nigerian
The more I listen to this lady, the more I'm so proud of my origin. As a nigerian, forced to pick up an italian passport for sake of avoiding baised questions in western airports, this Lady and many more like her reminds me that real nigerians can and should never regret being nigerians.
Yeah, I'm also based in Rome to. I'm putting efforts to try to get willing italians to understand Nigeria is something more than what they commonly think. A Great country with great people and resources.
Could this woman be any more Lovely, Luminous, Enchanting, Articulate, utterly enthralling. She re-frames all our notions of "writer", "African", and "woman". Check out her TED Talk on "the danger of the Single Story".
I'm reading Americanah as a Nigerian women born in America. I visited Nigeria many times and this book is so relatable and her opinions of color, race, hair ETC... LOVE LOVE LOVE HER.. CHIMAMANDA IS MY LATEST GIRL CRUSH!
Kuncey 526, I feel the same way! It's like she has given life to all of the feelings and experiences I've had growing into the woman I am today! Love her dearly!
I love the way she talks about speaking English, Igbo, and Pidgin English and how you switch from one to another. I am a Kenyan, and so speak 4 dialects - English, Kiswahili, DholUo, and Sheng (which is slang), and its very interesting how we switch from one language to another depending on who you are speaking to and the environment you are in. There are people with whom you only speak English to, others Swahili, others a mix of all 4, others only your DhoLuo. Its very interesting...actually, this shared experience of being multilingual and not a native English Speaker.
"I'm always one step removed. That's not to say that I'm not present: like with this incident in the airport, there was anger, there was humiliation, but the storyteller in me was always watching. It's not as if i became a character, but i was always observing."
THE PRIDE OF NIGERIA, THE MOST PATRIOTIC CITIZEN OF NIGERIA, THE GREATEST FORMIDABLE DAUGHTER OF IGBO LAND . WE LOVE YOU Mrs NGOZI CHIMAMNDA. YOUR GOD WILL NEVER FAIL YOU. LOVE YOU MUMMY.
You have to admire and respect this woman for her integrity and honesty in admitting how distant she felt toward Black Americans when she first got here. I truly applaud her for eventually making the "connection" by educating herself on Black history, by reading the works of Black authors. I won't be surprised if she looked at a lot of documentaries on public television too. Chimamanda is unique in this regard because many Nigerian immigrants in this country (and I'm talking about the highly educated set) still see themselves as totally separate from Black Americans and those from the Caribbean. They harbour this notion of superiority, to the extent that many of them were avid, rabid Trump supporters simply because his financial policies ensured that their income bracket would continue to prosper. One man (a doctor) defended his support for the Trump's Republican party, arguing that it was the party of Lincoln who freed slaves. In the face of such level ignorance, all I could say was "You need to watch Channel 13 more often." I suspect the light will eventually dawn for him, after he's had several "Karens & Cops" encounters.
The male hair stylists in Nigeria are not necessarily gay simply because they are male who choose to work in salon. Except you are stereotyping. If they don't tell you they are gay, how do you just conclude they are because they are in a female dominated trade.
As an African-born American (in the East African tradition) I absolutely admire and applaud the work that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is doing with her writing, public speaking, and her intellectual activism. She shines light on a marginalized group of people particularly African immigrants living in the West while raising awareness on key societal realities like women's issues, racism, classism, etc. All these pursuits that she mostly pens in her writing helps push the conversation forward on important subject matter on an engrossing, educational, didactic, and creatively, thought-provoking platform. With all that aside--I do have some criticisms to her writing. Having read her 2007 novel, "Half of A Yellow Sun", and her 2014 novel, "Americanah" I feel in many ways she's overly ambitious in her writing. While her characters in her books are, indeed, multi-dimensional and complex where Adichie does a good job in articulating their worlds and way of life, the multi-part narratives isn't constructive for a novel and, in many ways, confounds her overall message. Concision is tantamount to good writing. By eliminating verbosity and any loose tangents concision establishes clarity and lucidity to the morale of the story. Plus, its clean and organized in its structure--which in no way means a novel needs to be predictable and boring. Five-hundred pages is way too long for a novel and while both novels "Half of A Yellow Sun" (543 pages) and "Americanah" (588 pages) doesn't really stray off on a tangent it does bring in multiple major and minor characters to ongoing storylines mixed in with various themes that often leaves the reader confused and misguided to the original story arc itself. Simplicity is not only important in writing a novel for a wide market of readers because of sales it is vital in getting at the point of why the story is even being penned in the first place. There's no need to pack in all important subject matter and topics in one respectful novel. Leave your reader time to breathe, think, and reflect. If we are writing a nonfiction book that's a whole different thing in terms of concision. I felt after reading both novels that the story is so ongoing that it probably wouldn't really end--which was exactly the feeling I had afterwards. Both novels could really keep going in introducing new themes one after the other with no conclusion or closure. And, what great writer would not want one heck of a conclusion to their story? "Half of A Yellow Sun" which was the better-written book, in my opinion, was essentially a 3-person narrative in the backdrop of the Biafra War (Nigerian Civil War) during the mid-to-late 1960s. The three main characters are written simultaneously in chapter breaks from each other. Along the way, however, the timelines change and the story is no longer moving in chronological order, until later, it does again. Since this is Adichie's writing style--due to it also employed in her later novel "Americanah" I felt confounded as to where she is leading me as the reader. Her topics of love, war, violence, lessons in history, national identity, tribal/ethnic identity, patriotism, parenting, sexual expression, and so on gets lost in its juxtaposition constantly being inter-weaved in and out with no sense of understanding why and what to get at in context to the building of the story. Less is more--whether we are writing a novel, a screenplay for film, a teleplay for television, a script for stage-acting, or even an outline for a documentary film. Adichie should take one topic and one character and ride with it. For "Half of A Yellow Sun" I thought the character of Ugwu, the houseboy, as he goes through a loss of innocence during the war was far more intriguing of a storyline in development than the other two characters. Adichie could break each character down into their own respected novels as a series-part on the Biafra War, for example. Concision, in this case, is not only your friend but can save you and ensure a timeless legacy--if done well. As far as "Americanah" is concerned--again, a loose soap opera novel consisting of multiple themed-storylines with varying minor characters where the two major characters as part of a romantic entanglement carries the narrative over a time-frame spanning more than a decade. Plus, the blog entries that summed up the end of most of the chapters felt like the entire book was written as a freestyle, op-ed piece on race, hair, national identity, an immigrant experience in the U.S. and U.K., and more, which, really belongs more to the blogosphere than anywhere else.
Adelin Gasana you are back here with the same comments. Guess you are copying and pasting the exact comments to every Chimamanda interview. Are you hoping to get a book deal?
Even if you have a US passport, you can still be treated badly at the US/Canada border as we did even though the border person had 3 U S passports in his hand.
Oh poor you, I was interrogated by the South African immigration 4 hours, despite having a visa for 4 years and holding EU passport. Sure you're discriminate likewise
Shes a racist.Why platform this nasty person .Only kidding even if your evil you should have freedom of speech so people can decide for themselves by you revealing your views.
This is certainly not the time to go on a Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie binge considering I have a French exam tomorrow and I need to become fluent in less than 24 hours - Heaven help me - but I can listen to this bold, fearless and audacious woman speak all day.
Dude♥️🙆🏽♀️ I've been binging for a week now.
Chimamanda is very interesting and practical
I love this comment 😂 I hope you did well, or at least did better on the other exams lol
😂😂😂😂😂😂
I'm only 6:37 minutes in and I finally understand a weird encounter that I have had with Adichie. When she says that she 'goes through life watching', that just sums up my experience of seeing her in a Target store in MD, USA many years ago. She was with a relative, I imagine, and I (as a 10 or 11 year old kid) with my family (Nigerian - we were visiting family ourselves, in the US). So we see her, and recognise her as the popular, young Nigerian author who was such a big deal/name back home; and yet she was right in front of us, in Target like any other regular shopper. It was a little surreal, yet none of us approached her, we just kind of stared, because what do you say (I had never read her books) 'oh I recognise you as a famous author's to whom's works I have never really paid much attention' - that would have been a bit odd and awkward. But what was peculiar about that encounter was that as much as we were staring and glancing at her, she was sort of, for a short moment, staring back, in a kind of curious familiarity, in other words, she could probably identify that we were fellow Nigerians (our accents and loud, boisterous voices in the store, as kids, would have given that away) and I would never forget her stark gaze, she seemed keen to know who we were and what 'our story' was, why we were there, perhaps we knew people in the same circles etc - my mother is igbo as well, it's possible that she might have identified that.
Anyway I'm basically validating her stance of 'going through life watching', as that's definitely the experience I got from my silent encounter with Adichie, those many years ago in a Target store, as a 10 or so year old fellow Nigerian. I am just thrilled by her incredible and well deserved success now, and wish her many more successes in future.
sochuiwon khapai I know sis 🙌🏿😍
Wow, thanks for sharing a snippet of your life like this. What a lovely story.
I could listen to her all day! So intelligent, funny and poised...
I just love this girl. She makes me so proud being Nigerian and Igbo. She is an incredible role model.
Some of us have foreign passports for ease of travelling but than does not any way make us any less Nigerian
Spoilt Child You are less Nigeria because you do not bear the burden of the green passport. While we wait in line to be harassed, you just pass by.
+igboyorubahausaNaija ;)
The more I listen to this lady, the more I'm so proud of my origin. As a nigerian, forced to pick up an italian passport for sake of avoiding baised questions in western airports, this Lady and many more like her reminds me that real nigerians can and should never regret being nigerians.
Where are you based in Italy. I am based in Rome. I hope you are doing something to change Naija.
Yeah, I'm also based in Rome to. I'm putting efforts to try to get willing italians to understand Nigeria is something more than what they commonly think. A Great country with great people and resources.
Ikedichi O. Enwere
So how far with your project.
Could this woman be any more Lovely, Luminous, Enchanting, Articulate, utterly enthralling. She re-frames all our notions of "writer", "African", and "woman". Check out her TED Talk on "the danger of the Single Story".
Adam Donovan i love the choice of words you used to describe her...... so very true.
Yes! Also check out her Ted talks of Feminism (for men and women) so beautiful
'Women who live life in their own terms...' great
I'm reading Americanah as a Nigerian women born in America. I visited Nigeria many times and this book is so relatable and her opinions of color, race, hair ETC... LOVE LOVE LOVE HER.. CHIMAMANDA IS MY LATEST GIRL CRUSH!
Kuncey 526, I feel the same way! It's like she has given life to all of the feelings and experiences I've had growing into the woman I am today! Love her dearly!
Honestly I can't get enough of her.
I LOVE YOU CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
I love her too get in line lol :)
Nice to hear
+Mel Jama Oh! there's a line?? Ok, I'm right after you then.
Her work is so important to me. I really enjoyed this. It was very enlightening and informative.
I love the way she talks about speaking English, Igbo, and Pidgin English and how you switch from one to another. I am a Kenyan, and so speak 4 dialects - English, Kiswahili, DholUo, and Sheng (which is slang), and its very interesting how we switch from one language to another depending on who you are speaking to and the environment you are in. There are people with whom you only speak English to, others Swahili, others a mix of all 4, others only your DhoLuo. Its very interesting...actually, this shared experience of being multilingual and not a native English Speaker.
"I'm always one step removed. That's not to say that I'm not present: like with this incident in the airport, there was anger, there was humiliation, but the storyteller in me was always watching. It's not as if i became a character, but i was always observing."
A gracious African Powerhouse...👸🏽
I'm in a mission, to read her books and watch her interviews on TH-cam.
+Jennifer Ogazie me too
Jennifer Ogazie, me too! I've watched 20 or so already. Lol!
Jennifer Ogazie get the books.. she is amazing..
Jennifer Ojakovo me too! I just discovered her and I have been binging.
please can you send me some of her books on memhse@gmail.com.
thanks
THE PRIDE OF NIGERIA, THE MOST PATRIOTIC CITIZEN OF NIGERIA, THE GREATEST FORMIDABLE DAUGHTER OF IGBO LAND . WE LOVE YOU Mrs NGOZI CHIMAMNDA. YOUR GOD WILL NEVER FAIL YOU. LOVE YOU MUMMY.
Am so proud of you Chimamanda. You are a rare kind, coming from here. Just stumbled on this.
I'm Jamaican I'm proud of her Ilove her
Great and insightful conversation..
Chimamanda makes me proud.A sister to have......
I love this guy and I am an African
You have to admire and respect this woman for her integrity and honesty in admitting how distant she felt toward Black Americans when she first got here. I truly applaud her for eventually making the "connection" by educating herself on Black history, by reading the works of Black authors. I won't be surprised if she looked at a lot of documentaries on public television too.
Chimamanda is unique in this regard because many Nigerian immigrants in this country (and I'm talking about the highly educated set) still see themselves as totally separate from Black Americans and those from the Caribbean. They harbour this notion of superiority, to the extent that many of them were avid, rabid Trump supporters simply because his financial policies ensured that their income bracket would continue to prosper. One man (a doctor) defended his support for the Trump's Republican party, arguing that it was the party of Lincoln who freed slaves. In the face of such level ignorance, all I could say was "You need to watch Channel 13 more often."
I suspect the light will eventually dawn for him, after he's had several "Karens & Cops" encounters.
Haha!! I so relate. I'm bingeing her right now!! Completely helpless to her charm💖
Thanks so much......please do keep your Nigerian Pass. It is the ultimate for you( a big advantage for your writing)
Classy woman
The male hair stylists in Nigeria are not necessarily gay simply because they are male who choose to work in salon. Except you are stereotyping. If they don't tell you they are gay, how do you just conclude they are because they are in a female dominated trade.
I'm proud to identify with you. Cheers!!!
Am not de type dat lyk reading bt I kinda lyk listening to my 'sister' .n am tempted to start reading, although i don't know how. Proud being African
You are absolutely great! More grease to your elbow. 😊
As an African-born American (in the East African tradition) I absolutely admire and applaud the work that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is doing with her writing, public speaking, and her intellectual activism. She shines light on a marginalized group of people particularly African immigrants living in the West while raising awareness on key societal realities like women's issues, racism, classism, etc. All these pursuits that she mostly pens in her writing helps push the conversation forward on important subject matter on an engrossing, educational, didactic, and creatively, thought-provoking platform. With all that aside--I do have some criticisms to her writing. Having read her 2007 novel, "Half of A Yellow Sun", and her 2014 novel, "Americanah" I feel in many ways she's overly ambitious in her writing. While her characters in her books are, indeed, multi-dimensional and complex where Adichie does a good job in articulating their worlds and way of life, the multi-part narratives isn't constructive for a novel and, in many ways, confounds her overall message. Concision is tantamount to good writing. By eliminating verbosity and any loose tangents concision establishes clarity and lucidity to the morale of the story. Plus, its clean and organized in its structure--which in no way means a novel needs to be predictable and boring. Five-hundred pages is way too long for a novel and while both novels "Half of A Yellow Sun" (543 pages) and "Americanah" (588 pages) doesn't really stray off on a tangent it does bring in multiple major and minor characters to ongoing storylines mixed in with various themes that often leaves the reader confused and misguided to the original story arc itself. Simplicity is not only important in writing a novel for a wide market of readers because of sales it is vital in getting at the point of why the story is even being penned in the first place. There's no need to pack in all important subject matter and topics in one respectful novel. Leave your reader time to breathe, think, and reflect. If we are writing a nonfiction book that's a whole different thing in terms of concision. I felt after reading both novels that the story is so ongoing that it probably wouldn't really end--which was exactly the feeling I had afterwards. Both novels could really keep going in introducing new themes one after the other with no conclusion or closure. And, what great writer would not want one heck of a conclusion to their story? "Half of A Yellow Sun" which was the better-written book, in my opinion, was essentially a 3-person narrative in the backdrop of the Biafra War (Nigerian Civil War) during the mid-to-late 1960s. The three main characters are written simultaneously in chapter breaks from each other. Along the way, however, the timelines change and the story is no longer moving in chronological order, until later, it does again. Since this is Adichie's writing style--due to it also employed in her later novel "Americanah" I felt confounded as to where she is leading me as the reader. Her topics of love, war, violence, lessons in history, national identity, tribal/ethnic identity, patriotism, parenting, sexual expression, and so on gets lost in its juxtaposition constantly being inter-weaved in and out with no sense of understanding why and what to get at in context to the building of the story. Less is more--whether we are writing a novel, a screenplay for film, a teleplay for television, a script for stage-acting, or even an outline for a documentary film. Adichie should take one topic and one character and ride with it. For "Half of A Yellow Sun" I thought the character of Ugwu, the houseboy, as he goes through a loss of innocence during the war was far more intriguing of a storyline in development than the other two characters. Adichie could break each character down into their own respected novels as a series-part on the Biafra War, for example. Concision, in this case, is not only your friend but can save you and ensure a timeless legacy--if done well. As far as "Americanah" is concerned--again, a loose soap opera novel consisting of multiple themed-storylines with varying minor characters where the two major characters as part of a romantic entanglement carries the narrative over a time-frame spanning more than a decade. Plus, the blog entries that summed up the end of most of the chapters felt like the entire book was written as a freestyle, op-ed piece on race, hair, national identity, an immigrant experience in the U.S. and U.K., and more, which, really belongs more to the blogosphere than anywhere else.
Adelin Gasana you are back here with the same comments. Guess you are copying and pasting the exact comments to every Chimamanda interview. Are you hoping to get a book deal?
What's all this thrash critism,why don't you write your own if you know so well
Honestly inspiring..
It is so true, my too. Like word like ( Organization);( Organisation),...
LOVE HER!
So do I,i really appreciate her she's so brilliant
I love Chimamanda
Thank you
Nice
Wasn't Damian woetzel a ballet dancer?
Amen
Even if you have a US passport, you can still be treated badly at the US/Canada border as we did even though the border person had 3 U S passports in his hand.
5:41 of course it is uncomfortable..is that a serious question
+ruvimbo nyakudya ikr, that was a stupid question
Oh poor you, I was interrogated by the South African immigration 4 hours, despite having a visa for 4 years and holding EU passport. Sure you're discriminate likewise
Shes a racist.Why platform this nasty person .Only kidding even if your evil you should have freedom of speech so people can decide for themselves by you revealing your views.
@John John
Your written English sucks
@@scipioafricanus9841 Like I give a FC what you think 🤣🤣
@@JohnJohn-cu7nk The fact that you replied me, shows I'd touched a nerve and that you really do give an FC
@@scipioafricanus9841 Your right you really got to me.You changed my whole perspectives on life thanks😂👍