{"id":176471850,"date":"2017-03-06T03:25:22","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T09:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/?p=176471850"},"modified":"2017-03-06T03:25:22","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T09:25:22","slug":"pov-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-can-people-please-stop-telling-me-feminism-is-hot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/2017\/03\/06\/pov-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-can-people-please-stop-telling-me-feminism-is-hot\/","title":{"rendered":"POV: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘Can people please stop telling me feminism is hot?’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"Saturday<\/a>

Saturday 4 March 2017<\/p><\/div>\n

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Chimamanda <\/span><\/h1>\n

Ngozi Adichie: <\/span><\/h1>\n

‘Can people please stop<\/span><\/h1>\n

telling me <\/span><\/h1>\n

feminism is hot?’<\/span><\/h1>\n

The novelist has been accused of making<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

equality mainstream: isn\u2019t that the point? <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Plus an extract from her new book<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: \u2018There\u2019s a self-righteousness to the ultra-left that\u2019s hard for me to stomach.\u2019 Photograph: Stephen Voss for the Guardian<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

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By\u00a0Emma Brockes<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie<\/a>\u00a0was in Lagos last summer, teaching a writing workshop as part of an annual schedule that sees her time divided between Nigeria and the US. For much of the year, Adichie lives in a town 30 minutes west of Baltimore, where her Nigerian-American husband works as a medic and the 39-year-old writes in the quiet of a suburban home. When Adichie is in Nigeria, where her parents and extended family still live, she has a house in the vast city she regards with the complicated love and condescension of the part-time expat.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s an ambivalence with which many Nigerians regard her, too; last year, the workshop ended in a question-and-answer session, during which a young man rose to ask the famous novelist a question. \u201cI used to love you,\u201d she recalls him saying. \u201cI\u2019ve read all your books. But since you started this whole feminism thing, and since you started to talk about this gay thing, I\u2019m just not sure about you any more. How do you intend to keep the love of people like me?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Adichie and I are in a coffee shop near her home in the Baltimore suburbs. We have met before,\u00a0a few years ago<\/a>, when her third novel\u00a0Americanah<\/a>\u00a0was published, a book that examines what it is to be a Nigerian woman living in the US, and that went on to win a National Book Critics\u2019 Circle award. A lot has happened since then.\u00a0Half Of A Yellow Sun<\/a>, Adichie\u2019s second and most famous novel, about the Biafran war,\u00a0has been made into a film<\/a>\u00a0starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton. Her essay,\u00a0We Should All Be Feminists<\/a>, adapted from\u00a0her 2013 TEDx talk<\/a>, has remained on the bestseller lists, particularly in Sweden, where in 2015 it was distributed to every 16-year-old high-school student in the land. The talk was sampled by Beyonc\u00e9 in her song\u00a0Flawless<\/a>. Adichie has\u00a0become the face of<\/a>\u00a0Boots No7 makeup. And she has had a baby, a daughter, now 15 months old.<\/span><\/p>\n

Adichie is still somewhat in the blast zone, not entirely caught up on sleep, but has published a short book,\u00a0Dear Ijeawele, Or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions<\/a>, an extended version of a letter to a friend who, after having her own baby girl, asked Adichie\u2019s advice on how to raise her to be feminist. I have had twin girls myself since our last meeting, so I am curious about her approach, not least because one of my two-year-olds currently identifies as Bob the Builder and the other as Penelope Pitstop. I would like to equip them to be themselves, while resisting whatever projections might be foisted upon them. We show each other baby photos and smile. \u201cWelcome to the world of anxiety,\u201d Adichie says.<\/span><\/p>\n

The success of We Should All Be Feminists has made Adichie as prominent for her feminism as for her novels, to the extent that \u201cnow I get invited to every damned feminist thing in the whole world\u201d. She has always been an agony aunt of sorts, \u201cthe unpaid therapist for my family and friends\u201d, but having the feminist label attached has changed things, and not just among her intimates. \u201cI was opened to a certain level of hostility that I hadn\u2019t experienced before as a writer and public figure.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This is partly why she has written the new book, to reclaim the word feminism from its abusers and misusers, a category within which she would include certain other progressives, and to lay down in plain, elegant English her beliefs about child-raising.<\/span><\/p>\n