HOW TO RAISE A FEMINIST
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a writer, a mother, a thinker, and a fashion icon— an all- in- one woman of the modern world. And she won’t have it any other way, writes
Marianna Cerini
H er 2012 TEDx talk “We Should All Be Feminists” counts more than four million views on YouTube. It was adapted into a New York Times bestseller, and turned into a slogan touted by Christian Dior in its spring 2017 collection. Now, her latest book is being hailed as a “feminist blueprint” for how to raise a feminist daughter.
Is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the feminist icon of the 21st century?
Ask anyone familiar with the author and you’ll get a resolute, collective yes. But Adichie herself? She has a rather different answer. “No, I am not,” she says. “I have become a voice of modern feminism, I’ll concede that, even though it wasn’t at all intended. But I am not an icon, nor a leading figure of any kind. I just speak my mind.”
But she speaks it with an eloquence and purpose that has made her work reverberate across countries and diverse audiences. Which makes her, if not an icon, certainly one of the most remarkable women in contemporary culture today.
“I am, simply, a writer,” she insists. “And a person who, for her entire life, has felt very strongly about how women are treated in the world.”
Born in 1977 in eastern Nigeria, Adichie grew up in Nsukka, a university town, the fifth of six children. Despite the predominantly patriarchal nature of Nigerian culture, her household was a progressive one: her father was a professor of statistics and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Nigeria; her mother was the university’s first female registrar. They were open, kind parents, Adichie says, “who allowed me to follow my own path.”
That path led her to drop out of medical school in Nigeria a year and a half after enrolling and, at 19, pack her bags and move to the States on a scholarship, where she pursued her ambitions as a writer. Today, Adichie and her family live between Lagos and Baltimore, Maryland, and consider both countries home.
Adichie was 26 when she published her first novel, which was shortlisted Purple Hibiscus, for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her second book, 2006’s Half of a Yellow Sun— set during the Biafran War in Nigeria—was also critically acclaimed, picking up a number of international prizes. In 2008 she won a MacArthur Fellowship—the so-called “Genius Grant,” given annually to between 20 and 30 “extraordinary” individuals working in any field—and in 2013, the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for Americanah, a modern love story set between America and Nigeria. The common thread to all her writing? Her uncompromising heroines— some of the most engrossing characters in recent fiction.
During those same years, Adichie became well known for her public speaking on issues spanning race, gender and equality. Her 2009 TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” which warned against seeing the world from a single perspective, went viral—it currently counts 12 million views on the TED website. Her next talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” addressed a feminism beyond race or class. It took on a life of its own, and projected the author into celebrity territory. Beyoncé even sampled the speech in her 2013 song “Flawless.” After the huge success of her talk , Adichie wrote a book of the same title which turned into a call to arms for a generation of young feminists—so much so that in 2015, every 16-year-old high school student in Sweden was given a copy as a mandatory read. Adichie has received a fair share of criticism for the book, particularly from some of her Nigerian readership, which doesn’t quite know how to grapple with her role as a feminist as well as a writer. “Which is frustrating, but I have come to terms with it,”