Beauty, motherhood, activism
“We should all be feminists,” so said Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her famous TED Talk, viewed by 3.4 million people, sampled in Beyoncé’s hit Flawless and emblazoned across models’ chests on the Dior catwalk. Yet the author and activist still has plenty m
Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks feminism and her new book
It’s a freezing, grey day in suburban Baltimore. As the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes tea in her warm kitchen, the coos of a 13-month-old baby upstairs can be heard through the thrum of the kettle. She assures me with a wink she looks well rested only because her “concealer is good”.
Though she lives here now with her young daughter and husband, who is a doctor, 39-year-old Adichie was raised in Nsukka, Nigeria. She is a woman who has been conjuring exotic worlds and imagining the inner lives of complex characters since she was a child – after dropping out of medical school to concentrate on her writing, she had her first book, Purple Hibiscus, published at the age of 26. Since then, she’s gone on to write three more novels, all critically acclaimed and rich with complex narratives that look unflinchingly, and often humorously, at race, gender and belonging. The most recent, Americanah, was optioned by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, and this year will be made into a feature film starring Lupita Nyong’o. Add a clutch of awards to the mix, including the coveted Macarthur ‘Genius Grant’, and you will begin to get a sense of what a star this woman is. And, though Adichie will later confess to me that she has never really been one for popular culture, popular culture, nonetheless, has fallen spectacularly hard for her.
In 2013, she gave a TED Talk in London titled We Should
All Be Feminists, in which she declared, “Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice.” The Youtube video of her talk went viral (currently 3.4 million views and counting); it was then adapted and published as an essay, which Sweden handed out to every single 16-year-old in the country. Beyoncé sampled it in her track Flawless, while Dior’s artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, sent models down the runway wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the title. All a far cry from a story Adichie tells in that very same talk, when, as a little girl, she was told by her
teacher that the winner of a test would become the class monitor, a role that involved patrolling the class with a cane. Nine-year-old Adichie got the highest score. Except, she recalls, “To my surprise, my teacher said the monitor had to be a boy. She had forgotten to make that clear earlier because she assumed it was obvious. A boy had the second-highest score on the test, and he would be monitor.”
Thirty years later, sitting across from me now, Adichie still keenly remembers that moment. “I remember being really struck by the injustice of it,” she says, her smooth palms tensing around her teacup. “I’ve never forgotten.”
HAS FAME AFFECTED HER APPROACH TO WORK IN ANY WAY?
“I don’t actively remember the success,” she replies, simply. “When I’m sitting down to write, I don’t remember that I won the Macarthur. What I’m thinking is, ‘I want to write a good sentence.’” She adds, politely, that she balks a little at the idea that success should be something one would grapple with in the first place. “I remember once being asked, ‘Aren’t you grateful? Aren’t you so lucky that all of this has happened to you?’, and I was like, ‘No! I worked bloody hard!’” she says. “I don’t have that gratitude that women are constantly expected to have; a kind of gratitude that almost suggests you’re not worthy. I think that my books are not bad at all. But my gratitude is because I know there are people that write well who haven’t been as fortunate.”
This mixture of steadfast self-belief and unabashed modesty is the key to Adichie’s particular brand of magic. For someone so beloved by such a starry bunch, she is refreshingly unaffected. She tells me that she never reads her reviews, for instance, and has a “standing agreement” with her agent, family and friends that they mustn’t send them to her. Reviews, she warns, can foster a “certain self-consciousness that gets in the way of following what is true to you”.
That’s why, she confides, her first readers, are “a trusted circle of family friends, who I know love me very dearly, but who also tell me the truth.” Family plays a huge role in Adichie’s life, perhaps one of the reasons that she decided to write her new book
Dear Ijeawele, Or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions,
exploring how to raise a feminist child. She’s a self-proclaimed “besotted mother” to her daughter, who, about halfway through our interview, is brought in by her smiling father for a turn on mum’s lap. “Hello, my love,” says an enraptured Adichie, wrapping her arms around her daughter and whispering to her in her native Nigerian language of Igbo. “I’ve been keeping her quiet. I so want to protect her privacy,” she says, conspiratorially, a reference to the fact that she has not released her daughter’s name and didn’t reveal she was even having a child until after the birth in 2015. “It’s such a different kind of love,” she remarks as her adorable baby joyfully tears chunks out of a magazine on the table. “I wake up grumpy and then I hear her voice and think, ‘Life is good.’”
The thing that has surprised her most about motherhood,
MOTHERHOOD hasn’t been a taking away, it’s been an ADDING
she says between kisses, is that “it hasn’t been a taking away, it’s been an adding”.
“I think that for many women, there’s just a sense that you’re supposed to give up on yourself, somehow,” Adichie says. She cites her own mother, who worked full-time as she was growing up, as an inspiration: “I saw my mother as a person who went to work at the same time as my father and came back at the same time as my father,” she recalls. “I feel that she taught me that this is what I can be.”
ADICHIE LIKES A MATRIARCH.
It’s why she eventually accepted the invitation from Dior’s Chiuri to be a guest of honour at the fashion house’s spring 2017 show, where the models wore ‘We should all be feminists’ T-shirts.
She had initially rejected the invitation, she tells me, but changed her mind after Chiuri wrote her a personal letter. “She talked about how strongly she felt about gender, about feminism, about speaking out. I was very moved by it. So I went to Paris, and we had this long chat that I didn’t want to end. We talked about feminism as something that isn’t just a theory, but about wanting to change the way the world works.”
As for those who argue that a T-shirt, of all things, can’t make a difference to public discourse, Adichie disagrees. “Pushing feminism into spaces like that is not a bad thing,” she says. “Does it mean it’s going to make the world equal overnight? No. But do you know what? I think that if we all decide that, in whatever space we occupy, we’re going to make an effort, it makes a difference.”
Besides, she says, “I happen to be a person who has always been interested in appearance.” She comes from a family of glamorous women. “I grew up just knowing that you have to make an effort. My mother would say, ‘You have to look like a person.’”
Last year, Adichie became a beauty ambassador for No 7. Talking about the Boots gig, we discover a shared affinity for the brand’s cucumber face wipes, which, it turns out, we both have a habit of importing in bulk to the US in our hand luggage. “I mean I’ve spent so much time there, I thought I might as well bloody help them sell something,” she says with a grin. Still, Adichie found herself on the receiving end of criticism. “I remember a friend of mine in Nigeria saying to me, ‘Nigerians are saying, how can you do this when you’re a feminist?’” She rolls her eyes. “The idea that I’m being questioned as a feminist if
I’m doing a beauty commercial? There’s something really wrong with that. The idea that femininity and feminism are mutually exclusive is nonsense.”
“We need to start questioning why the standard with which we start is always a male standard,” she continues, indignant. “The serious dressing is the male power suit. Why? The serious standard is the make-up-free woman. Why? Why is femininity denigrated?”
It’s a scenario she knows all too well. When she first began to make her way in the literary world, she stopped wearing make-up. “I realised that if you wanted to be a ‘serious writer’” – she pulls a face – “you can’t wear lipstick.” Now, she notes pragmatically, “I have come to a position where I have been judged on my work, and so I’m fortunate that in some ways I can now afford to be my full self.” But she hates that she ever felt like she had to un-pretty herself in the first place. That’s why she intends to keep speaking out. “I’m hoping that if I take this position, I can start to challenge things for women who are coming behind me. So that a young woman in her early twenties, who’s starting off writing now, won’t have to deal with thoughts like, ‘Oh I can’t really wear this bright red lipstick because they’ll say
I’m not very intelligent or they’ll say I’m frivolous.’”
Her brand of feminism, she admits, is one that’s unashamedly evangelistic, and she has no intention of quieting down. “I think of my feminism as one that wants to persuade,” she says. “I don’t just want to throw theory into the world, I want to change a slice of the world.”
I ask her again about being passed up for class monitor in favour of the boy who came second. What would she do if she could go back? “I would grab that stick from that boy!” she says, with a grin. And her laughter peals through the house like a bell, announcing that here she sits in her rightful place in the world, exactly where she should be.
The idea that FEMININITY and FEMINISM are mutually exclusive is NONSENSE