Seniors told have courage, be kind
Nigerian novelist encourages engaging the world
NEW HAVEN — Courage and love. Both are necessary in the world outside Yale University.
Those are two of the qualities needed to make a difference, novelist, essayist and Yale alumna Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told the graduating seniors at Class Day on Sunday.
She told the class of 2019 that their Yale degrees will give them power, but also responsibility. Their degree will create in others an “automatic assumption of competence,” she said. But, “if power were a jacket, it is most flattering on all body types when worn very lightly.”
Adichie was born in Nigeria and studied medicine there before immigrating to the United States at 19, graduating from Eastern Connecticut State University and Johns Hopkins University, then earning a master’s degree in African studies at Yale in 2008. Her novel “Americanah” won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the New York Times’ Top Ten Best Books of 2013.
She admitted that “I wasn’t always happy here, for reasons having more to do with me than with Yale,” and told of “the slightly awkward seminar I took in African literature in which my own novel was part of the curriculum.”
But she said that Yale “afforded me opportunities to engage” that are “essential for a writer.” Much of the fodder for her fiction, she said, came from eavesdropping. “For writers, almost nothing is out of bounds when it comes to collecting material,” she said.
Much of her advice was to tell the graduates to be sure they do not shrink from making themselves be heard, but also to listen to others and not to hold too fast to their beliefs. “Look up primary sources first, and remember that context is always queen,” she said.
“Be open to the possibility that you might be wrong,” she said, warning that if the graduates “adhere unquestionably to the ideology you subscribe to, then maybe it’s time for some agility in your thinking, a small shift, for example. A sign that you know that there are complicated shades of gray everywhere. I would suggest, in general, that you marry being idealistic with being pragmatic.”
When it comes to engaging in the world, she said, “Politics is awful in all sorts of ways, but refusing to engage is not the answer. Sometimes you have to get in there to be able to work towards changing it to what you want it to be. Engage with the world as it is. Otherwise you won’t get anything done.”
However, she said, “Please do not ever apologize for existing or for taking up space in the world or for having a well-considered opinion. I say this particularly to women, whose socialization teaches them, teaches us, to shrink ourselves, as though our responsibility is never first to ourselves but always to others. And we end up sometimes feeling guilty for wanting the things we want, for wanting to be our own selves first.
“The messages that society sends us can be conflicting. That tension between telling you to value yourself, that you matter, and then that other message that tells you to put other people first and to serve,” she said. “It is possible, it is necessary, that you find a balance between the two. But you will have to figure it out yourself.”
Adichie told the seniors, who will graduate Monday, to value others, but said, “You do not have to make room in your life for people who wish you harm.”
Speaking about the political atmosphere in America, she said a Nigerian phrase, which she translated as “things are not standing well,” “best captures my sense of America today. … Wherever you might be on the ideological spectrum, things are not standing well if fear is in the air that Americans breathe.”