Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

For example, Adichie talks about how “we teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller” (27). Adichie suggests we do this to girls to “cater the fragile egos of males” or to sugarcoat men with what they need to boost their egos (27). In a patriarchal society, women would face higher costs from their…

The development and nature of the relationships on 'Americanah ' have been quite influential in my understanding of the novel, as the story goes on from the past to present, the only theme that was constantly never changing was the recreations of the relationships, how insanely unstable this romantic connections where and how they continue to exist for a quite long term of time. A couple of those relationships are Ifemelu’s Parents, Aunty Uju and The General, and the many relationships of…

being forms of self-expression, any spectrum that offers any fluidity is all but neglected. In the case of masculinity, there are preferences placed on men, such as being physically strong, tall, heterosexual, cisgender, dominant, and so on. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writer and feminist advocate, touched on this in her TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminist,” saying, “We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage, and we put boys inside the cage” (“We Should…

Chopin, books that presented me with a thorough dissection of gender and of the limitations gender places on human experiences, especially on those of women and queer people. As an undergraduate student at Cornell University, I began reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,…

The books Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Animal's People, by Indra Sinha, both explore what it is like to be an outsider finding your identity amongst the rest of ‘normal’ society. Adiche does this through her character Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who immigrates to the United States for college, experiencing culture shock and the inevitable changes she makes to her identity in order to fit into this new place. Indra Sinha explores the concept through a very different character: a…

connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 837). Normalizing the objectification of women is damaging because it suggests that a woman’s place is defined by men. In her Ted Talk, We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie refers to how men assume she is owned by other men she is with. Adichie retells the story of the reaction she received after she had tipped a man; he turned to her friend Louis and…

Friday is a dog. The Carib Indian companion in Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe may be Oppressors, Subalterns, and Dogs - the Island of Robinson Crusoe treated more respectfully than most other people of color of his time, but even though Crusoe and Friday are allegedly friends, he is nothing more than a dog to his Master - never his equal. Defoe’s depiction of the Carib Indians in his novel is a case of Othering, and the relationship between Friday and Crusoe resembles colonialism from…

our service trips; however, nothing can fully prepare us. One of our speakers last year chose to focus his talk on stereotypes. After asking us to tell him some stereotypes we have heard about the Appalachian region, he shared a quote by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete”. This quote resonated with me and since then I have seen its validity more times than one. While in Hollywood, SC last March my group worked with a…

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie defines feminism as “a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better.” Like Adichie, many feminists speak against gender stereotypes and fight the unequal treatment of women and minorities. Laci Green uses the phrase “Man Hater, Bra Burner, Baby Killer and Lesbian” in one of her videos, to describe few of the many stereotypes that revolve around women/men that…

In life, people have their own unique ways of coping with control. In the novel Purple Hibiscus, the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, uses symbols and motifs to depict how a family handles their Father’s control and religion. Kambili and Jaja use the silence of their home and their eye language to deal with Papa’s horrifying punishments, while Mama uses her figurines to get away from her abusive husband. Papa believes that religion is the forefront of the family and uses it for his own corrupt…