Yet Adichie also finds the most welcoming ways to engage her readers and audiences (she is a rather popular public lecturer) in the issues of our time. She recently gave the commencement speech at Wellesley, and in just a few minutes she brought insight and relatability to the topic of feminism through storytelling about her mother. Her point (and caution) is this: there's not one so-called feminist response to all situations. As Adichie says "gender is always about context and circumstance' and "life is messy," meaning standardized ideology doesn't fit all situations.
Check out this link for more excerpts from her recent lectures. The story about her mother is quoted below, and the full commencement speech can be found here.
Adichie's emphasis on the "danger of the single story" and "standardized ideology" resonate to say the least. As does her fiction work. My favorites are Half a Yellow Sun and That Thing Around Your Neck.
And who can't get drawn in by her smile? My guess is that she's as warm and funny and accessible and strong and insightful in person as she appears in her work and in her smile.
I bring greetings to you from my mother. She’s a big admirer of Wellesley, and she wishes she could be here. She called me yesterday to ask how the speech-writing was going and to tell me to remember to use a lot of lotion on my legs today so they would not look ashy.
My mother is 73 and she retired as the first female registrar of the University of Nigeria—which was quite a big deal at the time.
My mother likes to tell a story of the first university meeting she chaired. It was in a large conference room, and at the head of the table was a sign that said CHAIRMAN. My mother was about to get seated there when a clerk came over and made to remove the sign. All the past meetings had of course been chaired by men, and somebody had forgotten to replace the CHAIRMAN with a new sign that said CHAIRPERSON. The clerk apologized and told her he would find the new sign, since she was not a chairman.
My mother said no. Actually, she said, she WAS a chairman. She wanted the sign left exactly where it was. The meeting was about to begin. She didn’t want anybody to think that what she was doing in that meeting at that time on that day was in any way different from what a CHAIRMAN would have done.
I always liked this story, and admired what I thought of as my mother’s fiercely feminist choice. I once told the story to a friend, a card carrying feminist, and I expected her to say bravo to my mother, but she was troubled by it.
“Why would your mother want to be called a chairman, as though she needed the MAN part to validate her?” my friend asked.
In some ways, I saw my friend’s point.
Because if there were a Standard Handbook published annually by the Secret Society of Certified Feminists, then that handbook would certainly say that a woman should not be called, nor want to be called, a CHAIRMAN.
But gender is always about context and circumstance.
If there is a lesson in this anecdote, apart from just telling you a story about my mother to make her happy that I spoke about her at Wellesley, then it is this: Your standardized ideologies will not always fit your life. Because life is messy.
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