Ok, guys. I have a confession to make. I cheated a lil’ bit this month. Just a bit. I promised that I would read a book by an immigrant woman of color for every month in 2019 and I sort of did that, but I also sort of didn’t. This month’s book Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is all of those things, but it’s also not new to me. I first read Adichie’s Fifteen Suggestions last year after realizing that the constant damaging news cycle was often leaving me speechless when actually confronting people who were parroting “fake news.” I first read Adichie in an effort to help consolidate my own thoughts on feminism and as a sort of devotional text in the fight for equality.
Although I desperately wanted to keep to my new year’s resolution, I also realize that sometimes things just don’t work out. This month I’ve been finishing up the last few classes for my M.A. (woo!) and writing all the papers that go with those classes (un-woo). This also means that I’ve ingested about fifteen novels and numerous articles and pieces of criticism over the past six weeks. In the end, I just ran out of brain space. So, instead, I returned to a work that inspired me to do this project and that has become a staple for me—one that I will continue to return to for years to come.
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian novelist who moved to America to attend college, first graduating from Eastern Connecticut State University and eventually earning a Master’s degree from Johns Hopkins. Adichie has written three novels, Purple Hibiscus, Half a Yellow Sun, and Americanah, as well as a short story collection entitled The Thing Around Your Neck. Adichie gained fame as a speaker during her 2012 TED Talk, “We Should all be Feminists,” which was sampled in Beyoncé’s “Flawless.”
Rather than giving you my hot-take on this book, I want to leave you with a few reminders about feminism from Adichie and encourage you to go pick up a copy yourself. The book is small, only 63 pages in length. It is purse-sized and should probably just live in your purse forever. That way, you can return to it, just like I do, whenever you need a reminder to keep looking forward.
“Everybody will have an opinion about what you should do, but what matters is what you want for yourself, and not what others want you to want.”
“A young Nigerian woman once told me that she had for years behaved ‘like a boy’—she liked football and was bored by dresses—until her mother forced her to stop her ‘boyish’ interests. Now she is grateful to her mother for helping her start behaving like a girl. The story made me sad. I wondered what parts of herself she had needed to silence and stifle, and wondered about what her spirit had lost, because what she called ‘behaving like a boy’ was simply behaving like herself.”
“Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people.”
“Teach her about difference. Make difference ordinary. Make difference normal. Teach her not to attach value to difference. And the reason for this is not to be fair or to be nice, but merely to be human and practical. Because difference is the reality of our world. And by teaching her about difference, you are equipping her to survive in a diverse world.”
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