Hello Readers!
This blog is a response to the Sunday reading and task given by Prof. Dilip Barad.
As a part of this reading we had to watch two Ted talks and a lecture at the Harvard university uploaded on YouTube and delivered by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Shall write a blog reflecting the outcome of my understanding.
1. The danger of a single story.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had grown up on a University Campus in eastern Nigeria as her father was a Professor and her mother was an Administrator. At the age of four she started reading British and American children books, When she started writing, her characters were having blue eyes, talking about weather, eating apple, played in snow while in Nigeria, people did not have any need to talk about weather. or they were eating mangoes rather. Particularly as a child she had this imagination which she said saved her from having a single story of what books are.
In the video she is saying "I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature, I realized that people like me, girls with kinky hair could not form a ponytails, could also exist in literature".
London merchant John Lok represented the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the west in 1561 by saying "beasts who have no houses they are people without heads, having their mouths and eyes in their breasts".
Rudyard Kipling said them "Half devil, half child".
When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is taking about the role of power she said that Power is responsible to Show people as one thing, as only one thing over and over again and that is what they become.
Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti have said that if you want to dispossess people, a simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "Secondly".
All the stereotypes are not untrue but Incomplete, as far as they are told with the single side of the story or the narrative.
Here is the video if you are looking for deep insight.
We should all be Feminists.
"Influence of the western books" on someone is a common sentence used by people to prove the people about their different behaviors.
Wangari Maathai, Novel peace laureate said- " The higher you go, the fewer women there are".
Little things that string the most, waiter greeting man only in the restaurant, can't let woman accompanied without man, enter; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had written all these experiences in her article named "What it is to be a young and female in Lagos"
How we raise our children?
We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of Vulnerability and girls to make themselves smaller and shrink. Pressure of proving muscularity is highly we have stressed upon boys and we say to girls " You can have ambition, but not too much, you should aim to be successful but not too successful"
- Emasculating man
- Wearing ring without being engaged
- Terrible choice in the pressure of marriage
- "I did it for peace in my marriage", She is usually talking about having giving up a job, a dream, a carrier.
- We respect women for her virginity,
- We teach them: shame and silence.
Weight of gender expectations is given much more weight here in the video where Man and Woman both have load of their responsibility as a particular gender, which is in fact planted by the society.
We had time and again found women Saying thanks to her husband for changing a diaper of their child, and they are doing it in the present time also as if the child is of a Female only; there are also different dynamics working in a society that if a couple is getting divorce, Father claims his only right over the child which is not fair.
Clothing to look serious and powerful
"Culture doesn't make man, Man makes the Culture"
What does it mean to be a Feminists?
At its core, feminism is the belief that women deserve equal social, economic, and political rights and freedoms
Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men. At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes To Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For Men."
Harvard class 2018 where she delivers her speech, she starts about speech with Difference between malice and mistake, the pronunciation of her name that if someone speaks it wrong though trying hard and someone gets it wrong intentionally there is a huge difference between them. Context matters a lot in the Post colonial studies and Everywhere in the twenty-first century world.
Above all else, do not lie or don't lie too often
Political lie and a lie used by common man on a daily basis
" We should call a lie a lie, when is a lie a lie".
she strongly suggests everyone to Bent on the truth
"I don't know" is really easy term to know but harder to accept as someone has to accept openly sometimes that they really do not know something.
"It's hard to tell ourselves the truth, our failures, fragilities, uncertainties. It's hard to tell that we haven't done our best, which we could have.”
Universal story is very humanly, it needs to be told well!" is the discussion in her Ted Talk that if one observes stories from the lives of another it sounds similar to the story they are having.
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