Time Beings

While reading Adichie’s book, I was surprised by how much I could relate and think about examples, whether in my own life or that I’ve seen, of the things she mentioned. All of her tips were incredibly relatable and helpful, but some stood out to me more than others. In the second half of the book, I loved her eighth suggestion about “rejecting likeability.” Personally, as girls, I feel like we have always been taught to be nice and give in to the other person's ideas or plans, especially if they are men. We always have to adapt to men, yet I feel like men don’t really have to adapt to us. Even though I feel like we should all try to be nice to one another, I think there is more pressure for girls to be polite and more submissive. I am also guilty of trying to be overly nice when it’s not really “necessary,” so to speak, so I’ll try to follow Adichie’s advice myself and try to value other things more than “likeability.” Another piece of advice that I really liked was the tenth ...

 In her "Feminist Manifesto" of suggestions, Chimananda Ngozi Adiche highlights an overwhelming amount of expectations that socially have historically defined femininity.  If we were to consider gender culture as a time-knot in the United States, we would find some incredible progressions in liberties, while at the same time stagnant perceptions of what it means to be feminine.  By writing this to Ijeawele, it seems clear that Ijeawele could be personification of the audience as a whole (a whole generation).  This makes this work a call to action, in that we are responsible for raising feminist children so we can collectively alter the persistent stereotypical perceptions of women in society.  To emphasize this call to action, she reminds us of the many labels attached to women.  She claims that these labels are dangerous in that they aim to define a woman's worth and success.  Instead of character-defining labels, such "feminine values" posed by socie...

    The law of equals and reciprocity becomes hazy when contextualized under the greater concept of equity. What exactly is fair? Adichie explores, throughout her advisory discourse, this idea of reciprocity as it relates to being equal and providing equity in a relationship.        For context, reciprocity is the exchange of things or emotions for the mutual benefits of all parties involved in the transaction. It is not necessarily equal in face value, but is the same in terms of attributed worth. Equality is the equal distribution of those same things and emotions, but both being of the exact same value. Equity therefore, is the combination of both reciprocity and equality to create an environment of fairness.        Carefully, Adichie navigates around social constructs and cultural intricacies to reveal a simple yet elusive truth: that the key to a relationship or, for that matter, the key to being a proper feminist is indeed a b...

  Nathan Galloway I am writing this reading review moments after listening to 90 minutes of the first 2020 Presidential Debate. My takeaway is simple, the teachings of Adichie are needed as much now as they ever have been. Watching three grown men talk over one another for ninety minutes showed me that although Adichie’s suggestions are not radical per se, their implementation  would  have a radical impact on both macro-level and individual relationships in the United States and around the globe.  The context of reading the second half of her letters in such close proximity to the debate made me focus heavily on her eighth suggestion. The beginning of this section reads: Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people…We teach girls to be likable, to be nice, to be false. And we do not teach boys the same (Adichie, 36-37).   A big questi...

 After reading the second half of Dear Ijeawele or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, I was heavily astounded and intrigued while reading Adichie's beginning statement  (of the fifteenth suggestion) to "Make Difference ordinary. Make difference normal. Teach her not to attach value to difference"(61).  The reason I was so astounded and intrigued by Adichie's  statement is because I had thought it as differences aren't a unique, amazing, and out of the norm thing that only happens once an while but rather it is one of the ordinary things out that is everywhere we look. Fundamentally, I felt that  beginning statement had made me rethink a lot about what I value in the differences I see between myself and others as something that is pretty ordinary at the heart of things because humans are all different from one another and those differences are simply one basic foundation of what humans' lives.  To start off with the concept of why difference is nor...

  Throughout the second half of her novel, Adichie’s thoughts remain true to the guiding principle and question, “Can you reverse X and get the same results” (6)?     In other words, Adichie asks readers, does the same experience that a woman undergoes equal the experience that her male counterpart undergoes?     Oftentimes, as Adichie points out, the answer is no.     In discussing the impact that a woman encounters in changing her name upon marriage, Adichie guides readers to consider the ways marriage impacts a man’s identity.  She writes, “This new ‘becoming’ would not matter so much if men, too, had to undergo it … women should not be expected to make marriage-based decisions that men are not expected to make” (35-36).  In this situation, Adichie clarifies that women are held to a different, and much more rigorous standard when it comes to formalities associated with marriage.  Where men are able to keep their names a...

              Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions discusses major points related to being a true feminist, with focusing on the grounding of gender equality.  At the beginning of this manifesto, she lays out two feminist tools, one of which being that if you can reverse a situation and get the same result between a man and a woman, then it is equal, but if not, then there is work to be done (Adichie 6).  Adichie works this tool throughout the manifesto and truly uses it as a measure of whether something is just for women to be expected of or to care excessively about.  She particularly uses this tool in suggestion seven, discussing how “marriage as an achievement” (Adichie 30) is not an ideal that is reversible to men, and should therefore not be an ideal taught to women.          Adichie discusses how women are expected to look forwa...

            Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes compelling arguments throughout   Dear Ijeawele  for how to raise a daughter to become a feminist. However, the most compelling one she makes, and the one that exists beneath all the others is this: the changes people make now can serve to create a better future. Through her allusions to Chizalum’s adolescence and adulthood, Adichie tells her readers that the decisions people make in the present can positively or negatively impact their futures, and the futures of their children.               In her twelfth suggestion, Adichie urgers her friend to teach her daughter about sex and start early. This simple act, being open and honest with one’s daughter about the nature and realities of sex, can have a lasting impact. Adichie writes, “Tell her that her body belongs to her and her alone, that she should never feel the need to say ye to som...

The feminist manifesto, Dear Ijeawele , by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, was such an eye-opening read for me and truly taught me so much about feminism and our society. Like the book, though each suggestion was short in length, they were all jam-packed with wisdom and knowledge; I feel like I could read this book over and over and never cease to learn more every time. One part that stood out to me in the second half of the book was suggestion 8 in which Adichie advises her friend to teach her daughter to “reject likeability”(Adichie 36). This is such an interesting concept to me, and something I would like to explore more. By using the term “reject likeability” (Adichie 36), Adichie is saying that girls should not be taught to live their lives to be “likeable”. She then made a point that I had not before thought about. She said that girls are taught to be likeable and nice while boys are not taught the same. I have definitely noticed this in my life, and can attest to the claim that it...

       Adichie's text instructs not only her original intended audience, Ijeawele, on ways to raise a feminist daughter, but also all who choose to read her piece. Multiple times throughout the text, Adichie addresses the ways in which society views women as subordinate to their male counterparts - an example being the way in which marriage is seen as a goal women must achieve, but the same is not true for men. In light of this, Adichie goes on about the myriad of ways society heavily judges women on their outward appearance as a way to discern what they believe her whole person to be. Simply put, from a young age women are taught that the way she presents herself greatly affects the way she is seen in the eyes of society. The quote that stood out to me the most, in regard to the aforementioned argument, reads as follows, "Never, ever link Chizalum's appearance with morality. Never tell her that a short skirt is 'immoral'" (Adichie, 44).     Society oftenti...

Language shapes the way that we live our lives. We create definition s  and constructs in order to organize and understand the world around us.  Like all things that are “well intended” in our society,  excuses are often made for people who participate  and are   complacent in  sexist culture.    Even if it’s not apparent,  words / phrases / language  reinforce gender inequality.    The open letter format of  Dear Ijeawele,  by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,  allows the audience to read advice and personal accounts from the author to a close friend. In fifteen suggestions Adichie paints the picture of what it means to  grow up as a   woman in Nigerian and American culture and  how it impacts  everyone in these societies; girls, boys; young and old.  The  manifesto shows the impact of our words  and language and the influence we have over younger generations.    Adichie...

     Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of my all-time favorite authors so I was beyond excited to read Dear Ijeawele or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. This letter/manifesto was exactly everything I hoped it would be and more, and there are similar undertones between this text and Americanah. What makes this text so special is Adichie's unique perspective on feminism. In the first half of the text she refers to the concept of Feminism Lite which is honestly a half-ass and the entirely wrong approach to feminism . It is so hard to break the notions of feminism because gender and gender roles are ingrained in everything little thing we do. Clothes, hobbies, emotions– all of these things are defined by gender. Our parents have subconsciously raised us to see gender first.  For this post I wanted to focus on the second half of the text, specifically on chapter eleven and its definition of social norms. "Because social norms are created by human beings, and the...

 Chiang's The Merchant and the Alchemists Gate, similar to many of the preceding texts this semester, touches on the concept of time and its effects on an individual's entire being - simply put, the way in which one's past, present, and future can be dramatically altered in an instant. Chiang's piece presents the audience with a number of different interesting anecdotal stories and pieces of information, but the most crucial to the plot, in my opinion, is that of the Gate of Years. The Gate of Years, which was created by an alchemist named Bashaarat, presents the speaker Fuwaas ibn Abbas, and the audience, with a passageway he claims to be able to place an individual twenty years into the future. With this being said, this aforementioned Gate of Years supposedly allows an individual to meet and converse with their future self on how they got to their present moment. While some may have found this plot point to be inspiring, I found it to be rather problematic. For examp...

In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” Chiang utilizes narrative time in an impactful way, truly revealing the magic (or alchemy) that happens when someone writes down a story. In “Temporality and Literary Theory”, Martin refers to Gérard Genette’s  Narrative Discourse  in which narrative time is understood through order, duration and frequency. Identifying these three temporal relations in Chiang’s story reveals the impact that narrative time has on the reader.   At the beginning of the story, Fuwaad ibn Abbas, our narrator, addresses the caliph in what we can assume to be “present” time. Then Abbas says, “I begin my story with the day I took a walk through the district of metalsmiths” (Chiang, 10). At this point, as readers, we understand that Abbas is going to be talking about events that happened in the past. Then  within  the story that Abbas tells time changes once again. We learn about the Gate of Years which allows its user to travel twenty years int...