“I don’t think sexism is worse than racism, it’s impossible even to compare,” she clarifies. No.’ and it gives me hope.” I feel lonely in my fight against sexism, in a way that I don’t feel in my fight against racismĪdichie lives in both Maryland and Lagos: “I couldn’t be happy living entirely in Nigeria or living entirely in America.” She “became black” she says, when she moved to the US as a student, and the experience of being black but not American is bitingly captured in her much loved last novel Americanah.īut now in Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (just published in paperback), she writes that she is angrier about sexism than she is about racism. We just don’t know … I do see in women a sense that ‘We’re done, this is it. “It’s either the beginning of a revolution, or it is going to be a fad. But cautiously optimistic,” Adichie says of the #MeToo movement when we meet a couple of days later. As festival founder Jude Kelly said in her whoop-inducing introduction, “The world is changing very fast, and we intend to accelerate it.” The two writers received a riotous standing ovation before they had even sat down.

The excitement among the audience of largely young women was as striking as the amazing hair and outfits (“That will be the Nigerians,” Adichie says proudly). The atmosphere at a recent event with Reni Eddo-Lodge (author of Why I Am No Longer Talking to White People About Race), part of the Southbank’s WOW: Women of the World festival in London, was more like a party than a books evening. Following her sensational 2013 TED talk, We Should All Be Feminists, (sampled by Beyoncé, used by Dior for a series of slogan T-shirts and distributed in book format to every 16-year-old in Sweden) the 40-year-old has become something of a public feminist: hence scolding the former US secretary of state. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, published when she was only 26, was longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker she won the 2006 Orange prize for Half of a Yellow Sun was awarded a MacArthur fellowship – the so-called genius grant – and her work is now a fixture on American school reading lists. “When you put it like that, I’m going to change it,” promised the 2016 presidential candidate.Īdichie is an international bestseller and about as starry as a writer can be (when we meet she chats casually about recently meeting Oprah Winfrey, who made a little bow to her). Her husband’s account, it will surprise no one to know, does not begin with the word “husband”.

A t a PEN lecture in Manhattan last weekend, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie took Hillary Clinton to task for beginning her Twitter bio with “Wife, mom, grandma”.

Chimamanda feminist manifesto