SCHOOL IN AMERICA was easy, assignments sent in by e-mail, classrooms air-conditioned, professors willing to give makeup tests. But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called participation,...
Please note that I am not suggesting that you raise her to be non-judgemental, which is is a commonly used expression these days, and which slightly worries me. The general sentiment behind the idea i...
Please do not go to Kmart and buy twenty pairs of jeans because each costs five dollars. The jeans are not running away. They will be there tomorrow at an even more reduced price. You are now in Ameri...
Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure.
Or maybe we all have eccentricity in us, we just don’t have the money to show it?
One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad. She had spoken wearily.
One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad.
Oh, it’s normal, he said, and she remembered how he had always been quick to reassure her, to make her feel better. I was away for a much shorter time, obviously, but I was very surprised when I came...
Of course they nurse resentment, as they well should, but it has somehow managed to leave their spirits whole.
Of course much of this was tongue-in-cheek, but what it shows is how that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage: You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think wom...
Of course it was angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry.
Obinze said it was the exaggerated gratitude that came with immigrant insecurity.
Nigeria became where she was supposed to be, the only place she could sink her roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil.
Maybe it’s time to just scrap the word racist. Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute.
Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair.
Make dressing a question of taste and attractiveness instead of a question of morality.
It is our diffidence about the afterlife that leads us to religion
It is not hard, Ifemelu said firmly. You are using the wrong comb. And she pulled the comb from Aisha’s hand and put it down on the table.
In secondary school, a boy and a girl go out, both of them teenagers with meager pocket money. Yet the boy is expected to pay the bills, always, to prove his masculinity. (And we wonder why boys are m...
In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestat...