There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It
Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.
The white missionaries brought us their god, Amaka was saying. Which was the same color as them, worshiped in their language and packaged in the boxes they made. Now that we take their god back to the...
The simplest solution to the problem of race in America? Romantic love. Not friendship. Not the kind of safe, shallow love where the objective is that both people remain comfortable. But real deep rom...
The rude stranger in the supermarket--who knew what problems he was wrestling with, haggard and thin-lipped as he was--had intended to offend her but had instead prodded her awake.
The more civilians you bomb, the more resistance you grow.
The man standing closest to her was eating an ice cream cone; she had always found it a little irresponsible, the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men, especially the eating of ice cream...
The little boy had a delightful curious face. Do you live in London? he asked Obinze. Yes, Obinze said, but that yes did not tell his story, that he lived in London indeed but invisibly, his existence...
The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, the higher you go, the fewer women there are. In
The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina. Cooking is learned. Cooking – domestic work in general – is a life skill that both men and women should ideally have. It is also a ski...
The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina. ... If we stopped conditioning women to see marriage as a prize, then we would have fewer debates about a wife needing to cook in orde...
That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one gro...
Tell Chizalum that women actually don't need to be championed and revered; they just need to be treated as equal human beings.
Teach her, too, to question the idea of women as a special species. I once heard an American politician, in his bid to show his support for women, speak of how women should be revered and championed—a...
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 to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans. Men who, when discussing rape, will always say something like if it...
Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women. For X please insert words like anger, ambition, loudness...
Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. She would sink into moodiness, and snap at Obinze, or be distant. And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though look...
Some people will say a woman is subordinate to men because its our culture. But culture is constantly changing...culture does not make people, people makes culture.
Some people ask, 'Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?' Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in...