So I decided I would now be a 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 Hersel...
Siempre he tenido la impresión de que es imposible conocer debidamente un lugar o a una persona sin conocer todas las historias de ese lugar o esa persona. La consecuencia del relato único es la sigui...
Show her that she does not need to be liked by everyone. Tell her that if someone does not like her, there will be someone else who will. Teach her that she is not merely an object to be liked or disl...
She was used to this, being grabbed by men who walked around in a cloud of cologne-drenched entitlement, with the presumption that, because they were powerful and found her beautiful, they belonged to...
She was struck by how mostly slim white people got off at the stops in Manhattan and, as the train went further into Brooklyn, the people left were mostly black and fat. She had not thought of them as...
She was standing at the periphery of her own life, sharing a fridge and a toilet, a shallow intimacy, with people she did not know at all. People who lived in exclamation points.
She was after all the kind of woman who would make a man easily uproot his life, the kind who, because she did not expect or ask for certainty, made a certain kind of sureness become possible.
She wanted to interrupt and tell him how unnecessary it was, this bloodying and binding, this turning faith into a pugilistic exercise; to tell him that life was a struggle with ourselves more than wi...
She sits at the edge of the leather sofa and looks around the living room, remembers the delivery man from Ethan Interiors who changed the lampshade the other day. You got a great house, ma’am, he’d s...
She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty.
She liked that he wore their relationship so boldly, like a brightly colored shirt.
She heard his words like a melody and she felt herself breathing unevenly, gulping at the air. She would not cry, it was ridiculous to cry after so long, but her eyes were filling with tears and there...
She had thought of them as big, because one of the first things her friend Ginika told her was that fat in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgment like stupid or bastard, and not a mere de...
She had taught her son the ability to be, even in the middle of a crowd, somehow comfortably inside himself.
She had not thought of them as fat, though. She had thought of them as big, because one of the first things her friend Ginika told her was that fat in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgme...
She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rar...
She felt bitter toward them at first, because when she tried to talk about the things she had left behind in Nsukka—her books, her piano, her clothes, her china, her wigs, her Singer sewing machine, t...
She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach.
She called him often, with cheap phone cards she bought from the crowded store of a gas station on Lancaster Avenue, and just scratching off the metallic dust, to reveal the numbers printed beneath, f...
Saying no when no feels right is something to be proud of.