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,...
Robert Hayden
Recently a young woman was gang-raped in a university in Nigeria, and the response of many young Nigerians, both male and female, was something like this: 'Yes, rape is wrong, but what is a girl doing...
Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like reify in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a...
Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet,...
Please don't speak Igbo to him,' Aunty Uju said. 'Two languages will confuse him.''What are you talking about, Aunty? We spoke two languages growing up.''This is America. It's different.
Philadelphia was the smell of the summer sun, of burnt asphalt, of sizzling meat from food carts tucked into street corners, foreign brown men and women hunched inside. Ifemelu would come to like the...
Pero se sentía incómoda con lo que los profesores llamaban «participación», y no entendía por qué eso debía incluirse en la nota final; solo servía para inducir a los alumnos a hablar y hablar, perdie...
Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have been so conditioned to think of power as male that a powerful woman is an aberration. And so she is policed. We ask of powerf...
Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.
Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick. It
Or maybe we all have eccentricity in us, we just don’t have the money to show it?
Oppression Olympics is what smart liberal Americans say to make you feel stupid and to make you shut up. But there IS an oppression olympics going on. American racial minorities - blacks, Hispanics, A...
Olanna gently placed a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off.
Olanna gently placed a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off. She thought about how ephe...
Olanna felt the slow sadness of missing a person who was still there.
Oh, my God,’ she said, between sobs. ‘Oh, my God.’Olanna reached out often to squeeze her arm. The rawness of Edna’s grief made her helpless, brought the urge to stretch her hand into the past and rev...
Ogbenyealu is a common name for girls and you know what it means? ‘Not to Be Married to a Poor Man.’ To stamp that on a child at birth is capitalism at its best. Richard
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...
Obinze said it was the exaggerated gratitude that came with immigrant insecurity.