La triste verdad es que nuestro mundo está repleto de hombres y mujeres a quienes no les gustan las mujeres poderosas. Nos han condicionado tanto con que el poder es masculino que una mujer poderosa n...
La rabia tiene una larga historia de propiciar cambios positivos. Y además de rabia, también tengo esperanza, porque creo firmemente en la capacidad de los seres humanos para reformularse a sí mismos...
Just in case this is the last time we hold hands, let’s really hold hands. Because a motorcycle or a car can kill us now, or I might see the real man of my dreams down the street and leave you or you...
Just give her one, Ifemelu thought. To overwhelm a child of four with choices, to lay on her the burden of making a decision, was to deprive her of the bliss of childhood. Adulthood, after all, alread...
I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialectics of...
I’m Vincent, Obinze said, when they met in the back room. I’m Dee. A pause. No, you’re not English. You can pronounce it. My real name is Duerdinhito, but the English, they cannot pronounce, so they c...
It’s strange how I have felt, with every major event that has occurred in my life, that you were the only person who would understand.
It was a tiny moment, brief and fleeting, but Olanna noticed how scrupulously they avoided any contact, any touch of skin, as if they were united by a common knowledge so monumental that they were det...
It seemed to me that in America blacks and whites work together but don’t play together, and here blacks and whites play together but don’t work together, Emenike said.
It seemed so natural, to talk to him about the odd things. She had never done that before. The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her.
It had become a routine of Ifemelu’s visits: Aunty Uju collected all her dissatisfactions in a silk purse, nursing them, polishing them, and then on the Saturday of Ifemelu’s visit, while Bartholomew...
It does not have to mean a literal fifty-fifty or a day-by-day score-keeping, but you’ll know when the child-care work is equally shared. You’ll know by your lack of resentment. Because when there is...
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.
Ifemelu was looking forward to being away from home, to the independence of owning her own time.
Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be...
Ifemelu stood by the window while Aunty Uju sat at the table drinking orange juice and airing her grievances like jewels. It had become a routine of Ifemelu’s visits: Aunty Uju collected all her dissa...
Ifemelu opened her novel, Jean Toomer's Cane, and skimmed a few pages. She had been meaning to read it for a while now, and imagined she would like it since Blaine did not. A precious performance, Bla...
Ifemelu imaginaba a los autores, nigerianos en casas lúgubres de Estados Unidos, sus vidas amortecidas por el trabajo, guardando el dinero ahorrado con cuidado a lo largo del año para poder visitar su...
Ifemelu decided to stop faking an American accent on a sunlit day in July, the same day she met Blaine. It was convincing, the accent. She had perfected, from careful watching of friends and newscaste...
Ifemelu bristled at Chetachi’s goading. Still, it was her mother’s fault, to so eagerly tell the neighbors her mentor story. She should not have; it was nobody’s business what Aunty Uju did. Ifemelu h...