If she sees you reading, she will understand that reading is valuable.
She wanted Azuka to learn the ways of these foreigners, since people ruled over others not because they were better people but because they had better guns;.
Anger, the tone said, is particularly not good for a woman. If you are a woman, you are not supposed to express anger, because it is threatening.
When Philip complained about the French couple building a house next to his in Cornwall, Emenike asked, ‘Are they between you and the sunset?
Let her know that there are many individuals and many cultures that do not find the narrow mainstream definition of beauty attractive.
I don’t think love as a reason. I think love comes first and then the reasons follow.
At first Ifemelu thought Kimberly’s apologizing sweet, even if unnecessary, but she had begun to feel a flash of impatience, because Kimberly’s repeated apologies were tinged with self-indulgence, as though she believed that she could, with apologies, smooth all the scalloped surfaces of the world.
He said “see” as if it meant something more than what one did with one’s eyes.
Ikenna, I have come to realize, is a man who carries with him the weight of what could have been.
A good education isn’t the same thing as making the whole damn world something to be explained!
Do it together. Remember in primary school we learned that a verb is a ‘doing’ word? Well, a father is as much a verb as a mother.
We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak, a hard man.
And never say that Chudi is “babysitting” – people who babysit are people for whom the baby is not a primary responsibility.
Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.
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 dissatisfactions in a silk purse, nursing them, polishing them, and then on the Saturday of Ifemelu’s visit, while Bartholomew was out and Dike upstairs, she would spill them out on the table, and turn each one this way and that, to catch the light.
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.
People often told him how humble he was, but they did not mean real humility, it was merely that he did not flaunt his membership in the wealthy club, did not exercise the rights it brought – to be rude, to be inconsiderate, to be greeted rather than to greet – and because so many others like him exercised those rights, his choices were interpreted as humility.
But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.
A young Nigerian woman once told me that she had for years behaved ‘like a boy’ – she liked football and was bored by dresses – until her mother forced her to stop her ‘boyish’ interests. Now she is grateful to her mother for helping her start behaving like a girl. The story made me sad. I wondered what parts of herself she had needed to silence and stifle, and I wondered about what her spirit had lost, because what she called ‘behaving like a boy’ was simply behaving like herself.
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size. She told him how she very much wanted God to exist but feared He did not, how she worried that she should know what she wanted to do with her life but did not.