It was black-black, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon, so full it took hours under the hooded dryer, and, when finally released from pink plastic rollers, sprang free and full, flowing down her back like a celebration. Her father called it a crown of glory.
One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad.
But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her.
It was not as if he did not know what living in Lagos could do to a woman married to a young and wealthy man, how easy it was to slip into paranoid about ‘Lagos girls,’ those sophisticated monsters of glamour who swallowed husbands whole, slithering them down their throats.
You look like a black American” was his ultimate compliment, which he told her when she wore a nice dress, or when her hair was done in large braids.
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.
When Ifemelu met Obinze, she told her Aunty Uju that she had met the love of her life, and Aunty Uju told her to let him kiss and touch but not to let him put it inside.
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.
Before, she would have said, “I know,” that peculiar American expression that professed agreement rather than knowledge.
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 cones by grown-up American men in public.
He had discovered that grief did not dim with time; it was instead a volatile state of being.
She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.
We teach girls shame; close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they’re already guilty of something.
To choose to write is to reject silence.
Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.
Never ever accept ‘Because You Are A Woman’ as a reason for doing or not doing anything.
Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.
If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.
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.
You Americans, always peering under people’s beds to look for communism.