When we say fathers are “helping,” we are suggesting that child care is a mother’s territory, into which fathers valiantly venture. It is not.
I am just as human as the man.
Look, all of them are white women. This one is supposed to be Hispanic, we know this because they wrote two Spanish words here, but she looks exactly like this white woman, no difference in her skin tone and hair and features. Now, I’m going to flip through, page by page, and you tell me how many black women you see.
She was taking two sides at once, to please everyone; she always chose peace over truth, was always eager to conform.
We should not be asking whether a woman can “do it all” but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.
There was a stripped-down quality to her life, a kindling starkness, without parents and friends and home, the familiar landmarks that made her who she was.
When Buchi said “Amen!” with that delight, that gusto, Obinze feared she would grow up to be a woman who, with that word “amen,” would squash the questions she wanted to ask of the world.
You know, like race is a brew best served mild, tempered with other liquids, otherwise white folk can’t swallow it.
Boys and girls are undeniably different biologically, but socialization exaggerates the differences.
You were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did.
There’s something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You’ve never even accepted that the man was ugly.
There was something unquestioning about her roommates’ lives, an assumption of certainty that fascinated her, so that they often said, “Let’s go get some,” about whatever it was they needed – more beer, pizza, buffalo wings, liquor – as though this getting was not an act that required money.
There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have. To take “charity” for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know – perhaps it came from having had yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this.
One of the things I’ve learned is that everybody in this country has the mentality of scarcity. We imagine that even the things that are not scarce are scarce. And it breeds a kind of desperation in everybody. Even the wealthy.
Oh, it’s normal,” he said, and she remembered how he had always been quick to reassure her, to make her feel better. “I was away for a much shorter time, obviously, but I was very surprised when I came back. I kept thinking that things should have waited for me but they hadn’t.
She cries quietly, her shoulders heaving up and down, not the kind of loud sobbing that the women Chika knows do, the kind that screams Hold me and comfort me because I cannot deal with this alone. The woman’s crying is private, as though she is carrying out a necessary ritual that involves no one else.
She will listen to BBC radio and hear the accounts of the deaths and the riots – “religious with undertones of ethnic tension” the voice will say. And she will fling the radio to the wall and a fierce red rage will run through her at how it has all been packaged and sanitized and made to fit into so few words, all those bodies.
Ojiugo wore orange lipstick and ripped jeans, spoke bluntly, and smoked in public, provoking vicious gossip and dislike from other girls, not because she did these things but because she dared to without having lived abroad, or having a foreign parent, those qualities that would have made them forgive her lack of conformity.
Darkness descended upon him, and when it lifted he knew that he would never see Kainene again and that his life would always be a candlelit room; he would see things only in shadow, only in half glimpses.
And, in the pride in her eyes, he saw a shinier, better version of himself.