Chimamanda Adichie, Nigeria’s most celebrated contemporary novelist, has put out a "feminist manifesto" with 15 suggestions on how to “raise one’s daughter feminist”. In a Facebook post, Adichie explains the F-word in the simplest and most powerful manner possible.
Adichie manages to write about feminism with full knowledge of the nuances and the conflicts.
Without giving away too much, here are a few reasons why you must give it a read.
1) Feminism cannot be practised in isolation. There is always a context.
Feminism can never be a ready-made concept you simply add it as it is to your political beliefs. It will differ from person to person, from situation to situation.
2) Gender roles are what we are figthing, not men.
3) Our children will grow up listening to a lot of things being justified in the name of tradition. If tradition requires the child to do away with how she best identifies herself, she’d rather listen to herself than follow tradition.
How will a child make that discretion? Through the power of accommodation. The child will realise very soon that opinions are a dime a dozen, and so are snap judgments. Opinions need to be dealt with patience and understanding. And snap judgements need to be avoided.
4) Women are not and should not be expected to do it all. (Same goes for men.) Daughters aren’t your ghar ki lakshmis. Wives aren’t your revered saraswatis. Mothers , most importantly, are neither. They deign to be because you make them. Because you carve a make-believe deity out of a living, breathing person. Let her breathe, please?
5) Your child must be told every single day that she can be anyone she wants to be. Your onus is to keep her away from harm’s way, but only to a certain extent. Let her make her own mistakes and learn how to further make the right ones. Let her figure out herself who she wants to be, how she wants to dress, what work she likes and whom she wants to be with.
6) The most lethal weapon out there is language itself. Saying ‘what is so’ relegates ‘what is not’ to the background. When you say your boyfriend/husband lets you work late into the night, what you mean is he has the power to allow you to do so.
7) Please, please talk to your child about sex and sexuality. There is absolutely no need to attach shame to the topic, as society does when a woman’s sexuality is in question.
Periods are natural. Sex is natural. Attraction is natural. Hushed whispers are unnatural. Holding it in is unnatural.
8) Lastly, please try and make her understand why it is terribly important to keep away from anyone who has managed to stigmatise feminism. Feminism means asking for the basic right to be treated as each human being would like to be treated. Please don’t demonise such an honest demand.
Lastly, we realise choice is based on privilege. Just because Adichie says so, does not mean one has the choice to practise all of it. That being said, we need to, however, start talking more and more about all of this in order to get there someday.
Also, to all you humanists out there, it is mostly a manifesto aimed at the girl child and not the male child. That’s because she bears the brunt of generations of mothers who’ve not perhaps been told that there is a way out, that there are alternative modes of thinking. This does not mean that men aren’t braving sexism every single day. This, however, cannot be an excuse to not engage with women, who have been victimised enough to have had their senses numbed for centuries.
Feminism is a concept that’s alive, breathing in rhythmically. It is everyone’s conviction and everyone’s puzzle. The concept is almost always ready to be bent into new shapes. But more often than not, it is twisted out of shape by people, so much so that it gets reduced to something indistinct.
This is why Adichie’s “manifesto” is so important. She has explained the concept in a simple – and hard-hitting – manner. So that the message is neither lost nor ignored.
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