The old patterns are woven into the texture and colour of our desires and our meanings, they are entangled in our cultural foundations, waiting to trip us up again every time we believe we have finally raised our consciousness to extirpate them. “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story … the pen has been in their hands.”)Īdichie does the same balancing act here as she does in her fictions, addressing the Nigerian experience and the world (“No reference to examples in books,” Anne Elliot insists to a male friend in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Number eight for instance, “Teach her to reject likability”, burrows down into the heart of the matter – but oh, how is it done? And reject all likability, all of it? And what if their daughter when she is a teenager wants and needs desperately to be liked? Adichie is keen to get her reading books but stories won’t necessarily help: for so many centuries, and so persuasively, human stories and songs and dramas have mostly, with some honourable exceptions, been more interested in the beautiful women and punished the unlikable ones. Some of the suggestions feel like mountains of difficulty made simple: but then that’s what manifestos are for. They should never tell their daughter not to do something “because she’s a girl” they shouldn’t encourage her to aim at getting married, as if it were an achievement in itself. She should share childcare equally, and not thank her husband for changing their daughter’s nappy – nor complain about the way he does it, either. Ijeawele must be a full person and not let motherhood alone define her she should go back to work if she wants to, and love “the confidence and self-fulfilment that come with doing and earning”.
Her friend Ijeawele wrote to ask how she should bring her baby daughter up a feminist, and in response, after the right hesitations – “it felt like too huge a task” and “she will still turn out to be different from what you hoped, because sometimes life just does its thing” – Adichie made a list of 15 suggestions. I t would be difficult not to like this little book, which shines with all Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s characteristic warmth and sanity and forthrightness.
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