YouSaid · the spoken record

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

lines on the record: 59
first: 2022-01-16
most recent: 2022-01-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think saying sorry has always been a thing that I've struggled with, but since experiencing grief, I think life is so short, you know, reach out to people, that sort of thing. So I think I'm doing that a lot more. Knock on”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's also made me kind of have much less patience for bullshit. By which I mean the things I think before experiencing grief, I would let slide. Now I'm not willing to because I worry that life is so short and if one feels strongly about something, one should do something about it because we don't know how much time we have. And I think had my parents not died, I would not have written my essay about social media. And it's not because I didn't feel these things before, but I just thought, you know, just leave it alone. But now I just life is so damn short. The people I love are so much more precious to me. I'm also, I think it's also made me much more willing to say sorry.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's such a good question. And I don't want to get emotional. I'm doing my tough persona today. So I'm resolutely not going to cry because I often will when I talk about how much I've been changed by my dad and my mother. But yes, I did think a lot about it. And I really just feel like I'm a different person. And it's strange because... I think it's really important to think about what matters now. I think about it all the time. Like, what just really matters to me? And I'm so much more aware of mortality. So I'm always thinking about I could die tomorrow. So sometimes I'm like, I better do it today because, hey, I might die tomorrow. I mean, obviously, I don't want to die tomorrow because I do want to raise my daughter who's six. I don't want to leave her in the clutches of her wonderful father. But anyway.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm like, but surely you don't even, yeah, I mean, they don't even try. There isn't even sort of a semblance of, I mean, it's just really bad. And I read them and I think, but surely you can tell that this is nonsense. But can I just say, I sometimes also feel that way about the opinion on the left, the New York Times. Really like the Washington, I think the Washington Post is actually a really good.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is part of the issue, you know. How did that happen? But here's the thing, where are the thoughtful? Right wing does in America. Where does one find them? Because even the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, sometimes they just...”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Black people are not inferior. I know that for a fact. So when you say don't say that, when somebody says it, I'm like, no, I want to tell that person why they're full of shit and I will tell them that with facts, right? I mean,”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our ideas are better, but we should be open to challenge. And so when I talked about what I think this impulse on the left is to kind of suppress and don't say, don't talk, it almost seems as though the left does not have enough confidence in its own positions and so is unwilling to have it be challenged. And I remember my early years in the US sometimes thinking that in particular on the subject of race, I used to feel kind of Kind of sort of mildly annoyed with certain very left white academics who, when they talked about race, I just thought, I sometimes felt I was being bullshitted. I sometimes felt I was being patronized. And, you know, how they would say, if you're not supposed to say that, don't say that. And I would think... Why? Right? I mean”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To see, I couldn't agree more. I think fundamentally that progressive ideas are better. I think that they're better for the world. In general. I also think that we should be able to defend them. So I feel so strongly about I want to sharpen my ideas. I want to be challenged about what I believe. And that is why for a while, I must confess, I would turn to Fox News. Until I realized that it's just an utter suspic, it was not about ideas, it was just about a stupid performance. But for me, it's really important to.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just feel that in literature, and I think you can see that my voice is good, I need to sort of take a deep breath because I feel so strongly about the future of storytelling. And I think that the way that I don't like that expression cancel culture because I think it's been appropriated by... Sort of Fox News. But what that refers to this kind of people feeling afraid, not saying the wrong thing, this kind of what I like to call this sort of insistence and a kind of unrealistic purity, I think it's so bad for literature. I really do. I think there are, in fact, enough people in the world who can say this is bad and here's why. I think that there are. The problem is I think the gatekeepers on the left think that people are not as bright as they are.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we cannot wish it away, and we cannot write about it in ways that are always sort of ideologically correct. So the world is complex. Women sometimes are the ones who are fiercely in support of FGM in many parts of the world, for example. That kind of ideologically isn't pure, right? Because women are supposed to support girls and women, but often they don't. There's racism in the world. Sometimes people on the left are very racist, so that people who are very progressive views but who have really messed up views about race, we need to be able to write about that.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think for me, the question is we cannot wish away misogyny. We cannot wish away racism. And I sometimes feel that there's an impulse on the left to do that. where you know and i i start to find it not just annoying but also kind of patronizing Misogyny is rife in the world. And I don't mean just in, you know, it's not even just, oh, women are not CEOs and women are not. I mean just fundamental things, the large swathes of the world where girls are not going to school because they are girls. I mean, they're real things happening. We have to be able to write about them. And especially in narrative ways, because that's how we can get people to feel. Because I think the thing that literature does well is literature doesn't just tell us what happens. It tells us how it felt.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the problem becomes where writers think they cannot approach certain subjects because they're going to be called out. I was reading a piece about young adult literature All of this that's been going on in the younger adult literature world where people have been called out for all kinds of things and young writers have been banished and sometimes it's one sentence in the book and I just think my God I really worry about the literature that's going to be produced. And I have to tell you I don't want to name names or anything, but the few recent novels that I have read. I found depressing. Depressing because I think there's so much potential here, but I can see, I can just see in the writing the holding back.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not saying you had to tell us a few burnished lies. Because Brother Barack, to see what he had to say. No, no, but really, I think literature, for me it's looking at literature and thinking literature is the last thing that can tell us how we really are. Literature is the thing that can reflect to us who we are. But if we have this kind of social situation where everyone is terrified, there are things that people call sensitivity readers in publishing houses, I think that's a bad idea. And here's why I think some people will write terrible books. And I think novels have world views. So you can read a novel and you can sort of tell that this novel has a racist worldview, right? You can read another novel in which a character is a racist, but it doesn't have a racist worldview. But we should allow both because then we can use ideas to talk about why the book with a racist worldview is bad.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I've had conversations with young people who, and again, I find myself sounding like the old cantancherous uncle because I say to them, you're not reading with any kind of complexity. I ask them what they think about something. And they say things like, well, there was a character who said the N-word. Or they'll say there's a character who was a misogynist. And that's the literary kind of feedback that they have about a piece of literature. And I find that to be awful. Well, first of all, it seems to me that literature is the last kind of last thing that we can depend on to tell us the truth about who we are. Politicians have to lie. I mean, they have to. I'm not talking about your speeches, John.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's actually the thing that worries me the most. Because obviously that's the thing I care about the most stories and literature, I worry about what's going to happen. I think the art and by art, I mean, I think the sort of literary arts that will be produced in the US in the next 10 to 15 years unless something changes will be awful. I think it'll be flat. I think the characters will be terrible mouthpieces. Because what's happening now is people are afraid. I really think that people are afraid of not just writing about certain subjects, but how they write about it. I think art has to be able to go to a place that's messy, a place that's not comfortable. You have to be able to write characters who are assholes in all kinds of ways and not have that be somehow that explains you the writer.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I do think that there were two things there, which is I did think that there were people who were genuinely hurt, who genuinely felt that somehow I was saying that there were other and less than. I think that there were people who felt that way. And that made me feel bad. But I think that by far the noisier people were the performers. Those people I had no time for”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I do think that there were two aspects to all of the backlash. And because I wasn't on social media, I mean, initially I was so surprised at how people kept calling me at friends who sent me flowers, who were saying hanging there, and I thought, my God, right? We forget that being a public figure does not mean that you are somehow immune to depression and hurt and just sort of not wanting to get out of bed for weeks because you don't understand why people are after you, right? You're not vaccinated from all of those things just because you're a quote unquote public figure”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, two things there's a part of me, me being a woman who's had sort of female socialization from birth already bristles at that because I'm thinking, wait, hold on, someone's been nasty to me in a way that I find very unfair and I'm supposed to be sort of the saint. And I'm done with saintliness, right? I mean, I'm just not a saint. I'm not interested in being a saint. But on the other hand, I did have, and that's part of the reason I then went and started reading. And in particular, I wanted to read memoirs. I wanted to read stories of trans women's experiences.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And really, honestly, if these two writers, To go back to them. So I was upset that they did not sort of reach out to me to say, we don't like that you said this and here's why, which I really would have appreciated. But had they in fact gone on social media and said, we don't like that she said this and here's why. I don't think I would have been so upset. It's going on social media and saying she's a murderer. There's a difference. And I just think that there's some things that are unacceptable. So I would not consider that holding quote-unquote public figures accountable. I think that's nonsense.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but if you're holding them accountable with a bit of sense in your bloody head, my point is, again, it's not about saying that I don't want people to disagree with me or with people who are in power, but it's about saying we have to start with a good faith assumption. We have to engage with what they're saying. We have to, when we do disagree, disagree With intelligence and facts.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, this is the kind of statement that requires a lot of nuance. So on the one hand, yes, obviously, and I think in particular in a place like Nigeria, and I think many other countries in the world where for so long, not just that young people did not have a voice, but that A system that was supposed to be democratic really wasn't. So, I like to say that what we have now is an ostensible democracy. So in Nigeria, yes, young people have had a voice. But I don't think it also means then that So, this idea that People in power have always been able to say what they want, and now Twitter means that we get to hold them accountable.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the benefit is you don't get, if you're doing the sort of grassroots on the groundwalk, you don't get the high of lights. I think it's important to, I mean, there are benefits to being nasty on Twitter.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Twitter, anyway, but it just shows you the power of social media that the government felt that it should ban Twitter. But in terms of just thinking about the US, I think social media and the way that it's structured is kind of an American invention, isn't it? And so I think the US has managed to To export its issues to the rest of the world. So you have people fighting American battles that are not really their battles.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nigeria is different because our politics is not ideological. And we don't have a left or right. There's really no ideology. Our politics is a kind of patronage politics. And so I think because it's not ideological, that kind of polarization doesn't really exist. So what you have is the majority of Nigerians furious at terrible government, which has been our story since independence in 1960. So that hasn't changed. Social media, I think, has given young people a voice in this country. So in that sense, I'm actually kind of pro-Twitter for Nigeria because I think that it's giving young people a voice. It's allowed young people to make complaints about things that they would not have been able to before. And it's also forced the government to sometimes react. By the way, I should tell you that Twitter is currently banned in Nigeria, has been banned for the past. Has it been up to a year for just the most stupid reasons? But of course, all the young people have VPNs, so they are all.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But which came first? To me, that's the question. Which came first, right? I mean, so all of this polarization and the assumption of good faith being... Which came first?”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find that really troubling. I'm learning and growing every day. There are things I said 10 years ago that I don't believe anymore because I like to think them I'm slightly wiser now with encroaching old age and to be made to somehow To be made to go back to that person that I was, and to be told this is who you are and this is who you will always be just seems to me very strange”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I don't know. I really don't know. It's something I think about quite a bit. And I think it's something that's kind of happened in the past maybe 10, 15. I think it's relatively recent in the sense that I first came to the US in 1997 to go to college. And obviously social media wasn't much of a thing then. And just having conversations, even in just small academic circles, I think there wasn't that much fear of tripping up and then having people come after you. I think there was more of an assumption of good faith. I don't know why that is, but it's obvious that that's how Twitter now operates fundamentally. And even taking back something one has said is no longer allowed. I mean, there's assumption that one hasn't changed from the person that one was 25 years ago.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The DNA of these platforms are not to encourage thoughtful persuasion, I don't think. But can they maybe, I mean, they're not right now, but can they? What if we all kind of Drank a potion that made us all sort of a bit more compassionate and a bit more patient. Would we use social media differently? I mean, I don't know.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so. I just don't think it is. The platform Twitter in particular, I think, this Facebook is kind of Facebook is an entirely different kind of monster. I mean, it just kind of feeds people nonsense. But I do think that the social media platforms are not...”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To shift policy, hopefully. And that's how we change the world. I think change has to be incremental. I mean, we're not children in preschool who want everything and want it now. The sad thing about being adult in the adult world is to realize that, you know, persuasion is a good thing. Compromise in certain ways is a good thing.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just will not talk to because there's no point, and I say this in conversations about feminism. And here I am in Lagos, and this is a country that is refreshing in the sense that people are very in your face about what they think about women. Unlike in the US, where they will not tell you, but they're thinking it. So, you know, it's true, right? So in the US, I think when Hillary Clinton was running that people who felt a woman cannot be president, but they would probably not be willing to say it. In Nigeria, I've just been in my home state, my ancestral home state, and a woman was running for governor and a bunch of men just say, oh, but a woman can't be governor. They're just like, yeah, a woman just can't be governor. The second men who have these opinions that I think there's no point, they will never change. But in that cohort of men, there are people who I think we can have a conversation. And if I can try and shift his view just a little bit, he has power. He's then going to go on.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is interesting in itself, I think. But I mean, to what you said, I'm just struck by that word persuasion, because I am a keen believer in persuasion. And I think it's important in politics. You cannot write a person off starting out. I mean, I feel like it's important to give a bit of room. And my general feeling is there's some people...”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just, I just find that when race comes up in the US and both sides, the left and the right, there's a problem with it. There's a problem with the way that the conversation is had. I mean, you do not reach people by sneering at them. And there are people who believe the CRT nonsense. Actually, believe it, who maybe, if you're engaged with them and said to them, actually, here's what's being taught in schools. And by the way, here's your history. Maybe, I don't know, would it change their minds? I don't know. But I do know that yelling and sanctimony and snaring is not working. And the left is very good at sneering.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I know that, of course, there are always going to be people on the right, a certain kind of person on the right, who just doesn't want to hear it. But I think if we were more familiar, right? I mean, I remember for me when I came to the US and I started reading African American history, because even I knew very little about black history. And I just was stunned. And so my American home is in Maryland. And to think that as recently as the 70s, Know it's not slavery, it's in the 1970s. And I think if people knew this, not in a way of saying somehow you're bad or even, look how good you are because we've overcome that. But simply here's what happened. I think maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm being optimistic, but maybe the conversation today would be... I don't know. Maybe just less.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but I kind of agree with that in political terms, but just more outside of politics, my thing is just see what happened. I think the focus on history should be more narrative. I really don't think And I think maybe if African American history in particular were taught in a more narrative way, maybe the conversations we're having today would not be so fraught. I think that if people really understood just the magnitude of Just going to use the word like evil. The American state perpetrated on black people. I think that most good human beings would not be so horrified at the thought of reparations, for example. I feel as though part of the problem with the state of the conversation.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for me, I really want to gauge what a person is saying. If somebody has an opinion, I want to understand where it is coming from, what does it mean, what are the facts behind it, what's the story behind it. And the question about who gets to say which opinion is offensive. That's part of living in a democracy. Nobody gets to say. And maybe this is also a question about. That age old idea of free speech and where the line should be drawn. So I'm a person who believes very much that the answer to that idea is more ideas. I do not believe that the answer to a bad idea is somehow to find ways to stifle it because I think that when you suppress things, they only fester. And I know this as a person who's a storyteller. I mean, just human nature is like that. And I think there's a lot on the left that is about suppression.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, critical race. Which on the one hand for me, I just think this is just complete nonsense from the right, right? But then on the other hand, I think the answer for the left is not just to say nobody's teaching CRT to your kids. The answer is maybe to talk about it. How is, in fact, History of African Americans taught in American schools. I kind of feel that maybe we should have more of a fact base and more narrative approach to things. And so when a person has an opinion, maybe we should talk about what's backing up that opinion. You don't just wake up and pull things out of the air, right?”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's the question Who gets to? And that's why, by the way, I really, I mean, what you said about opinions for me, that's also one of my. I think maybe we should do less opinion and more fact. So there's a, I love this line, this lovely line from a lovely poem by Robert Lowell, and the line is, and why not just say what happened? And I think about this a lot because in terms of thinking about what's going on in the US right now, for example, all of the noise about CRT.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm all for vanity. So I think Instagram, but I don't even do it myself. My assistant does. So we just talk about which picture should we put up. But the reason I don't do it myself is really because I recognize that I have personality flaws and I know that I would get into fierce fights. And so I just step away. I would not have the self-control to not sort of get involved and rolling the mud. So that's why I'm not on Twitter.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I've thought about it, and maybe this is what they know. And I should say as well that Not just about people like me who have public figures and have a platform. Because I think there is a kind of fear that they live in not just a bubble of what I like to call a kind of ideological orthodoxy, but also a bubble of fear, of fear of saying the wrong thing because they worry that their own will come after them. And so, you know, I think sometimes, and maybe this is also a consequence of my feeling that people are generally better than, I mean, I really think that human beings fundamentally on the whole are not too bad. And so I sometimes think that the young people who are on social media and just writing this awful, nasty thing are doing it out of fear. Because I think there's a sense in which if you then say, well, maybe we should have a bit more nuance in this conversation, your people will come after you because then they'll say you're...”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there are benefits to it. There's very little to gain from being thoughtful or acknowledging nuance, but there's a lot to gain from having that sharp one sentence killer about someone, right? That you get the likes and you get cool and I guess you get more followers. So there are benefits to it.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Politician denies being racist, which in itself gives a certain kind of power to it. So I find myself really bristling, really bristling and having to. What seems to me fairly obvious, I think that anybody who knows the things that I've stood for cannot possibly think that I would agree to a group of people being excluded from any kind of access to civil rights. It's just not the person that I am.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am, I am. I mean, I'm completely, but there's also something about having to say this that I find upsetting. It's kind of like a politician who's kind of made to say you're racist with no evidence and that the politician suddenly has to say, no, I'm not. And then the headline then becomes.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, the one thing that I'm thinking about, I'm actually writing an essay about this, and I've read, and it's interesting because since this happened, I feel like I've become an authority of sorts on this subject because I went and I've read every damn thing I could find because I really was taken aback. I didn't quite understand. What all of the vitriol was about. I really was genuinely taking it back by it. And so I thought I'm missing something, right? Clearly, something that I'm missing. So I then started reading.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it's not. I really do welcome people disagreeing with me. I really do. I like, actually quite like a good argument about ideas. What I did not like and what I found awful was that they could easily have called me or sent a text or emailed because they had access to me and we knew each other. And so there's something very performative about going on social media and sort of doing this.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think because what's happening on the left in the US is that there's a kind of A kind of expectation that Of oppression. So, well, she said that because she means that trans women are lesser than. And I'm thinking, of course not. And anybody who knows me knows, I don't think that way, I don't think there's any human being who's lesser than, right? I mean, I just don't. The other thing I wanted to say is just talking about these two writers who went on social media.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm much more likely to read a memoir by a trans woman than I am to read theory about transgender ideology because I'm interested in stories and in human beings. So anyway, so I said that. And why did I say that it's important to note the differences? Because it is. I mean, the things that are fairly obvious, but for ideological reasons, we're no longer allowed to say them. I'm a feminist because from the time that I was three years old, I knew that being born in this female body meant that there were so many things I was going to be excluded from. Actually, we've just been having a conversation in my family because being female means that I cannot inherit certain things. My parents have just passed away. The things that when you're a woman you cannot inherit. And so my point was it's okay to acknowledge differences. But also it's important.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But talking about feminism then made me become the sort of feminist icon. And I think maybe because I talked about it in a way that's accessible to people and in a way that wasn't about jargon and also wasn't about theory. But then what it did, I think, is that for many people, I was then expected to become this kind of expert. And the expectation as well was that I knew the language. I'm actually not joking when I say that until that sort of furore that happened, I did not in fact know what this meant. So I'm not in the, you know, I'm not in the feminist academic circle. I don't know the latest language. I don't, you know.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did also say, I think, in that post that CIS is not part of my vocabulary Reason I say that is that I think a lot of this conversation is about language and obviously as a person who earns a living by writing, language is really important to me and clarity of language and meaning it's really important to me to ask what does this mean and where does this come from? And I think I've strangely become a kind of feminist icon, which I like to joke about. And there are many good things about it. But that's not my day job. I'm actually a storyteller. The thing that I'm interested in is reading and writing. I want to spend all of my time reading poetry and fiction and hopefully writing a bit of that too.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These two writers, it became about, and I don't want to sound the times when I worry that I'm starting to sound like a cantanchrous old uncle, you know, where I say things like, we're not civil anymore. You know, we do not talk to each other with compassion, but it's true. I mean, and I find that really worrying. On so many levels.”
2022-01-16 · Pod Save America · Offline: Chimamanda Adichie on the Death of Good Faith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source