■   Reflections on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Hillary Clinton’s pep talks to graduating students of Wellesley College, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

By Chika Abanobi

The rousing convocation talks (which Americans know as commencement speech or lecture) that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the world-renown author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of A Yellow Sun, The Things Around Your Neck and Americanah, gave to the 2015 graduating set of the all-female Wellesley College, Massachusetts, U.S.A. founded in 1870, and the alma mater of Hillary Clinton, the former U.S. Secretary of State and today, Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, is evocative of the similar speech that Hillary gave to her fellow students in 1969.
Like Clinton’s, Adichie’s speech, besides pieces of advice on feminism, etc, hinged on the need for the graduating students to create their own world out of the one they found themselves, adding that it is the most effective post-graduation survival strategy.
At the start of the convocation speech, she had expressed her hope that the students will very soon be the proud alumni of the college that produced America’s first female president, “if the goddesses and gods of the universe do the right thing,” before telling the story of a man, who during a dinner talk, way back in Nigeria, had dismissed her as “a small girl” for wishing that the Igbo custom which allows only men the honour to break kola nut, “a deeply symbolic part of Igbo cosmology”, had been based on achievement rather than gender.

The blinding nature of privilege
Then she was 23 “but people often told me I looked 12.” According to her, the man looked at her and said, dismissively, “You don’t know what you are talking about, you’re a small girl.” Arguing that “men were not inherently bad or evil,” but “merely privileged,” she cautioned that, “privilege blinds because it is the nature of privilege to blind.”
“I knew from this personal experience, from the class privilege I had of growing up in an educated family, that it sometimes blinded me, that I was not always as alert to the nuances of people who were different from me. And you, because you now have your beautiful Wellesley degree, have become privileged, no matter what your background. That degree, and the experience of being here, is a privilege. Don’t let it blind you too often. Sometimes you will need to push it aside in order to see clearly.”

Creating my world
Giving an insight into how she created her own world out of the world around her, he recounted how she ditched medicine while growing up in Nigeria and opted for creative writing, instead.
“Deep down I knew that what I really wanted to do was to write stories,” she said. “But I did what I was supposed to do and I went into medical school. I told myself that I would tough it out and become a psychiatrist and that way I could use my patients’ stories for my fiction.
“But after one year of medical school I fled. I realized I would be a very unhappy doctor and I really did not want to be responsible for the inadvertent death of my patients. Leaving medical school was a very unusual decision, especially in Nigeria where it is very difficult to get into medical school. Later, people told me that it had been very courageous of me, but I did not feel courageous at all.”
“What I felt then was not courage but a desire to make an effort,” she insisted. “To try. I could either stay and study something that was not right for me. Or I could try and do something different. I decided to try. I took the American exams and got a scholarship to come to the US where I could study something else that was NOT related to medicine. Now it might not have worked out. I might not have been given an American scholarship. My writing might not have ended up being successful. But the point is that I tried.”

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Creating your own world
At this juncture, she drove home her point. “We cannot always bend the world into the shapes we want but we can try, we can make a concerted and real and true effort. And you are privileged that, because of your education here, you have already been given many of the tools that you will need to try. Always just try. Because you never know. And so as you graduate, as you deal with your excitement and your doubts today, I urge you to try and create the world you want to live in.
“Minister to the world in a way that can change it. Minister radically in a real, active, practical, get your hands dirty way. Wellesley will open doors for you. Walk through those doors and make your strides long and firm and sure. And as you graduate today, I urge you to think about that a little more. Think about what really matters to you. Think about what you WANT to really matter to you.
“All over the world, girls are raised to be make themselves likeable, to twist themselves into shapes that suit other people. Please do not twist yourself into shapes to please. Don’t do it. If someone likes that version of you, that version of you that is false and holds back, then they actually just like that twisted shape, and not you. And the world is such a gloriously multifaceted, diverse place that there are people in the world who will like you, the real you, as you are.”

Why you shouldn’t waste your time on earth
Going back in time to the story she started with, she said: “I am lucky that my writing has given me a platform that I choose to use to talk about things that I care about, and I have said a few things that have not been so popular with a number of people. I have been told to shut up about certain things – such as my deeply held belief that men and women are completely equal.
“I don’t speak to provoke. I speak because I think our time on earth is short and each moment that we are not our truest selves, each moment we pretend to be what we are not, each moment we say what we do not mean because we imagine that is what somebody wants us to say, then we are wasting our time on earth. I don’t mean to sound precious but please don’t waste your time on earth.”

Hillary Clinton’s view
Hillary Clinton, then Hillary Diane Rhodam, did say as much as Chimamanda on the issue of creating your own world, as a graduate and her sect’s valedictorian, when she passed out from Wellesley College, with a degree in Political Science, in 1969. “Part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything,” she said. “We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”
On this, she further elaborates: “The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot. We arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn’t a discouraging gap and it didn’t turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap.
“What we did is often difficult for some people to understand. They ask us quite often: “Why, if you’re dissatisfied, do you stay in a place?” Well, if you didn’t care a lot about it you wouldn’t stay. It’s almost as though my mother used to say, “You know I’ll always love you but there are times when I certainly won’t like you.” Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education.

Questioning the status quo
“Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley inside here in the community were our concerns for what happened beyond Hathaway House. We wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was going to have to the outer world. We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty.”
She insists that creating your own world starts with questioning the status quo. “There are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us,” she told her fellow graduating students. “We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We have seen them heralded across the newspapers. But along with using these words—integrity, trust, and respect—in regard to institutions and leaders, we’re perhaps harshest with them in regard to ourselves.

Between authentic and inauthentic realities
“Every protest, every dissent, whether it’s an individual academic paper or Founder’s parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive—now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see—but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men’s needs.
“If the experiment in human living doesn’t work in this country, in this age, it’s not going to work anywhere. But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves.”