A return to public civility
Lisa Allardice talks to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
The reason for our call is the announcement that Adichie has won the public vote in the Winner of Winner’s award, celebrating 25 years of the Women’s prize for fiction. She won the award, when it was sponsored by Orange, in 2007, for her epic war novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, beating many of the biggest names in contemporary fiction.
The prize that was necessary because the people who awarded prizes kept overlooking women.
She hopes that the election of Biden will usher in a return to public civility. “I’m really excited at the idea that the discourse across the country will not sound like childish name calling. There’s a sadness there that this is how low the bar has sunk,” she says. “When you are Nigerian there are things that are familiar to you. You don’t expect them to happen in America. Trump showed me how fragile democracy is, how fragile what we consider the norms are.”
Especially the norm that bullying is bad.
When I last spoke to Adichie following the paperback publication of Dear Ijeawele in 2018, her manifesto for bringing up a feminist daughter, she had recently been on the wrong end of what she calls “the American liberal orthodoxy” for comments she made arguing that the experiences of trans women are distinct from those of women born female. She has no truck with “cancel culture” (her quote marks). “There’s a sense in which you aren’t allowed to learn and grow. Also forgiveness is out of the question. I find it so lacking in compassion. How much of our wonderfully complex human selves are we losing?” she asks. “I think in America the worst kind of censorship is self-censorship, and it is something America is exporting to every part of the world. We have to be so careful: you said the wrong word you must be crucified immediately.” She was interested by “all the noise” sparked by JK Rowling’s article on sex and gender, “a perfectly reasonable piece” in her view, earlier this year. “Again JK Rowling is a woman who is progressive, who clearly stands for and believes in diversity.” She blames social media for this rush to censure, which she finds both “cruel and sad. And in terms of ideas, it is fundamentally uninteresting. The orthodoxy, the idea that you are supposed to mouth the words, it is so boring.”
Boring, simple-minded, and not true.
And……………one of the TIMs of Jezebel is already having a conniption about this — here is an archived version for anybody with a big ability to deal with Drama Llama stuff https://archive.vn/TSxJw
Must really upset the White men who claim to be women when a real Black women tells them to calm themselves
Heh, I know, I did a post about it earlier, then went looking for more Adichie to spite them all.
What’s a “TIM” / “TiM”?
It’s obviously an insult, but it’s cropping up often enough that I’d be interested to know the actual meaning.
TIM = Trans-Identifying Male
I had never heard of this prize. I was also surprised to find few of the novels I’ve loved in the past decade on the list. I have noticed, in recent years, that many of the novels I thought the best were written by women. For example:
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt. This won the Pulitzer Prize. Deservedly, in my opinion.
The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
I had to cut this list down, because there are so many. And now you know too much about me.
In some cases, it seemed like novels I thought weren’t the author’s best work were on the prize list. Are they going after the also-rans? They’ve got Lacuna, which I thought meh, but not the Poisonwood Bible? That was a finalist for the Pulitzer. They’ve got Home, by Marilynne Robinson, but it was Gilead that won the Pulitzer.
“Special Topics in Calamity Physics” looks absolutely delightful, just the sort of thing I’d like. Adding it to my list. I’ll have to check out the other books you mention.
It is possible that the year-based approach to granting this prize misses some great work, because they are beaten in their publication years. But, as you note, they missed some Pulitzer winners, another year-based prize. I suppose it wouldn’t be good if the same books always won all the subjective prizes.
I purchased Special Topics in Calamity Physics a couple of years ago; my reading list is so vast, it’s still sitting in the pile. :-(
It does seem to me that there is often a tendency to avoid works that win other major prizes; I know the Academy has been known to ignore movies that were box office successes (often rightly so, since most of the best movies are not in the super hero/chase scene/woman in the refrigerator genres). I frequently disagree with the awarding of prizes for best works.
I haven’t read the Goldfinch, but I enjoyed the movie, and put the book on my (swollen) list.
Still “white feminism” though. As we all know, gender ideologues – no matter how white – are the exclusive owners of Non-White Feminism™.
James Howde #3
Please know that nobody that I know of uses TIM or TIF as an insult. These are simply the most accurate ways to describe a man who claims to be a woman or a woman who claims to be a man. Using the term “trans woman” for men who claim to be women was something we gender critical people should have avoided from the start because calling a man any kind of “woman” was allowing TIMs to control the conversation.
Thanks Papito – can’t believe I didn’t twig that before.