La femme Chimamanda or Gloria?

Celebrated Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's talk on feminism in Africa is interesting, dazzling even, peppered as it is with sharp humor and anecdotes that one can easily relate to, especially if the audience is a female from any part of the globe, of any class and ethnicity.

A few things Adichie said struck me as gem-like utterances:

"The problem with gender is that it prescribes what we should, instead of recognizing how we are."

"Women are not born with cooking genes."

"Men ought to know how to cook if only because it's risky to delegate the task of nourishing oneself to the hands of others."

"Women and men, both should strive to unlearn the lessons of gender they have internalized."

"The Nigerian saying that women have more 'bottom power' than men and therefore rule the world, is based on a belief that is degrading to women." ['Bottom power' is the local slang for sexual power; means women get things done by manipulating men through sex].

While I was highly impressed by Adichie's experience of being a feminist in Nigeria, I also thought that she spoke of a crucial social issue of power, gender and justice like a celebrity would. The tone was too catchy to be true; her body image was too desirable to not please, and most importantly, she is advocating feminist values post ipso facto, after the fact of her celebrity status.

Turn to Gloria Steinem now: At 81, having been one of the lighters of the fire of the women's movement in the 60s, Steinem at 81, comes across as a spokesperson of an idea of women, not as a celebrity who makes a mark on her audience because of how famous she is. 

Steinem's thoughts are exquisite yet mellow enough not to find place as captions on mugs and T shirts, but to quietly embed themselves in the loamy soil of one's consciousness.

Steinem's characterization of women as a perpetual "immigrant" group who are always falling behind because they have to negotiate structures of powers in societies from which they have been historically excluded, is brilliant. 

Equally memorable is the "pink ghetto" phrase: Women typically are founts of cheap labor in capitalism; it's no surprise that the healthcare industry (especially home health care) and food industry, among other industries, are dominated by women. The jobs pay little to nothing. 

Steinem focuses on the exploitation of women, not simply, as Adichie does, on how they are victims of a gender-bias.

On any given day, I'd choose La femme Gloria over all the other la femmes who come and go these days.

The fictional Avocado

Esther Greenwood, the protagonist in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar loved her avocado.

She reminisces about the "pear" when a literary luncheon gets dreadful:

I bowed my head and secretly eyed the position of the bowls of caviar.... Under cover of the clinking of water goblets and silverware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. Then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn't ooze off and ate them.... Avocados are my favorite fruit. Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado pear hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics. He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and French dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. I felt homesick for that sauce.

The avocado's fortune has waxed and waned in literary representation. In a New Yorker fiction, "Here's the Story" (June 9 & 16, The Summer Fiction Issue of 2014), by David Gilbert, the avocado is used as a figurative bone of contention between a husband and a wife who are unhappily married:

His wife hated avocados, something about the mushy texture reminding her of rotten flesh, as if she were on intimate terms with decay, and no doubt the girls would follow suit, but maybe he could show them the pleasure of the pit, how you could cut around the middle and twist and the halves would come apart at the hard center, a world hidden within a world...and how you could remove the pit and poke in a few toothpicks and rest this Sputnik half submerged in a glass of water, and in a few weeks you'd have the beginnings of a tree right there on the windowsill.

Two novels, one eminently readable, the other vapid

The eminently readable novel, is Tom Rachman's The Rise and Fall of Great Powers

The vapid novel is the latest Dave Eggers offering with a long, gimmicky title: Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

Reviews of the novels can be found here and here, respectively.

Development

The short documentary on a small Peruvian's journey into becoming a "developed" place in the world, offers insights into assumptions we rarely examine.

The popular notion is that "development"=wiring a place. To develop today means simply to attain a spot on the worldwide landscape of the Internet.

However, this small village has no road, a fundamental infrastructure without which the village in a geographical sense of the term, remains, as one of the wiser residents say, a "prison".

Navigating knowledge of the wider world via the medium of the screen is fine, but a prior acculturation to acquiring a sense of what's out there beyond one's village or strip of homeland, is necessary before the secondary witnessing of the world through a mediation by the Internet takes place.

It's like the hungry child has to be first fed with essential nutrients before it can successfully go on a diet of tertiary food.