PH
Chimamanda Adichie says she was close to tears watching her mother read negative comments about her online.
The award-winning author made this known during a hangout section with a group of young Nigerians in Lagos over the weekend. According to her, she was surprised by the backlash she got from the now famous question she asked Hilary Clinton during an interview.
“I felt close to tears. When I got back to Lagos and there is just all of this noise and apparently it’s just all of ugliness, people said to me: ‘they are writing public letters to you. They said you are a demon; that you want to break up marriages, all kinds of things. I felt. Let me be honest, that is the first time I really started to rethink how I felt about Nigeria.
“I have never done that before. Until then, I had been a very dutiful daughter of Nigeria and I am still at that phase where I am thinking about how I really, really feel about Nigeria,” she said.
It would be recalled that back in April 2018, Chimamanda Adichie interviewed Hilary Clinton at the PEN World Voices Festival lecture in Manhattan where she asked her the now famous and controversial question.
On Sunday, April 22, 2018, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie interviewed Hillary Clinton during a PEN World Voices Festival lecture in Manhattan. During this interview, she confronted Clinton with a question about why she led her Twitter bio with ‘Wife”.
Adichie said to Hilary Clinton, “In your Twitter account, the first word that describes you is ‘Wife.’ And then I think it’s ‘Mom,’ and then it’s ‘Grandmother.’ And when I saw that, I have to confess that I felt just a little bit upset. And then I went and I looked at your husband’s Twitter account, and the first word was not ‘husband.’”
Adichie was curious to know if it was Hillary Clinton’s choice to first identify herself in relation to her husband and that, if so, why. Clinton replied with an explanation that women should have the ability to celebrate their accomplishments and their relationships. She quoted a speech she heard from Barbara Bush, the late wife of former president, George H. W. Bush. “At the end of the day, it won’t matter if you got a raise, it won’t matter if you wrote a great book if you are not also someone who values relationships,” Clinton said.
