Privilege Blinds, Because It's In Its Nature

You Can Have Ambition But Not Too Much You Should Aim To Be Successful But Not Too Successful Otherwise You Will Threaten The Man

The Novels I Love, The Ones I Remember, The Ones I Re-read, Have An Empathetic Human Quality, Or 'emotional Truth'. This Quality Is Difficult To Fully Define, But I Always Recognise It When I See It: It Is Different From Honesty And More Resilient Than Fact, Something That Exists Not In The Kind Of Fiction That Explains But In The Kind That Shows.

At About The Age Of Seven … I Wrote Exactly The Kinds Of Stories I Was Reading: All My Characters Were White And Blue-eyed, They Played In The Snow, They Ate Apples, And They Talked A Lot About The Weather: How Lovely It Was That The Sun Had Come Out. This Despite The Fact That I Lived In Nigeria; We Didn’t Have Snow, We Ate Mangoes, And We Never Talked About The Weather, Because There Was No Need To.

We Teach Girls To Shrink Themselves, To Make Themselves Smaller. We Say To Girls: 'you Can Have Ambition, But Not Too Much. You Should Aim To Be Successful, But Not Too Successful. Otherwise, You Will Threaten The Man.' Because I Am Female, I Am Expected To Aspire To Marriage. I Am Expected To Make My Life Choices, Always Keeping In Mind That Marriage Is The Most Important. Now, Marriage Can Be A Source Of Joy And Love And Mutual Support, But Why Do We Teach Girls To Aspire To Marriage And We Don't Teach Boys The Same?

I Can Write With Authority Only About What I Know Well, Which Means That I End Up Using Surface Details Of My Own Life In My Fiction.