The reigning book titled "Dear Ijeawele' or a Feminist Manifesto" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been named one of three winners of Le Grand Prix de l'héroïne Madame Figaro.
http://nairapp.com/index.php?rp=5405
The prize was established in 2006 by the French magazine Madame Figaro to celebrate heroines of French and foreign literature. Each year the shortlisted works are selected by the magazine's editor.
A team of judges, chaired by influential journalist Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, selected one French novel, one foreign novel in translation, and one nonfiction work. "Chère Ijeawele, ou un manifeste pour une éducation féministe," the French translation of 'Dear Ijeawele,' was selected as the winner in the latter category.
Along with Adichie, Alex Stresi was awarded the prize in the French novel category for 'Lopping' and Lauren Groff received the foreign novel prize for 'Les Furies.'
Adichie's French publisher, Marie-Pierre Gracedieu of Gallimard, commented: "When I read Dear Ijeawele, I felt an urge to share it with many friends, women and men, who had become parents of a girl in the recent years. Then I started to feel it had to be read by parents of boys too. And thereafter by everyone of us to investigate our own education, and try to overcome a few inherited clichés.
"Therefore to publish it at Gallimard has meant a lot to me, and it is a very rewarding experience to see it awarded the Grand Prix de l'Héroïne by Madame Figaro, a prize that celebrates the power of literature and of characters as role models.
"The fact that such an established and popular weekly has understood the importance of spreading the content of this letter-manifesto, even in the Western world, and especially in the political context we are now, brings me joy and hope."
This was the 12th edition of the prize.
The prize was established in 2006 by the French magazine Madame Figaro to celebrate heroines of French and foreign literature. Each year the shortlisted works are selected by the magazine’s editor.
A team of judges, chaired by influential journalist Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, selected one French novel, one foreign novel in translation, and one nonfiction work. “Chère Ijeawele, ou un manifeste pour une éducation féministe,” the French translation of ‘Dear Ijeawele,’ was selected as the winner in the latter category.Along with Adichie, Alex Stresi was awarded the prize in the French novel category for ‘Lopping’ and Lauren Groff received the foreign novel prize for ‘Les Furies.’
Adichie’s French publisher, Marie-Pierre Gracedieu of Gallimard, commented: “When I read Dear Ijeawele, I felt an urge to share it with many friends, women and men, who had become parents of a girl in the recent years. Then I started to feel it had to be read by parents of boys too. And thereafter by everyone of us to investigate our own education, and try to overcome a few inherited clichés. Therefore to publish it at Gallimard has meant a lot to me, and it is a very rewarding experience to see it awarded the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne by Madame Figaro, a prize that celebrates the power of literature and of characters as role models.
The fact that such an established and popular weekly has understood the importance of spreading the content of this letter-manifesto, even in the Western world, and especially in the political context we are now, brings me joy and hope.”
This was the 12th edition of the prize.
Adichie confesses that she was motivated by a challenge from her good friend Ijeawele, who asked for concrete ways to raise her (at the time, unborn) daughter as a feminist. So Adichie, a self-proclaimed feminist and bestselling author, began working on the project that would eventually become this manifesto. By the time she had completed it, she was a new mother as well.
“Now that I, too, am the mother of a delightful baby girl,” Adichie writes in the introduction, “I realize how easy it is to dispense advice about raising a child when you are not facing the enormously complex reality of it yourself.”
And so the piece became a message to her friend Ijeawele, to Ijeawele’s daughter Chizalum, to the world, to herself and to her own child. Dear Ijeawele is indeed a letter to a friend preparing to take on the difficult task of raising a girl in a world where gender is, as Adichie describes it, “a straitjacket” of damaging rules and restrictions for women. But it’s also a love letter to our younger selves "Adichie’s included", because most of us were conditioned to think of girlhood and womanhood as something to be survived. The survival techniques we were taught—even by mothers who identified as feminists, womanists and believers of equal rights for all—we are likely to pass on to our own children, even when we think we know better than to perpetuate ideas that support and enforce the patriarchy.Dear Ijeawele is powerful because it’s short and sweet—the perfect disguise for a collection of ideas that attempt to set the world on fire. Some may wonder (yes, even after Trump) why setting the world as we know it on fire is a desirable action. Adichie’s work encourages you to look around and inward to see where gender binaries—pink vs. blue, doll vs. truck, mother vs. earner, giver vs. taker—have gotten us. The proof is in the pudding, in the violence against women, in Brock Turner, Casey Affleck, Nate Parker, Donald Trump. We have failed at creating a world where men and women are equal. And Adichie argues that to address this failure, we cannot start looking at what people are taught in middle school sex ed courses. The genesis of this failure won’t be found in college campus rape crises or in oval offices where groups of men sign legislation to control entire societies of women. It starts from birth. And really, from before then.
Adichie’s work speaks against those voices that parents are listening to before they’ve even given birth—before they’ve even started to wonder if and how they will raise feminist children. Those other women and men offering up practical—and damaging—advice are not to be underestimated in the struggle for equality. Well-meaning individuals, it seems, might be the death of the movement.
I remember being told as a child to “bend down properly while sweeping, like a girl.” Which meant that sweeping was about being female. I wish I had been told simply “bend down and sweep properly because you’ll clean the floor better.” And I wish my brothers had been told the same thing.
We are at your services anytime anyday.