The world works in mysterious ways they say, and it is always mesmerising how sometimes those words feel true in the most random of times. During my visit to Schloss Templehof close to Stuttgart this year for instance, I never thought I would be making so many good friends. I came without expecting anything but left feeling so much richer with the joy of friendship and the treasure of new exciting ideas.
In this particular instance, one of the good good friend I made that week gave me his most favourite book. He had it because the organisers of the event has asked us to bring books that have most inspired us, and him being the good person he is actually did it (unlike me who ignored the request and thought it’ll be cute to bring myself as an inspiration). Being given books is one of the best things in the world, and it was great that a person who was a stranger just two weeks earlier, gave me a book that he thought so dearly of. The book is called Americanah, written by an African writer whose name is so unfamiliarly long and difficult I didn’t bother to remember her name.
So I came home from that beautiful gathering bringing with me a piece of my friend, a book that means a lot to him and I started reading and reading. I was so impressed by my friends kindness that I would’ve read the book just for the sake of telling him that I did read it, but I was surprisingly consumed by it. I have for awhile now sworn off fiction, deeming them silly and unworthy of my time. Always thinking that I would rather read books about the economy, social situations and or solutions to the current world situation. But this book about a continent I have never stepped foot on, by an author whose name sounds so unfamiliar, about people who might as well feel so different to me, really captivated me. This book has made me rediscover my love for stories, for fiction.
Chimamanda, has beautifully portrayed all the characters as being so human, and so multi faceted that I was able to feel their emotions and relate to them in a way that made me realise how truly similar to each other we are. We humans have this tendency to go into ourselves, building walls to make us feel separate from the world around us, feeling different, feeling incomprehensible. Although we believe in all beings are inherently equal, sometimes in our hearts we wonder if we truly are. We wonder if that person next to us feels these confusions we have in our head just as much as we do, or if we are alone in it?
But page after page, reading her book I realise how similar we were, despite the apparent difference. Although we come from different continents, different countries, different social background, but somehow the story she portrayed is relevant and resonated with me. The joy and pain she is telling me about is similar to mine, and to me this is simply mind blowing.
Through good fiction I have come to realise (or rediscover), we can learn to put ourselves in the other persons shoes, to sympathise and empathise with the other person because we can imagine how it feels like to be them. I find this ability to enter another person private thoughts to be just so beautiful that I feel it is incredibly important for us to start reading books again just for the sake of this experience. Just for the sake of the excercise of feeling another persons thoughts.
Americanah brought with it the complexity of human experience, that a persons life is not just about their individual struggle and ambitions, but also that in life there is always a layer of societal situation that somehow shapes our story, and the book brought all these layers to life just so seamlessly.
What was also amazing to me was that I had this image of the main female character in the book to be of this beautiful African lady I once watched on TED, one of my favourite TED speakers, who had two talks that I always remember. The name of that African lady was also hard that I did not remember it, and when I googled the name of the author of Americanah after I finished reading the book, I was pleasantly surprised that the African lady I imagined for the main character was indeed her!
It is amazing how I have read a book by someone, not knowing who she was when all along I have known her and loved her. Even Beyonce put parts of her speech in her song Flawless, just to make it sound badass. How more impressive can this lady be?
The book explores with it ideas of feminism, but in a way that puts feminism back in its perspective. She explored the rights of women in a way that is magnetic and not threatening, because being a feminist should not be threatening. Chimamanda put it so well in her own words, in the TED talk that I have attached below. This TED talk I promise you is worth every single minute of your time.
Another talk by Chimamanda is my good friend favourite talk. Where she explores the danger of having just one story to represent people. This talk actually inspired my friend so much that she started actively gathering stories of people by encouraging children to write their stories. And now Chimamanda, through her book, has convinced me even more of how important it is to read peoples stories to learn from them about how we humans really are.