Literary Clusterfucks 2013

"She didn't tolerate my intolerance! I won't tolerate her intolerance of my intolerance! Waaaaaaah"

There's a lot of puffed-up bullshit in that essay but "I don't think this person who kissed my ass when she wanted something, then talked shit about me when I said something she didn't like, should get to use my name in her PR materials like we're BFFs" is an unreasonable position.

That position isn't unreasonable at all, but the parts of the piece that the usual people are quote-tweeting as "SO BRAVE AND NECESSARY" are the puffed-up bullshit.

ass-kissing and two-facedness are not traits that are unique to kids today either

why in my day the kids kissed my ass with both their faces and never complained

Having read more about the opinions she has expressed re trans people, I feel like she's more heart-in-the-right-place than, say, JK Rowling, but is never gonna be 100% acceptable to US/EU thought leaders on this issue, at least in part because she's the product of a much more conservative society. Any kind of feminism at all is pretty radical for Nigeria. So she's starting from a very different baseline than your average Twitter trans rights activist, and anyone attempting to hold her to/expecting her to meet contemporary Western standards of progressivism is gonna find themselves flying into a rage pretty fast.

Part of Nigeria's conservatism, too, comes from colonial processes, the lives and afterlives of which are still very much part of Nigerian society. It's pretty myopic and uncomprehending of historical processes for western activists to force these issues when it is their very societies that set such conservatism into place.

she has Masters degrees from John Hopkins and Yale, stop acting like she's brand new

Her degrees and their provenance don't seem entirely relevant to the points made by unperson and table.

yes they are, in so much as they show she's not new to Western culture, like the babe in the woods the two posts are making her out to be

and yes, I'm aware that Western academia isn't the most progressive place either

they show she's not new to Western culture

is western culture presumed to be so attractive or superior that one invariably must adopt it as soon as one is sufficiently exposed to it?

These are good tweets imo has she written any others

I...would be careful about assuming Adichie is representing her beef with Akwaeke Emezi fairly/accurately, especially because at the beginning of their relationship there was definitely an asymmetry of power. Also, many trans people have engaged Adichie over the years pointing out where her takes on trans women not being women don’t match a reality she herself has no direct experience of. She has shown no inclination toward humility/trying to understand a different experience, and all the stuff about young people not feeling safe in tweeting their actual thoughts seems like a distraction. My impression is that she is v delighted with herself in a way that sometimes obstructs critical thought (honestly that can often be a charismatic quality!) I say this as someone who admires her way with words and some of her fiction. The extremely long blog post is a coded fuck you to Emezi and a doubling down on transphobia. I am out of patience with her.

Also, I wish she would put this energy toward writing another novel, frankly; she’s a bit out of her depth taking on gender identity imo.

In her looooong blog post she suggests Emezi has encouraged others to attack Adichie with machetes, for example. the actual Emezi tweet...reads a bit differently. https://twitter.com/moanerleaser/status/1404967840948658176?s=21

Sorry, I think I screwed that link up. Anyway, it seems like evidence of Adichie positioning herself as a victim when in fact she’s quite powerful.

also all the worst people on Twitter have praised her blog post: Shapiro, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Bari Weiss, Niall Ferguson. I think it’s sort of sad she’s become a tool of those particular culture warriors.

Aimless: no, I never said that. I'm responding directly to the two posts that position her and her culture as ass-backwards and that these conversation(s) about gender are new to her

This Emezi tweet thread from 2020 is worth reading in its entirety; even if you’re inclined to be skeptical, it’s the other side of the story Adichie tells:

A reminder that several of your favorite cishet African women writers share similar opinions on trans people as She Who Must Not Be Named 🙃

— akwaeke emezi (@azemezi) November 12, 2020

who are the war criminals adichie is aligned with?

I mean, to be fair, we are talking about a woman who aligns with war criminals, so I suppose it all tracks. But also, even her transphobia is so much bigger than her. There's that reminder that Black cis women will continue to uplift her at the expense of trans people.

— akwaeke emezi (@azemezi) November 16, 2020

two posts that position her and her culture as ass-backwards and that these conversation(s) about gender are new to her

oh, so that's what those posts I read were doing, as opposed to what I saw when I read them. it's funny how two people can read the same exact posts and one of them be so very wrong about what they meant.

also all the worst people on Twitter have praised her blog post: Shapiro, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Bari Weiss, Niall Ferguson. I think it’s sort of sad she’s become a tool of those particular culture warriors.

― horseshoe, Saturday, 19 June 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Yeah I first came across it when the 2/3 liberals (also writers/artists) I am mutuals with retweeted it from a free speech angle. This innocent picture of someone attempting to 'learn' then 'struggling to comprehend'. Words about 'nuance' and 'complexity' follow (literature narrowly cast as a set of "messy stories"). Sometimes repeating a phrase that everyone else has said is totally fine.

yeah my position is honestly can she just not talk about this shit

I don't think putting this down to cultural differences really works if you look at Chimamanda's actual writing. I read Americanah which, as the title indicates, is very much about the Nigeria/diaspora divide and describes Nigeria, the UK and the USA with an equal level of insider knowledge; she's clearly not a victim of culture shock here. And of course as a feminist she's had to deal with Aimless' troll-or-at-least-stupendously-bad-faith "is western culture presumed to be so attractive or superior that one invariably must adopt it as soon as one is sufficiently exposed to it?" question from that perspective, too.

The actual divide imo is much more to do with age - you don't need to search far to find wealthy transphobic European or American women in their 40's - and while I've said before that her original comments seemed to come from cluelessness as opposed to bigotry, as is often the case, once the person doubles down on that shit there's really not much difference.

In spite of your calling me a troll, I thank you for posting something that provides its reasoning from evidence, not just its conclusions, making it of actual value to those who read it. You advanced the conversation.

To be clear Aimless I don't think you're a troll, I just think you were trolling with that particular comment - in that I don't think you need to assume some superiority of western culture to renounce bogotry, and that I don't think you believe that, either.

The constant mantra in the ask for 'evidence', 'conversation', 'value, usually comes from people who are the most ready to deny others their right to be left alone to live their lives.

bogotry.

.

I'm very far from an expert and I'm sortof hesitant to weigh in on this, but I do wonder if anyone on this thread, myself included, is really in a position to talk about feminism and its meanings in Nigeria.

It's definitely true that the closer you get to the centres of global power the more provincial and solipsistic the politics. So while mainstream US or UK feminism can be totally inward looking and know little about Nigerian feminism, you can be sure the opposite is not true. There's many reasons for this, some obvious like the large reach of american news and entertainment, the very large size of the Nigerian diaspora and the vulnerability of global south countries to the 'foreign interests' of powerful global actors.

Table is right to point out the enduring contributions of overlapping colonial legacies to contemporary manifestations of social conservatism in africa. I would add to this that this is a story that is very much ongoing and you can see how US aid continues to exert something a little stronger than soft power in undermining feminist causes across the world. A really good example of this is the 'global gag' that withdraws aid from organisations that provide abortion and related care or collaborates with others that do. So while I think it would be a mistake to interpret this in a way that undermines any notion of Nigerians having any agency (but being somehow guided entirely by these kinds of dictats) I think it also shows that its a bit of a stretch to see 'progressivism' in general and feminism in particular as the preserve of the west, especially as I doubt anyone on this thread really has any authority to talk about histories of feminism in Nigeria and Africa.

One might look at how the critiques by Nigerian feminists to IMF structural adjustment programs in the 1980s to see that there are often very different stakes for feminist struggle yet those critiques have influenced feminist and other political struggles elsewhere (probably most notably Silvia Federici).

It's a long open letter straight-up dragging a trans, Nigerian author, and it's a terrible look.

Otm. kind of gross that she pretends to make it about cancel culture in the abstract.

I don't think anyone is directly endorsing her position, so much as cutting her some slack in terms of the level of outrage, labeling and dismissal directed at her personally for having expressed a wrong opinion.

Hmm I'm not quite sure that publishing something to a global audience is simply 'expressing an opinion'

It may not be 'simple' but she is definitely expressing an opinion.

It's a long open letter straight-up dragging a trans, Nigerian author

Had she expressed that opinion to a couple of friends while out to lunch instead she would not be facing this current criticism, it might be worth dwelling on how those two scenarios differ

Like if I called you an asshole here and if I called you an asshole in a NYT op-ed I'm sure you would have quite a different reaction to the same expressed opinion

Yes. I am sure that is true. But a clusterfuck is a clusterfuck, wherever it happens. There were options on both sides for avoiding a clusterfuck right from the start, and simlar options for ilxors to avoid participating in the clusterfuck aspects of this situation, too.

if I called you an asshole in a NYT op-ed

The editors would probably have intervened before this went to print. At the very least, it would have been more refereed and measured.

How are we participating, commenting on it here? Is CNA an ilxor that I didn't know about?

How do you respond to someone rolling out a bunch of defenses of their transphobia and... fear of people who disagree with her? Fear of youth? without it being a clusterfuck?

Aimless, what exactly are you trying to defend here?

TERF wars always make me sad because they're always among people who ought to be allies. Which imo takes some allowances and graciousness on all sides, which are the things always lacking. (Especially on Twitter, that part is true.)

🧐

I'm sorry if "allowances and graciousness" is somehow offensive. They're valuable things for everyone.

takes some allowances and graciousness on all sides

writing and publishing are rather insular and are cutthroat competitive worlds, even when the amount of money and status at stake are extremely small. as such, rivalries can get quite bitter, like the range wars among cattle ranchers and sheep herders. this may be a factor in this particular inter-author wrangle.

Even aside from the transphobia, I found the tone of Adichie's essay really unpleasant. In particular the decision to reprint the two very personal emails Emezi sent her, in full, comes across very narcissistic to me - there's an implied "how dare this person write to me, when I am so much more important than her" that makes me more inclined to trust Emezi's account of events than Adichie's.

that's not very allowing or gracious of you

xp Sorry, "so much more important than them" - I forgot to check Emezi's pronouns before posting.

I totally agree, it's a bad essay. I couldn't even finish it because it came off like a rant. It's mostly an excuse for her to air personal grievances. A bad look. I'm also not super impressed with Emezi's take, for a lot of the same reasons. But also, everybody doesn't have to choose sides and have big fights over every single thing. It's exhausting for everybody. Alliances are only successful if they spend more energy on united effort than internal fighting. That's just how they work. I think some people have an overly rosy idea of what an "ally" is. You can't force them to think just like you, you just want people in the same ballpark. There are much bigger fights to have.