“Where the Imagination Matters” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If you’ve been in a book club in the last ten years, you’ve probably read, or at least considered reading, something by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian writer. Perhaps her remarkable breakthrough novel, Americanah. Perhaps the earlier one our club read recently, Purple Hibiscus. Perhaps her TEDx talk made into a book, We Should All Be Feminists.

What inspires me to write today, however, is a July 27 headline in La Croix International, “African feminist reflects on ‘Fratelli tutti’ in Vatican paper,” an article now made more available in NCR. Really? Who gets this kind of attention? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Not exactly an “African Catholic feminist,” though. Adichie characterizes herself not as a Catholic but as “A person who is slowly finding solace in Catholic rituals,” as emphasized by Lucie Sarr, La Croix’s African correspondent. What a perfect description of the emotional attachment many of us cannot escape.
Adichie’s parents both died last year, which was emotionally devastating to her:

Grief brings, too, a ravenous and wretched hunger for answers, for assurance, for comfort. This hunger is almost never sated. I read Pope Francis’ Encyclical Fratelli Tutti in this state of emotional upheaval. It felt like a gift which, until I received it, I did not know I needed…

Above all else, and perhaps because grief is a daily struggle against a defensive, nihilistic ‘me versus the world’ individualism, I felt inordinately moved by the exhortation to “dream, then, as a single human family.” But this beautiful sentence brought darker questions about the church itself, because of my own personal experience. Does the Catholic Church, especially the Nigerian Church, see itself as a single family? For it must first see itself as a single family before it is able to dream as one.

Adichie describes herself in an image I love: “As a teenager, I wore my Catholic identity like a favorite dress, joyfully and reverently.” But she then details many incidents that led to her increasing distance from the church, some of which are described in Purple Hibiscus, and some of which are more recent. She moves beyond local indignities to address the wider racism in the church: “We see … evidence of an equality that is not truly equal.” Where Pope Francis seems to express surprise at this lack of “social friendship,” she does not. “Black clergy and religious,” she writes: “have experienced racism in the church, often not the familiar vile and vulgar manifestation which is easy to recognize and to condemn, but the subtler version, which kills the spirit and lingers poisonously in the mind. This kind of racism shields from direct view the superficiality of a social friendship that is still on the level of words.”

This can be an examination of conscience for those of us who are white. It’s not only the institutional church that needs to dialogue in the deep sense presented in Fratelli Tutti.

Racism affects us all. And so does sexism. (See the YouTube video of the TEDx talk below.) While Adichie exemplifies these aspects of intersectionality, she has been involved in a social media controversy with a former student over a comment she made about trans women. Both sides are covered in a recent New York Times article, which has links to the student’s Twitter feed and to a long defense by Adichie.

My guess is that the Vatican document came about because at her mother’s funeral, a parish priest criticized an interview that Adichie had given a few months before. “The Nigerian church, I said, had become too much about money.” Her view is complex:

I do not advocate for a poor church, for despite traditional Christianity’s extolling of poverty, a poor church could not possibly carry out its works of mercy. Pope Francis in his nuanced criticism of modern capitalism seems to seek not a dismantling but a reimagining of capital. I advocate instead for a church in which giving does not feel
backed by an oblique threat or by the fear of embarrassment, as is often the case in the Nigerian church. A church in which the faithful give voluntarily, preparedly rather than in ambush, and always out of love. 

To conclude, Adichie returns to the Pope. “The presence even of one parish, darkly devoid of social friendship, taints all the others because the church is a unified body and all drink from its central spring. The church is powerful – the church would not be the church without its power – but what if that power were worn more lightly? This is where the imagination matters.” I am surprised that she writes, “I am struck by an overriding theme in Fratelli Tutti, which is the centrality of the human imagination.” Does she mean to take on the most frequent criticism of this document as unrealistic and idealistic in presenting a new worldwide order of social and economic equality? “Pope Francis suggests that we must re-think and re-imagine and re-envision, and that this work of the imagination must be courageous and step outside of the established norm.”

How important is it that an admittedly ambiguously Catholic feminist speaks out her truth? Adichie uses her power to challenge the petty power that challenged her. She reaches out and is heard in the very heart of the Church. I know Pope Francis will read L’Osservatore Romano. I hope he links to the TEDx talk as well. It’s basic but it’s fun. It’s written from the point of view of what women know and men don’t. I fear that it may be heard as words are heard, and not as part of the deep dialogue Francis writes about in other contexts.