Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Will Address The Harvard Graduating Class Of 2018
Acclaimed Nigerian author and feminist icon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been selected to address the Harvard class of 2018, as part of the annual class day celebration on May 23, the day before Harvard’s 367th Commencement.
Ms. Adichie is a prolific writer whose work has been translated into more than 30 languages. She wrote the novelsPurple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize; and Americanah, a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award winner, which she finalized during a fellowship year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017. She has delivered two landmark TED talks: “The Danger of a Single Story” in 2009, and her 2012 TEDxEuston talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” which kickstarted a worldwide conversation about feminism, was included in Beyoncé’s “Flawless” in 2013 and published as a book in 2014.
On May 29, 2015, she addressed the class of 2015 at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts in a truly remarkable speech. Below is the excerpt that stood out the most:
“We can not always bend the world into the shapes we want but we can try, we can make a concerted and real and true effort. And you are privileged that, because of your education here, you have already been given many of the tools that you will need to try. Always just try. Because you never know.
And so as you graduate, as you deal with your excitement and your doubts today, I urge you to try and create the world you want to live in.
Minister to the world in a way that can change it. Minister radically in a real, active, practical, get your hands dirty way.
Wellesley will open doors for you. Walk through those doors and make your strides long and firm and sure.
Write television shows in which female strength is not depicted as remarkable but merely normal.
Teach your students to see that vulnerability is a HUMAN rather than a FEMALE trait.”
All Ms. Adichie’s books and talks have the same underlying philosophy: to look beyond stereotypes and social norms to recognize our common humanity. So, to put it lightly, the Harvard graduating class of 2018 are in for a treat!
Ms. Adichie joins the ranks of speakers who have spoken at the Harvard class day from various fields including politics, social activism, journalism, film, comedy, most notably, Coretta Scott King, who delivered the speech on behalf of Martin Luther King Jr. had accepted the invitation to speak, shortly before his assassination.
