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1c6c06c
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they have been raised to expect so little of men that the idea of men as savage beings with no self-control is somehow acceptable. We
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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a61c5a3
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You can't even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folk.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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fd7fc62
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Ogbenyealu is a common name for girls and you know what it means? 'Not to Be Married to a Poor Man.' To stamp that on a child at birth is capitalism at its best." Richard"
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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9003d4a
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Ugwu had saved them, the same way he saved old sugar cartons, bottle corks, even yam peels. It came with never having had much, she knew, the inability to let go of things, even things that were useless. So when she was in the kitchen with him, she talked about the need to keep only things that were useful, and she hoped he would not ask her how the fresh flowers, then, were useful.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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2259eb0
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Even at ten you knew that some people can take up too much space by simply being, that by existing, some people can stifle others.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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e5c3071
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said. "I'm fine. I have a granola bar," Ifemelu said. She had some baby carrots in a Ziploc, too, although all she had snacked on so far was her melted chocolate. "What bar?" Aisha asked. Ifemelu showed her the bar, organic, one hundred percent whole grain with real fruit. "That not food!" Halima scoffed, looking away from the television. "She here fifteen years, Halima," Aisha said, as if the length of years in America explained Ifemelu's ..
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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d090193
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Aokpe will always be special because it was the reason Kambili and Jaja first came to Nsukka.
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page-275
purple-hibiscus
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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3115966
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I will advise you to wait until you are at least in the university, wait until you own yourself a little more. Do you understand?" "Yes," Ifemelu said. She did not know what "own yourself a little more" meant."
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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a85fe95
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They do not doubt their presence here, these students. They believe they should be here, they have earned it and thay are paying for it. Au fond, they have bought us all. It is the key to America's greatness, this hubris,
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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1f3951f
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He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. There were things that existed for him that she could not penetrate. With his close friends, she often felt vaguely lost. They were youngish and well-dressed and righteous, their sentences filled with "sort of," and "the ways in which"; they gathered at a bar every Thursday, and sometimes one of them had a dinner party, where Ifemelu mostly listened, saying little, looking at them i..
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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471b27e
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Race is totally overhyped these days, black people need to get over themselves, it's all about class now, the haves and the have-nots,
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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74acb36
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He said, 'Ifemelu is a fine babe but she is too much trouble. She can argue. She can talk. She never agrees. But Ginika is just a sweet girl.' " He paused, then added, "He didn't know that was exactly what I hoped to hear. I'm not interested in girls that are too nice."
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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4b52117
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O problema da questao de generos e que ela prescreve como devemos ser em vez de reconhecer como somos. Seriamos bem mais felizes, mais livres para sermos quem realmente somos, se nao tivessemos o peso das expectativas do genero.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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5e15cbe
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He told me that people were saying my novel was feminist, and his advice to me--he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke--was that I should never call myself a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands. So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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c295dbe
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Of course much of this was tongue-in-cheek, but what it shows is how that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage: You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you don't wear makeup, you don't shave, you're always angry, you don't have a sense of humor, you don't use deodorant.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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548b9d3
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And when, all those years ago, I looked the word up in the dictionary, it said: Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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9bb5d45
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I often wear clothes that men don't like or don't "understand." I wear them because I like them and because I feel good in them. The "male gaze," as a shaper of my life's choices, is largely incidental."
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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290a526
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They expected certain things of her, and forgave certain things from her, because she was foreign. Once, sitting with them in a bar, she heard Curt talking to Brad, and Curt said "blowhard." She was struck by the word, by the irredeemable Americanness of it. Blowhard. It was a word that would never occur to her. To understand this was to realize that Curt and his friends would, on some level, never be fully knowable to her."
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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9379bcc
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They have the kinds of things we can eat.' An unease crept up on Ifemelu. She was comfortable here, and she wished she were not. She wished, too, that she were not so interested in this new restaurant, did not perk up, imagining fresh green salads and steamed still-firm vegetables. She loved eating all the things she had missed while away, jollof rice cooked with a lot of oil, fried plantains, boiled yams, but she longed, also, for the othe..
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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e567ed0
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Existem pessoas (...) que acham que nos nao conseguimos governar nosso proprio pais, pois nas poucas vezes em que tentamos nos falhamos, como se todos os outros que se governam hoje em dia tivessem acertado de primeira. E como dizer a um bebe que esta engatinhando, tenta andar e cai de bunda no chao que ele deve permanecer no chao. Como se todos os adultos que passam por ele tambem nao houvessem engatinhado um dia.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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e9209c1
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O jokal Eugene tem de parar de fazer o trabalho de Deus. Deus e grande o suficiente para fazer seu proprio trabalho. Se Deus for julgar nosso pai por escolher o caminho de nossos ancestrais, entao Ele que faca o julgamento, nao Eugene.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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6033557
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Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care...What if being black had all the privileges of being white? Would you still say "Don't call me black, I'm from Trinidad"? I don't think so. So you're black, baby."
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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1ed24ba
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Obinze said it was the exaggerated gratitude that came with immigrant insecurity.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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09a4785
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On the day Princess Diana died, a group of students had gathered before a lecture, talking about what they had heard on the radio that morning, repeating "paparazzi" over and over, all sounding knowing and cocksure, until, in a lull, Okoli Okafor quietly asked, "But who exactly are the paparazzi? Are they motorcyclists?" and instantly earned himself the nickname Okoli Paparazzi"
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diana
media
name
paparazzi
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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9ee6079
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There was something unquestioning about her roommates' lives, an assumption of certainty that fascinated her, so that they often said, "Let's go get some," about whatever it was they needed--more beer, pizza, buffalo wings, liquor--as though this getting was not an act that required money."
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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6ccfce1
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They believed. They truly believed. It often came to her as a sweet shock, the knowledge that there were so many people in the world who felt exactly as she and Blaine did about Barack Obama. On
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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01eed74
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before he fell asleep, Moliere's words came to him, strangely comforting: Unbroken happiness is a bore; it should have ups and downs.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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02508ee
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They mimicked what Americans told them: You speak such good English. How bad is AIDS in your country? It's so sad that people live on less than a dollar a day in Africa. And they themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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adf04b1
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And even though she checked "yes" to all the symptoms on the card the doctor gave her, she refused to accept the diagnosis of panic attacks because panic attacks happened only to Americans. Nobody in Kinshasa had panic attacks. It was not even that it was called by another name, it was simply not called at all. Did things begin to exist only when they were named?"
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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2858851
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She sits at the edge of the leather sofa and looks around the living room, remembers the delivery man from Ethan Interiors who changed the lampshade the other day. "You got a great house, ma'am," he'd said, with that curious American smile that meant he believed he, too, could have something like it someday. It is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope."
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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683f4fc
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You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be, Richard," she said quietly."
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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eed5753
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There are simply no doctors and nurses left on that continent. It's an absolute tragedy! African doctors should stay in Africa." "Why shouldn't they want to practice where there is regular electricity and regular pay?" Mark asked, his tone flat. Obinze sensed that he did not like Alexa at all. "I'm from Grimsby and I certainly don't want to work in a district hospital there." "But it isn't quite the same thing, is it? We're speaking of some..
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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3efedfd
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Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like "reify" in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people's stories for something she could use. Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing herself."
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commenters
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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63fb5a6
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She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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5551c73
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Gender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. We
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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2dd410e
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She didn't want to speak up because she didn't want to seem aggressive. She let her resentments simmer. What struck me--with her and with many other female American friends I have--is how invested they are in being "liked." How they have been raised to believe that their being likable is very important and that this "likable" trait is a specific thing. And that specific thing does not include showing anger or being aggressive or disagreeing..
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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d0fe9aa
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And it struck Obinze that, a few years ago, they were attending weddings, now it was christenings and soon it would be funerals. They would die. They would all die after trudging through lives in which they were neither happy nor unhappy.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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c609c40
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She had a formidable air; a person who went about setting everyone and everything right in the world.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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9b7d694
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Eu tinha lido que o Brasil e a meca das racas, mas, quando fui ao Rio, ninguem que estava nos restaurantes e hoteis caros se parecia comigo.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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aaf142f
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She was taking two sides at once, to please everyone; she always chose peace over truth, was always eager to conform.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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c67a418
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He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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76daf3e
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When I started in real estate, I considered renovating old houses instead of tearing them down, but it didn't make sense. Nigerians don't buy houses because they're old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn't work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahe..
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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3b921b9
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could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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8d721b0
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she was uncomfortable with what the professors called "participation," and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words. It had to be that Americans were taught, from elementary school, to always say something in class, no matter what. They never said, "I don't know." They said, instead, "I'm not sure," which did not..
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |