In the latest issue of The New York Times Style Magazine, Nigerian Author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was one of those chosen to pen thank-you notes to United States First Lady Michelle Obamaalongside Feminist activist and Writer, Gloria Steinem, Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Times bestselling author Jon Meacham as well as American actress, comic book author and screenwriter Rashida Jones.
Here’s what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had to write about the First Lady:
She had rhythm, a flow and swerve, hands
slicing air, body weight moving from foot to foot, a beautiful rhythm.
In anything else but a black American body, it would have been
contrived. The three-quarter sleeves of her teal dress announced its
appropriateness, as did her matching brooch. But the cut of the dress
scorned any “future first lady” stuffiness; it hung easy on her, as
effortless as her animation. And a brooch, Old World style accessory,
yes, but hers was big and ebulliently shaped and perched center on her
chest. Michelle Obama was speaking. It was the 2008 Democratic National
Convention. My anxiety rose and swirled, watching and willing her to be
as close to perfection as possible, not for me, because I was already a
believer, but for the swaths of America that would rather she stumbled.
She first appeared in the public
consciousness, all common sense and mordant humor, at ease in her skin.
She had the air of a woman who could balance a checkbook, and who knew a
good deal when she saw it, and who would tell off whomever needed
telling off. She was tall and sure and stylish. She was reluctant to be
first lady, and did not hide her reluctance beneath platitudes. She
seemed not so much unique as true. She sharpened her husband’s then-hazy
form, made him solid, more than just a dream.
But she had to flatten herself to better
fit the mold of first lady. At the law firm where they met before love
felled them, she had been her husband’s mentor; they seemed to be truly
friends, partners, equals in a modern marriage in a new American
century. Yet voters and observers, wide strips of America, wanted her to
conform and defer, to cleanse her tongue of wit and barb. When she
spoke of his bad morning-breath, a quirky and humanizing detail, she was
accused of emasculating him.
Because she said what she thought, and
because she smiled only when she felt like smiling, and not constantly
and vacuously, America’s cheapest caricature was cast on her: the Angry
Black Woman. Women, in general, are not permitted anger — but from black
American women, there is an added expectation of interminable
gratitude, the closer to groveling the better, as though their
citizenship is a phenomenon that they cannot take for granted.
“I love this country,” she said to
applause. She needed to say it — her salve to the hostility of people
who claimed she was unpatriotic because she had dared to suggest that,
as an adult, she had not always been proud of her country.
Of course she loved her country. The
story of her life as she told it was wholesomely American, drenched in
nostalgia: a father who worked shifts and a mother who stayed home, an
almost mythic account of self-reliance, of moderation, of working-class
contentment. But she is also a descendant of slaves, those full human
beings considered human fractions by the American state. And ambivalence
should be her birthright. For me, a foreign-raised person who likes
America, one of its greatest curiosities is this: that those who have
the most reason for dissent are those least allowed dissent.
Michelle Obama was speaking. I felt
protective of her because she was speaking to an America often too quick
to read a black woman’s confidence as arrogance, her
straightforwardness as entitlement.
She was informal, colloquial, her
sentences bookended by the word “see,” a conversational fillip that also
strangely felt like a mark of authenticity. She seemed genuine. She was
genuine. All over America, black women were still, their eyes watching a
form of God, because she represented their image writ large in the
world.
Her speech was vibrant, a success. But
there was, in her eyes and beneath her delivery and in her few small
stumbles, a glimpse of something somber. A tight, dark ball of
apprehension. As though she feared eight years of holding her breath, of
living her life with a stone in her gut.
Eight years later, her blue dress was
simpler but not as eager to be appropriate; its sheen, and her edgy hoop
earrings, made clear that she was no longer auditioning.
Her daughters were grown. She had
shielded them and celebrated them, and they appeared in public always
picture perfect, as though their careful grooming was a kind of
reproach. She had called herself mom-in-chief, and cloaked in that
nonthreatening title, had done what she cared about.
She embraced veterans and military
families, and became their listening advocate. She threw open the White
House doors to people on the margins of America. She was working class,
and she was Princeton, and so she could speak of opportunity as a
tangible thing. Her program Reach Higher pushed high schoolers to go
further, to want more. She jumped rope with children on the White House
grounds as part of her initiative to combat childhood obesity. She grew a
vegetable garden and campaigned for healthier food in schools. She
reached across borders and cast her light on the education of girls all
over the world. She danced on television shows. She hugged more people
than any first lady ever has, and she made “first lady” mean a person
warmly accessible, a person both normal and inspirational and a person
many degrees of cool.
She had become an American style icon.
Her dresses and workouts. Her carriage and curves. Toned arms and long
slender fingers. Even her favored kitten heels, for women who cannot
fathom wearing shoes in the halfway house between flats and high heels,
have earned a certain respect because of her. No public figure better
embodies that mantra of full female selfhood: Wear what you like.
It was the 2016 Democratic Convention.
Michelle Obama was speaking. She said “black boy” and “slaves,” words
she would not have said eight years ago because eight years ago any
concrete gesturing to blackness would have had real consequences.
She was relaxed, emotional, sentimental.
Her uncertainties laid to rest. Her rhythm was subtler, because she no
longer needed it as her armor, because she had conquered.
The insults, those barefaced and those
adorned as jokes, the acidic scrutiny, the manufactured scandals, the
base questioning of legitimacy, the tone of disrespect, so ubiquitous,
so casual. She had faced them and sometimes she hurt and sometimes she
blinked but throughout she remained herself.
Michelle Obama was speaking. I realized
then that she hadn’t been waiting to exhale these past eight years. She
had been letting that breath out, in small movements, careful because
she had to be, but exhaling still.
To read other letters from Gloria, Jon and Rashida, click here.
#1 Megan Young (Philippines), Miss World 2013
