Can women write believable male characters?

QUESTIONS:
1. Identify the narrative voice. Whose point of view is the story told from?
2. How does Adichie present the characters of the narrator´s parents in her story?
Comment on her use of language and stylistic choices.
3. Interpret what message she is trying to convey about superstition in Nigeria.
4. How does Adichie use time in the story?
5. What do we learn about class?
6. How is the character of the narrator presented in the story?
Find some key quotations about personality and analyze them.
7. What connects him to Raphael?
What causes the friendship to break?
8. In pairs, discuss which IB learner profile attributes the narrator possesses and which he
lacks.
9. Evaluate how well Adichie, a female writer, crates and develops the character of the
narrator, who is male.
10. How far do you agree with V.S. Naipaul´s claim that it is possible to tell if a woman
writes the text?

ANSWERS:
1. The whole story is written from the view of the main character, Okenwa. A good
example is the first sentence: “Twice a month, like a dutiful son, I visited my parents in
Enugu, in their small overfurnished flat that grew in the afternoon. “Also, there is proof
that Okenwa is the main character in this small dialogue between him and their
housekeeper:
“Raphael!” I called out.
He turned. “Oh. Okenwa. Are you allowed to come downstairs?”

2. The parents are caring, and strict/scared (mixed feelings). Her mother was caring when
he got Apollo by asking him the question “Do you have and headache?”. His father was
strict/scared (mixed feelings) when he said to Raphael (when Raphael got Apollo) “Go!”
my father said. “Before you infect us all with this thing.”
 ↑
The author is using conversations to describe Okenwa´s parents.

3. In this extract author isn´t describing the people being superstitious just believing
everything they hear. To support my idea, I chose this example:
When my father told me that Chief Okeke's young house help had mysteriously died,
the story around town.
was that the chief had killed the teenager and used her liver for moneymaking rituals,
my mother added they say he used the heart, too.

4. Adichie used time in a form that she specified every conversation and every move of
characters so that the reader wouldn´t be confused. I don´t have to find proof because
she used this kind of method in a whole extract. But also, sometimes she skipped some
unimportant parts. For instance, when the parents went away that moment wasn´t
especially important, more important information was what happened in the house.

5. The class that was Okenawa’s family a middle class because they had a housekeeper
that was caring for their property but that was everyone they had. They didn´t have
their cook, cleaner and other servants. But also if they were in low class, they couldn´t
afford one servant.

6. The author of the story isn´t presented in this story. She camouflaged herself too well,
so the reader couldn´t spot anyone who wrote it and she also made it so that the one
who is reading it felt like he/she is part of a story. But I think that she surely experienced
something like the loss of a best friend and that one of them lied about something, my
reason is that no one would describe the situation this well without experience.

7. Their connection is through their friendship, same age, and that he also a whole day
with him because of Raphael’s profession of being a houseboy. Their friendship was
growing because they liked the same things and were together all day long. They both
liked kung fu which, in my opinion, was the biggest bridge to their
friendship( sometimes they trained in kung fu and watched films together).

8. She surely is knowledgeable because her story is well-oriented and not, for the reader,
confusing at all. Also, she should be balanced because her story was balanced with
happiness and the tense of the story. The happiness was boys playing together and
building trust in each other, the tension was because of the highly infective and surely
tough Apollo.

9. Her character was more like a female character. It made it look like this because of his
characteristics. You can´t make a male character by giving him love to kung fu or by
 saying that he is male. The more important things are different descriptions such as no
man would write “like a dutiful son” or “have you used eye drops this evening, the male
would use a different kind of vocabulary.

10. In my opinion, the statement that was said by V.S. Naipaul is in most cases true (“I read
a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or
not”). The very important, I think, is the point of view. We, men, see women as
beautiful, kind, and emotional, but there is no reason to think that it is true. And I think
that this is with the opposite gender. For example: when I was small, I used to read Enid
Blyton and her book The famous five, and there is one thing that didn´t seem to be real,
yes, characters. By this, I don´t mean that I didn´t enjoy their personalities but male
characters such as one male (father of one of the main characters) were described as
growlers, hard-working but sometimes he was kind and that’s it. We men don´t have
fluctuations of emotions but we are very stable. Also, when you´re older and want to sit
on public transport such as trams, many men will stand up and let you sit on their place.
This is another fact that made it less believable, but on the other hand, it made the story
better, more interesting, and tenser.

SOURCES:
I had no sources just my book from English ;-).