Biography
Early Life
Faith Adiele is a college professor, writer, and world traveler who was ordained as Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun.
Holly, her Nordic American mother, and Magnus, her Nigerian father, met while they were both students at Washington State University. They fell in love but were soon pulled apart by culture and circumstances.
When Holly realized that she was pregnant, her parents ordered her to get an abortion. When she refused to do so, she was put out of her home.
In 1963, she gave birth to Faith Adiele in Spokane, WA at a home for unwed mothers.
Adiele and her mother lived in Seattle, but she grew up on her maternal grandparents’ farm in Sunnyside, WA. Adiele grew up in a small, born-again Christian town.
While her childhood experiences with religion centered around her maternal Scandinavian heritage, she also studied world religions. She spent her junior year of high school on a study abroad experience in Thailand.
After graduation, Adiele won a scholarship to Harvard University but left after a year to return to Thailand and learn more about Buddhist nuns. Enthralled by the nuns, she eventually decided to be ordained as one.
Spiritual Journey
In a YouTube interview with The Motley News, Adiele talks about her religious views.
She recounts that she considered religion to be “divisive and oppressive” and that she was “anti-religious.”
She explains in that same interview that it was only during her experience with the Buddhist nuns that she recognized the distinction between religion and spirituality. Adiele published a book about her ordination experience called Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun.
Her journey resulted in a spiritual transformation. Although her original reason for embarking on the ordination path was to be allowed to interview one of the other nuns at the end of the process, Adiele says that the experience switched from being an academic research project to being a “spiritual redemption.”
She describes it as “stripping away all of the externals and just working on her inner peace and inner knowledge. Novice nuns were required to take a vow of silence. They were not allowed to have money or shoes. And they were expected to meditate nineteen hours a day.”
Advocacy Through Education & Travel
As a consequence, she went home changed, sure of who she was, and without the need for external validation. She later returned to Harvard and graduated with a B.A. in Southeast Asian Studies.
She continued her education by earning a M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa, and an MFA in both fiction and nonfiction from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Adiele works as a teacher, Black travel advocate, and writer. She is a staunch advocate of global travel for the Black community and has been at the forefront of creating a space for Black travel writers.
In an interview, she expresses her belief that such travel can “help us to see that we can be the architects of our own lives without the stereotypical limitations of what Black people do or don’t do.”
In 2014, Adiele was invited by Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA) to start the first writing workshop in the nation for travelers of color. She guides writers to make connections to other cultures through creative nonfiction writing.
In 2020, she co-founded the African Book Club and the Pandemic Writing Party, which attracted writers from all over the globe. In addition, she is an integral part of Detour: Best Stories in Black Travel, an online magazine, and multimedia brand that seeks to redirect travel narratives away from the typical white male perspective.
Faith Adiele envisions her travel writing and teaching as an extension of her activist calling. On her website, she writes: “I teach memoir, the intersection between story and reflection. What I love about memoir is that it democratizes storytelling. Official history is penned by power brokers, but the real stories are lived on the ground by ordinary folks. Memoir is the ultimate civic act.”
