Birdsong

Adichie was born into an Igbo family in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1977. She grew up in the house formerly occupied by the internationally-renowned Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Her father was a professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and her mother was the university’s first female Registrar. At the age of 19, Adichie left Nigeria for the US to pursue her degrees in Communication, Political Science, and Creative Writing. She received numerous honorary doctorate degrees from both American and African universities.

Adichie’s literary works are difficult to classify due to their hybridized genre style. Although Adichie’s fiction often features Igbo and/or Nigerian women exploring their identities through their relationships with the world around them, Adichie’s use of nonlinear framing and exposition frequently leads to her works being classified as social commentaries on the topics of gender, race and/or sexuality. Due to the multi-faceted textuality of her works where, for example, a love story becomes a social critique of the permanent in-betweenness of Black migrants leaving and returning to their homelands (e.g., Americanah), scholars and critics alike have referred to Adichie as an Afropolitan, realist writer.

Afropolitanism is a portmanteau of the words “African” and “cosmopolitanism.” The word was coined by the Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe but popularized by Nigerian-Ghanaian-British author Taiye Selasi in her 2005 essay “Bye-Bye Babar.” Afropolitanism seeks to separate itself from the view of Africa as a continent of strife, wars, and famine. Rejecting common, Eurocentric images of Africa as a continent of immobility, superstition, and rampant death, Afropolitanism proposes a more positive and worldly image of the continent. Since Afropolitanism openly embraces cultural hybridity, a term borrowed from postcolonial theory, Afropolitans see their identities as processes in constant flux rather than permanent states. Adichie’s Afropolitanism also involves a commitment to questioning sexist and racist systems of oppression, both in her work and in her public speaking. Her TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,”  details how patriarchal thinking limits women’s ability to be fully realized human beings. In turn, Adichie’s views on gender and sexism weave into the Afropolitanism portrayed in her literary corpus.

“Birdsong” portrays an Afropolitan experience through the relationship of a woman with a married man. Although her lover is wealthy and well-traveled, the woman struggles to come to terms with her own identity while in this relationship. Instead of the narrator being the Afropolitan as in other works, Adichie uses the woman’s relationship with a married, Afropolitan man as a framing device to call attention to the sexism and limited options for women in urban environments.