Birdsong (book)
Birdsong (2010) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a short story first published in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” series. “Birdsong” focuses on a young Nigerian woman’s affair with an older, married man. Like many of Adichie’s works, the story explores how gender impacts women’s private and public lives. Adichie’s debut novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist as well as a New York Times Notable Book. It was adapted into a film in 2013. That same year, Adichie published Americanah, which also received multiple awards. Adichie is an international speaker, particularly known for her 2009 TED Talk “The Danger of the Single Story,” which is one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time. Adichie has written other novels, essays, and short stories.
Quotes
edit- consumed as I went by how relentlessly unpretty Lagos was, with houses sprouting up unplanned like weeds.”
- (Adichie 883)
- Have fun, oh as long as your spirit accepts it, but as for me, I cannot spread my legs for a married man.”
- (Adichie 874).
- a woman for whom things were done”
- (Paragraph 1).
- friends with out of necessity”
- (Paragraph 3)
- Did you ever see a cock with a dick?”
- (Paragraph 15)
- face [full] of overseas”
- (Paragraph 18
- I should not have gone back—I knew that even then”
- (Paragraph 46).
- rituals of distrust”
- Page 75
- She was the kind of woman I imagined my lover’s wife was, a woman for whom things were done.”
- (Paragraph 1)
- She was thirty-two and tottering under the weight of her desire: to settle down. It was all she talked about. It was all our female co-workers talked about when we had lunch at the cafeteria.”
- (Paragraph 4)
- From the moment I met him, I had had the sensation of possibility, but for him the path was already closed, had indeed never been open; there was no room for things to sweep in and disrupt.
- (Paragraph 5)