How Adichie Helped Beyoncé Make Lemonade
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in southeastern Nigeria as the fifth of six children. Her mother and father both worked at the University of Nigeria, and her mother became the university’s first-ever female registrar. From the early age of 10, Adichie was heavily inspired by Chinua Achebe’s tremendously popular novel Things Fall Apart, a narrative about pre-colonial life in southeast Nigeria — a story Adchie connected with greatly.
In her own words, Adichie describes herself as,“a storyteller but I would not mind at all if someone were to think of me as a feminist writer… I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that world view must somehow be part of my work.” This idea of Adichie thinking of herself as a just writer, not a feminist writer, is mirrored in her book, adapted from her famous Tedx Talk, We Should All Be Feminists. Adichie explains how the word “feminism” comes with great baggage and negative stereotypes associated with it. And so, she goes on to propose feminism as a “solution” for society’s great prevalence of gender inequality. Instead of thinking of feminists as “‘angry,’ ‘non-shaving’ ‘man-haters,’ that a feminist is instead, “a person who believes in social, political and economic equality of the sexes.”
Adichie was famously featured in Beyoncé’s 2014 Flawless music video in which a section of the audio from her Tedx Talk was used. It wasn’t until more than 2 years after the music video was released that Adichie came out and shared her mixed feelings about being featured. Adichie said, “I felt such a resentment.” having been a successful writer for a number of years by that point she was somewhat annoyed that people expected her to endlessly credit Beyoncé for ‘boosting’ her career. And Adichie became further frustrated when people referred to her as the woman from the Beyoncé video — not from her own work. Though Adichie states she respects Beyoncé greatly, she says, “Her [Beyoncé’s] type of feminism is not mine… it gives quite a lot of space to the necessity of men. I think men are lovely, but I don’t think that women should relate everything they do to men: did he hurt me, do I forgive him, did he put a ring on my finger?”
I think it can be argued that perhaps Beyoncé’s earlier music can be described under the definition of feminism Adichie described. However, I believe Beyoncé’s more recent album, Lemonade, broke those definitional boundaries and rewrote her own definition of feminism all together. Instead of constructing the visual album to tell the story of her own husband’s cheating scandal, according to Beyoncé through Lemonade, “She wanted to show the historical impact of slavery on black love, and what it has done to the black family.”
Both Adichie and Beyoncé represent just two of the millions of individuals, diverse definitions and meanings of what feminism means. And so, the beauty of both of their work is that they represent what feminism means to them, in their own ways with the intention of empowering women all over the world to recognize their power, and question society’s continuous unwillingness to eradicate gender inequalities.
