There's nothing better than getting lost in a good book. Or, if you're an engineering student on a time budget, there's nothing better than getting lost for a significantly shorter amount of time in an equally good short story. I recently revisited a short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichiewhich I read a few years ago and loved, Birdsong. The cool thing about rereading anything a few years after the first time you do is all the things you notice the second time around. I think the first time I read Birdsong I really just appreciated the quality of the writing and the fact there was a female narrator. This time, I think I tuned in to some other stuff too.
The theme in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Birdsong rings out strong and clear from the pages of the story: distrust. Adichie builds up this concept throughout the story by stacking examples like bricks. The multitude of tricks the street hawkers have up their sleeves--dipping cans in water to make them look cold, hiding rotten tomatoes under ripe ones--constitute the odd light colored brick here and there, while the foundation of the theme of the story is built on the relationship the story revolves around. While she is initially able to navigate her feelings and her situation with a clear head, the sum of a thousand small doubts and uncomfortable events cause her to become frustrated.
The story is narrated in first person by a young woman who is one of only two female employees in the community relations unit of a telecommunications company based in Lagos. Adichie takes this perspective to its limits, infusing it with her own personal experiences, such as not being greeted while men around her are, and describing the vibrant, bustling urban atmosphere of the setting so well that I was reminded of my experiences in India, where everything was always moving even if I wasn't. The tale begins with the narrator stopped at a traffic light, aware that someone in a jeep next to her is watching her. She looks up to see a superciliously beautiful woman staring at her, and she falls back through her memories of her relationship with a married man, thinking he would have been married to someone like the woman watching her. Her journey through her memories seemed to happen in parallel with her sitting at the traffic light, and the reader has the experience of sitting with the narrator in her car and in her head. These parallel stories come tantalizingly close to the intersection because of the narrator's nagging thought that this is her lover's wife. Distrust again echoes through the story because of the tension created between these two narratives.
I felt there was a simple, strong element of distrust in the narrator's relationship just because of the dynamic. Firstly, she entered a relationship with a married man, stepping into the worn-out shoes of the "Other Woman" trope. Secondly, it seems her lover doesn't love her so much as he is just fascinated or entertained by her, similar to others in the narrator's life - not many people take her seriously, perhaps because of her lack of ambition to "settle down." Her lover's waning awareness of her interest in him slowly erodes as he makes misstep after misstep - easily avoidable if he paid enough attention to the narrator to get to know her well. He shares the same jokes with the narrator as he does with his wife, which she sees as one of the final straws in their relationship.
As her relationship continues to wear down, the narrator begins to notice the "rituals of distrust" in society around her. She goes back to the examples of the street hawkers, notices that the waiter at the restaurant she and her lover regularly dine at doesn't greet her, and also that whenever there is food in the office, she or her other female colleague, Chikwado, have to serve it. She reaches a point where she realizes that the world around her sees her as nothing in relation to the man she loves. Her anger begins to overflow, and she lashes out at the world around her for having so little regard as to her place in it. These are issues Adichie speaks about in her TED talk, Why We Should All Be Feminists, which was sampled in Beyoncé's song Flawless(!!).
The parallels Adichie creates in her story are again running parallel to themes in the real world. Infidelity is a theme that, like taking women seriously, is often considered taboo. The feeling of being almost invisible as a woman is an experience hard to recreate by its very nature, but is something that is also very often left alone because people are afraid to discuss it. Literature is an opportunity to explore alternate realities and possibilities, some closer to home than we realize. Birdsong is an excellent example of using well-placed words to shine some light on the corners of our world that we'd rather ignore.
I think it's important as someone who spends most of their time doing integrals and studying circuitry to ocassionally poke my head out of that realm and try to explore the human experience. Stories like this one are a great place to start, and I think I learn as much from them as I do from Fourier Transforms.
