Superstar Beyonce did two astonishing things Thursday night: Release a complete album without any promotion or advance notice, and sample Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Adichie, who lives part of the year in the U.S., is the author of the acclaimed 2013 novel “Americanah,” a smart and surprisingly funny take on race and gender in contemporary society. In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, after the publication of “Half a Yellow Sun,” a historical novel set during Nigeria’s bloody Biafran war.

Adichie appears on Beyonce’s track “Flawless.” She isn’t in the short video sample of the song that’s online; according to Rap Genius, the video is of the third verse, while Adichie’s sample makes up most of the second.

The sample is from a talk Adichie gave at TEDxEuston in London earlier this year titled, “We Should All Be Feminists.” What appears in “Flawless” pulls from different parts of her speech:


We teach girls to shrink themselves

To make themselves smaller

We say to girls

“You can have ambition

But not too much

You should aim to be successful

But not too successful

Otherwise you will threaten the man”

Because I am female

I am expected to aspire to marriage

I am expected to make my life choices

Always keeping in mind that

Marriage is the most important

Now marriage can be a source of

Joy and love and mutual support

But why do we teach to aspire to marriage

And we don’t teach boys the same?

We raise girls to each other as competitors

Not for jobs or for accomplishments

Which I think can be a good thing

But for the attention of men

We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings

In the way that boys are

Feminist: the person who believes in the social

Political, and economic equality of the sexes

Adichie is also the author of the novel “Purple Hibiscus” and the short-story collection “The Thing Around Your Neck.”

Beyonce’s self-titled new release, which has videos for every track and is being called a “visual album,” is available exclusively on iTunes.

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