When this collection came out in 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was already well known from the excellent Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, but had not yet published the wonderful Americanah. This collection, This Thing Around Your Neck, was her first venture into short stories, and it turns out she is just as good a writer of short stories as of novels.
The first story, Cell One, is immediately riveting.
The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbour Osita who climbed in through the dining room window and stole our TV, our VCR, and the Purple Rain and Thriller videotapes my father had brought back from America. The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother Nnamabia who faked a break-in and stole my mother’s jewellery.
The family in this story are much like Adichie’s own: a university family, with parents who taught at Nsukka. They are churchgoers, respectable, with a future for the children, so … why?
[Nnamabia] did it because my mother’s jewellery was the only thing of any value in the house. […] He did it, too, because other sons of professors were doing it. This was the season of thefts on our serene Nsukka campus. […] We knew the thieves.
Over the next few pages, Adichie gives us a wonderful portrayal of the handsome, gracious, smiling Nnamabia, over the threatening background of 1990s Nigeria with General Abacha gaining power. ‘Cults’, or gangs, were becoming common on campus. The ‘silently concerned’ parents, and the narrator, Nnamabia’s younger sister, are beautifully drawn. This would be enough for a good story, but it goes far further: three years later Nnamabia is arrested for an unrelated violent event that he could not possibly have been involved in, and thrown in jail — his first introduction to the violence of the impending Abacha regime.
I’ve enjoyed several of the new Nigerian fiction writers who have been published recently, such as Oyinkan Braithwaite, Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi, Ayobami Adebayo, Jendella Benson. But Adichie stands out, because she is simply such an excellent writer. The stories in this collection have the characters front and center, but they effortlessly touch social mores, history, and politics without ever losing the thread of the story, or the personalities of her characters. Even the slightly lesser stories in this collection are very very good.
A Private Experience is tension-filled yet quietly thoughtful and observant, one of my favourites in the book. Hausa Muslims are attacking Igbo Christians at a market, and Chika hides in a deserted store with another woman. There are commonalities and differences between them: Chika is Igbo Christian, and can tell from the other woman’s accent and scarf that she is Hausa Muslim. In addition, Chika is well-to-do and studying medicine at the university, while the other woman is an onion-seller at the market. They both fear the mayhem outside, and fear for their relatives who vanished during the attack, but there is no religious tension inside the store where they shelter. Adichie superbly outlines the gaps between their knowledge, understanding and opinions on what is happening outside, while simultaneously underscoring their similarities.
Some stories are set in Nigeria, while some have immigrant Nigerian-American characters. Imitation is set near Philadelphia, where Nkem lives with her two children. Her husband, Obiora, lives part of the year in Nigeria, and the grapevine has just informed Nkem that he has a young girlfriend in Lagos.
At first, when she had come to America to have the baby, she had been proudly excited because she had married into the coveted league, the Rich Nigerian Men Who Sent Their Wives to America To Have Their Babies league.
Nkem’s helplessness, anger, and sense of betrayal is beautifully drawn, but Adichie gives her agency as well.
The Biafra civil war is at the center of Ghosts, where a retired university professor meets an old friend who had been assumed to have died during the war.
He was in sociology, and although many of us in the proper sciences thought that the social sciences people were empty vessels who had too much time on their hands and wrote reams of unreadable books, we saw Ikenna differently. […] One heard of him in those days, and then struggled to hide great disappointment upon seeing him, because the depth of his rhetoric somehow demanded good looks. But then, my people say that a famous animal does not always fill the hunter’s basket.
Every story is worth reading, but a particularly unusual one is On Monday of Last Week, about a Nigerian immigrant babysitter who is captivated by the artistic American mother of her six-year-old charge. The American Embassy explores the mixed feelings of asylum seekers who must expose their most traumatic events to suspicious Americans; this is also very powerful and precisely drawn. It is a masterful exposition of the famous ‘show, don’t tell’ approach to writing.
And a deliciously biting story, that the reader is tempted to assume comes out of Adichie’s own experiences, is Jumping Monkey Hill, where a handful of African writers are selected to attend the African Writers Workshop near Cape Town, organized by a white Brit called Edward.
[…] the kind of place where she imagined affluent foreign tourists would dart around taking pictures of lizards and then return home still mostly unaware that there were more black people than red-capped lizards in South Africa. Each participant — the Tanzanian man, the Ugandan man, the Zimbabwean woman, the Kenyan man and the Senegalese woman, as well as our Nigerian narrator — has to write a story during the workshop, and have it critiqued by the others, and their interactions and reactions are captured in perfect commentary.
Most of the stories have characters from the university setting where Adichie grew up, but The Headstrong Historian is set among villagers in the 1800s (a guess) when Christian missionaries have just come to Nigeria. Many years later, a descendent, Grace begins to rethink her colonial schooling,
sifting through moldy files in archives, reimagining the lives and smells of her grandmother’s world for the book she would write called Pacifying with Bullets: A Reclaimed History of Southern Nigeria.
I am tempted to include quotes from every single story here, but why bother? You should really read this collection yourself.
In Ghosts, the elderly father says:
“Is it a good life, Daddy?” Nkiru has taken to asking lately on the phone, with that faint, vaguely troubling American accent. It is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is what matters.
so nice to read that every story in the collection was good. Some collections are so uneven, a few good stories, a few that go nowhere. Glad Adichie is so consistently good!